Wonder

“There is one possibility that we haven’t considered,” said the Secretary of Defense, as the group in the Oval Office continued to discuss the phone call from Webmind.

“Yes?” said the president.

“You brought up the issue yourself: verifying that Webmind is who he says he is. We could, in fact, eliminate Webmind now but fake his continued existence.”

“How?” asked the president “He’s involved, as I understand it, in millions of online conversations at once. And now he’s on Twitter and Facebook and MySpace.”

“Not MySpace,” said Tony Moretti.

“Regardless,” said the secretary, “we could contrive a reason to explain a scaling-down of his activities. Not coming from us, of course: we’d get an academic somewhere—preferably outside our borders—to put forth a plausible-sounding scenario. It would have to appear that Webmind was maintaining some level of activity for the ruse to work, but the NSA could provide the sort of insights that are normally associated with Webmind’s special access to the net; we could make it look like he’s still alive. The truth that we’d eliminated him would not have to come out until after the election is over.”

“That would be a hard thing to pull off,” said the president.

“Disinformation is an important part of any intelligence campaign,” said the secretary. “We don’t have to keep it up forever; just until we’re re-elected. By that point—a few weeks of reduced activity—people will have lost much of their interest in Webmind, anyway.”

“Do you really think we could get away with that?” asked the president.

“Half the world believes Webmind is a hoax or a publicity stunt as it is,” replied the secretary. “We only have to convince the other half—and given that they bought into Webmind before there was convincing evidence to corroborate its existence, they’re obviously easy to convince.”

The president looked at Hume. “Colonel, are you still convinced it’s dangerous? It sounded, frankly, much more reasonable than any number of foreign leaders I’ve had to deal with.”

Peyton Hume took a deep breath and looked around the Oval Office. “Mr. President, let me put it this way. They say you’re the most powerful person in the world—and you are. But, even for you, sir, there are checks and balances: you had to be elected, the Constitution defines your role, you must reach accommodations with Congress, there are mechanisms for impeachment, you are subject to term limits, and so on. But if we don’t nip Webmind in the bud now, while we still can, you won’t be the most powerful entity on Earth; it will be—and there will be no checks and balances on its actions.”

Hume paused, perhaps considering if he should go on, then: “If you’ll forgive me, sir, the ultimate check on a presidency, or, indeed, on a dictatorship, has always been the eventual death of the incumbent, either through natural causes or assassination. But this thing will soon be invulnerable, and it will be around forever. For good or for ill, Bill Clinton and George Bush were out after eight years; Mao and Stalin and Hitler shuffled off this mortal coil; Osama bin Laden will be gone soon enough in the grand scheme of things, as will, for that matter, Queen Elizabeth, Pope Benedict, and every other human who has power. But not Webmind. Is it dangerous now? Who knows? But this is our only chance ever to keep human beings at the top of the pyramid.”

Tony Moretti had had enough. “But what if we try again, Colonel—and fail again? You want to piss off something that so far has treated us with courtesy—and even given us, it seems, a cure for cancer? You want to make it consider us its enemy—not humanity as a whole, mind you, but the United States government in particular? You want to convince it that we cannot be trusted, that we are, in fact, mad dogs so possessive of power that we answer kindness with murder?”

Tony shook his head and turned now to look at the president. “Sir, trying again to eliminate Webmind is a gigantic immediate risk, which has a potentially catastrophic downside. Is it really worth taking? To me, this has ‘disastrous blowback’ written all over it.”

Hume said, “I’m sure we can find a way to take it out successfully, sir.”

The president frowned. “Dr. Moretti is right, Colonel, that it doesn’t seem to be a threat. A superintelligence like this might, in fact, be a great gift to mankind.”

“Fine,” said Hume in what sounded to Tony like carefully controlled exasperation. “Say a massive artificial intelligence is a good thing. Go make a speech, like the one Kennedy did at Rice all those years ago: challenge the nation to build a superintelligent AI before the decade is out—one that’s designed, one that’s programmed, one that has a goddamned off switch.”

“Could we do that?” asked the president.

“Sure. We’ll learn a lot from a postmortem on Webmind.”

“God,” said the president.

“No, it’s not. Not yet. But it will be as good as, sir, if you don’t act right now.”

Matt gave directions to Caitlin’s father as they drove along, but the only acknowledgment he got was that Dr. Decter silently executed each one. It was four blocks to his house, and Matt thought about letting the whole journey pass with nothing significant being said between them. But as the hatchback pulled into the driveway, he said, “Dr. Decter, I just want to say…” His voice cracked; he hated it when that happened. He swallowed and went on. “I just want to say, I’m going to be good to Caitlin. I’d never hurt her.”

There was a sound like a gunshot—but, after a moment, Matt realized it was just Dr. Decter unlocking the car doors. “Getting hurt is part of growing up,” he said.

Matt could think of no reply, and so he simply nodded.

It was time for the handoff. Every night, just before Caitlin went to bed, she talked with Dr. Masayuki Kuroda in Tokyo. Although Webmind was now in contact with millions of people, he still maintained a special relationship with Caitlin and Dr. Kuroda—Caitlin, because he saw through her eye, and Dr. Kuroda, because he had taught Webmind how to see everything else: all the GIFs and JPGs online, all the videos and Flash, all the webcam feeds.

Caitlin put on her Bluetooth headset, and said “Konnichi wa!” when Kuroda answered her Skype call.

“Miss Caitlin!” said Kuroda, his round face dominating Caitlin’s desktop monitor. His voice was its usual wheeze. It was already Saturday morning in Tokyo; by this time, he would have had his usual giant breakfast. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, “but—God, there’s so much to tell you. An attempt was made this afternoon—well, afternoon my time—to purge Webmind. I’m sure Webmind himself can fill you in on the details, but the bottom line is that the US government, and God only knows who else, have figured out that Webmind is composed of mutant packets, and they did a test run at removing them.” She went on to tell him about how she and Webmind had orchestrated the denial-of-service attack to overwhelm the attempt, and about Webmind’s call to the President of the United States.

“You know the curse they have in China, Miss Caitlin? ‘May you live in interesting times…’ ”

“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Anyway, now that you’re up to speed, I gotta hit the hay.” She felt her watch. “Man, I’d really like to get eight hours for a change.”

“Go ahead,” said Dr. Kuroda. “I’ve got a clear day today.”

I continued to refine my mental map of the Decter house. A corridor ran off the living room leading to a small washroom; Malcolm Decter’s office, which he referred to as his “den”; the laundry room, where Schrodinger’s litter box was kept; and the side door. I had lost track of Malcolm when Caitlin had shut off the eyePod for the night, but I soon detected that he was checking his email, and his usual place for doing that was indeed the den. I surmised that he’d walked down the corridor and was now sitting behind his reddish brown desk, looking at the LCD monitor that sat upon it. I had seen this room only through Caitlin’s eye, but it was rectangular, with the desk oriented parallel to one of the long sides of the room. Behind it was a window. I had noted in the past that Dr. Decter didn’t draw his blinds at night, and so I assumed they were still open, and that a large oak tree would be visible just outside, illuminated by streetlamps.