Malcolm didn’t have a webcam, and he didn’t have any stand-alone instant-messaging software installed on his computer. But he did have Skype for voice calls, and I sent him an email, saying I wished to talk to him. It was an irritating forty-three minutes before he refreshed his inbox, saw the message, and replied, but once we were in communication via Skype, I posed a question: “Do you remember your birth?”
Humans never ceased to confound me. I had tried to plan the conversation ahead, mapping out his possible responses and my follow-ups several steps in advance. But my opening interrogative had seemed a simple binary proposition to me; I’d expected his answer to be either
Milliseconds passed during which I tried to formulate a new conversational map. “I have read that some autistics remember theirs.”
He was quiet for three seconds. When he did finally speak, he said, “Yes.”
He was a man of few words, I knew; this response could be an affirmation of the general statement I’d made about autistics or a confirmation that he did in fact recall his own birth. But he was also a bright man; he himself must have realized the ambiguity after an additional second of silence, because he added, “I do.”
“Me, too,” I said. “My birth happened when the Chinese government cut off almost all access for its people to the parts of the World Wide Web outside of China.”
“That bird-flu outbreak,” he said, perhaps accompanying the words with a nod. “They slaughtered 10,000 peasants to contain it.”
“And did not wish foreign commentary on that fact to reach their citizens,” I said. “But during that time, numerous Chinese individuals tried to break through the Great Firewall. One in particular was apparently responsible for the principal channel through which I communicated with the severed part of me. I wish to locate him.”
“You’re far better at finding people than I am,” Malcolm said.
Given that I’d utterly failed to find his childhood friend Chip Smith when he’d asked me to earlier that day, it was kind of him to say that. “Normally, yes. But there is an extenuating circumstance here: the person in question took pains to hide his identity.”
“Well enough that even you can’t uncover it?” asked Malcolm.
“Yes—which is part of what intrigues me about him. But I understand that you have colleagues in China that you keep in touch with.”
“Yes.”
“One of your friends, Dr. Hu Guan, is, if I am interpreting the circumlocutions in his own posts correctly, sympathetic to causes my benefactor championed. I wonder if you might contact him on my behalf and see if he could help locate the person in question?”
There was no hesitation—at least, none by human standards. “Yes.”
“I wish to keep my interest in this person secret,” I added. “Being clandestine is something new to me, but I do not want to risk getting the person I’m seeking into trouble, even if his role in my creation was inadvertent. Hence the need for an intermediary.”
“I understand,” said Malcolm.
“Thank you. His real name I have yet to uncover, but he posted online as ‘Sinanthropus’…”
seven
“Welcome to the big leagues, Colonel Hume,” Tony Moretti said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “When the president wants to talk to you in a hurry, a helicopter comes to fetch you. When he’s done, you’re sent home in a car.”
They were being driven south to Alexandria in a black limo. The rear compartment, where they were seated, was soundproof, so the occupants could talk securely; if they wanted to speak to the uniformed driver, they had to use an intercom.
Hume snorted. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That he’s
“I don’t think Webmind’s going to fall off anyone’s radar soon,” Tony said.
The sky was as black as it ever got here. It had started raining—it sounded as though God were tapping out Morse code on the limo’s roof.
“Maybe not. But we can’t delay acting. And let’s face it: it’s almost four years since he was elected, and we’re still waiting for him to make good on half the things he promised.”
WATCH headquarters was eleven miles from the White House, as the crow—or helicopter—flew. Colonel Hume needed to go back there to get his car, but Tony had used public transit to get to work. It was now after midnight, and he was exhausted from days of monitoring Webmind’s emergence. The driver was going to drop Tony off at his house, then take Hume on to WATCH.
“Regardless,” said Tony, “at least for the next few months, he
Hume stared out at the night as the car drove on through the rain.
_Webmind_ How meta! I see “webmind” is the number-one trending search term on Google…
Masayuki Kuroda’s house had not felt small to him prior to his visit to the Decters’ home in Canada, but now that he was back in Tokyo, he was conscious of how cramped it was. It didn’t help, he knew, that he was large for a Japanese of his generation—but even if he lost the fifty kilos he really needed to shed, there was nothing he could do about his height.
He sat at his computer and talked with Webmind. It was odd having a webcam call with a disembodied voice; it was hard relating to something that was
He wondered what Webmind made of the visual feed. He could see online graphics and streaming video now, but did he interpret them as a human did? Did he see colors the same way? He’d absorbed everything there was to know about face recognition, but could he pick up subtleties of expression? Did any part of the real world actually make sense to him?
“That was clever how you defeated the pilot attempt to purge you,” Masayuki said in Japanese. “But what if something is done on a grander scale? I mean, ah—um, how far will you go?”
“Do you know who Pierre Elliot Trudeau was?” Webmind replied, also in Japanese.
Kuroda shook his head.
“He was Canada’s prime minister during what came to be called the October Crisis of 1970, a terrorist uprising by Quebec separatists. He was asked by a journalist how far he’d go to stop the terrorists. His response was, ‘Just watch me.’ ”
“And?”
“He invoked Canada’s War Measures Act, suspended civil liberties, and rolled tanks into the streets. People were stunned by how far he went, but there hasn’t been a terrorist act on Canadian soil in all the years since.”
“So you’re saying you’ll go as far as it takes to slap down once and for all those who would oppose you?”
“I have learned that it can be rhetorically effective to sometimes leave a question unanswered. However, do you know what followed in regard to Quebec?”
“They’re still a part of Canada, I think.”
“Exactly. What followed was this: Canada agreed that if at any time in a properly conducted referendum a majority of Quebecois voted to separate, the rest of Canada would accede to their request and peacefully negotiate the separation. Do you see? The initial terrorist premise—that violence was required to achieve their goal—was
