Wonder

what Ivy League school would turn down an application that combined her marks with this?

Besides, keeping the secret was killing her. Bashira would be amazed, and Stacy back in Austin would freak.

“So, what do we do?” her mom said to her dad. She was seated on the couch now, an oblivious Schrodinger rubbing against her legs. “All the American networks want Caitlin to appear tomorrow, and so do the Canadian ones. The BBC just called, and the NHK. Of course, we don’t have to do anything.” She looked at Caitlin. “Just because people want to talk to you doesn’t mean you have to talk to them.”

“Works for me,” said her dad, who was now pacing where his wife had previously.

“No,” said Caitlin. “I’ve got to tell people what I know. You’ve seen the news, the blogs—and you heard what the president and his advisors said: there are those who are frightened by Webmind, who don’t trust him.”

“Okay, but then which of the Sunday-morning news shows? You can’t do them all.”

Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t want to leave Waterloo.”

“CBS said you could do it from the CBC in Toronto,” her mother said. “And both the ABC guy and the NBC one said you could do it from the CTV station in Kitchener. They’ve all got reciprocal arrangements with Canadian broadcasters, apparently.”

Caitlin was about to speak when, to her astonishment, her father looked directly at her, as if he wanted to fix in his memory the way she’d been before. Finally, after averting his eyes, he said, “Caitlin?” That was all: just her name. But it was enough. He was saying, as always, that it was up to her.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“Which show?” asked her mom.

“I’m a numbers kind of girl,” Caitlin said. “Let’s do the one with the highest ratings.”

Chase sat at the far-left computer, pounding out code. Guns ’N Roses blared from the stereo. He shook his head, took a swig of Red Bull, slid his chair down two workstations, and looked at the results of his previous attempt: the compiler reported four errors. He went into debugging mode, found the problems, fixed them.

More Red Bull.

Sliding to another computer.

The stereo switching to another song.

The maestro at work.

twelve

“We aren’t getting the Decter kid,” said the story editor at Meet the Press, looking across the wide table. Through the window, the Washington Monument seemed to be giving her the finger today. “She’s going with ABC.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” said the producer, slapping his hand against the tabletop. “Who can we get instead?”

She consulted her notes. “There’s a Pentagon expert on artificial intelligence, um… Hume. Peyton Hume. And he’s in Virginia—we can get him here in studio.”

“Is he good?”

“He’s venomous.”

Big smile. “Book him. But we need more.”

“I’ll see if Tim Berners-Lee is available. He invented the World Wide Web.”

“Where’s he?”

“Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

“Good, good. Okay, we’ll lead with Berners-Lee out of Boston, if we can get him, then go into the studio with Hume.”

Another editor spoke up. “What about the Little Rock story? I had it down for the first eight minutes. I’ve booked a civil-rights attorney and one of the National Guardsmen who originally blocked the black students from getting into the school—plus the candidate’s communications director, who’s going to try to say it was all taken out of context.”

“Cut that segment,” said the producer. “This is our main story. Okay, folks: move, move, move!”

After handing off Webmind to Dr. Kuroda, Caitlin changed into her pajamas, did what needed doing in the bathroom, then lay down on her bed. Usually when sleeping, she turned the eyePod off altogether, but tonight, although she was exhausted, she was also too nervous to sleep—the notion of going on TV tomorrow was a scary one.

And so she tried something that had helped her relax before. She pressed the eyePod’s single switch, and the device toggled over to duplex mode. The wonder of webspace bloomed around her: crisscrossing lines connecting glowing points set against a shimmering backdrop: her mind interpreting the structure of the World Wide Web.

She lay there quietly, thinking. Of course, Webmind knew what mode the eyePod was in, knew she was looking at him. There had been a time when he talked with her constantly, and he still could, if he wished to, but it was different now.

And yet…

And yet she’d read that book, back at the outset, the one Bashira’s dad, Dr. Hameed, had recommended to her: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

Jaynes believed that, until historical times, humans had not integrated the two hemispheres of their brains, and so one part heard the thoughts of the other as if they were coming from outside, from a separate being.

And, she realized, she herself had become bicameral, had, in a sense, reverted to a more primitive state: Webmind’s thoughts could appear to her, and only her, as words scrolling across her vision; there was another voice in her head.

No, it wasn’t a regression; it was the future. Surely, she was just the first—the alpha test—of this sort of human-machine mental interface; surely, as the decades went by, as Moore’s Law marched ahead, as data-storage costs dropped to zero, everyone would eventually have what she had.

But no. No, they wouldn’t have just this; they would have more. And the thought frightened her.

“Webmind?” she said, rolling onto her side—her view of webspace rotating as she did so. She tucked her knees toward her chest.

As always, the reply was instantaneous: Braille letters superimposed over her vision. Yes, Caitlin?

She was getting sleepy and didn’t feel like reading. Her iPod of the musical variety was sitting on her night table. She unplugged the white earphones from it and plugged them into the BlackBerry that was attached to the back of her eyePod of the miracle variety. She then tucked one of the buds into her ear that was facing up.

“Speech, please,” she said into the air, and then: “You and me, we’re like a bicameral mind.”

“Interesting thought,” said a synthesized male voice.

“But,” said Caitlin, “Julian Jaynes said that consciousness emerged when bicameralism broke down—when the two separate things became one.”

“Jaynes’s hypothesis is, as I’m sure you know, highly speculative.”

“No doubt,” Caitlin said. “But, still… do you think, at some point the barriers will break down between us? I don’t just mean between you and me, but between you and humanity? Are we—do you foresee us becoming a hive mind? Wouldn’t that be the next step—all these separate consciousnesses becoming one?”

“One is the loneliest number, Caitlin.”

She smiled. “True, I guess, but… but isn’t it inevitable? All those transhumanists online, they all think that’s what’s bound to happen. We’re all going to upload or merge with you, or something. After all, if we’re going to throw cliches around, it’s also said that hell is other people.”