Wonder

And there was a pause.

Her stomach was roiling. If he could do all those things—cancer, solar energy, economic solutions—surely he could do this.

After what seemed an awfully long time, Webmind replied, He has had no identifiable online presence since 4:42 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. I have reviewed the police files and news coverage related to his disappearance, but found no leads to pursue.

Her heart sank. She thought, But you know everything, although that seemed a pointless thing to type. But after several seconds of just staring at Webmind’s words, that’s exactly what she did put in the chat box.

I know many things, yes, replied Webmind. And, after a few seconds, he added two more words. I’m sorry.

She got up from the chair and headed back to the living room. By the time she reached the couch, her face was wet again.

Peyton Hume woke with a start, soaked with sweat. He’d dreamed of an anthill, of thousands of mindless, sterile workers tending an obscene, white, pulsating queen.

Next to him in the darkness his wife said, “Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” he replied. “Bad dream.”

Madeleine Hume was a lobbyist for the biofuels industry; they’d met four years ago at a mutual friend’s party. He felt her hand touch his chest. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“They just don’t get it,” Hume said. “The president. The world. They just don’t get it.”

“I know,” she said, gently.

“If I push much harder, I’m going to get in trouble,” he said. “General Schwartz already sent me an email, reprimanding me for my ‘incendiary language’ on Meet the Press.”

Madeleine stroked his short hair. “I know you?re a chain-of-command kind of guy,” she said. “But you have to do what you think is best. I’ll support you all the way.”

“Thanks, baby.”

“It’s almost time to get up, anyway,” Madeleine said. “Are you going to go back to WATCH today, or heading into the Pentagon?”

He hadn’t been to his office in the E-ring for three days now; it probably was time he made an appearance again. But—

Damn it all, the test they’d conducted at WATCH had been proof of concept. If he could get someone to craft a virus that would eliminate Webmind’s mutant packets, the danger could be scoured from the Internet. Yes, yes, such a virus might screw other things up—maybe even crash the Internet for a time— but humanity could survive that. And survival was the name of the game right now.

But Hume needed a hacker—a genuine Gibsonian cyberpunk—to pull that off. He’d tried last night to contact three more names on the black-hat list. He’d been unable to get hold of one—which could mean anything, he knew; another was indeed missing, according to her devastated boyfriend; and the third told Hume to cram it up his ass.

“Yeah, I’ll go into the office,” he said. “And I’ll check with the FBI again, see if they’ve got any leads. The guy I talked to yesterday agreed it was a suspicious pattern—maybe even a serial killer; he called it the ‘hacker whacker.’ But the only blood at Chase’s place was his own, and there’s no sign of foul play in the other cases, they say.”

She snuggled closer to him in the dark. “You’ll do the right thing,” she said. “As always.”

The alarm went off. He let it ring, wishing the whole world could hear it.

twenty-three

It was now Thursday morning, October 18—one full week since Webmind had gone public. Caitlin wanted to do as much as she could to help him, and so today she started another pro-Webmind newsgroup, although thousands of those had already cropped up.

She also posted comments on seventy-six news stories that had their facts wrong—and, yes, she knew the futility of that, and well remembered having had the famous xkcd webcomic read to her: a man is working at his computer, and his wife calls out, “Are you coming to bed?” He replies, “I can’t,” as he continues to type furiously. “Someone is wrong on the Internet!”

And, anyway, she wasn’t really sure why she was bothering. After all, Webmind himself was now participating on tens of thousands of newsgroups, was posting comments on countless blogs, and was tweeting in dozens of languages. As CNN Online had put it, he was now the most overexposed celebrity on the planet, “like Paris Hilton, Jennifer Aniston, and Irwin Tan rolled into one.”

Except that wasn’t really true, at least not to Caitlin’s way of thinking. In mathematics, celebrities were often used in discussing graph theory, since their interactions with their fans were a perfect example of a directed, asymmetric relationship between vertices: by definition, many more fans know a celebrity than are known to the celebrity. But Webmind did know everyone who was online. He wasn’t a celebrity; he was more like the whole planet’s Facebook friend.

Still she continued to read news coverage and the follow-up comments—some favorable, some not—about Webmind’s speech at the UN, and all the other things he’d been doing, and—

And what was that?

There was an odd red-and-white logo next to the name of the person who had posted the comment she was now reading. She still had a hard time with small text, and JAWS couldn’t deal with text that was presented as graphics, but she squinted at it, and—

Verified by Webmind.

“Webmind?” she said into the air. “What’s up with that?”

His synthesized voice came from her desktop speakers. “A number of people noted that I was in a position to verify the identity of people posting online, affirming that they were using their real names, rather than a handle or pseudonym. On sites like this one that allow avatar pictures, that picture can, at the individual’s request, be replaced with the Verified by Webmind graphic.”

Caitlin thought about this. She often wrote online under the name Calculass, but there were indeed countless trolls who posted incendiary comments under fake names simply to spew hatred or mock others; on many sites, they derailed almost every discussion. Caitlin had found, for instance, that she simply couldn’t stomach reading the comments on the CBC News site, most of which were nasty, crude, racist, or sexist, or one of the eleven possible combinations of those four things.

Webmind went on. “Some sites, such as Amazon.com, already allow an optional ‘Real Name’ badge to be attached to reviews, but, until now, there was no simple, across-the-Web solution for verifying that one was posting under his or her true identity. It was trivial for me to provide it, so I did.”

“Interesting. But… but, I dunno, people gotta be able to say things anonymously online.”

“In some cases, that’s true. There’s obviously a need for free political commentary in repressive regimes, and a way for whistle-blowers to draw attention to corporate and government malfeasance without fear of reprisals. But others have told me that a good part of the joy of the online world has been taken away by people who snipe from behind masks; as they’ve said, they wouldn’t engage in conversation with people who hid their identities in the real world, and they don’t feel they should be compelled to online.”

“I guess.”

“Already filters are starting to appear on sites to allow you to select to see only comments by those who are posting with Verified by Webmind credentials. In other places—where there is no legitimate need for anonymity— filters are being installed to allow only users I have verified to post at all. JagsterMail started offering VBW flags on ‘from’ addresses this morning, and Gmail is planning to follow suit. The initiative, which is grassroots based, has been referred to by many names, but the one that seems to be sticking is ‘Take Back the Net.’ That term—a play on the campaign against violence against women called Take Back the Night—has been used from time to time for