Wonder

“Complete madness,” said Caitlin. “But, yeah.”

“But what common word is shorter in Canadian English than in American English?”

Caitlin frowned. “Um, ah… hmmmm. Well, what about ‘Toronto’? We Americans say it like it’s got seven letters and three syllables in it, but you guys seem to think it’s only got six and two: ‘Trawna’—T-r-a-w-n-a.”

Matt laughed. “Cute—but no. Guess again.”

“I give up.”

“ ‘Centred,’ ” said Matt triumphantly. “It’s c-e-n-t-r-e-d up here, but c-e-n-t-e-r-e-d in the States.”

Caitlin nodded, impressed. “That’s cool.”

“You could win money with that, betting people at parties, and…” He trailed off, perhaps because he didn’t get invited to a lot of parties. But then he added, “The only other common one is a form of the same word: ‘centring,’ c-e-n-t-r-i-n-g.”

“What about ‘metered’?”

“No, we only spell that with r-e when it’s a noun; the verb is e-r.”

“Like I said before, Matt, this is one whack-job country you got here.”

He usually smiled when she said that, but he didn’t this time. “Caitlin,” he said. “Um…”

“Hey, I’m just kidding, baby. I love the Great White North.” She tried to imitate the call of a loon—and discovered it was much harder to do properly than she’d thought.

“No, it’s not that,” said Matt. “It’s just…” He trailed off again.

“What?”

“I just… No, forget it.”

“No, what is it?”

He hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Umm, I know you’re no longer a student at Miller, but…”

“Yes?”

“Well, there’s a school dance the last Friday of each month, right? And that means there’s one next week, and—and, well, um, I’ve never been to a school dance. I mean, I never had anyone to go with before and, ah… I thought maybe you’d like to see some of the gang again.” He paused, then added, as if playing a trump card, “Mr. Heidegger is scheduled to be one of the chaperones.”

Mr. H had been Caitlin’s math teacher; she certainly would like to see him, but…

But the last school dance had been a disaster. Trevor Nordmann—the fucking Hoser—had taken her, but Caitlin had run off when he kept trying to grope her, and she’d ended up walking home alone and blind through a thunderstorm, after parting company with Sunshine Bowen.

“Trevor will probably be there,” Caitlin said. “And, um, didn’t he—”

“He said I should stay away from you, yeah. But…” He took a deep breath then exhaled noisily. “Caitlin, I’m not a tough guy. I know the simplest thing is to avoid him for, like, ever. But you like to dance, and there’s a dance coming up that I can take you to, and I want to do that.” He looked at her. “So, would you like to go?”

“I’d love to!”

“Great,” said Matt, nodding firmly. “It’s a date.”

“… but the president dismissed that as mere posturing on his opponent’s part,” said Brian Williams, from behind the gleaming anchor desk on the NBC Nightly News. “Turning to an even larger story, a high-ranking government computing expert says he knows exactly what Webmind is, and, in an NBC exclusive, he’s in our Washington studio right now, to share his findings with us. Colonel Hume, good evening.”

Hume had thought about changing out of his Air Force uniform; wearing it for this interview was just going to make matters worse for himself, he knew—but it added weight to his words. “Good evening, Brian.”

“So—Webmind. Exactly what is it?”

“Webmind is a collection of mutant packets on the Internet.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Whenever you send something over the Internet, be it a document, a photo, a video, or an email message, it’s chopped up into little pieces called packets, and these are sent out by your computer on a multileg journey; they’re handed off along the way by devices called routers.

“Each packet has a header that contains the sending address, the destination address, and a hop counter, which keeps track of how many routers the packet has passed through. The hop counter is sometimes also called the time-to-live counter: it starts with the maximum number of hops allowed and works its way, hop by hop, down toward zero. Of course, a packet is supposed to reach its intended destination before the counter hits zero, but if it doesn’t, the next router in line is supposed to delete the packet and ask the sender to try its luck again with a duplicate packet.”

“Okay,” said Brian Williams. “But you said Webmind consists of mutant packets?”

“That’s right. Its packets have hop counters that never finish their countdown; they never reach zero. Those packets were probably created by buggy routers in the first place, and now there are trillions of them, some of which might have been bouncing around the Web for years. The mutant packets are like cancer cells; they never die.”

“It’s quite a breakthrough, Colonel Hume, and thank—”

“FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17,” said Hume. He’d gotten it out—enough at least so that others could find the rest.

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“FF, EA, 62, 1C, 17. That’s the beginning of the Webmind signature: most of the mutant packets contain that hexadecimal code. It’s the target string.”

“Target string?”

“Exactly. If those packets could be deleted, Webmind would disappear.”

“Colonel Hume, thank you. In other news tonight…”

In the Washington studio, the floor director made a hand gesture. “And we’re clear!”

The audio technician came over to remove Hume’s lavaliere microphone. “Unusual interview,” he said.

Hume’s forehead was slick with sweat. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded a bit like you were calling on the hacking community to write a virus to kill the Webmind,” said the audio man. “You know how those guys love a challenge.”

Hume stood up and straightened his uniform jacket. “Do they?” he replied.

twenty-five

Houston, we have a problem.

Caitlin was simultaneously alarmed and amused as those words flashed in her vision. She’d been born in Houston; her family had moved to Austin when she was six—and so she admired Webmind’s word play. “Wassup?” she said.

Her family had finished dinner a few minutes ago, and she was just entering her bedroom. She pointed at her desktop computer, and Webmind switched to speaking through the computer’s speakers—for him a much slower method of communicating than pumping out text, but Caitlin’s visual reading speed, even when using a Braille font, was still quite low.

“Colonel Hume just appeared on the NBC Nightly News,” Webmind said, as she sat down in front of her desk. “He explained how to identify the majority of my mutant packets. He did not explicitly state his intentions, but it seems clear his goal was to crowd-source attempts to eradicate them. Word of his revelation is spreading rapidly across the Web.”

“Stop it!” Caitlin said at once. “Delete the messages.”

“I don’t think that would be prudent,” Webmind said. “Over four million people have watched the news broadcast so far; it will be repeated in other time zones later, and many people recorded it. Even if I were so inclined, I do not believe there is an effective way to suppress this information.”