Wonder

wouldn’t have known that some hadn’t been eliminated in his earlier attempt. We really need an inventory of everything that Webmind is made of so that we can protect it all.”

“That’s job number two,” Caitlin said. “Job number one is making sure that hackers don’t succeed in attacking Webmind.”

“Agreed,” said her mom. “But how can we do that? Granted, there are only so many people who have the technical skill to do it, but it’s not like all of them could be hunted down and rounded up.”

“No,” said Webmind, his smooth voice sounding far away. “Of course not.”

The D.C. cops were polite and respectful; the one who had saluted Colonel Hume turned out to have done a tour of duty in Iraq. Hume wasn’t under arrest, they said, but a call had gone out for any car near NBC4 to do a pickup on behalf of the White House. Twenty minutes later, Hume was once again in the Oval Office, facing his commander in chief.

The president was pacing in front of the Resolute desk and smoking a cigarette. “Damn it, Colonel, do you know how hard I’ve been trying to give these damned things up? And you pull a stunt like this!”

“Sir, I’m prepared to face the consequences of my actions.”

“You absolutely will, Colonel. I’m going to leave it to General Schwartz to discipline you. For now, the press office is issuing a statement saying that your comments were completely unauthorized and do not reflect the policy of this administration, DARPA, the Air Force, or any other part of the government.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If we didn’t need you in dealing with Webmind, I’d—”

“Sir, Webmind is killing people.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He is killing those who could harm him.”

“What proof do you have of that?”

“Some of the most capable hackers in the greater Washington area have disappeared. The FBI is investigating.”

“If it were Webmind, hackers everywhere would be disappearing, wouldn’t they? Not just here?”

“With respect, sir, D.C. is a mecca for hackers; the best in the nation are here. There are so many sensitive installations here—not just domestic, but all the embassies, too; they draw them like flies. But there are also reports of missing hackers from elsewhere, too—as far away as India.”

“How do you know Webmind’s behind it? It could be the work of those nutcases who believe Webmind is God, taking preventive steps.”

“Possibly,” said Hume. “But I think—”

“By this point, Colonel, I’ve heard quite enough of what you think. If you weren’t one of our top experts on this sort of thing, you’d be shipping out to Afghanistan tomorrow.”

Hume kept his face impassive as he saluted. “Yes, sir.”

twenty-six

The Communist Party was keeping its promise. Wong Wai-Jeng was no longer a prisoner: he could wander the streets at will, and, indeed, his new salary would soon let him trade his tiny apartment for a bigger one. Of course, he was watched wherever he went; he’d been advised to stay away from Internet cafes; and his new cell phone had been provided by the government, meaning it was monitored. Still, he had greater freedom than he’d ever expected he would; instead of a ball and chain, all he had was a leg in a plaster cast.

And he had to admit he was fascinated by the technical aspects of his new job at the People’s Monitoring Center inside the Zhongnanhai complex. The walls were blue, and one wall was partly covered by a giant LCD monitor displaying a map of China. It showed the seven major trunks that connect China’s computers to the rest of the Internet. Key lines came from Japan both on the north coast and near Shanghai, and connections snaked across from Hong Kong down in Guangzhou. Controlling those trunks meant controlling access to the outside world.

He pushed a pen into the top of the cast on his leg, trying to scratch an itch—and he was both simultaneously delighted and irritated that he did itch. It had been horrifying not to be able to feel his legs, to be cut off from so much, all because communication lines had been severed.

When he’d started blogging, seven years ago, relatively few Chinese had been online; now getting on to a billion were, giving China by far the largest population of Internet users on the planet, most of whom accessed the Web through smartphones.

Even at the best of times, the Chinese had their Internet connections censored. But, to Wai-Jeng’s delight, he’d discovered that the People’s Monitoring Center had unfettered access, courtesy of satellite links; of course, even during last month’s strengthening of the Great Firewall, there had to be a way for the government to keep tabs on the outside world.

He was tempted to take advantage of the open connection to see what those who were still at large were up to: see what Qin Shi Huangdi and People’s Conscience and Panda Green and all the others were railing against. But he couldn’t do that; his activities were doubtless being monitored—and, besides, looking at their postings might make him feel even more sad that his own voice had been silenced.

Still, he did peek at a little news from the outside world, including another mention of that fascinating ape called Hobo, a name that could be unfalteringly translated into Chinese as youmin, or “vagrant.” Wai-Jeng liked primates; in his blog he’d called himself Sinanthropus, an old scientific name for Peking Man, a kind of hominid 400,000 years closer to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees than any living person was.

Hobo was an exceptional ape. Old Dr. Feng, Wai-Jeng’s former boss at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, had been delighted by reports of Hobo’s intellectual abilities. Feng had felt vindicated; he’d long argued that the intellectual leaps beginning with Homo erectus—the species that included Peking Man—had come from hybridization between habilines and australopithecines.

Wai-Jeng’s office cubicle—another idea taken from the West—was one of two dozen in the windowless room. Large ceiling fans rotated slowly overhead. Over his dinner of dry noodles, rice, salted fish, and tea, taken at his desk, Wai-Jeng also looked to see what the world had to say about the other remarkable entity that had been in the news so much: Webmind.

Twitter was often blocked in China, including during the Olympics in 2008, on the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 2009, during the riot in Wai-Jeng’s hometown of Chengdu, and most recently in the aftermath of the bird-flu outbreak in Shanxi province. But in this room, Wai-Jeng had access to all the tweets about Colonel Hume’s revelation of Webmind’s nature. So far, no one from the hacking community had succeeded in deleting Webmind’s packets—headers are normally only read by routers, not application software—but there were hints that the US government had already undertaken a pilot attempt to purge Webmind’s presence. That had apparently been done with physical access to the routing hardware, not by anonymously uploading code.

As Wai-Jeng ate, he periodically tapped the PgDn key with the end of one of his chopsticks. He was amused to read in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle—a newspaper normally inaccessible in China—about a brawl that had broken out at the University of Rochester. Computer-science students there had been secretly collaborating on an attempt to purge Webmind, and they were overheard by three English majors who objected to what they were planning. More damage could apparently be inflicted by throwing a hardcover of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare than a pocket calculator.

Like a billion other people on the planet, Wai-Jeng had now conversed directly with Webmind. Maybe growing up in China gave him a different perspective, he thought, but he actually preferred being watched by something that was open about what it was doing rather than being clandestinely observed; he found little to object to in Webmind’s presence—except for its irritating English name!—and hoped that the Rochester students were atypical. But just as he himself had spent years successfully eluding detection by the Chinese authorities, so other hackers elsewhere surely had ways of working below even Webmind’s considerable radar. There was no way to know for sure, but—