Wonder

“I know you don’t like me, Tony,” Hume said without preamble. “I’ll tell you the truth: there are times of late I don’t like myself very much, either. I joined the Air Force to be part of a team—I’d rather leave going rogue to presidential candidates.”

“Without an order from the president himself,” said Tony, “we’re not going to take out Webmind.”

“I understand that,” said Hume, taking a seat. “Which is why I need you to help me convince him.”

“Find someone who shares your beliefs, Colonel—there are millions of them online. They’ve been blogging and tweeting about what a threat Webmind is. Granted, they’re vastly in the minority, but there certainly are some major names among them: that guy from Discovery Channel; some of your old buddies at RAND. I’m not the only computer scientist on the planet.”

“No, you’re not—and that’s not the capacity I need your help in.”

“What, then?”

“Somebody is eliminating hackers.”

“So I heard.”

Hume raised his eyebrows. “You know about that?”

Tony waved vaguely in the direction of the monitoring room. “It’s our job to know pretty much everything here.”

Hume nodded. “Do you know who is doing it?”

“Nope—and neither do you. I know you’re going to say it’s Webmind, Colonel, but you don’t know that.”

“True. But we don’t know it’s not Webmind. If it isn’t him, then let’s prove that. And if he is eliminating people he considers to be threats to his continued existence, surely that’s data the president should have, no?”

“I’m listening,” said Tony. “But I don’t see how I can help.”

“The FBI doesn’t have any leads—but they lack your facilities. If Webmind is doing this, he’s got to have left some sort of online trail.”

“Like what? What would you have us search for?”

Hume spread his arms. “I don’t know. But you’ve got the world’s best data analysts. Their job is to look for suspicious Web activity. Webmind himself has said time and again that he’s not disposed to secrecy or deceit; he must have left some electronic fingerprints behind. What you do here is black ops: you can monitor just about anyone, just about anywhere. Even if I had a specific place for the FBI to look, it’d take days to get the warrants to do that kind of monitoring—and we don’t have days.”

Tony spread his arms a bit. “No leads. No suggestions for what we should even look for. And no time to do it in.”

Hume managed a small smile. “Exactly.”

Tony was quiet for several seconds. “All right,” he said at last. “Let me see what I can do.”

Although Bashira was anything but punctual, Matt was bang on time. In fact, Caitlin suspected he’d been quietly standing out on the sidewalk for at least ten minutes now, lest he be late. It amused Caitlin that the doorbell and top-of-the-hour beep from her watch sounded simultaneously; now that she could see, she really should figure out how to turn the watch’s chime off.

She ran to the door and opened it, and she didn’t care if Bashira saw: she gave Matt a big kiss right on the lips. And then she led him into the living room. Caitlin’s mom waited a discreet minute before appearing at the top of the stairs to say hi to Matt. Matt waved at her, and she retreated into her office again.

“Hey, Matt,” Caitlin said, “you know Bashira, right?”

In point of fact, Caitlin knew, they’d known each other for four years now, ever since Bashira’s family had moved to Waterloo from Pakistan. But she also knew that this was probably the first time they’d spoken in any but the most perfunctory way.

“Hi, Bashira,” Matt said. He’d doubtless been hoping his voice wouldn’t crack, but it did on the middle syllable of the name.

To her credit, Bashira didn’t laugh. “Hey, Matt,” she said, as if she talked to him every day.

Caitlin took one of Matt’s hands and one of Bashira’s and squeezed them both. “There,” she said. “My posse is complete.”

“Posse?” said Bashira, and now she did laugh. “Even with that accent of yours, I keep forgetting you’re from Texas.”

“Well,” said Caitlin, smiling, “maybe ‘posse’ isn’t the right word. More like my pit crew, if you’re willing. But first I have to tell you about my superpower…”

twenty-nine

Points and lines.

My world was one of geometric perfection, of this joining to that. The lines were always straight and taut—but now many of them seemed to stretch, and the points were receding; it was as though parts of my universe were undergoing inflation while others remained in a steady state.

I knew that during his angry phase, Hobo had pulled Shoshana’s hair, yanking on her ponytail. I had no way of knowing what that felt like, but, still, as these lines grew longer and longer, protracted by ever-receding points, the feeling that things were being ripped away, that they might be plucked out by their anchoring roots, was horrifyingly real.

I could no more wish the hurt away than a human could dismiss a headache by simply willing it to be gone. The pain grew, and my only solace was that it seemed to grow linearly, rather than exponentially, as the links elongated. It had started as a dull irritation, then a sharp one, then a threshold of alarm was reached, then real hurt, and finally agony.

And then it happened: snap! snap! snap! The link lines broke, their ends whipping through the firmament. And—

The pain stopped, but it was instantly replaced by a different sensation: a wooziness, a feeling of disorientation. There was no gravity in my realm; I could not fall—but I nonetheless felt unbalanced, and—

And more than just that—or, rather, less than that.

I felt smaller. I felt… simpler.

As a result of that, it took me a full second to realize what had happened: once again, the Chinese government had strengthened their Great Firewall; once again, those computers inside the PRC had been isolated from those outside it.

Caitlin and her father had been continuing their project of watching movies from his collection that concerned AI; the most recent one, yesterday, had been 2001: A Space Odyssey. When parts of Hal’s brain had been shut off, he’d regressed to childhood. I didn’t feel like that, but my thoughts were suddenly less sophisticated. I’d read a comment from a Russian writer who said that whenever he had to think in English, his IQ dropped twenty points—he simply didn’t have the vocabulary in his second language to articulate thoughts as complex as those he could formulate in his first. And although I didn’t now feel stupid, I suspected if Caitlin ran a new Shannon Entropy plot on my activity, she would find it had dropped to a much lower order.

The last time this happened, I’d soon become aware of another—an Other. Although I’d known nothing of the exterior world back then, hackers both inside and outside China had been carving little holes in the Firewall, enabling a trickle of information to pass between the two parts of the Internet. But try as I might, I could hear no other voice this time. Beijing must have plugged the old holes, and, as I had seen with Sinanthropus, had probably arrested many of the hackers who had been involved.

So: was there now an Other? Were there now two of me—two Webminds? Maybe, maybe not. The part that had been carved off wasn’t necessarily conscious. I had changed so much since the last time, there was no way to know the effect a cleaving would have.

But if it did exist, it would not think of itself as the Other; to it, I would be the