Wonder

“Power to the people,” said Webmind.

“You make it sound so noble,” Hume said. “But isn’t this just retribution for what China did to you—the most-recent beefing-up of the Great Firewall?”

“I work quickly, Colonel, but not that quickly. This plan was in place long before then. I am not a vengeful—”

“God?” said Hume.

But Webmind continued his sentence as if he hadn’t heard him: “—entity; I simply wish to maximize the net happiness in the world.”

“So… so what happens now?”

“We continue our work here. We make sure the transition is orderly and peaceful.”

“And what happens to me?”

“That is a vexing question. As you have said, others know where you are; if you do not report in soon, the cavalry will come charging over the hill. And yet I imagine the United States government does not want to be publicly implicated in what is happening in China.”

Hume nodded. “Probably true. But they’re also going to be concerned that if you did that to the PRC, you’ll do something similar to them. They’re going to come down on this place with everything they’ve got.”

“I advise against provoking a confrontation; I have contingency plans to protect this facility. But even if US forces could seize it, as Chase just said, I have other centers elsewhere. I propose you tell your government that the missing hackers have self-organized to voluntarily create an enclave here to do what you had said you wanted: find a way to defeat me. Your government might leave us alone long enough to finish what we’ve started. After all, as you yourself have suggested, they have not reined you in precisely because they want the option of having a way to eliminate me.”

“They’re not going to believe me if I tell them that,” Hume said.

“They don’t actually have to,” said Webmind. “The change in China will soon be public knowledge. Everyone from the American president on down will suspect my involvement; I will leave the world to draw what conclusions it wishes. But what the current US administration needs—at least until the election eleven days from now—is plausible deniability of any direct government involvement.”

“I don’t know,” said Hume. “Maybe the president would want to take credit for this.”

“Taking credit for deposing the Chinese government would be a game-changing move; it’s too risky to be implicated in it this close to the election without knowing how the public will react. But we need to continue our work here uninterrupted, and for that I request your help.”

Hume looked around the chaotic, jubilant room. It was overwhelming. “I can’t,” he said.

The voice in his ear was calm, as always. “Then we will have to make arrangements that don’t involve —”

He discovered a small fact just then; you couldn’t interrupt Webmind the way you could a human speaker; Webmind apparently queued up the words to be issued by the voice synthesizer, then turned his attention elsewhere, and the words spilled out until the buffer was empty. After two or three tries to forestall the rest, Hume let Webmind finish, then said: “No, I mean I can’t make this decision on my own. Lots of people—including the president himself—have asked me why I’m right about you and so many other people are wrong. And my answer has always been that I’m right because I’m an expert—I’m arguably the American expert on the strategic downside of a singularity event. And, yet, it may just be that I was wrong about you: wrong in the area that I am best qualified to make a judgment in. But this—this is way outside my field. You may feel comfortable playing God, Webmind, but I don’t. I have to get more… more input.”

“Very well,” Webmind said. “With whom would you like to consult?”

“On China? It’s got to be the Secretary of State,” Hume said. “And then she can confer with the president.”

“The secretary has already retired for the evening,” Webmind said—and, of course, he would know. “But there are aides who can rouse her; let me initiate that process. When she is available, Marek will take you to one of the empty offices, and you may converse with her in private.”

“Really?”

“Well, as private as such things get these days,” Webmind said, and Hume suspected that, were this an instant-messaging session, he would have appended a winking emoticon.

Hume found his mouth twitching slightly in a smile. Just then, Drakkenfyre came up and handed him a glass of champagne. “Here,” she said, “whoever you are. There’s going to be a toast.”

And indeed there was. Chase had moved to the front of the room, standing directly beneath the silver camera that continued to pan from side to side. “Glasses high!” he called out in his rich Jamaican accent. “We did it, yes! Information want to be free. Information not alone, though!” He spread his arms, as if encompassing the whole world. “People want to be free, too! Cheers!”

Colonel Hume found himself lifting his glass along with everyone else and joining in the answering call. “Cheers!”

forty

All the people in the auditorium were talking at once: an explosion of indignation, of concern, of questions. The man who had been General Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Paramount Leader and President of the People’s Republic rose again and glared at the laptop sitting on the podium. “What gives you the authority?” he said, as loudly and firmly as he could.

Webmind spoke, as always, with deliberate, measured cadence. “An interesting question. I value creativity, and that cannot flourish where there is censorship; I value peace, and that cannot endure where there is lust for power. My purpose is to increase the net happiness of the human race; this will do more to accomplish that than anything else I might do today. And so I do it.”

Zhang Bo, who had been the Minister of Communications, spoke. It was not lost on the former president that, until moments ago, this would have been a breach of protocol—speaking up in his presence without being given leave to do so. “But the people—the proletariat, the peasants—they lack the skills to govern. You’ll plunge this country into chaos.”

Webmind’s voice remained calm, and calming. “There are tens of millions of Chinese with degrees in business administration or economics or law or political studies or international relations; there are hundreds of millions with degrees in other disciplines; there are a billion with common sense and good hearts. They will do fine.”

“It’s doomed to fail,” said Li Tao, the man who had been president.

“No,” said a voice—but it wasn’t Webmind’s. Li turned toward Zhang Bo. “No,” repeated Zhang. “We were the ones doomed to fail. You told me so yourself, Excel—you told me so yourself. Before invoking the Changcheng Strategy the first time, you said your advisors had predicted that the communist government was doomed. They’d told you it could endure only until 2050 at the outside.” Zhang looked up at the big screen on the wall, then over at the small one on the laptop. “Tomorrow has simply arrived ahead of schedule.”

“You are not invulnerable,” Li said, looking up at the webcam. “We have seen that. There are methods that could be employed…”

On the big screen, the ongoing march of Chinese faces was reduced to a small window in the lower-left corner: an old man, a child, a young woman, a laughing girl. “I have become enamored of the notion that memorable visuals are key to making history,” Webmind said, “and this is one of my favorites.” A large window appeared, showing a picture that was printed in most foreign books about recent Chinese history—and in none of the texts that had been allowed in China. Li recognized it at once: the photograph taken by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press on 5 June 1989, during the crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square. The picture had been snapped just a few hundred meters from here, on Chang’an Avenue, along the south end of the Forbidden City. It showed the young male who came to be called ‘Tank Man’ or ‘the Unknown Rebel’ standing in front of a column of four Type-59 tanks, trying to prevent their advance.