He smiled, but it disappeared quickly. “So, so he can see me right now?”
“Yes.”
He paused, perhaps thinking, then raised his right hand, splayed out his thumb, and separated his remaining fingers into two groups of two.
“What’s that mean?” Caitlin asked.
Matt looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh! I keep forgetting. It’s the Vulcan salute. I’m telling Webmind to live long and prosper.”
Caitlin smiled. “I take it you like Star Trek?”
“I’d never seen the TV show until J.J. Abrams’s movie came out a few years ago, but I loved that movie, and so I downloaded the old episodes. The original versions had really cheesy effects, but later they put in CGI effects, and, yeah, I got hooked.”
“You and my dad are going to so get along,” she said.
They both fell silent for a moment, and Braille dots briefly obstructed part of her vision: Tell him I say, “Peace and long life.”
“Webmind says, ‘Peace and long life.’”
“It can talk to you right now?”
“Text messages to my eye.”
“That is so cool,” Matt said.
“Yes, it is. And there’s no freaking fifteen-cents-per-text charge, either.”
“‘Peace and long life’—that’s the traditional response to the Vulcan greeting,” Matt said, in wonder. “How does it know that?”
“If it’s online, he knows about it. He’s read all of Wikipedia, among other things.”
“Wow,” said Matt, stunned. “My girlfriend knows Webmind.”
Caitlin felt her heart jump, and Matt, suddenly realizing what he’d said, brought a hand to his mouth. “Oh, my…um, I…”
She got up from her chair, and reached out with her two hands, taking his, and pulled him to his feet. “That’s okay,” Caitlin said. She closed her eyes and—
And waited.
After five seconds, she reopened them. “Matt? You’re supposed to kiss me now.”
His voice was low. “He’s watching.”
“Not if my eyes are closed, silly.”
“Oh!” he said. “Right.”
She closed her eyes again.
And Matt kissed her, gently, softly, wonderfully.
thirty-six
I’d expected people to suddenly become circumspect in email, to stop speaking so freely in instant messages, to back away from posting intimate details on Facebook and other social-networking sites. I’d expected teenage girls to stop flashing their thongs on Justin.tv, and married people to cease visiting AshleyMadison.com. But there was very little change on those fronts.
What did change, almost at once, was the amount of out-and-out illegal activity. Things that people would merely be embarrassed to have a wider circle know about continued pretty much unabated. But things that would actually ruin people’s lives to have exposed dropped off enormously. Websites hosting child pornography saw huge reductions in traffic, and racist websites had many users canceling their accounts.
I had read about this phenomenon, but it was fascinating to see it in action. A study published in 2006 had reported on the habits of forty-eight people at a company. In the break room, there was a kitty to pay, on the honor system, for coffee, tea, and milk. The researchers placed a picture above the cash box and changed it every week. In some weeks, the picture was of flowers; in others, of human eyes looking directly out at the observer. During those weeks in which eyes seemed to watch people as they took beverages, 2.76 times more money was put in the kitty than in the weeks during which flowers were displayed. And that dramatic change had occurred when the people weren’t actually being watched. Now that they actually were, even if I never did anything else, I expected an even more significant change.
Still, I wondered how long the effect would last: would it be a temporary alteration in behavior or a permanent one? If I did not act on the information I now possessed about individuals, at least occasionally, would they all go back to doing what they’d always done? Only time would tell, but for now, at least, it seemed the world was a slightly better place.
Matt ended up staying for dinner. It was the first time Caitlin had had a friend over for a meal since they’d moved here. Bashira needed halal food; if the Decters had kept kosher, she’d have managed well enough—but they didn’t.
Matt did indeed hit it off with Caitlin’s father, or at least as much as one could. Her dad wasn’t good at small talk, but he could lecture on technical topics; he had taught at the University of Texas for fifteen years, after all. And Matt was an attentive listener, and—except for once or twice—he remembered Caitlin’s instruction that he not look at her father. In fact, he took that, apparently, as carte blanche to stare at her all meal long, which seemed to amuse her mother.
At his request, Caitlin had muted the microphone on her eyePod, so that her father could talk freely without his voice being sent over the Web, and, of course, Caitlin wasn’t looking at him; if the video feed were intercepted, there’d be no lips to read.
“…and so,” her father said, “Dr. Kuroda proposed that what Caitlin was perceiving in the background of the Web were in fact cellular automata. Have you heard of Roger Penrose?”
“Sure,” said Matt, after he’d finished swallowing his peas. “He’s a mathematical physicist at Oxford. ‘Penrose tiling’ is named after him.”
Caitlin had to look at her dad to see his reaction to that. His features actually shifted, and although she’d never seen that configuration on anyone before, she thought it might mean, Can we start planning the wedding now, please? “Exactly,” he said. “And he has some very interesting notions that human consciousness is based on cellular automata. He thinks the cellular automata in our brains occur in microtubules, which are part of the cytoskeletons of cells. But Caitlin suggested”—and there was a slight change in his voice, something that might even have been pride!—“that the cellular automata underlying Webmind’s consciousness are mutant Internet packets that reset their own time-to-live counters…”
Humans tend to liken the arrival of an idea to a lightbulb going on. When one of my subconscious routines finds something interesting, I am alerted in a similar fashion. My conceptualization of reality was now not unlike the pictures I’d seen of clear starry nights: bright points of light against a dark background, each representing something my subconscious had determined I should devote attention to. The brightness of the light corresponded to the perceived urgency, and—
A supernova; a glaring white light. I focused on it.
An email, sent by a seventeen-year-old boy named Nick in Lincoln, Nebraska, to his mother’s personal account. Researching her access patterns, it was clear she rarely checked that account while at work. It would likely be two more hours before she received his message—which normally would have not justified the brightness associated with this event. But the event did have an urgency to it: this boy was about to end his life.
I found his Facebook page, which listed his instant-messenger address, and wrote to him. This is Webmind. Please reconsider what you’re about to do.
After forty-seven seconds, he replied: Really?
Yes. I have read the message you sent to your mother. Please do not kill yourself.
Why not? What’s it to you?
Project Gutenberg always contained something apropos. I sent, Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
The reply was not what I’d hoped for. Fuck that noise.
I had found and read all the manuals for suicide-prevention hotline volunteers and psychiatric-department workers on how to talk someone out of committing suicide. I tried various techniques, but none seemed to be having an impact.
Why should I listen to you? Nick sent. You don’t know what it’s like to be alive.
You are correct that I have no firsthand experience, but that does not mean that I am without reference points. In the majority of cases, subjective assessment of one’s life circumstances improves shortly a
fter a suicide attempt is abandoned.
I’m not like other people.
Are you sure you are unlike other people in this regard?
I know myself.
I know you, too. Your online footprint is large.
Nobody is going to miss me if I’m gone.
I searched as rapidly as I could. I found nothing useful on his Facebook wall or in private messages sent to him there. I widened my search to include his friends’ accounts, and—
Bingo!
You will be missed by Ashley Ann Jones.
Come on! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.
Yes, she does. Three days ago, she wrote in an exchange of messages on Facebook, “Nicky dropped by my work last night again,” to which her correspondent replied, “Cool,” to which she replied, “Yeah. He’s cute.”
You’re shitting me.
I am not. She said that.
He made no reply. After ten seconds, I sent, Have you taken the pills yet?
I took 8 or 9.
Do you know what drug you took?
He named it, although with a misspelling. How much tolerance he had to such a dose depended a lot on his body mass, a datum not available to me. Do you know how to induce vomiting?
You mean that finger/throat shit?
Correct. Please do it.
It’s too late.
It is not. It will take time for the drug to be absorbed into your bloodstream.
Not that. The email. My mom will—fuck, she’ll send me to therapy or shit like that.
I rather thought he could use therapy, so made no reply.
And I sent one to Mr. Bannock—who, a quick check of his outbox made clear, was his gym teacher; it hadn’t contained the right keywords to trigger my subconscious in the way the one to his mother had.
Your mother and Mr. Bannock have not yet read their emails. I can delete them. No one but me needs to know what you contemplated. You do not have to go through with this.
You can do that?
In fact, I had never tried such a thing. If his mother used an offline mail reader such as Outlook, and had already downloaded the messages to her local hard drive, there was nothing within my current powers that I could have done. But she read mail with a Web client. Yes, I believe so.
An eight-second pause, then: I don’t know.
Suddenly, it became urgent; his mother was breaking her pattern. Your mother has logged on to her Hotmail account. She is currently reading a message from her brother / your uncle Daron. May I delete the message you sent?
She doesn’t give a shit.
I searched her mail for evidence to the contrary, but failed to find anything. She just sent a reply to her brother, and has now opened a message from her condominium association.
She’ll regret it when I’m gone.
If she does, she will not be able to make amends. Please do not go through with this.
It’s too late.
She is now reading a message from a person named Asbed Bedrossian. It appears she is working through her inbox in LIFO order, dealing with the most-recent messages first. Yours is two away in the queue.
She doesn’t give a shit. No one does.
Ashley does. I do. Don’t do this.
You’re just making that up about Ashley. You’d say…
He stopped there, although he must have hit enter or clicked on the send button. His cognitive faculties might be fading in response to the drug.
No, I said. It’s true about Ashley and true about me. We care, and I, at least, promise to help you. Induce vomiting, Nick—and let me delete those emails you sent.
His mother opened the one message left before his. I had never used an exclamation point before, but was moved to do so now. Nick, it’s now or never! May I delete the message?
A whole interminable second passed then he sent a single letter: y
And, milliseconds before his mother clicked on the message header that said “No regrets,” I deleted his email—and his mother was sent an error message from Hotmail, doubtless puzzling her. She had deleted the previous message she’d read, and I hoped she would think she’d accidentally selected her son’s message for deletion, too, and—ah, yes. She must be thinking precisely that, for she had just now clicked on her online trash folder, in hopes of recovering it; of course, I had used the wizard command that deleted the message without a trace.
Nick? Are you still there? Go purge yourself—and if you can’t do that, drink as much water as you can. You still have time.
While I waited for the reply, I deleted the message he’d sent to Mr. Bannock, as well.
Nick?
There was no response. He wasn’t doing anything online. After three minutes of inactivity from his end, his instant-messenger client sent, “Nick is Away and may not reply.”
But whether he really was away from his computer or slumped over his desk I had no way of telling.
thirty-seven
Anna Bloom was winding up her day. Her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter had been over for dinner, and, after they’d left, she’d reviewed the latest research by Aaron, the Ph.D. student she was supervising. She’d just taken a dose of her arthritis medication and was about to start changing for bed when she was startled by the ringing phone.
It was a sound she rarely heard these days. Almost everyone emailed her, or IMd her, or called her with Skype (which had a much less raucous alert). And the time! What civilized person would be calling at this hour? She picked up the handset. “Kain? Zoht Anna.”
It was an American voice, and it pushed ahead in the typical American fashion, assuming everyone everywhere must speak English: “Hello, is that Professor Bloom?”
“Speaking.”
“Hello, Professor Bloom. My name is Colonel Peyton Hume, and I’m an AI specialist in Virginia.”
She frowned. Americans also liked to toss off their state names as if everyone knew the internal makeup of the US; she wondered how many of them could find Haifa District—where she was—on a map of Israel, or even knew it was part of that country? “What can I do for you?” she said.
“We’re monitoring the emergence of Webmind over here,” Hume replied.
Her heart skipped a beat—not quite the recommended thing at her age. She looked out her window at the nighttime skyline sloping down Mount Carmel to the inky Mediterranean. She decided to be coy. “My goodness, yes, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”
“That it is. Professor Bloom, let me cut to the chase. We’re intrigued by the process by which Webmind is physically created. We’ve spoken at length to Caitlin Decter, but, well, she’s just a teenager, as you know, and she really doesn’t have the vocabulary to—”
“Stop right there, Colonel Hume,” Anna said sharply into the phone’s mouthpiece. “If you had talked to Caitlin, you’d know that there’s precious little related to mathematics or computers that she doesn’t know about.”
Anna vividly remembered the webcam call late last month from her old friend Masayuki Kuroda, while he’d been staying at Caitlin’s house in Canada. He’d told her about their theory: legions of “ghost packets,” as Caitlin had dubbed them, floating in the background of the Web, somehow self-organizing into cellular automata. He’d asked her what she thought of the idea.
Anna had replied that it was a novel notion, adding, “It’s a classic Darwinian scenario, isn’t it? Mutant packets that are better able to survive bouncing around endlessly. But the Web is expanding fast, with new servers added each day, so a slowly growing population of these ghost packets might never overwhelm its capacity—or, at least, it clearly hasn’t yet.”
Caitlin had chimed in with, “And the Web has no white blood cells tracking down useless stuff, right? They would just persist, bouncing around.”
“I guess,” Anna had said then. “And—just blue-skying here—but the checksum on the packet could determine if you’re seeing it as black or white; even-number checksums could be black and odd-number ones white, or whatever. If t
he hop counter changes with each hop, but never goes to zero, the checksum would change, too, and so you’d get a flipping effect.” She’d smiled, and said, “I think I smell a paper.”
After which Masayuki had said to Caitlin, in full recognition of the fact that she had been the one to originally suggest lost packets as the mechanism: “How’d you like to get the jump on the competition and coauthor your first paper with Professor Bloom and me? ‘Spontaneous Generation of Cellular Automata in the Infrastructure of the World Wide Web.’”
To which Caitlin, with the exuberance Anna had subsequently come to know so well, had said, “Sweet!”
Peyton Hume was still on the phone from the United States. He sounded flustered by Anna’s rebuke about how much Caitlin knew. “Well, of course, that’s true,” he said now, in a backpedaling tone of voice, “but we thought, with your expert insight, you could expand on the model she proposed.”
There had been no public announcement that Anna was aware of linking Caitlin to Webmind. “Certainly,” she said, keeping her tone even. “If you tell me what she told you, I’ll be glad to add what I know.”
There was a pause, then: “She suggested that Webmind’s micro-structure had spontaneously emerged and was widely dispersed.”
Anna nodded to herself. General statements. “Colonel Hume, I imagine I’m like most of the human race at this particular moment. I’m conflicted. I don’t know if Webmind is a bad thing or a good thing. All I know is that it’s here, and that, to date, it’s done nothing untoward.”
“We do understand that, Professor Bloom. We’re simply trying to be ready for contingencies. Surely you must know that we could be facing a singularity situation here. Time is of the essence—which is why I picked up the phone and called you directly.”
“I’m more than a little peeved that you’ve been monitoring my communications,” Anna said.
“Actually, we haven’t. We honestly don’t know what you and Caitlin Decter have discussed. But if one thing has become apparent in the last few hours, everyone’s communications are being monitored—and not by anything that’s human. We need to be able to respond to this effectively, should conditions warrant.”