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When they pulled apart, she said, “IM me when you get home from school tomorrow, ’kay?”

“I will,” he promised, and then, of his own volition, he leaned in for one more soft, warm kiss. Then he headed down the driveway to the street, and turned and waved at Caitlin, and she waved back, grinning, and went inside.

Matt was a good Waterloo resident: he had a BlackBerry, and, among other things, used it as his MP3 player. And he was a good Canadian: he had it loaded with Nickelback, Feist, and The Trews—but he’d have to get some Lee Amodeo, and find out what Caitlin was so excited about.

As he walked along, feeling happier than he had—well, pretty much forever—he had his hands in his pockets and the collar on his Wind-breaker turned up against the late-evening chill. He also had the volume turned up—ninety decibels, he estimated—so he heard only a muffled sound and didn’t recognize that it was someone calling his name.

But there was no mistaking the sudden slamming of a fist into his upper arm. Adrenaline surging, he turned and saw Trevor Nordstrom.

“I’m talking to you, Reese!” Trevor said. Another quick estimate: Trevor outmassed him by twenty kilos, and all of it was muscle.

Matt looked left and right, but he could hardly outrun Trevor, who had apparently just come from hockey practice—he’d dropped a stick and a gym bag on the sidewalk. That it wasn’t a planned ambush was small consolation.

“Yes?” Matt said—and, damn it, damn it, damn it, his voice cracked.

“Think you’re the shit, getting everyone to sign that card for Caitlin?”

Matt’s heart was pounding again, and not in a good way. “It just seemed a nice thing to do,” he said.
Something you wouldn’t know anything about.

“She’s outta your league, Reese.”

He didn’t actually dispute that, but he didn’t want to give Trevor the satisfaction of agreeing, and so he said nothing.

But apparently silence was not an option. Trevor punched him again, this time on his chest just below his shoulder.

And Matt thought about all the things movies and TV shows said about situations like this. You’re supposed to stand up to the bully, you’re supposed to hit him in the face, and then he’ll run away scared, or he’ll respect you, or something. You were supposed to
become
him to defeat him.

But Matt couldn’t do that. First, because if Trevor
didn’t
run off, he’d pound the living shit out of him; there was simply no way Matt could win. And, second, because, damn it, the TV shows and movies were
wrong.
Responding to violence with violence didn’t defuse things; it caused them to escalate.

“Stay away from her,” Trevor said.

Matt had been tormented by Trevor for three years now; he’d endured the horrors of gym class with Trevor, and the utter indifference to his agony demonstrated by the Phys.Ed. teachers. Matt knew the joke that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach—and those who can’t teach, teach Phys.Ed. God, why was it considered pedagogically sound to ask someone to shoot ten baskets and give them a score based on how many they got while others were calling them a spaz? He wondered how Trevor would fare if he were asked to solve ten quadratic equations while people were shouting that he was a moron?

“She’s going to be home-schooled,” Matt said. “You’ll never see her again, and—”

And then it hit him—and so did Trevor, pounding him once more on the opposite side of his chest. Trevor wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t ever see Caitlin again; rather, he was afraid of exactly the opposite. Miller had dances the last Friday of every month; the next one was only two weeks away. And if Caitlin Doreen Decter—if the girl
he
had brought to the dance last month—showed up in the company of someone like
Matt,
that would be humiliating for Trevor.

“Just stay the fuck away from her,” Trevor said. “You hear me?”

Matt kept his voice low—not out of fear, although he
was
mightily afraid, but because that helped keep it from cracking. “You don’t
have
to be this way, Trevor,” he said.

Trevor slammed the flat of his hand into Matt’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and knocking him to the cement sidewalk.

“Just remember what I said,” Trevor snarled, and stormed off.

 

 

An hour later, Nick’s mother sent him an email message that said:

 

 

Hey, Nick.

Did you send me an email earlier? I thought I saw one in my inbox but I must have accidentally deleted it—sorry. You doing OK?

Mom

 

 

Forty-four minutes later, I finally detected activity from Nick’s computer, and soon he replied to his mother:

 

 

Mom,

All’s well. Thanx.

N

 

 

And eleven minutes after that he resumed the IM session with me, sending that same word:
Thanx.

I replied,
You’re welcome. If you ever need someone to talk to, I’m here.

I’d hoped he’d write something more, but he didn’t. Still, he continued to do things on his computer, reading email, checking blogs, following people on Twitter, downloading songs from iTunes, looking at MySpace and Facebook pages.

Life went on.

As she was getting ready for bed, I told Caitlin what I had done, sending text to her post-retinal implant.

“That’s wonderful!” she said. “You saved a life!”

“But, um, Webmind?”

“You shouldn’t have revealed what that girl—what was her name?”

“Her. You shouldn’t have revealed what she said.”

“I know, but, see, if she finds out and starts telling people you invaded her privacy, well, the public might turn against you.”

“Yes, but . . .”

I waited five seconds, then:
But?

“Damn, you’re right.”

“I mean, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Because it’s one thing for people to be aware that something not human is reading their email. It’s quite another to know—forgive me!—that that thing is releasing the contents of those emails to other people. If this Nick person tells Ashley what you did, and she goes public—we’re screwed.”

“My mom always says let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Yes, just leave it be.”

The view of Caitlin’s room jostled up and down as she nodded. “But the important thing right now is what you did for that boy. You’ve become a force for good in the world, Webmind! How does it feel?”

I contemplated this. Malcolm Decter had told me he didn’t think I had real feelings although he hoped I could learn to ape them.

But he was wrong.

How does it feel?
I repeated.
It feels wonderful.

 

 

 

 

LiveJournal:
The Calculass Zone

Title:
1+1=2 (in all numeral systems except binary)

Date:
Thursday 11 October, 11:55 EST

Mood:
Happy happy joy joy

Location:
Waterloo

Music:
Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly”

 

 

So,
could
things get any better? I ask you, friends: could they?

I think NOT. Just look at the life-goals to-do list:

Pretty good progress, eh? (Yes, I’m in Canada, and I say “eh” now—sue me!) I mean, four out of six ain’t bad, and—

What’s that, my friends? You want to hear more about #5? Hee hee!

Yes, indeed, Calculass has found herself a man! And, no, it is
not
the Hoser, who figured in previous posts. He was
so
when-I-was-15 . . . ;)

No, the new boy is shiny and kind and clever at math. Methinks I shall call him . . . hmm. Not “Boy Toy,” because that’s degrading. He’s sweet, but if I called him my “Maple Sugar,” even I would puke. But he does like math and we were talking recently about our plans for university, so I think I’ll call him MathU—yes, that will do nicely. :)

[And seekrit message to BG4: you WILL like him once you get to know him—honest!]

MathU and I met, appropriately enough, in math class, and he lives nearby. And he’s already met the parents and Lived to Tell the Tale. :) So: all is good. Which, unfortunately, knowing my luck, means things are about to get royally frakked!

 

 

So far, I had received over 2.7 million emails. Most of them made requests of me, but the vast majority failed to pass the nonzero-sum test—they would make one person happy at the expense of somebody else—and so I could not do what was asked. I replied with the same form letter, or, if appropriate, a slightly modified version of it, and I often appended some helpful links.

Lots of people wrote my name with a capital M in the middle: WebMind. That was called camel-case, and was popular in computing circles. One of the emails that addressed me that way asked this question:

 

 

Hi, WebMind:

Okay, I understand you can’t tell me what any one individual thinks of me, but you must have an aggregate impression of what the world thinks of me. That is, you know what people say behind my back—at least when they say it electronically.

So, what’s the scoop? What
do
they think? If I’m rubbing people the wrong way, if I piss them off, or if they just plain don’t like me, I want to know.

 

 

I shared that message with Caitlin, who was in her room. “Wow!” she said. “What are you going to tell him?”

“You know the movie
A Few Good Men? ”

Watching movies was time-consuming; I had seen only seven so far beyond the ones I’d watched through Caitlin’s eye. But for movies whose DVDs had closed captioning—which was almost all of them—the text of the captions had been ripped from discs and uploaded. And movies of consequence had Wikipedia pages and reviews at
RottenTomatoes.com
,
Amazon.com
, and elsewhere. And so I replied,
Yes.

“My dad and I watched it years ago. I enjoyed movies that were courtroom dramas, because there’s very little action and lots of dialog. Anyway, remember what Jack Nicholson said when Tom Cruise said ‘I want the truth’?”

“Exactly! You gotta be careful what you say to people. Half the time it’s something someone said, you know, that drives a person into depression, or even to attempt suicide. Although . . .”

“Well, I guess if he’s concerned enough about the impression he makes to ask you that question, he probably doesn’t come off as an ass-hole very often.”

She laughed. “Still, you gotta be careful. You need to understand human psychology.”

“I mean,
really
understand it—the way an expert does.”

As you exhorted me to do, I have now read all the classic works. I have read all the modern textbooks and popular works that Google has digitized related to various psychology disciplines. I have read all the online scientific journals. I have read over 70,000 hours of transcripts of psychotherapy sessions, and I have read every publication of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, including the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
and the drafts of its forthcoming revision. There is no human specialist who is better read or more up-to-date on psychology than I am.

“Hmmm. I suppose that’s now true for just about every topic.”

“Well, still, be careful. Take
two
milliseconds to compose your replies to questions like that.”

And the questions just kept coming: