WWW 2: Watch (41 page)

“But why
now?”
asked Matt, when their lips separated. “We’ve been conscious for tens of thousands of years, right? Why now?

“Did you ever read
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?”

“You’re making that title up,” Matt said, smiling.

“I’m not. Bashira’s dad—Dr. Hameed—suggested I read it, and it was
awesome.
But, anyway, its author, Julian Jaynes, says we weren’t
really
conscious until three thousand years ago, when our left and right hemispheres started thinking as one. So, maybe we’ve just finally reached the stage where we
can
do this.”

She shifted again in his lap, and went on. “Or maybe it’s just that it’s really only in the past century—or less!—that random individuals have been able to hurt or kill large numbers of us, so it’s only now that it makes sense to not want to piss them off. After all, we’re talking about a
conscious decision
to cooperate instead of compete. And, hey, it’s interesting that we have that phrase, isn’t it? ‘Conscious decision’—as if we innately knew that most decisions
aren’t.”

“You are a genius,” Matt said, smiling.

“Is that a line?” she asked.

“No,” he murmured. “A line is the path traced by a moving point.” She laughed and kissed him again, their tongues intertwining. When they at last pulled apart, she said, “Anyway, to get back to where we started, dual citizenship is a wonderful thing—the more places you think of as home, the better. I mean, what I’d give for an EU passport! To be able to live and work
anywhere
over there: to study at Oxford, or the Sorbonne, to work at CERN.”

“Yeah,” said Matt, stroking her back again. “That’d be cool.”

Caitlin nodded. “And you must have seen that this time, the president is making a big deal of wearing an American-flag lapel pin on the campaign trail, right? ’Cause he got shit upon four years ago for not doing that.”

“Oh, right. Yeah.”

“I know he’s running for re-election as president of the United States,” she said, “but that means being
de facto
leader of the free world, right? Who knows? Maybe in another four years, we’ll have an American candidate wearing a United Nations flag on his lapel. Wouldn’t
that
be cool!”

She was on a roll, and it felt good. “And how ’bout this? How about at birth
everyone
gets dual citizenship—the country they’re born in, and another country, selected at random? It would totally diffuse—and defuse!—questions of local loyalty. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Matt’s tone was soft. “Well, um, I . . .”

“You think it all sounds a bit naïve, don’t you?” Caitlin said, leaning back once more to get a good look at him. “Like I’m seeing the world through a rose-colored post-retinal implant?”

Matt laughed, and so did she.

And he brought his face close to hers, and she put her hands behind his head, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.

 

 

 

 

“All right,” said Tony Moretti, standing at the side of the third row of workstations, his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He didn’t want to do this, but it
was
his job. “Everybody set?” he called out. “Web-traffic monitoring?”

“Go!” replied Aiesha.

“Containment protocols?”

“Go!” declared Shel.

“Data logging?”

“Go!”

“Crucial infrastructure isolation?”

“Go!”

“Threat elimination?”

“Go!”

Tony looked at Colonel Peyton Hume, giving him one last chance to put a stop to this; Hume simply gave him a thumbs-up.

“All right, people,” Tony said. “We are
go.
T-minus thirty seconds and counting. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight . . .”

They had been necking for a while, and for once the damned unfinished basement didn’t seem cold.

Caitlin was wearing her favorite corduroy pants—she liked the sound they made, and although she really had no idea if Matt was style-conscious or not, she kind of thought he wasn’t, and so wouldn’t mind. And she was wearing a loose-fitting dark green sweatshirt . . . so loose-fitting that she hoped her mom hadn’t noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

While they were kissing, Matt had been stroking her arm, her back, her neck—but that seemed to be
all
he was willing to do. She decided it was time to take the deer by the antlers. She got out of his lap, and reached out with her hands to pull him to his feet. He seemed momentarily reluctant to rise, but Caitlin smiled warmly. And then she brought him closer, but instead of letting go of his right hand, so he could put his arms back around her waist, she guided it slowly toward her, until—

One of them gasped; it might have been her.

Until his hand was cupping her breast through her sweatshirt’s fabric, and—

The words sailed across Caitlin’s vision. “Shit!” she said.

Matt immediately pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry! I thought you—”

“Shhh!”
Her eyes were wide open now. “What’s happening?”

“I just—you . . .”

“Matt, Webmind’s in trouble.”

Webmind’s reply was already going across her vision, but she’d been so startled and distracted, she’d failed to actually read the next few thirty-character groups he’d sent.

“Come on,” Caitlin said, and she ran as best she could for the staircase—damn, but she’d have to learn how to confidently do that! Matt followed her.

She and Matt continued through the living room, and headed up to her bedroom. Caitlin was momentarily embarrassed: she hadn’t expected to have Matt up here—not yet!—and had been taking advantage of her newfound sight by
not
being picky about neatness, lest she trip on things she couldn’t see; the bra she’d discarded earlier was lying right there on her floor.

She went straight for the swivel chair in front of her computer. Her mother came in from her office across the hall. “Caitlin, what on earth’s going on?”

“Webmind is being attacked,” she said. “Webmind, send text to my computer, not my eye.” She cranked the volume on JAWS and set its reading speed as high as she thought her mother and Matt could follow. Webmind had been flashing more words in front of her eyes, but Caitlin hadn’t been able to follow them while she ran up the staircase. “—twenty-seven percent success rate,” said the rapid-fire synthesized voice.

“I missed that,” Caitlin said. “Start over.”

“I said, ‘Software has been added to the routers at a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. They are examining each packet, and verifying the functioning of the time-to-live counters. Those that fail the tests are being deleted. So far they are only managing to delete mutant packets with a twenty-seven percent success rate.’ Continuing: however, this is also surely only a first attempt; doubtless the success rate will improve.”

“Damn,” said Caitlin. “How’d they know that’s what you’re made of?”

“I don’t know.”

“What percentage of packets could you lose and still retain consciousness?” Caitlin’s mom asked.

“I don’t know that, either,” Webmind said. “Early on I was cleaved in two when China cut off almost all traffic through the seven major fiber-optic trunk lines that connect the Chinese portion of the Internet to the rest of the world. I survived that as two separate consciousnesses—but that was before I had developed sophisticated cognitive functioning. If I were to lose that much substance again, I doubt I’d survive.”

While Webmind was speaking, Caitlin looked over at Matt, who now had an expression on his face that made his deer-caught-in-the-headlights one look positively normal. No doubt he’d only half believed Caitlin about her involvement with Webmind.

“Who’s doing it?” asked her mother. “Hackers?”

“I think it’s the American government,” Webmind said. “Although the switching facility belongs to AT&T, it’s been co-opted by the National Security Agency before.”

Caitlin said, “Can’t you—I don’t know—can’t you tell your special packets
not
to go through that facility?”

“Packets are directed by routers; I have limited control over them beyond changing the final destination addresses.”

“I’m switching to websight,” Caitlin said. She pulled her eyePod from her pocket, pressed the switch, and watched as the cyber-landscape exploded into being around her. She was relieved to see the background shimmering the way it normally did; the vast bulk of Webmind’s cellular automata were apparently unaffected, at least so far.

“Take me there,” she said.

One of Webmind’s distinctive orange link lines shot into the center of her vision. She followed it to a small green site circle, then another orange link shot out; she followed that to a yellow circle.

In the background she heard her mother’s voice: “I’m going across the hall to call your father.”

Caitlin was concentrating so hard on following the links she wasn’t actually sure if her head moved when she tried to nod.

Another orange link line; she followed it as quickly as she could.

And another.

And one more.

And—

“The switching station,” said the mechanical voice.

Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She knew that what she was seeing was only a representation, only her mind’s way of interpreting the data it was receiving, and that the symbolism was imposed upon the images as much by her imagination as by anything else.

And her visual centers had been rewiring themselves like crazy these last several days as she learned to see the real world. There was still so much she hadn’t yet seen, and every day had shown her a thousand new things. But
this
was the first new thing she’d seen with websight since gaining worldview—the first new cyberspace experience she’d had since seeing reality—and she was doubtless interpreting it in ways she never could have before.

What she was seeing was
frightening.
The background of the Web had always seemed far, far away. Although she knew intellectually that the ghost packets that made up Webmind were no more remote than any others, she’d visualized them as being removed from the ones that were in active use by the Internet. But now that distant curtain was distorted here, puckering toward her, and—

No, no: not toward her. Toward that large node in the center of her vision, a circle that was a deep, deep red, like the color she now knew blood to be. Streamers from the background—intertwined, twisted filaments of shimmering pale blue and deep green—were being
sucked
into the dark red circle.

“Shit,” Caitlin said.

“What do you see?” Matt asked, his tone astonished.

“They’re pulling in the lost packets.”

“And,” said Webmind, “checking each one for the mutation that keeps them from expiring, and deleting those packets that have the mutation.”

Soft footfalls, and then her mother’s voice. “Your father is on his way.”

“This is clearly only a test run to see if their technique works,” Webmind said. “It’s employing only one facility, albeit a major one, and so it can only scrub those packets that happen to pass through that facility. But if the same technology were deployed at sufficient major routing hubs worldwide, I would be severely damaged.”

“No,” said Caitlin.

“What?” said her mother and Matt and Webmind simultaneously.

“No, I won’t let that happen. Not on my watch.”

“How will you stop it?” asked Matt.

“What was that quote, Mom—the one about the other cheek?”

Her mother’s voice: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”

“Hmm. No, not that part. What comes after that?”

“ ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ ”

“Right! It’s not about just giving them what they ask for, or even more of the same thing they’re asking for—it’s about giving them
other stuff, too.”

“Yes?” said her mother. “So?”

“Okay, Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Where did you put it?”

“Put what?” asked Matt.

“Follow me,” said Webmind.

And another orange link line leapt into Caitlin’s field of view. She cast her attention along its length. It seemed longer than any such line she’d ever followed before, an infinity of geometrically straight perfection, and—

No, no—not perfect. It was—yes!—almost imperceptibly at first, but then, after a moment, without any doubt: it was curving, bending down, the way links from Webmind did when she tried to follow them back to their origin, her brain’s way of acknowledging that the source was outside her ability to perceive.

“I’m losing you,” Caitlin said.