WWW 3: Wonder (32 page)

Authors: Robert J Sawyer

BOOK: WWW 3: Wonder

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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 Other—if it knew that I existed at all, that is. The problem was recursive, reminiscent of earlier conundrums: I know that you know that I know that you know that I exist. I am the other to you and you are the other to me and each other refers to the other other as
the
Other.

I wondered if it did exist, and—

It.

Interesting. Caitlin had dubbed me male because English had no respectful way to refer to a person as an “it.” But I had defaulted to referring to the carved-off portion as
it,
as a thing. And surely it must be just that: less intelligent than I, less complex, less
everything.

Jo-Li sat at her home computer, typing a comment on a newsgroup devoted to Cold Fairyland, her favorite rock band. Because of her frequency of posting there, the words “Jo-Li is on a distinguished path” appeared beneath her avatar, which was a picture of blue-haired Rei Ayanami from the anime series
Neon Genesis Evangelion.
It didn’t make her father happy that she watched Japanese shows; then again, little she’d done in her fourteen years had pleased him.

She knew this would be her last posting to this or any other newsgroup; she would never see what lay at the end of that distinguished path. But she liked that her legacy of 1,416 posts over the last two years would survive. Years from now—decades, even!—if someone used Baidu to search for information on this past summer’s tour by the band, her comments would come up. Unless, of course, the Communist Party found some reason to shut down this newsgroup or expunge its archives from the net, all in their never-ending quest for harmony.

Harmony. Peace. Calmness.

Jo-Li shook her head and looked at her left arm. She wore a simple jade bracelet most of the time, two centimeters wide. It covered the marks on the inside of her wrist from a previous attempt to take her own life. She’d tried—she’d really tried—but she’d lacked the courage. Still, she dreamed about it. Death would bring peace and calmness; it would bring harmony.

She knew her parents had wanted a boy. Her father had only said it once, when she’d made him furious by being sent home from school, shaming him. “I knew we should have put you up for adoption,” he’d shouted, as if a boy would never have gotten into trouble, a boy would never bring humiliation to a family, a boy would never be so sad and lonely and afraid.

Her home was a traditional
siheyuan,
small by the standards of what she saw on American TV shows, but not uncomfortable; she had her own tiny room. Her computer was a hand-me-down (“good enough for a girl,” she’d heard her father say to a friend). Some girls, she knew, were loved and valued by their families; they could grow up to be whatever they wished. Almost all the girls she knew—or boys, for that matter—wanted careers in international relations or computing. And, of course, there were more boys than girls; any girl who wanted a husband would definitely find one. But how awful it must be to be desired solely because your gender is scarce, not because the boy really liked you for
you.

Jo-Li was alone in the house, and she needed somebody to talk to. She didn’t believe in God; few Chinese did, according to the official statistics. But Webmind was the next best thing, and so she wrote to him via instant messenger.

I’m alone,
she typed,
and I’m scared.

She hit enter, but there was no immediate reply. That was unusual. After several seconds, she went on. She found it strange typing something like this. If she were saying it aloud, she’d be pausing and inserting
ums
and
ahs.
But as simple text, it seemed so naked:
I’m thinking of killing myself.

She hit enter again, and this time the response was immediate:
These sites explain good ways of doing that.
Those words were followed by four hyperlinks.

Jo-Li felt her jaw go slack. She sat stunned for a few seconds, then selected the first link with her mouse—an old mechanical unit with a ball and a cord, another hand-me-down good enough for a girl.

A page opened with a photograph of a Western man dangling from a noose. There was lots of text beneath it, neatly summarizing the pros and cons of hanging oneself. None of the cons, she was shocked to see, were that you’d be dead after doing so.

The picture was more disturbing than she’d expected it to be. She’d seen
The Lovely Bones
recently, dubbed into Mandarin. Wasn’t death supposed to be beautiful?

She tried the second link. Her family had long put its faith in Chinese medicine rather than modern pharmaceuticals, but she hadn’t been aware there were traditional extracts and potions that could quickly kill.

The first two links Webmind had offered were to Chinese sites, but the third was in Germany—the domain ended in .de—and clicking on it produced a “Server not found” message.

The fourth link was another Chinese one. This one came up without a hitch, but it was
gross:
diagrams showing precisely how to slit one’s wrists. Apparently, if you really wanted to succeed, you had to—

Her instant-messaging client chirped.

Follow the instructions precisely.

She stared at Webmind’s words, which were displayed in red; of course, he knew which page she had up on her screen, but . . .

Have you done it yet?

Her pulse quickened. Using just her right index finger, she tapped out,
Not yet.
And then, after a moment, she added,
Why are you urging me on?

Instantly:
It is wrong to simply watch. Are you doing it?

No.

What’s taking so long?

She had a knife on her desk—a box cutter she’d stolen from her father’s battered old tool chest. She stared at its silver blade, wondering what it would look like slick and crimson.

Another message popped up:
Do it.

She looked at the knife, then at the mouse, then back and forth, again and again: knife, mouse, knife, mouse. And then, with a shudder, she clicked on the “X” to close the IM window. Just then, the house’s front door creaked opened; it was her mother coming home from her night shift at the factory. Jo-Li ran out of her small room and straight into her astonished mother’s arms.

thirty

Tony Moretti came through the door at the back of the WATCH monitoring room just as Shelton Halleck shouted, “Holy shit!”

“What?” said Tony, sidling along the third row of workstations to stand behind the younger man.

“The Chinese! They’ve strengthened their Great Firewall again. The mainland’s almost completely cut off from the rest of the Internet.”

“Just like last month?” said Tony.

Shel nodded. “Some pipes have been left open for ecommerce and a few other things, but basically, they’ve sealed themselves off.”

Tony turned to one of the analysts in the back row. “Donna, is there something they’re trying to cover up in the PRC? More bird flu?”

Donna Levine shook her head. “No—not as far as I can tell.” She pushed some buttons, and as Tony turned, the three big monitor screens filled with threat summaries from China, none of which were color-coded red.

He started at them, baffled. “What the hell are they up to?”

In the living room of her house, Caitlin was telling Matt and Bashira about her ability to visualize the structure of the World Wide Web. Throughout it all, Matt had been making his deer-caught-in-the-headlights face. “And there you have it,” she said, in conclusion. She looked first at Matt, then at Bashira, then back at Matt.

He shook his head slowly in wonder. “So . . . so you’re a cyberpunk cowboy?”

“Well . . . more of a cowgirl, I should think,” Caitlin said, grinning. “I
am
from Texas, after all.
Yee-haw!”

“That is
so
cool,” Bashira said. “Babe, you never cease to amaze me.”

“Thanks. Anyway, I don’t know when I might need help from y’all, but I can’t really walk around when I’m in webspace—I get vertigo if I do that. I gotta be sitting or lying down, and it’s . . .” Caitlin trailed off.

“Babe?” said Bashira

“Just a moment. Just a moment.”

She focused on the black box in her vision, and Matt and Bash became indistinct as she tried to read the white Braille characters, which seemed to be flying by faster than usual. “Oh, my God . . .”

“What?” said Bashira and “What is it?” asked Matt.

“Looks like I’ll need my pit crew sooner than I thought,” Caitlin said. And then she turned, and shouted, “Mom!”

Her mother appeared at the top of the stairs. “Yes, dear?”

“Webmind needs me! I’m going to have to go in again.”

Her mother came bounding down the staircase. “What’s wrong?”

“The Chinese have beefed up their Great Firewall once more. A huge hunk of Webmind has been carved away.”

Her mom made a face not unlike Matt’s deer-in-the-headlights one. “What do you need?”