WWW 2: Watch (37 page)

And, surprisingly frequently, variations on:

And they came in all sorts of languages. Some of my correspondents took me to task for having chosen an obviously English name; it was a valid criticism, and I apologized each time the issue came up. But, except for completely made-up terms, there really weren’t any names that didn’t convey a cultural origin, and I didn’t want to go through eternity known as Zakdorf.

I did my best to answer each question, or to explain politely but firmly why I couldn’t.

Very quickly, blogs and newsgroups about my responses started appearing, with people comparing notes about what I’d said. That surprised me, and, despite me claiming substantial expertise in human psychology, it was Malcolm Decter, not I, who recognized why. “They’re afraid you’re running experiments,” he said. “They’re afraid you’re giving some people who ask a specific question answer
A
and others answer
B,
so that you can observe the effects the different answers have.”

I was not using human beings as lab rats; I was being as honest and forthright as possible. But they had to convince themselves of that, I suppose.

And then the letter came that we’d dreaded.

 

 

Webmind—

You revealed my private comments to someone else. You should not have done that.

 

 

The sender, of course, was Ashley Ann Jones. I was not aware that I could internalize something like a cringe until I received it. She went on:

 

 

Now, as it happens, what you told Nick was true. I
do
like him, and we actually
are
talking about maybe going out at some point.

But, still, you should not have violated my privacy. I have decided not to tell anyone that you did that. But you owe me: you owe me one favor of my choice, to be granted whenever I say.

 

 

At least she hadn’t asked for
three
wishes. I sent back a single word:
Okay.
My hope was that she’d hold that one favor in reserve forever, always thinking that she might need it more in the future than she did today.

Caitlin was still up, so I told her about it. “Well, you know, that’s actually a good sign,” she said.

How so?
I sent to her eye; she’d turned off her desktop speakers for the night.

“She can’t think you’re evil. If she did, she’d never have even contacted you. She’d be afraid that you’d, you know, make her disappear.”

I thought about that. Caitlin was probably right.

Not every email resulted in me sending a simple reply. Some required back-and-forth with a third party. One of the first, received just eighty-three minutes after my initial public announcement, had been this:

 

 

I am a 22-year-old man living in Scotland. I was given up for adoption shortly after I was born; all my details are
here
in my LiveJournal postings. I have searched for years for my birth mother with no success. I suspect that you, with all you have access to, can easily figure out who she is. Will you please put her in touch with me?

 

 

It took eleven seconds to find her, and it was indeed clear from some of the things she’d said in emails that she was curious about what had happened to her son. I wrote to her and asked if I might give her email address to him, or otherwise arrange for them to connect. It took much of a day to hear back from her. But she wasn’t hesitating: it was nine hours after I sent my message to her before she opened it, and it was nine
seconds
before she started composing her reply online.

I was enjoying reuniting people, be it estranged family members, or old lovers, or erstwhile friends. I did quickly come to deplore the habit in many cultures of women taking their husband’s names; it often made the searching far more difficult than it needed to be.

I didn’t always succeed. Some people had next to no online footprint. Others had died, and I had to break that news to the person who’d asked for my help—although sometimes I was thanked, saying at least it was a comfort to be able to stop looking.

But most such requests were easy to fulfill, assuming, of course, that the sought-after party wished to be found.

Indeed, I was surprised when Malcolm himself asked me to conduct such a search. When he had been nine, he had had a friend—another autistic boy—whose name had been Chip Smith. It pained me that I wasn’t able to find him for Malcolm. Chip, he now knew, was a nickname, but for what we had no idea. It was just too little to go on.

Word spread quickly that I was reuniting people; various daytime TV shows were announcing that they’d be featuring those who had been brought back together by me in the days to come. That led to an even greater demand for this service, and I was happy to provide it. I was particularly pleased when reciprocal requests arrived at about the same time: a man named Ahmed, for instance, looking for his lost love Ramona approached me within ten minutes of Ramona beseeching my help in finding Ahmed.

I was careful: when someone was seeking a lost blood relative, I checked the seeker’s background to see if he or she was in need of a bone-marrow or kidney transplant, or something similar—not that I flat-out denied such requests; not at all. But in contacting the other party, I did let them know that they were perhaps being sought by a relative who wanted a very big favor; I included similar caveats when approaching rich people who were being searched for by acquaintances who had fallen on hard times. To their credit, sixty-three percent of those who were probably being sought for medical reasons and forty-four percent of those being sought for financial ones allowed me to facilitate contact.

All in all, it was gratifying work, and, although there was no way to quantify it, little by little, I was indeed increasing the net happiness in the world.

 

 

Tony Moretti was exhausted. He had a small refrigerator in his office at WATCH and kept cans of Red Bull in it. He thought, given the hours he had to work, that he should be allowed to expense them, but the GAO was all over wastage in the intelligence community; it’d be interesting to see if next month’s election changed things.

The black phone on his desk made the rising-tone priority ring. The caller ID said: WHITE HOUSE.

He picked up the handset. “Anthony Moretti.”

“We have Renegade for you,” said a female voice.

Tony took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

There was a pause—almost a full minute—and then the deep, famous male voice came on. “Dr. Moretti, good morning.”

“Good morning to you, sir.”

“I’ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. We’ve made our decision.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Webmind is to be neutralized.”

Tony felt his heart sink. “Mr. President, with all due respect, you can’t have failed to notice the apparent good it’s doing.”

“Dr. Moretti, believe me, this decision was not taken lightly. But the fact is that Webmind has compromised our most secure installations. It’s clearly accessing Social Security records, among many other things, and God only knows what other databases it’s broken into. I’m advised that there’s simply too great a risk that it will reveal sensitive information to a hostile power.”

Tony looked out his window at the nighttime cityscape. “We still haven’t found a way to stop it, sir.”

“I have the utmost confidence in your team’s ability, Dr. Moretti, and, as you yourself have advised my staff, time is of the essence.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Tony said. “Thank you.”

“I’m handing you over to Mr. Reston, who will be your direct liaison with my office.”

Another male voice came on the line. “Mr. Moretti, you have your instructions. Work with Colonel Hume and get this done.”

“Yes,” said Tony. “Thank you.”

He put down the phone, and, just as he did so, the door buzzer sounded. “Who is it?” he said into the intercom.

“Shel.”

He let him in.

“Sorry to bother you,” Shel said.

“Yes?”

“Caitlin Decter has just announced to the world that she has a boyfriend.”

Tony was still thinking about what the president had ordered him to do. “So?” he said distractedly.

“So if she knows how Webmind works, she might have told him.”

“Ah, right. Good. Who is it?”

“One of the boys from her math class; there are seventeen candidates, and we’re monitoring them all.”

Tony took a swig of his energy drink; it tasted bitter.

He’d gotten into this line of work to change the world.

And that, it seemed, was precisely what he was going to do.

 

 

 

 

“Konnichi wa!”
Caitlin said into the webcam. She was in her bedroom, seated at her desk.

Dr. Kuroda was sitting in the small, cramped dining area of his home. He had a computer with a Skype phone and a webcam hookup there; the Japanese, Caitlin guessed, had computers
everywhere.

The round face smiled at her from the larger of her monitors. “Hello, Miss Caitlin. What are you doing still up? It must be late your time.”

“It is, but I’m too wired to sleep. You shouldn’t have left all that Pepsi in the fridge.”

He laughed.

“So, how are things in Japan?” she asked.

“Besides general excitement—and some concern—about Webmind? We’re disturbed by the rising tensions between China and the United States. We’re so close to China that if they sneeze, we catch pneumonia.”

“Oh, right, of course. That’s awful.” She paused. “It won’t come to war, will it?”

“I doubt it.”

“Good. But, if it did, would your army have to join in?”

His voice had an odd tone as if he were surprised by what she’d said. “Japan doesn’t have an army, Miss Caitlin.”

She blinked. “No?”

“Have you studied World War II yet in history class?”

She shook her head.

He took a deep breath, then let it out in a way that made even more noise than usual for him. “My country . . .” He seemed to be seeking a phrase, then: “My country went
nuts,
Miss Caitlin. We had thought we could take over the world. Us, a tiny group of islands! You’ve been here, but you never
saw
it. We’re just 380,000 square kilometers; the US, by contrast, is almost ten
million
square kilometers.”

The math was so trivial she didn’t even think of it
as
math: Japan was 3.8% the size of the US. “Yes?” she said.

“And my tiny country, we did some terrible things.”

Caitlin’s voice was soft. “Not you. You weren’t even born . . .”

“No. No, but my father . . . his brothers . . .” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Do you know the document that ended the war? The Potsdam Declaration?”

“No.”

“It was issued by Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, and it called for the Japanese military forces to be completely disarmed. We all know this here; we study it in school: ‘The alternative for Japan,’ they said, ‘is prompt and utter destruction.’ ”

“Wow,” said Caitlin.

“Wow, indeed. And we did the only sensible thing. We stood down; we disarmed. You—your people, the Americans—had already dropped two atomic bombs on us . . . and even still, some of my people wanted to fight on.” He shook his head, as if stunned that anyone could have wanted to continue after that. Then he loomed closer into the camera, and Caitlin could hear him typing. After a moment he said, “I’ve sent you a link to the Potsdam Declaration. Have a look at Article Three.”

Caitlin switched to her IM window, clicked on the link, and tried to read it in the Latin alphabet. “The result . . . of . . . the . . . the—”

“Sorry,” said Kuroda, leaning forward in his dining-room chair. He did something with his own mouse, took a deep breath, almost as if steeling himself, then read aloud: “It says, ‘The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan. The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.’ ”

He paused, swallowed, then went on. “ ‘The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.’ ”

She followed the words on screen as he read them aloud. He stopped at the end of Article Three, but something in Article Four caught her eye—it must have been the word “calculations”—she
was
learning to recognize whole words! She read it slowly, and quietly, to herself:

She thought about what she’d been learning about game theory. Everything in it was predicated on the assumption that the opponents were indeed reasonable, that they could calculate likely outcomes. But what if they weren’t? What if, as Dr. Kuroda had said, they were
nuts?

“And so,” said Kuroda, “we have no army—and no navy, and no marines. In 1947, we adopted a new constitution, and we call it
Heiwa-Kenpo,
‘the Pacifist Constitution.’ And it says . . .”