And so, at last, I was ready for my coming-out party.
Peyton Hume and Tony Moretti stood together at the back of the WATCH monitoring room, looking at the four rows of analysts spread out in front of them, and the three giant monitors on the wall they were facing. The left-hand monitor showed the picture the CSIS agents had forwarded of white mathematical characters on a blackboard: angle brackets, vertical bars, Greek letters, superscripted numerals, subscripted letters, arrows, equals signs, and more. And they’d listened four times now to the audio recording of their interview with Malcolm Decter.
“I don’t know,” said Colonel Hume. “The math looks legit, but how it could give rise to consciousness… I just don’t know.”
“Kuroda confirmed what Decter said,” said Tony.
“I know,” said Hume. “But it’s too complex.”
“We’re talking about a very sophisticated process,” said Tony.
“No, no, we’re not,” said Hume. “We can’t be. Exponential’s consciousness was emergent, apparently. That means it just sort of happened, just sprang into being. At its most basic level, it has to be simple. It’s like the old creationist argument: they say that something as complex as a watch—or a bacterial flagellum—can only appear by design, because it’s too sophisticated to come together by chance, and the component parts—the spring in the watch, or the parts that make up the motor for the flagellum—don’t do anything useful on their own. What Decter described there might be a good underpinning for programming consciousness on a quantum-computing platform, if you could ever get a big one to be stable for the long term, but it’s not something that could have just emerged. Not that way.”
“A wild-goose chase,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “He wanted us to waste time.”
“I think so,” said Hume. “And Kuroda played along.”
“Do you think he knows the real basis for Exponential?”
“He’s Malcolm Decter,” Hume said. “Of course he knows.”
Tony shook his head in wonder. “Wiping out all spam,” he said, “must have required a level of finely detailed control over the Internet way beyond anything our government, or any other government, is capable of.”
“Exactly,” said Hume. “It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Exponential has already become more sophisticated than we are, and its powers will only grow. The window is closing fast; if we don’t kill it soon, we’ll never be able to.”
thirty-four
Before going to bed Wednesday evening, Caitlin had set up a Google alert for news stories that contained the word “Webmind,” and she’d selected the “as it happens” option, meaning she’d be emailed as soon as such a story was indexed. When she crawled out of bed on Thursday at 8:00 a.m., she had 1,143 emails from Google; she couldn’t possibly read them all, or even glance at each one, and—
And that drove reality home for her: she couldn’t deal with all the news on even one topic, and yet Webmind could handle that, plus countless other things effortlessly. He could as easily give the same level of attention to hundreds, or thousands, or millions, of other individual humans that he gave to her, juggling relationships with whatever number of people wanted them, and not even be slowed down. He could make all of them feel as special as she did. She was not at all sure she liked that thought.
After a moment, Caitlin right-clicked—such a handy feature, that!—on four of the news stories at random and had Firefox open each one in its own tab. She began reading them. She still wasn’t good at skimming text, but the word “Webmind” was highlighted each time it occurred, and that let her jump to relevant sentences.
The first one was from the Detroit Free Press:
…purport to be from an entity calling itself “Webmind.” But experts advise caution about accepting this claim.
Rudy Markov, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, says, “The language employed in the email message was awfully colloquial. You’d expect much more precision from a machine.”
And Gunnar Halvorsen, whose blog “AI, Oh, My!” has long been a popular destination for those interested in artificial intelligence, says that the similarities between the structure of the World Wide Web and that of the human brain have been greatly exaggerated.
“You might as reasonably expect the highway system, which is full of things we call arteries, to actually start pumping blood,” he wrote in a posting today.
But Paul Fayter, a historian of science at York University in Toronto, Canada, said, “Teilhard de Chardin predicted this decades ago, when he wrote about the noösphere. I’m not at all surprised to see it come to pass…”
Caitlin clicked on the next tab. This one contained a piece from New Scientist Online.
…but trying to trace the origin of Webmind messages has proven difficult. Standard network utilities such as traceroute come up a cropper.
“There’s no doubt that botnets are involved,” said Jogingder Singh of BT. “That’s a typical way to disguise the true origin of a message.”
And the disappearance of spam doesn’t impress him. “It’s long been known that the vast bulk of spam is generated by only a couple hundred spammers,” he says. “Doubtless many of them know each other. They could easily decide to refrain from sending spam for a day to make one message stand out. Although I admit to being puzzled by why they’re trying this particular scam, which, so far at least, hasn’t asked anyone to send money…”
Caitlin smiled at that one. Traceroute, she knew, worked by modifying the time-to-live values stored in the headers of data packets, which were the morsels of information that flew around the Internet. But she and Kuroda had theorized that the actual material making up Webmind’s consciousness consisted of mutant packets whose time-to-live counters didn’t respond to normal commands.
Still, the notion that the clearing out of spam was the doing of spammers would have struck her as crazy even if she didn’t know the truth. People believed millions of nutso things with less evidence than Webmind had put forward for his own existence. Why they were being skeptical now, she didn’t know.
She remembered once being in a bookstore with her father, back in Austin. He’d surprised her by speaking up, and not even to her, as they walked down the aisles. “Lady,” he’d said, “there’s no other kind.”
Which had prompted blind Caitlin to ask what was going on. “There was a woman looking at a book entitled Astrology for Dummies,” he’d said. People believed in that, but they were doubting this!
Caitlin and her mother spent the morning answering questions from Webmind; it was being inundated with emails, and it wanted advice on how to respond to many of them.
But by noon, she and her mom had to take a break—they had both skipped breakfast and were starving. And, while her mother was making sandwiches for them, Caitlin brought up something that had been bothering her for a few days. “So, um, Mom, I told Bashira that you’re a Unitarian.”
Everything was fascinating the first time you saw it; Caitlin watched as her mother spread something yellow on the bread. “Guilty as charged,” she replied.
She’d been aware back in Austin that her mother disappeared to “fellowships” several times a year—sometimes on a weeknight, sometimes on a Sunday morning—but that was really all she knew about it. “But, um, what does that mean, exactly? Bashira asked, and I didn’t know the answer.”