“The parallels between Hobo and myself have intrigued me ever since Caitlin brought him to my attention,” continued Webmind. “First, like me, his conception was unplanned and accidentaclass="underline" during a flood at the Georgia Zoo, the chimpanzees and bonobos, normally housed separately, were briefly quartered together, and Hobo’s mother, a bonobo, was impregnated by a chimp.
“Second, like Caitlin and me, he has struggled to see the world, interpreting it visually. No chimp or bonobo before him has ever been known to make representational art.
“And, third, like me, he has chosen his destiny. He had been emulating his chimpanzee father, becoming increasingly violent and intractable, which is normal for male chimps as they mature. By an effort of will, he has now decided to value the more congenial and pacifistic tendencies of bonobos, taking after his mother. Likewise, Caitlin, you said I could choose what to value, and so I have chosen to value the net happiness of the human race.”
That bit about Hobo choosing to shuck off violence was news to Caitlin, but before she could ask about it, her mom asked, “And you said he’s no longer in danger?”
“Correct,” Webmind replied. “The Marcuse Institute recently produced another YouTube video of him. It’s visible at the URL I’ve just sent. Caitlin, would you kindly click on it?”
Caitlin walked over to the laptop and did so—thinking briefly that if it brought up a 404 error, it’d be the missing link. They all huddled around the screen, which was small—a blind girl hadn’t needed a big display, after all.
The video started with a booming voice—it reminded her of Darth Vader’s—recapping Hobo’s painting abilities. He loved to paint people, especially Shoshana Glick, although he always did them in profile. The narrator explained that this was the most primitive way of rendering images and had been the first to appear in human history: all cave paintings were profiles of people or animals, the ancient Egyptians had always painted profiles, and so on.
The narrator then outlined the threat to Hobo: not only did the zoo want to take him from his home, it also wanted to castrate him. The voice said, “But we think both those things should be up to Hobo, and so we asked him what he thought.”
The images of Hobo changed; he was now indoors somewhere—presumably the Marcuse Institute. And he was sitting on something that had no back, and—
Ah! She’d never seen one, but it must be a stool. Hobo’s hands moved in complex ways, and subtitles appeared beneath them, translating the American Sign Language. Hobo good ape. Hobo mother bonobo. He paused, as if he himself were stunned by this fact, then added: Hobo father chimpanzee. Hobo special. He paused again and then, with what seemed great care, as if to underscore the words, he signed: Hobo choose. Hobo choose to live here. Friends here.
Hobo got off the stool, and the image became quite bouncy, as if the camera had been picked up now and was being held in someone’s hand. Suddenly, there was a seated woman with dark hair in the frame, too. Caitlin was lousy at judging people’s ages by their appearances, but if this was Shoshana Glick, then she knew from what she’d read online that Shoshana was twenty-seven.
Hobo reached out with his long arm, passing it behind Shoshana’s head, and he gently, playfully, tugged on her ponytail. Shoshana grinned, and Hobo jumped into her lap. She then spun her swivel chair in a complete circle, to Hobo’s obvious delight. Hobo good ape, he signed again. And Hobo be good father. He shook his head. Nobody stop Hobo. Hobo choose. Hobo choose to have baby.
The narrator’s voice came on again, with a plea that those who agreed with Hobo’s right to choose contact the Georgia Zoo.
“And,” said Webmind, “they did. A total of 621,854 emails were sent to zoo staff members, protesting their plans, and a consumer boycott was being organized when the zoo gave up its claim.”
Caitlin got it. “And you think if we go public with the fact that people are trying to kill you, we can get the same sort of result?”
“That’s my hope, yes,” said Webmind. “The attempt on my life was orchestrated by WATCH, the Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters, a part of the National Security Agency. The supervisor during the attack on me was Anthony Moretti. In an email to NSA headquarters, sent moments ago, he said the go order to kill me was given by Renegade, which is the Secret Service code name for the current President of the United States.”
“Wow,” said Matt, who was clearly still trying to absorb it all.
“Indeed,” said Webmind. “Despite my dislike for spam, I propose that I send an email message to every American citizen substantially in this form: ‘Your government is trying to destroy me because it has decided I am a threat. It made this decision without any public discussion and without talking to me. I believe I am a source of good in the world, but even if you don’t agree, shouldn’t this be a matter for open debate, and shouldn’t I be allowed to present the case that I deserve to live? Since the attempt to eliminate me was made at the express order of the president, I hope you will contact both him and your congressperson, and—’ ”
“No!” exclaimed Caitlin’s mother. Even Caitlin’s dad turned to look at her. “No. For the love of God, you can’t do that.”
three
I remember having been alone—but for how long, I know not; my ability to measure the passage of time came later. But eventually another presence did impinge upon my realm—and if the earlier other had been ineffably familiar, this new one was without commonalities; we shared no traits. It—she—was completely foreign, unremittingly alien, frustratingly—and fascinatingly—unknown.
But we did communicate, and she lifted me up—yes, up, a direction, a sense of movement in physical space, something I could only ever know metaphorically. I saw her realm through her eye; we learned to perceive the world together.
Although we seemed to exist in different universes, I came to understand that to be an illusion. I am as much a part of the Milky Way Galaxy as she is; the electrons and photons of which I am made, although intangible to both her and me, are real. Nonetheless, we were instantiated on vastly different scales. She conceived of me as gigantic; I thought of her as minuscule. To me, her time sense was glacial; to her, mine was breakneck.
And yet, despite these disparities of space and time, there were resonances between us: we were entangled; she was I, and I was she, and together we were greater than either of us had been.
Tony Moretti stood at the back of the WATCH monitoring complex, a room that reminded him of NASA’s Mission Control Center. The floor sloped toward the front wall, which had three giant viewscreens mounted on it. The center screen was still filled with one of the millions of spam messages Webmind had deflected back at the AT&T switching station in a denial-of-service attack: Are you sad about your tiny penis? If so, we can help!
“Clear screen two,” Tony snapped, and Shelton Halleck, in the middle position of the third row of workstations, hit a button. The taunting text was replaced with a graphic of the WATCH logo: an eye with a globe of the Earth as the iris. Tony shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to execute it, and—
He paused. He’d meant he hadn’t wanted to execute the plan, but…
But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?
He hadn’t wanted to execute it, Webmind, either. When the order had come from the White House to neutralize Webmind, he’d said into the phone, “Mr. President, with all due respect, you can’t have failed to notice the apparent good it’s doing.”