There were new sounds in the square: everyone talking excitedly. People were showing the message to those who didn’t have cell phones with them, or whose phones had been turned off or hadn’t yet received the note. As before, it was a symphony, mostly in Mandarin, but with smatterings of Cantonese and English and French and other languages, too: exclamations of wonder or disbelief, and questions—so many questions!
Many clearly doubted what they were reading. Wai-Jeng was about to remark to the woman nearest him that it was similar to when Webmind had announced himself to the world: no one had believed that at first, either, but evidence of its truth had soon become overwhelming. But she was already saying much the same thing to someone else.
Wai-Jeng looked around the square. Many still appeared bewildered, but some were hugging and others were shouting jubilantly. And Wai-Jeng found himself shouting, too: “The people!”
The person next to him took up the shout as welclass="underline" “The people!”
And behind him, two more joined in: “The people! The people!”
And then it spread, propagating outward, a vast exultant wave: “The people! The people! The people!”
The shouting continued for several minutes, and by its end Wai-Jeng had tears streaming down his cheeks. But there was something else he had to say. As exclamations of joy continued to go up around him, he sent a text message to Webmind, banging it out rapidly with his thumbs: Thank you!
The response, as always, was instantaneous: You’re welcome, my friend. I believe it is no longer a curse to be living in interesting times…
forty-one
Peyton Hume had never expected to visit the Oval Office even once in his life—and now he was sitting in it for the third time this month.
It really was oval in shape, with the Resolute desk at the end of the long axis. The president had come out from behind that desk and was now sitting on one of the matching champagne-colored couches that faced each other in front of it. He was wearing a blue suit and a red tie. Next to him sat the Secretary of State, her legs crossed; she was wearing a gray outfit. Hume was in the middle position on the opposite couch. Webmind had let him go home to sleep next to Madeleine, and he’d showered there and shaved before coming here. As befit the occasion, he was wearing his USAF uniform.
A small dark-wood coffee table sat between them, carefully not obscuring any part of the giant presidential seal woven into the carpet. A basket of fresh, polished, perfect red apples sat atop the table.
The president was looking haggard, Hume thought; four years in this office aged a man as much as eight in any other job. “All right, Colonel,” he said. “Suppose we decide to close down Webmind’s facility—what did you call it?”
“Zwerling Optics,” Hume said. “And, yes, you could indeed do that, but I’m not sure it would make any difference. Webmind is a denizen of the computing world; he understands all about backups. He’s got similar enclaves in five other countries; if we stopped him here, he’d just go on using them.”
“What about taking Webmind out altogether?” asked the president. “That’s what you were originally urging us to do, after all.”
“WATCH is still collating all the reports from when Webmind was recently cut in two. But it seems that what Webmind himself has said is true: we won’t be able to eliminate him instantaneously, and any gradual whittling away could well result in him behaving erratically or violently.”
“So you’re saying we should leave him be?” asked the Secretary of State.
“Better the devil you know,” Hume replied.
Something in her eyes conveyed, “Tell me about it…” But, after a moment, she nodded. “All right.” She turned to the president. “I concur with the colonel. Of course, we’ve got to be ready if civil unrest or a collapse of infrastructure occurs in China, but—”
“It won’t,” said Hume, and then he immediately lifted his freckled hands, palms out. “I’m so sorry, Madam Secretary. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
The cool blue eyes held him in their gaze. “That’s all right, Colonel. You sound definite. Why?”
“Because Webmind has too much depending on this to allow it to fail. Don’t you see? He owes the Chinese people after the things part of him did while the Great Firewall was strengthened. There are some promises you just have to keep, and this is one of them. He’s not going to let the transition fail.”
The president nodded. “Colonel, thank you. Let me ask you a question: how risk-averse are you?”
“I’m an Air Force officer, sir; I believe in assessing risk but not being daunted by it.”
“All right, then. Dr. Holdren has been doing an exceptional job as my Science Advisor, but I need a full-time person in the West Wing advising me day in, day out about Webmind. I’m offering you the job—with the caveat that we both might be out of work come January if my opponent wins on November 6. Feel like taking a chance?”
Peyton Hume rose to his feet and saluted his commander in chief. “It would be my privilege, sir.”
Google alerts were normally a great thing, Caitlin thought. They notified you by email whenever something you were interested in was discussed anywhere on the Web. But for some topics, they were useless. Trying to track the lead-up to the presidential election would have resulted in an alert every second. And she’d had to turn off her alert on the term “Webmind.” It, too, had resulted in an endless flood. Besides, if anything really important happened, Webmind would—
Bleep!
Caitlin was sitting at her bedroom desk reading blogs and news-groups and updating her LiveJournal. Schrödinger was stretched out contentedly on the windowsill. She glanced at her instant messenger, which showed a new comment from Webmind in red: the words “cough cough” followed by a hyperlink. Caitlin found her mouse—she still didn’t use it much—and managed to click the link on her second try, and—
And… and… and…
She immediately copied the link and went to her Twitter window; she didn’t want to take time to shorten the link with bit.ly, which would have require more fiddling with the mouse. As soon as she pasted it in, she saw she had only twenty characters left before she hit Twitters’ 140-character limit. But that was enough. She typed: OMG! Squee! and the hashtag #webmind, and sent it off to her 3.2 million followers. And then she leaned back and read the full article, grinning from ear to ear: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is to be awarded jointly to Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee and Webmind.
Sir Tim’s creation of the software underlying the World Wide Web in 1990 brought the world together in ways that simply would not have been possible previously. His invention of the hypertext transport protocol, the hypertext markup language, the URL web-address system, and the world’s first Web browser, all very appropriately at CERN, itself one of the world’s great models of international cooperation, facilitated international friendships, electronic commerce, worldwide collaboration, and more, tying all of humanity together by opening channels of communication between men and women of all nations.
And Webmind, the consciousness that now lives in conjunction with the Internet, has done as much to foster peace and goodwill on a global scale as any individual human since the Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901.
Although the committee unanimously agreed to dispense with its normal nomination timetable in recognition of the historic significance of the events of this past year, the ceremony will take place on the traditional date of 10 December—the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death—at Oslo City Hall, followed by the annual Nobel Peace Prize Concert the next day.