WWW 3: Wonder Read Free Page A

packets with time-to-live counters that never reached zero, and that those packets behaved like cellular automata. Government agents had clearly been monitoring Matt’s searches, and those searches had given them the information they’d needed for their test run at eliminating Webmind.
    “Your dad’s a bit intimidating,” Matt said.
    “Tell me about it. But he does like you.” She smiled. “And so do I.” She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. And then they got the laptop and its AC adapter.
    She closed her eyes as they headed back down; if she didn’t, she found that going down staircases induced vertigo.
    Matt helped Caitlin get the laptop plugged back in and set up on the glass-topped coffee table; she hadn’t powered down the computer, or even closed its lid, so it was all set to go. She started an IM session with Webmind and activated JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, so that whatever text Webmind sent in chat would be spoken aloud.
    “Thank you,” said Webmind; the voice was recognizably mechanical but not unpleasant to listen to. “First, let me apologize to Matt. I am not disposed to guile, and it had not occurred to me that others might be monitoring your Internet activity. I lack the facilities yet to make all online interactions secure, but I have now suitably encrypted communications via this computer, the others in this household, Malcolm’s work computer, Matt’s home computer, and all of your BlackBerry devices; communications with Dr. Kuroda in Japan and Professor Bloom in Israel are now secure, as well. Most commercial-grade encryption today uses a 1,024-bit key, and it’s—ahem—illegal in the US and other places to use greater than a 2,048-bit key. I’m employing a one-million-bit encryption key.”
    They talked for half an hour about the US government trying to eliminate Webmind, and then the doorbell rang. Caitlin’s mother went and paid the pizza guy. The living room was connected to the dining room, and she placed the two large pizza boxes on the table there, along with two two-liter bottles, one of Coke and the other of Sprite.
    One pizza was Caitlin’s favorite—pepperoni, bacon, and onions. The other was the combination her parents liked, with sun-dried tomatoes, green peppers, and black olives. She was still marveling at the appearance of almost everything; hers, she was convinced, was tastier, but theirs was more colorful. Matt, perhaps being politic, took one slice of each, and they all moved back into in the living room to continue talking with Webmind.
    “So,” said Caitlin, after swallowing a bite, “what should we do? How do we keep people from attacking you again?”
    “You showed me a YouTube video of a primate named Hobo,” Webmind said.
    Caitlin was getting used to Webmind’s apparent non sequiturs; it was difficult for mere mortals to keep up with his mental leaps and bounds. “Yes?”
    “Perhaps the solution that worked for him will work in my case, too.”
    Simultaneously, Caitlin asked, “What solution?” and her mom said, “Who’s Hobo?” Although Webmind could deal with millions of concurrent online conversations—indeed, was doubtless doing so right now—Caitlin wondered how good he was at actually hearing people; he was as new to that as she was to seeing, and perhaps he had as hard a time pulling individual voices out of a noisy background as she did finding the borders between objects in complex images. Certainly, his response suggested that he’d only managed to make out Caitlin’s mother’s comment.
    “Hobo is a hybrid chimpanzee-bonobo resident at the Marcuse Institute near San Diego. He gained attention last month when it was revealed that he had been painting portraits of one of the researchers studying him, a Ph.D. student named Shoshana Glick.”
    Caitlin nibbled her pizza while Webmind went on. “Hobo was born at the Georgia Zoological Park, and that institution filed a lawsuit to have him returned to them. The