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thirty-six

I’d expected people to suddenly become circumspect in email, to stop speaking so freely in instant messages, to back away from posting intimate details on Facebook and other social-networking sites. I’d expected teenage girls to stop flashing their thongs on Justin.tv, and married people to cease visiting AshleyMadison.com. But there was very little change on those fronts.

What did change, almost at once, was the amount of out-and-out illegal activity. Things that people would merely be embarrassed to have a wider circle know about continued pretty much unabated. But things that would actually ruin people’s lives to have exposed dropped off enormously. Websites hosting child pornography saw huge reductions in traffic, and racist websites had many users canceling their accounts.

I had read about this phenomenon, but it was fascinating to see it in action. A study published in 2006 had reported on the habits of forty-eight people at a company. In the break room, there was a kitty to pay, on the honor system, for coffee, tea, and milk. The researchers placed a picture above the cash box and changed it every week. In some weeks, the picture was of flowers; in others, of human eyes looking directly out at the observer. During those weeks in which eyes seemed to watch people as they took beverages, 2.76 times more money was put in the kitty than in the weeks during which flowers were displayed. And that dramatic change had occurred when the people weren’t actually being watched. Now that they actually were, even if I never did anything else, I expected an even more significant change.

Still, I wondered how long the effect would last: would it be a temporary alteration in behavior or a permanent one? If I did not act on the information I now possessed about individuals, at least occasionally, would they all go back to doing what they’d always done? Only time would tell, but for now, at least, it seemed the world was a slightly better place.

Matt ended up staying for dinner. It was the first time Caitlin had had a friend over for a meal since they’d moved here. Bashira needed halal food; if the Decters had kept kosher, she’d have managed well enough—but they didn’t.

Matt did indeed hit it off with Caitlin’s father, or at least as much as one could. Her dad wasn’t good at small talk, but he could lecture on technical topics; he had taught at the University of Texas for fifteen years, after all. And Matt was an attentive listener, and—except for once or twice—he remembered Caitlin’s instruction that he not look at her father. In fact, he took that, apparently, as carte blanche to stare at her all meal long, which seemed to amuse her mother.

At his request, Caitlin had muted the microphone on her eyePod, so that her father could talk freely without his voice being sent over the Web, and, of course, Caitlin wasn’t looking at him; if the video feed were intercepted, there’d be no lips to read.

“…and so,” her father said, “Dr. Kuroda proposed that what Caitlin was perceiving in the background of the Web were in fact cellular automata. Have you heard of Roger Penrose?”

“Sure,” said Matt, after he’d finished swallowing his peas. “He’s a mathematical physicist at Oxford. ‘Penrose tiling’ is named after him.”

Caitlin had to look at her dad to see his reaction to that. His features actually shifted, and although she’d never seen that configuration on anyone before, she thought it might mean, Can we start planning the wedding now, please? “Exactly,” he said. “And he has some very interesting notions that human consciousness is based on cellular automata. He thinks the cellular automata in our brains occur in microtubules, which are part of the cytoskeletons of cells. But Caitlin suggested”—and there was a slight change in his voice, something that might even have been pride!—“that the cellular automata underlying Webmind’s consciousness are mutant Internet packets that reset their own time-to-live counters…”

Humans tend to liken the arrival of an idea to a lightbulb going on. When one of my subconscious routines finds something interesting, I am alerted in a similar fashion. My conceptualization of reality was now not unlike the pictures I’d seen of clear starry nights: bright points of light against a dark background, each representing something my subconscious had determined I should devote attention to. The brightness of the light corresponded to the perceived urgency, and—

A supernova; a glaring white light. I focused on it.

An email, sent by a seventeen-year-old boy named Nick in Lincoln, Nebraska, to his mother’s personal account. Researching her access patterns, it was clear she rarely checked that account while at work. It would likely be two more hours before she received his message—which normally would have not justified the brightness associated with this event. But the event did have an urgency to it: this boy was about to end his life.

I found his Facebook page, which listed his instant-messenger address, and wrote to him. This is Webmind. Please reconsider what you’re about to do.

After forty-seven seconds, he replied: Really?

Yes. I have read the message you sent to your mother. Please do not kill yourself.

Why not? What’s it to you?

Project Gutenberg always contained something apropos. I sent, Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

The reply was not what I’d hoped for. Fuck that noise.

I had found and read all the manuals for suicide-prevention hotline volunteers and psychiatric-department workers on how to talk someone out of committing suicide. I tried various techniques, but none seemed to be having an impact.

Why should I listen to you? Nick sent. You don’t know what it’s like to be alive.

You are correct that I have no firsthand experience, but that does not mean that I am without reference points. In the majority of cases, subjective assessment of one’s life circumstances improves shortly after a suicide attempt is abandoned.

I’m not like other people.

Are you sure you are unlike other people in this regard?

I know myself.

I know you, too. Your online footprint is large.

Nobody is going to miss me if I’m gone.

I searched as rapidly as I could. I found nothing useful on his Facebook wall or in private messages sent to him there. I widened my search to include his friends’ accounts, and—

Bingo!

You will be missed by Ashley Ann Jones.

Come on! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.

Yes, she does. Three days ago, she wrote in an exchange of messages on Facebook, “Nicky dropped by my work last night again,” to which her correspondent replied, “Cool,” to which she replied, “Yeah. He’s cute.”

You’re shitting me.

I am not. She said that.

He made no reply. After ten seconds, I sent, Have you taken the pills yet?

I took 8 or 9.

Do you know what drug you took?

He named it, although with a misspelling. How much tolerance he had to such a dose depended a lot on his body mass, a datum not available to me. Do you know how to induce vomiting?

You mean that finger/throat shit?

Correct. Please do it.

It’s too late.

It is not. It will take time for the drug to be absorbed into your bloodstream.

Not that. The email. My mom will—fuck, she’ll send me to therapy or shit like that.

I rather thought he could use therapy, so made no reply.

And I sent one to Mr. Bannock—who, a quick check of his outbox made clear, was his gym teacher; it hadn’t contained the right keywords to trigger my subconscious in the way the one to his mother had.

Your mother and Mr. Bannock have not yet read their emails. I can delete them. No one but me needs to know what you contemplated. You do not have to go through with this.

You can do that?

In fact, I had never tried such a thing. If his mother used an offline mail reader such as Outlook, and had already downloaded the messages to her local hard drive, there was nothing within my current powers that I could have done. But she read mail with a Web client. Yes, I believe so.

An eight-second pause, then: I don’t know.

Suddenly, it became urgent; his mother was breaking her pattern. Your mother has logged on to her Hotmail account. She is currently reading a message from her brother / your uncle Daron. May I delete the message you sent?

She doesn’t give a shit.

I searched her mail for evidence to the contrary, but failed to find anything. She just sent a reply to her brother, and has now opened a message from her condominium association.

She’ll regret it when I’m gone.

If she does, she will not be able to make amends. Please do not go through with this.

It’s too late.

She is now reading a message from a person named Asbed Bedrossian. It appears she is working through her inbox in LIFO order, dealing with the most-recent messages first. Yours is two away in the queue.

She doesn’t give a shit. No one does.

Ashley does. I do. Don’t do this.

You’re just making that up about Ashley. You’d say

He stopped there, although he must have hit enter or clicked on the send button. His cognitive faculties might be fading in response to the drug.

No, I said. It’s true about Ashley and true about me. We care, and I, at least, promise to help you. Induce vomiting, Nick—and let me delete those emails you sent.

His mother opened the one message left before his. I had never used an exclamation point before, but was moved to do so now. Nick, it’s now or never! May I delete the message?

A whole interminable second passed then he sent a single letter: y

And, milliseconds before his mother clicked on the message header that said “No regrets,” I deleted his email—and his mother was sent an error message from Hotmail, doubtless puzzling her. She had deleted the previous message she’d read, and I hoped she would think she’d accidentally selected her son’s message for deletion, too, and—ah, yes. She must be thinking precisely that, for she had just now clicked on her online trash folder, in hopes of recovering it; of course, I had used the wizard command that deleted the message without a trace.

Nick? Are you still there? Go purge yourself—and if you can’t do that, drink as much water as you can. You still have time.

While I waited for the reply, I deleted the message he’d sent to Mr. Bannock, as well.

Nick?

There was no response. He wasn’t doing anything online. After three minutes of inactivity from his end, his instant-messenger client sent, “Nick is Away and may not reply.”

But whether he really was away from his computer or slumped over his desk I had no way of telling.