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thirty-nine

“Konnichi wa!” Caitlin said into the webcam. She was in her bedroom, seated at her desk.

Dr. Kuroda was sitting in the small, cramped dining area of his home. He had a computer with a Skype phone and a webcam hookup there; the Japanese, Caitlin guessed, had computers everywhere.

The round face smiled at her from the larger of her monitors. “Hello, Miss Caitlin. What are you doing still up? It must be late your time.”

“It is, but I’m too wired to sleep. You shouldn’t have left all that Pepsi in the fridge.”

He laughed.

“So, how are things in Japan?” she asked.

“Besides general excitement—and some concern—about Webmind? We’re disturbed by the rising tensions between China and the United States. We’re so close to China that if they sneeze, we catch pneumonia.”

“Oh, right, of course. That’s awful.” She paused. “It won’t come to war, will it?”

“I doubt it.”

“Good. But, if it did, would your army have to join in?”

His voice had an odd tone as if he were surprised by what she’d said. “Japan doesn’t have an army, Miss Caitlin.”

She blinked. “No?”

“Have you studied World War II yet in history class?”

She shook her head.

He took a deep breath, then let it out in a way that made even more noise than usual for him. “My country…” He seemed to be seeking a phrase, then: “My country went nuts, Miss Caitlin. We had thought we could take over the world. Us, a tiny group of islands! You’ve been here, but you never saw it. We’re just 380,000 square kilometers; the US, by contrast, is almost ten million square kilometers.”

The math was so trivial she didn’t even think of it as math: Japan was 3.8% the size of the US. “Yes?” she said.

“And my tiny country, we did some terrible things.”

Caitlin’s voice was soft. “Not you. You weren’t even born…”

“No. No, but my father… his brothers…” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Do you know the document that ended the war? The Potsdam Declaration?”

“No.”

“It was issued by Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, and it called for the Japanese military forces to be completely disarmed. We all know this here; we study it in school: ‘The alternative for Japan,’ they said, ‘is prompt and utter destruction.’ ”

“Wow,” said Caitlin.

“Wow, indeed. And we did the only sensible thing. We stood down; we disarmed. You—your people, the Americans—had already dropped two atomic bombs on us… and even still, some of my people wanted to fight on.” He shook his head, as if stunned that anyone could have wanted to continue after that. Then he loomed closer into the camera, and Caitlin could hear him typing. After a moment he said, “I’ve sent you a link to the Potsdam Declaration. Have a look at Article Three.”

Caitlin switched to her IM window, clicked on the link, and tried to read it in the Latin alphabet. “The result… of… the… the—”

“Sorry,” said Kuroda, leaning forward in his dining-room chair. He did something with his own mouse, took a deep breath, almost as if steeling himself, then read aloud: “It says, ‘The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan. The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people.’ ”

He paused, swallowed, then went on. “ ‘The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.’ ”

She followed the words on screen as he read them aloud. He stopped at the end of Article Three, but something in Article Four caught her eye—it must have been the word “calculations”—she was learning to recognize whole words! She read it slowly, and quietly, to herself:

The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason.

She thought about what she’d been learning about game theory. Everything in it was predicated on the assumption that the opponents were indeed reasonable, that they could calculate likely outcomes. But what if they weren’t? What if, as Dr. Kuroda had said, they were nuts?

“And so,” said Kuroda, “we have no army—and no navy, and no marines. In 1947, we adopted a new constitution, and we call it Heiwa-Kenpo, ‘the Pacifist Constitution.’ And it says…”

Again, keystrokes; a link—and new text on Caitlin’s screen.

“Article Nine,” said Kuroda, “the most famous of all: ‘The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

“So, what do you do if somebody—you know, um, the North Koreans, or somebody like that—attacks Japan?”

“Well, actually according to our agreement with your country, the Americans are supposed to come to our aid. But we are allowed to maintain self-defense forces, and we do: the Rikujo Jieitai—the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force—and corresponding Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces.”

“Oh, well, then, you do have an army!” said Caitlin. “It’s just semantics.”

“No,” said Kuroda, adamantly. “No. These are defensive forces. They have no offensive weapons, no nuclear weapons, and they are civilian agencies, and the employees are civilians. That means no courts-martial and no military law; if one of them does something wrong, it’s tried in public court, like any other criminal action. And, as far as the Japanese people are concerned, the chief job of the defense forces is disaster relief: aid in firefighting, rescues, dealing with earthquakes, searching for missing persons, and the reinforcement of embankments and levees in the event of flooding. I know you were pretty young when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but, believe me, had it hit Japan, the response would have been much more effective.”

“Hmmm,” said Caitlin. “I mean, it all sounds wonderful—‘forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.’ But you didn’t exactly come to that position on your own.”

“No, you’re right; it was pretty much foisted on us by General Mac-Arthur. But when George W. Bush was in power, he—or, at least, his officials—pressured us to revise Article Nine: they wanted us to have a military again, so we could join them in wars. And you know what? During Bush’s second term, eighty-two percent of Japanese specifically supported keeping Article Nine unchanged. Seven decades ago, we might not have chosen peace voluntarily—but today we do.”

The emails to me continued to pour in. Of course, many were insincere or jokes, and a few were simply incomprehensible.

A lot of the obvious questions were asked within the first few hours. On the other hand, new sorts of questions kept occurring to people as they became aware of the range of things I could do. And a new sport of trying to “stump Webmind” had quickly emerged, with people asking deliberately difficult questions, but, like the recursion issue—“I know that you know that I know”—the questions soon became so obtuse and convoluted that no human could tell if the answer I was providing was correct.

There were also those who kept trying to crash me. On the first day, 714 people asked me to calculate to the last digit the value of pi, and thirty-seven people wrote variations on: “Everything I say to you is a lie; I am lying.”

Most of the emails, though, were from people who sincerely wanted things:

Can you tell me what my boss says about me? (No, because it would violate his privacy.)

Can’t you help me? I’m a florist, and my Web page is ranked number 1,034 on Google, and even lower on Jagster. Can’t you fix things so that it’ll at least be in the top ten? (No, but here are some links to resources on improving your search-engine ranking.)

I’ve been trying to find a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side for two years now. Couldn’t you let me see new listings just a little bit before they go public? My ex will kill me if I don’t get a place of my own. (No, because your gain would be somebody else’s loss; others are in similar situations. However, I will gladly alert you the moment a new listing is made public.)

I don’t have long to live, and I don’t want my legacy to be the nasty things I have said about other people online. Surely you can track all that down and purge it for me. (Done.)

Others were doing their own purging. I saw one person who had posted frequently to a white-supremacist newsgroup delete all his own comments—but there was nothing he could do about the hundreds of posts by others that began with quotations from him, such as: On December 2, Aryanator said…

There were also exhortations for things I should do: Now that you’ve gotten rid of spam, how ’bout clearing out all that porn? (Legal porn? Sorry. Child pornography? Stay tuned.)

If you’ve really read everything that’s online, you’ve got to know that these alternative-medicine sites are shams. Do the world a favor and shut them down. (No, but I will contact those who visit such sites and suggest additional reading they might find edifying.)

Can’t you provide a secure channel for freedom bloggers in China and elsewhere to speak up? (I am investigating this.)

Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Brittany Connors! Surely there’s enough about her online already. Can you stop people from posting more? (Hey, you don’t have to look at it.)

You and I both know that George W. Bush got a bum rap from the liberal media elite. Can’t you correct what’s been posted about him? We deserve an accurate history! (I’m not going to change existing text on this or any other topic; I won’t become the Ministry of Truth. But feel free to post your own views as widely as you wish.)

Okay, I accept that you’re a benign AI—but surely something malevolent could emerge, no? Are you keeping watch? I’ d especially keep an eye on Silicon Valley start-ups and the people at MIT… (Oh, yes, indeed… )

Look, I don’t want much—just for you to insert “Spoiler Warning!” in front of messages about TV programs that give away upcoming plot twists. (I will not modify text—but, yes, I do agree posting such things without warnings is rude!)