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forty-three

“All right,” said Tony Moretti, standing at the side of the third row of workstations, his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He didn’t want to do this, but it was his job. “Everybody set?” he called out. “Web-traffic monitoring?”

“Go!” replied Aiesha.

“Containment protocols?”

“Go!” declared Shel.

“Data logging?”

“Go!”

“Crucial infrastructure isolation?”

“Go!”

“Threat elimination?”

“Go!”

Tony looked at Colonel Peyton Hume, giving him one last chance to put a stop to this; Hume simply gave him a thumbs-up.

“All right, people,” Tony said. “We are go. T-minus thirty seconds and counting. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”

They had been necking for a while, and for once the damned unfinished basement didn’t seem cold.

Caitlin was wearing her favorite corduroy pants—she liked the sound they made, and although she really had no idea if Matt was style-conscious or not, she kind of thought he wasn’t, and so wouldn’t mind. And she was wearing a loose-fitting dark green sweatshirt… so loose-fitting that she hoped her mom hadn’t noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

While they were kissing, Matt had been stroking her arm, her back, her neck—but that seemed to be all he was willing to do. She decided it was time to take the deer by the antlers. She got out of his lap, and reached out with her hands to pull him to his feet. He seemed momentarily reluctant to rise, but Caitlin smiled warmly. And then she brought him closer, but instead of letting go of his right hand, so he could put his arms back around her waist, she guided it slowly toward her, until—

One of them gasped; it might have been her.

Until his hand was cupping her breast through her sweatshirt’s fabric, and—

I am under attack.

The words sailed across Caitlin’s vision. “Shit!” she said.

Matt immediately pulled his hand back. “I’m sorry! I thought you—”

“Shhh!” Her eyes were wide open now. “What’s happening?”

“I just—you…”

“Matt, Webmind’s in trouble.”

Webmind’s reply was already going across her vision, but she’d been so startled and distracted, she’d failed to actually read the next few thirty-character groups he’d sent.

…a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. It is…

“Come on,” Caitlin said, and she ran as best she could for the staircase—damn, but she’d have to learn how to confidently do that! Matt followed her.

She and Matt continued through the living room, and headed up to her bedroom. Caitlin was momentarily embarrassed: she hadn’t expected to have Matt up here—not yet!—and had been taking advantage of her newfound sight by not being picky about neatness, lest she trip on things she couldn’t see; the bra she’d discarded earlier was lying right there on her floor.

She went straight for the swivel chair in front of her computer. Her mother came in from her office across the hall. “Caitlin, what on earth’s going on?”

“Webmind is being attacked,” she said. “Webmind, send text to my computer, not my eye.” She cranked the volume on JAWS and set its reading speed as high as she thought her mother and Matt could follow. Webmind had been flashing more words in front of her eyes, but Caitlin hadn’t been able to follow them while she ran up the staircase. “—twenty-seven percent success rate,” said the rapid-fire synthesized voice.

“I missed that,” Caitlin said. “Start over.”

“I said, ‘Software has been added to the routers at a major switching facility in Alexandria, Virginia. They are examining each packet, and verifying the functioning of the time-to-live counters. Those that fail the tests are being deleted. So far they are only managing to delete mutant packets with a twenty-seven percent success rate.’ Continuing: however, this is also surely only a first attempt; doubtless the success rate will improve.”

“Damn,” said Caitlin. “How’d they know that’s what you’re made of?”

“I don’t know.”

“What percentage of packets could you lose and still retain consciousness?” Caitlin’s mom asked.

“I don’t know that, either,” Webmind said. “Early on I was cleaved in two when China cut off almost all traffic through the seven major fiber-optic trunk lines that connect the Chinese portion of the Internet to the rest of the world. I survived that as two separate consciousnesses—but that was before I had developed sophisticated cognitive functioning. If I were to lose that much substance again, I doubt I’d survive.”

While Webmind was speaking, Caitlin looked over at Matt, who now had an expression on his face that made his deer-caught-in-the-headlights one look positively normal. No doubt he’d only half believed Caitlin about her involvement with Webmind.

“Who’s doing it?” asked her mother. “Hackers?”

“I think it’s the American government,” Webmind said. “Although the switching facility belongs to AT T, it’s been co-opted by the National Security Agency before.”

Caitlin said, “Can’t you—I don’t know—can’t you tell your special packets not to go through that facility?”

“Packets are directed by routers; I have limited control over them beyond changing the final destination addresses.”

“I’m switching to websight,” Caitlin said. She pulled her eyePod from her pocket, pressed the switch, and watched as the cyber-landscape exploded into being around her. She was relieved to see the background shimmering the way it normally did; the vast bulk of Webmind’s cellular automata were apparently unaffected, at least so far.

“Take me there,” she said.

One of Webmind’s distinctive orange link lines shot into the center of her vision. She followed it to a small green site circle, then another orange link shot out; she followed that to a yellow circle.

In the background she heard her mother’s voice: “I’m going across the hall to call your father.”

Caitlin was concentrating so hard on following the links she wasn’t actually sure if her head moved when she tried to nod.

Another orange link line; she followed it as quickly as she could.

And another.

And one more.

And—

“The switching station,” said the mechanical voice.

Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She knew that what she was seeing was only a representation, only her mind’s way of interpreting the data it was receiving, and that the symbolism was imposed upon the images as much by her imagination as by anything else.

And her visual centers had been rewiring themselves like crazy these last several days as she learned to see the real world. There was still so much she hadn’t yet seen, and every day had shown her a thousand new things. But this was the first new thing she’d seen with websight since gaining worldview—the first new cyberspace experience she’d had since seeing reality—and she was doubtless interpreting it in ways she never could have before.

What she was seeing was frightening. The background of the Web had always seemed far, far away. Although she knew intellectually that the ghost packets that made up Webmind were no more remote than any others, she’d visualized them as being removed from the ones that were in active use by the Internet. But now that distant curtain was distorted here, puckering toward her, and—

No, no: not toward her. Toward that large node in the center of her vision, a circle that was a deep, deep red, like the color she now knew blood to be. Streamers from the background—intertwined, twisted filaments of shimmering pale blue and deep green—were being sucked into the dark red circle.

“Shit,” Caitlin said.

“What do you see?” Matt asked, his tone astonished.

“They’re pulling in the lost packets.”

“And,” said Webmind, “checking each one for the mutation that keeps them from expiring, and deleting those packets that have the mutation.”

Soft footfalls, and then her mother’s voice. “Your father is on his way.”

“This is clearly only a test run to see if their technique works,” Webmind said. “It’s employing only one facility, albeit a major one, and so it can only scrub those packets that happen to pass through that facility. But if the same technology were deployed at sufficient major routing hubs worldwide, I would be severely damaged.”

“No,” said Caitlin.

“What?” said her mother and Matt and Webmind simultaneously.

“No, I won’t let that happen. Not on my watch.”

“How will you stop it?” asked Matt.

“What was that quote, Mom—the one about the other cheek?”

Her mother’s voice: “ ‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”

“Hmm. No, not that part. What comes after that?”

“ ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.’ ”

“Right! It’s not about just giving them what they ask for, or even more of the same thing they’re asking for—it’s about giving them other stuff, too.”

“Yes?” said her mother. “So?”

“Okay, Webmind,” Caitlin said. “Where did you put it?”

“Put what?” asked Matt.

“Follow me,” said Webmind.

And another orange link line leapt into Caitlin’s field of view. She cast her attention along its length. It seemed longer than any such line she’d ever followed before, an infinity of geometrically straight perfection, and—

No, no—not perfect. It was—yes!—almost imperceptibly at first, but then, after a moment, without any doubt: it was curving, bending down, the way links from Webmind did when she tried to follow them back to their origin, her brain’s way of acknowledging that the source was outside her ability to perceive.

“I’m losing you,” Caitlin said.

And suddenly the link rippled and waved, as if by an effort of will—hers, or Webmind’s, she couldn’t say which—it was being pulled taut. She continued to slide her attention—slide her mind—along its length.

It was unlike any perception she’d had yet in the real world. As she zoomed toward the shimmering background, the individual pixels—the individual cells—did not grow larger. Rather, they remained almost invisible, just at the limit of her ability to perceive. She imagined if she ever did get to take her trip into space, hurtling up into the night sky would have the same sort of feeling: the stars might be getting closer, but they wouldn’t ever appear as anything more than tiny pinpoints.

“God, it’s hard,” she said. And it was: her breathing had accelerated, and she felt herself sweating. Staying focused on that one orange line took prodigious concentration; she was sure if she relaxed her attention for even a moment, instead of continuing to move along its length, she’d snap back to where she’d begun. But attention wanted to wander; vision—even internalized mental vision—wanted to flick now here and now there in an endless series of saccades. She concentrated totally, concentrated the way she did when tackling a really tough math problem, concentrated for all she was worth, and—

There.

“Oh, my God,” Caitlin said, softly.

Spread out before her, filling her perception, spilling over in all directions into her mental peripheral vision, was a vast sea of points, each again resolvable only at the very limit of her perception. Not thousands, not millions, not billions, but trillions upon trillions of them. In aggregate, it appeared as a pulsing mass of grayness, but, as she strained to discern, she realized that the ever-so-tiny pixels came in different colors.

And she counted the colors: there was black, and yellow, and—that was green, wasn’t it? Yes, and blue, and red, and—

Ah! The colors Newton had named, her brain drawing on what she had read about optics: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the seven hues of the rainbow, plus black, which was no color at all, a nothingness, a—

Yes, a zero!

And the colors came in two intensities: dull red and bright; pale orange and a flaming shade; a yellow so muted it was almost brown and another yellow that flared like the noonday sun. And that shade of gray, she’d seen it before, too: it was black but with the brightness turned up. There weren’t eight shades here, but sixteen! She was seeing not binary, as she had before, but the base-16 counting system of most computers, the colors no doubt corresponding to the hexadecimal digits that would be written as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. Pushing to concentrate at a higher level had driven her perception to a new level, too. Spread out before her was a vast ocean of data, of information.

“There’s so much,” she said.

“Indeed,” said Webmind.

“Okay,” she said, and she took a deep breath. “Here’s what we’ll do…”

“Well?” snapped Tony in the WATCH control room.

“It’s working,” said Colonel Hume, looking at the central monitor. “Our initial attempt was only getting about thirty percent of the aberrant packets, but we’ve adjusted the algorithm. Some are still resistant—I’m not sure why—but we’re now deleting sixty-two percent of those that pass through the switching station.”

“Ah…” said Tony. “Good.”

“Damn right it’s good!” said Hume, shaking a freckled fist at the screen. “Time for that son of a bitch to sing ‘Daisy’…”

The vast shimmering mass made up of all the colors of the rainbow heaved and throbbed, almost as though it were a living thing. Caitlin held her breath as she backtracked now along the orange link line, her attention to the rear, watching as the mass—yes, yes, as it started to move toward her. She felt a bit like the pied piper—although, in her case she supposed it was the πed piper!—enticing all the rats to follow.

As she hurried along, the orange link line grew wider and wider, like a road or a sluice, and the mass, the torrent, the deluge surged toward her, running down its length. She sped up—she might not be able to run well in the real world, but in webspace she was a gazelle!

“What’s happening?” her mother’s voice called from the other realm, but Caitlin didn’t dare break her concentration to answer.

Webmind, though, could better subdivide his attention, and she heard him say, “We’re giving them more than they bargained for.”

“Traffic at the switching station is increasing,” said Aiesha, looking up from her console.

Tony looked at the right-hand monitor, beneath the WATCH eye logo. It was now showing a graph of web-traffic levels at the Alexandria AT T switching center. It had just shot way, way up, the curve looking an awful lot like the leading edge of a tsunami. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Everywhere!” shouted Shel. “Anywhere—still can’t trace the damn source.”

“God,” said Colonel Hume. “It’s a fucking flood.”

Tony looked at Hume, then back at Shelton Halleck. “A denial-of-service attack?”

“Maybe,” said Shel. “There are so many packets now. The ones we were looking for were initially a tiny fraction of the traffic flow, but now they’re not even one in a billion.”

“What is it?” demanded Tony. “What the hell is it?”

“Analyzing now,” said Shel. “Gotta string the packets back together—give me a sec…”

And then the center screen filled with a hex dump, including 6F 75 72 20 74 69 6E.

“Well?” snapped Tony. “What is it? Viruses? Program code? Encrypted data?”

“Oh, crap,” said Shel. “No, it’s not encrypted. It’s goddamn plaintext. It’s fuckin’ ASCII, for crying out loud.” He hit a key, and the hexadecimal bytes were converted to their English equivalents on the screen: Are you sad about your tiny penis? If so, we can help! Just respond with your credit-card number, and—

“Jesus!” said Tony.

“It’s still pouring in,” said Aiesha. “It must be everything since Webmind started intercepting it! Something like 300 billion messages—and it’s bouncing it all back at our node at once.”

“AT T is reporting critical overload conditions,” said Dirk Kozak, the communications officer, holding a telephone handset to his chest. “They say if we don’t do something, that node will lock up totally.”

“It’s not going to give up without a fight, is it?” Tony said to Hume, who slammed his freckled right fist into his left palm. Tony turned and looked out at the vast room. “All right,” he shouted. “Abort! Abort! Abort!”