Wonder

fifteen

Barbara Decter was sitting alone on the couch in the living room at 7:30 on Monday morning, reading the latest International Journal of Game Theory, when she happened to look up. Just outside the window there was a tree branch that still had some of its autumn leaves on it, and perched on the branch was a beautiful male blue jay.

For years, the Decters’ Christmas cards had always featured one of Barb’s photos, and this looked like it’d be perfect—way better than the picture she’d taken last month of the St. Jacob’s farmers’ market. But her SLR was up in her office, and she knew if she got up, she’d startle the bird.

Ah, but Caitlin’s little red BlackBerry was still right there on the coffee table. She slowly reached over and picked it up. Although Caitlin’s was a different model from her own, she had no trouble figuring out what to do. She aimed the device and snapped the picture—just before the jay took flight.

She used the little track pad to select the photo app so she could check the picture. The app showed thumbnails of two photos—the one she’d just taken and… and maybe a pair of cartoon eyes?

No—no, that wasn’t what they were. She selected the thumbnail, and the square screen filled with a photograph of a pair of breasts.

What on earth was Caitlin doing with a picture like that? Barb wondered, and then, after a moment, she realized that the breasts in question must be her daughter’s own.

And if Caitlin had taken the picture, she might have sent it somewhere. She selected the outbox and—

And there it was: Caitlin had appended the photo to a text message she’d sent to Matt yesterday. God!

Caitlin was still in bed—and, given how little sleep she’d been getting of late, Barb wasn’t about to wake her just yet. But Malcolm hadn’t left for work. Still holding the red BlackBerry, Barb marched down the corridor to Malcolm’s den. He was staring at his monitor, typing away, Queen playing in the background. As always, he didn’t look up.

Barb stifled her first impulse, which had been to thrust the incriminating picture in his face and say, “Look!” After all, he really didn’t need to see his own daughter topless. But she did wave the BlackBerry around as she spoke. “Caitlin is sending naked pictures of herself with her phone.”

This did get Malcolm to look up, at least for a moment. But then he lowered his gaze. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

Barb couldn’t believe her ears. “Doesn’t matter? Your daughter—your newly sighted daughter, I might add—is sending nude photos of herself to boys, and you say it doesn’t matter?”

“Boys, plural?”

“Well—to Matt. She sent him a picture of her breasts.”

He nodded but said nothing.

She was flabbergasted. “This is a girl who wants to get into a top university, who wants to work somewhere important. Things that get online take on a life of their own. This will come back to haunt her.”

Malcolm was still looking down at his keyboard. “I don’t think so.”

“How can you be so sure? I know you like Matt; so do I, for that matter. But what’s to stop him from plastering this photo all over Facebook, or wherever, if he and Caitlin have an ugly breakup?”

Malcolm just shook his head again. “It’s the end of Victorianism—and about time, too. Many members of Caitlin’s generation are saying I don’t care if you’ve seen me naked, or know I smoke pot, or whatever.”

“Caitlin is smoking pot?” Barb said, alarmed.

“Not as far as I know.” He fell silent again.

Barb stared at him, exasperated. “Damn it, Malcolm—this is your daughter we’re talking about! This is important. We have to deal with it as parents, and we can’t if you don’t participate in the dialog. I need your—” She sought a word that might resonate for him, then: “—input on this.”

He looked down at the desktop, with its perfectly neat stacks of paper, and the stapler precisely aligned with the edge of the desk. His shoulders rolled slightly; she’d seen this before—seen him gathering himself into professorial mode, the only mode in which he could speak at length. And then he looked up, and ever so briefly met her eyes, his own perhaps pleading for her to understand that the way he was didn’t mean he loved Caitlin any less than she did. And then he focused on a spot on the gray wall a little to Barb’s right, and he spoke in rapid-fire sentences, wanting to get it all out as quickly as possible. “The point is that all the things we used to let society hold over us—my God, he got drunk in public; good Lord, she actually has sex; wow, he’s experimented with drugs; gee whiz, sometimes she doesn’t look perfect; holy crap, he’s had a few minor runins with the law—none of that garbage matters, and Caitlin and most of her generation are saying so. They just don’t care about it; they don’t care about it now, and they won’t care about it when they’re the ones in power, either.”

Barb was astounded but knew better than to interrupt him; if she turned the water pump off, it wouldn’t run this freely again for days. And, she had to admit, what he was saying did make sense.

He went on. “What’s the biggest fear the world has right now? It’s whether we can survive the advent of Webmind—survive the coming of superintelligence, survive being dethroned from our lofty position as the smartest things on Earth—survive all that with our fundamental humanity intact. But the way our generation lived our lives—hiding who we really were, fretting over what the neighbors might know about us, letting peccadilloes embarrass us, living in fear of being shamed for nothing more than doing what almost everyone else was doing anyway—well, as Caitlin would say, that is so over.”

He seemed to have said his piece and was looking again at his desktop, and so Barb said, “But… but they could blackmail her.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. The feds, maybe.”

“Well, first, Webmind said he’s made our BlackBerrys secure. And, second, I’d love to see that headline: ‘US government has naked picture of underage girl.’ If anything, Caitlin could blackmail them: ‘Federal agent tries to coerce sixteen-year-old with topless photo.’ Attempting to kill Webmind might not cost the Democrats the next election, but getting into the child-porn business certainly will.”

“Porn!” said Barbara.

“It either is or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then who gives a damn?”

Barb frowned, remembering back to when her marriage to Frank, her first husband, had been falling apart: she’d been mortified that people would find out about their difficulties, that strangers—or, even worse, friends!—might overhear them fighting. “Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly.

“I am right,” he replied, and again he focused on the wall next to her. “We’re trying to preserve humanity in this new era, and yet we’ve spent the last century or more pretending to be perfect little robots. Well, I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. Caitlin isn’t perfect. So what? You’re divorced, I’m autistic, she used to be blind—who gives a damn? If you’re a good person, hiding who you really are is just another way of saying that you’ve decided to let others establish your self-worth. Remember how pissed you were when you found out the university was paying you less than they were paying me simply because you were a woman? It’s only because we shared that information that you were able to lead the fight for pay equity at the campus. Keeping things private empowers others to take advantage of your ignorance, to hold things over your head.”

“I guess. But I feel I should do something.”

“You should indeed,” said Malcolm, and he was clearly done now, for he went back to typing on his keyboard. “Make sure she knows about safe sex.”

I was still working my way through the vast quantities of online video. Some of it had to be accessed in real time; indeed, some played out slower than real time, with frequent pauses for buffering. Looking at videos randomly did not seem efficient; huge numbers of them were pornography, many more were unremarkable home movies (and a goodly quantity were both). And so, instead, I was guided partially by the star-ratings system on YouTube and by textual reviews, and I also followed links posted by people who intrigued me.

For instance, Shoshana Glick, the student of primate communications who worked with my friend Hobo, did “vidding” as a hobby: remixing scenes from TV shows to fit the storylines of popular songs, usually of a sexually suggestive nature. The notion of mixing others’ creations to make your point appealed to me, and I admired Shoshana’s artistry (although, judging by the posted comments, I wasn’t alone in failing to see the sexual chemistry she asserted existed between the two male leads on Anaheim, a new NBC drama series).

When I’d finished watching her own videos, I turned to the list of other videos she recommended. Most were vids by her friends, but there was also a link to an older YouTube video she thought was important. Caitlin and her father had recently watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and this video featured one of the actors from there; I was pleased with myself for recognizing that it was the same man despite his being three decades older.

The video was simple: two men sitting side by side on a couch. But the one on the left was oddly attired; my first thought had been that he was wearing the dress uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—a red jacket with a wide black belt—but as soon as he started speaking, he put that notion to rest: “I’m George Takei,” he said, “and I’m still wearing my Starfleet uniform.”

The other man spoke next, pointing to a highly reflective conical cap he was wearing: “And I’m Brad Altman, and this is a foil cap on my head.”

I saw now, in fact, that the two men were holding hands. “And we’re married,” Takei said, and then he looked at the odd headgear Altman had on, and said, with a deep chuckle, “My husband can be so silly at times.”

Altman spoke again: “This is the first time in history the census is counting marriages like ours.”

And then Takei: “It doesn’t matter whether you have a legal marriage license or not; it only matters if you consider yourself married.”

“Let’s show America how many of us are joined in beautiful, loving marriages,” Altman said. And they went on to explain how to fill out the census form to indicate that.

When they were done, Altman said, “Now, you may ask, why am I wearing this hat?”

And Takei said, “Or why I’m still wearing this Starfleet uniform? It’s to get you to actually listen to this important message.”

I had watched that three days ago, but, like everything, it was always front and center in my mind. I suspected they were correct: if you did have something important to say to people, you should indeed say it in a visually memorable fashion.

Communications Minister Zhang Bo once again made the long march to the president’s desk. This time he had been summoned—and that, at least, meant no interminable wait in the outer office until His Excellency was ready to receive him.

“Webmind is a problem,” said the president, gesturing for Zhang to sit in the ornate chair that faced the cherrywood desk. “Even its name reeks of the West. And the things it says!” He gestured at the printout on his desktop. “It speaks of transparency, of openness, of international ties.” A shake of the head. “It is poisonous.”

Zhang had compiled the summary the president was referring to. “It does show the imprinting effect of being helped into existence by an American.”

“Exactly! And intelligence reports suggest it has spoken to the American president? It has not been in touch with me, but it consults with him.”

Zhang thought it prudent not to point out that anyone could talk to Webmind whenever they pleased, and so he said nothing.

“The last time I invoked the Changcheng Strategy, you exhorted me to drop the Great Firewall as quickly as possible. I acceded to your request and opened up the floodgates once more. But given the statements this Webmind is making, I realize it was a mistake. We need to isolate our people from its influence.”

“But it is part and parcel of the Internet, Your Excellency. And, as I said before, there is a need for the Internet, for the World Wide Web. We rely on them for ecommerce, for banking.”

“You mistake the end for the means, Zhang. Yes, we need those economic capabilities—but we don’t have to use the existing Internet for them. It was madness to superimpose our financial transactions on top of an international, Western-controlled infrastructure.” He pointed to a small lacquered table. On it were three telephone desk sets, one red, one green, and one white, each under a glass bell jar. None had dials or keypads. “Do you know what those are?” the president asked.

“I assume they are the hotlines.”

“Exactly. The red connects directly to the Kremlin; the green to the Kantei; and the white to the White House. They each use their own communication channels, established decades ago: a buried landline to speak to my Russian counterpart, undersea cable to speak to my Japanese one, a dedicated satellite to connect with Washington. They are the template, the proof-of-concept: we can build a new, secure network, unpolluted by Webmind’s presence, for the specific needs we have for international communication. And, for communication within China, we will build a separate new network that we alone control.”

“That might take years,” said Zhang.

“Yes. So, for the interim, we will again strengthen the Great Firewall, isolating our portion of the Web from the rest, and purge whatever remains of that—that thing.”

“Again, Your Excellency, I am not sure this is… prudent.”

“Those judgments are mine to make. Your role is simply to advise me of whether what I’ve asked for is technically possible.”

Zhang took a deep breath and considered the matter. “Your Excellency, I live to serve. The bulk of the current Internet was built in the 1960s and 1970s, with copper-wire cabling. Your question is whether China here in the twenty-first century can, with fiber optics and wireless equipment, do better than Americans did half a century ago? And the answer, of course, is yes.”

The president nodded. “Then set your staff to it; draw up the plans. Make it completely different from the Internet: no packets, no routers. Surely there were alternative designs originally considered for the Internet’s architecture. Find out what they were and see if one of them can be adapted to this project.”

Zhang resisted the urge to say he would google the question—the irony, he feared, would not be appreciated—and instead simply replied, “As you wish, Excellency. But, truly, what you’re asking will take years.”

“Let that part take years. But I told you last month that some of my advisors think the Communist Party cannot endure in the face of outside influences—they gave it until 2050, at the outside. Webmind exacerbates that problem; it is a threat to our health, and so we must take immediate and decisive action.”

“Yes, Excellency?”

“Prepare to enact the Changcheng Strategy once more; we will strengthen the Great Firewall.” He pointed again at the printout on the polished desktop. “When infection is rampant, isolation is key.”