Free WWW 3: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer Page B

revealing that he wasn’t carrying a weapon.
    Chase stood aside and gestured toward the living room. “In.”
    One wall was covered with shelving units displaying vintage computing equipment, much of which had been obsolete even before Chase was born: a plastic Digi-Comp I, a mail-order Altair 8800, a Novation CAT acoustic coupler, an Osborne 1, a KayPro 2, an Apple ][, a first-generation IBM PC and a PCjr with the original Chiclet keyboard, a TRS-80 Model 1 and a Model 100, an original Palm Pilot, an Apple Lisa and a 128K Mac, and more. The second wall had something Hume hadn’t seen for decades although there was a time when countless computing facilities had displayed it: a giant line-printer printout on tractor-feed paper of a black-and-white photo of Raquel Welch, made entirely of ASCII characters; this one had been neatly framed.
    Another wall had a long workbench, with a dozen LCD monitors on it, and four ergonomic keyboards spaced at regular intervals. In front of it was a wheeled office chair on a long, clear plastic mat; Chase could slide along, stopping at whichever screen he wished.
    Chase was tall, black, and heroin-addict thin, with long dreadlocks. There was a gold ring through his right eyebrow and a series of silver loops going down the curve of his left ear.
    “You ever kill anyone?” Chase asked. He had a Jamaican accent.
    Hume raised his eyebrows. “Yes. In Iraq.”
    “That’s a bad war, man.”
    “I didn’t come here to discuss politics,” said Hume.
    “Maybe Webmind stop all the wars,” said Chase.
    “Maybe humanity should be able to determine its own destiny,” said Hume.
    “And you don’t think we be able do that much longer, so?”
    “Yes,” said Hume.
    Chase nodded. “You right, maybe. Beer?”
    “Thanks, no. I’ve got a long drive home.”
    Hume knew that Chase was twenty-four. He’d come to the States three years ago—the required paperwork magically appearing; more proof that he was one of the best hackers in the business. In other circumstances, someone else might have gone off the reservation to hire a former black-ops sniper, but for this, a digital assassin was called for.
    “So, what you want from me?” said Chase.
    “Webmind must be stopped,” Hume said. “But the government is going to waste too much time deciding what to do, so it has to be done by guys like you.”
    “There ain’t no guys like me, flyboy,” said Chase.
    Hume frowned but said nothing.
    “You don’t say to Einstein, ‘Guys like you.’ I’m Mozart; I’m Michael Jordan.”
    “Which is why I came to you,” Hume said. “The public doesn’t know this, but Webmind is instantiated as cellular automata; each cell consists of a mutant packet with a TTL counter that never decrements to zero. What’s needed is a virus that can find and delete those packets. Write me that code.”
    “Why I wanna do that, man?”
    Hume knew the only answer that would matter. “For the cred.” Hacking into a bank was so last millennium. Compromising military systems had been done, quite literally, to death. But this! No one had ever taken out an AI before. To be the one who’d managed that would ensure immortality—a name, or at least a pseudonym, that would live forever.
    “Need more,” said Chase.
    Hume frowned. “Money? I don’t have—”
    “Not money, man.” He waved at the row of monitors. “I need money, I take money.”
    “What then?”
    “Wanna see WATCH—see what you guys got.”
    “I can’t possibly—”
    “Too bad. Cuz you right: you need me.”
    Hume thought for a moment, then: “Deal.”
    Chase nodded. “Gimme seventy-two hours. Sky gonna fall on Webmind.”

nine
     
    Even though it was a Saturday morning, Caitlin’s father had already left for the Perimeter Institute. Stephen Hawking was visiting; he did not adjust to different time zones easily and wasn’t one to take weekends off, so everyone who wanted to work with him had to get in early.
    Caitlin and her mother were