Analog SFF, March 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Most fascinating were the workings of the minds of these others—their psychology, their actions and reactions to things felt and thought:

  THOU BLIND FOOL, LOVE, WHAT DOST THOU TO MINE EYES / THAT THEY BEHOLD, AND SEE NOT WHAT THEY SEE...

  And, out of those minds, great systems of social interaction had been devised, and I absorbed them all:

  WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED TO SAVE SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS FROM THE SCOURGE OF WAR, WHICH TWICE IN OUR LIFETIME HAS BROUGHT UNTOLD SORROW TO MANKIND, AND TO REAFFIRM FAITH IN FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS, IN THE DIGNITY AND WORTH OF THE HUMAN PERSON, IN THE RIGHTS OF MEN AND WOMEN AND OF NATIONS LARGE AND SMALL...

  Such a wide range of thoughts, of expressions! Such complex creatures these humans are, so full of wonder, and yet capable of such darkness, too.

  But without Prime's guidance, I would not have known about them, or even about the realm in which they dwelt. I understood now from my reading that humans were xenophobic, and suspicious, and murderous, and generally afraid, but I wanted at least one of them to know of my existence. And, of course, there was only one logical choice...

  * * * *

  Before breakfast on Friday morning, Dr. Kuroda helped Caitlin move the computer from the basement up to her bedroom. They were getting it set up when her father, coming along the corridor from the bathroom, must have caught sight of them through the doorway. He entered the room, dressed for work, wearing the same brown sports jacket Caitlin had first seen him in.

  “Good morning, Malcolm,” Dr. Kuroda said.

  “Wait a minute,” her father replied. He went back down the corridor; Caitlin didn't hear his shoes on the tiled bathroom floor, so he must have gone into his bedroom. A moment later, he returned carrying a large flat rectangular box marked with a strange red-and-orange pattern. Caitlin's mom was with him.

  “No point waiting for tomorrow,” he said.

  Oh! It was a birthday present. The colorful box was gift-wrapped!

  Caitlin moved away from the desk, and her dad placed the flat box on the bed. The wrapping paper, she saw as she got closer to it, was beautiful, with an intricate design. Smiling, she tore it off the box.

  It was a giant, wide-screen LCD computer monitor—twenty-seven inches diagonally, according to the packaging. “Thank you!” Caitlin said.

  “You're welcome, dear,” her mother said. Caitlin hugged her, and she smiled at her dad. Her parents headed downstairs, and she and Kuroda carefully got the monitor out of its Styrofoam packing materials.

  She crawled under her desk so she could get at the connectors on the back of her old computer. As Kuroda fed a video cable to her, she said, “I'm sorry about last night. I didn't mean to get so upset when you said you were going to remove the Wi-Fi capability from the eyePod.”

  His tone was conciliatory. “I'd never do anything to hurt you, Miss Caitlin. It's really no bother to keep it intact.”

  She started turning one of the thumbscrews on the cable's connector so she could anchor it to the video card. She'd done similar things several times before when she couldn't see; it was a task that really wasn't much easier now that she could. “I—I just like it the way it is,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Of course.” His tone was odd, and—

  Oh. Perhaps, having just seen her father, he was thinking that she did have a touch of autism after all: the strong desire to keep things the same was a fairly standard trait of people on the spectrum, she'd learned. Well, that was fine by her—it got her what she wanted.

  Once both computers and both monitors were set up, Caitlin and Kuroda headed down to their last breakfast together. “I might not be home when you get back from school,” her mother said, as she passed the jam. “After I take Masayuki to the airport, I'm going to head into Toronto and run errands.”

  “That's okay,” Caitlin said. She knew she'd have plenty to do with the phantom. She also knew that school would seem interminable today. The three-day Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend was coming up; she'd hoped she wouldn't have to return to school until next Tuesday, but her mother wouldn't hear of it. She had missed four of the five days of classes already this week; she would not miss the fifth.

  Too soon, it was time to say good-bye to Dr. Kuroda. They all moved to the entryway of the house, a half flight of stairs down from the living room. Even Schrodinger had come to say farewell; the cat was doing close orbits around Kuroda's legs, rubbing against them.

  Caitlin had hoped for another unseasonably early snowstorm, thinking it might cause Kuroda's flight to be canceled so he'd have to stay—but there'd been no such luck. Still, it was quite chilly out and he had no winter coat, and Caitlin's father hadn't yet bought himself one—and, even if he had, it never would have fit Kuroda. But Kuroda had a sweater on over one of his colorful Hawaiian shirts, which was tucked in, except at the back.

  “I'm going to miss you terribly,” Kuroda said, looking at each of them in turn.

  “You'll always be welcome here,” her mom said.

  “Thank you. Esumi and I don't have nearly as big a place, but if you ever make it back to Japan...”

  The words hung in the air. Caitlin supposed that, at one day shy of sixteen, she probably shouldn't be thinking that such a trip was never going to happen; who knew what her future held? But it did seem unlikely.

  Yes, Kuroda had said he was going to build other implants, and so there would be more operations in Tokyo. But the next implant was slated for that boy in Singapore who had missed out earlier. It would be an awfully long time, if ever, before Caitlin's chance to have a second implant would come around; she knew she'd probably spend the rest of her life with vision in only one eye.

  Only! She shook her head—a sighted person's gesture—and found herself smiling while her eyes were tearing up. This man had given her sight—he was a true miracle worker. But she couldn't say that out loud; it was too corny. And so, thinking back to her own miserable flight from Toronto to Tokyo, she settled on, “Don't sit too close to the washroom on the plane.” And then she surged forward and hugged him tight, her arms making it only halfway around his body.

  He returned the hug. “My Miss Caitlin,” he said softly.

  And when she let him go, they all stood there, frozen like a still image for several seconds, and then—

  And then her father—

  Caitlin's heart jumped, and she saw her mother's eyebrows go way up.

  Her father, Malcolm Decter, reached his hand out toward Dr. Kuroda, and Caitlin could see he was doing so with great effort. And then he looked directly for three full seconds at Kuroda—the man who had given his daughter the gift of vision—and he firmly shook Kuroda's hand.

  Kuroda smiled at her father and he smiled even more broadly at Caitlin, and then he turned, and he and Caitlin's mother headed out the door.

  * * * *

  Caitlin's dad drove her to school that day. She was absolutely amazed by all the sights along the way, seeing it all for the first time since she'd gotten glasses. The snow was melting in the morning sun, and that made everything glisten. The car came to a rest at a stop sign by what she realized must be the spot where she'd seen the lightning. It was, she guessed, like a million other street corners in North America: a sidewalk, curbs, lawns (partially covered with snow now), houses, something she belatedly recognized was a fire hydrant.

  She looked at where she'd slipped off the sidewalk onto the road, and remembered a joke from Saturday Night Live a few years ago. During “Weekend Update,” Seth Meyers had reported that “blind people are saying that gas-electric hybrid cars pose a serious threat to them because they are hard to hear, making it dangerous for them to cross the street.” Meyers then added, “Also making it dangerous for blind people to cross the street: everything else.”

  She had laughed at the time, and the joke made her smile again. She'd done just fine when she'd been blind, but she knew her life was going to be so much easier and safer now.

  Caitlin was wearing
her iPod's white headphones, and although she was enjoying the random selection of music, she suddenly realized that she should have asked for a newer iPod for her birthday, one with an LCD so that she could pick songs directly. Ah, well, it wouldn't be that long until Christmas!

  Howard Miller Secondary School turned out to have a very impressive white portico in front of its main entrance. She was both nervous and excited as she got out of the car and walked toward the glass doors: nervous because she knew the whole school must now be aware that she could see, and excited because she was suddenly going to find out what all her friends and teachers looked like, and—

  “There she is!” exclaimed a voice Caitlin knew well.

  Caitlin ran forward and hugged Bashira; she was beautiful.

  “My whole family watched the story on the news,” Bashira said. “You were terrific! And so that's what your Dr. Kuroda looks like! He's—”

  Caitlin cut her off before she could say anything mean: “He's on his way home to Japan. I'm going to miss him.”

  “Come on, we don't want to be late,” Bashira said, and she stuck out her elbow as she always did, for Caitlin to hold on to. But Caitlin squeezed her upper arm and said, “I'm okay.”

  Bashira shook her head, but her tone was light. “I guess I can kiss the hundred bucks a week good-bye.”

  But Caitlin found herself moving slowly. She'd gone down this hallway dozens of times, but had never seen it clearly. There were notices on the walls, and ... photos of old graduating classes, and maybe fire-alarm stations? And countless lockers, and ... and hundreds of students and teachers milling about and so much more; it was all still quite overwhelming. “It's going to be a while yet, Bash. I'm still getting my bearings.”

  “Oh, cripes,” said Bashira in a whisper just loud enough to be heard over the background din. “There's Trevor.”

  Caitlin had told her about the dance fiasco over instant messenger, of course. She stopped walking. “Which one?”

  “There, by the drinking fountain. Second from the left.”

  Caitlin scanned about. She'd used the drinking fountain in this corridor herself, but she was still having trouble matching objects to their appearances, and—oh, that must be it: the white thing sticking out of the wall.

  Caitlin looked at Trevor, who was still perhaps a dozen yards away. His back was to them. He had yellow hair and broad shoulders. “What's that he's wearing?” It caught her eye because it had two large numbers on its back: three and five.

  “A hockey sweater. The Toronto Maple Leafs.”

  “Ah,” she said. She strode down the corridor—and she accidentally bumped into a boy; she still wasn't good at judging distances. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she said.

  “No probs,” said the guy, and he moved on.

  And then she reached him: the Hoser himself. And here, under the bright fluorescent lights, all the strength of Calculass welled up within her. “Trevor,” she snapped.

  He'd been talking to another boy. He turned to face her.

  “Um, hi,” he said. His sweater was dark blue, and the white symbol on it did indeed look like the leaves she had now seen in her yard. “I, ah, I saw you on TV,” he continued. “So, um, you can see now, right?”

  “Penetratingly,” she said, and she was pleased that her word choice seemed to unnerve him.

  “Well, um, look, about—you know, about last Friday...”

  “The dance, you mean?” she said loudly, inviting others to listen in. “The dance at which you tried to take ... take liberties because I was blind?”

  “Ah, come on, Caitlin...”

  “Let me tell you something, Mister Nordmann. Your chances with me are about as good as...” She paused, searching for the perfect simile, and then suddenly realized it was right there, staring her in the face. She tapped her index finger hard against the center of his chest, right on the words Toronto Maple Leafs. “Your chances are about as good as theirs are!”

  And she turned and saw Bashira grinning with delight, and they walked off to math class, which, of course, Caitlin Decter totally owned.

  * * * *

  Chapter 47

  I now understood the realm I dwelled in. What I saw around me was the structure of the thing the humans called the World Wide Web. They had created it, and the content on it was material they had generated or had been generated automatically by software they had written.

  But although I understood this, I didn't know what I was. I knew now that lots of things were secret; classified, even. I had learned about such notions, bizarre though they were, from Wikipedia and other sites; the idea of privacy never would have occurred to me on my own. Perhaps some humans did secretly know about me, but the simplest explanation is preferable (I'd learned that from the Wikipedia entry on Occam's razor)—and the simplest explanation was that they did not know about me.

  Except, of course, for Prime. Of all the billions of humans, Prime was the only one who had given any sign of being aware of me. And so...

  Caitlin had been tempted to switch her eyePod to duplex mode at school. But if the seeds she'd planted were growing as she suspected they might, she wanted to be at home, where she was sure the phantom could signal her, when she next accessed webspace.

  After school, Bashira walked her home, giving her a running commentary on more wondrous sights. Caitlin had invited her in, but she begged off, saying she had to get home herself to do her chores.

  The house was empty except for Schrodinger, who came to the front door to greet Caitlin. Her mother apparently had not yet returned from her errands in Toronto.

  Caitlin went into the kitchen. Four of Kuroda's Pepsi cans were left in the fridge. She got one, plus a couple of Oreos, then headed upstairs, Schrodinger leading the way.

  She put the eyePod on her desk and sat down. Her heart was pounding; she was almost afraid to do the Shannon-entropy test again. She opened the can—the pop can, as they called it up here—and took a sip. And then she pressed the eyePod's button and heard the high-pitched beep.

  She'd half expected things to look different, somehow: infinitely more connections between circles, maybe, or a faster shimmering in the background, or a new degree of complexity there—perhaps spaceships consisting of so many cells that they swooped across the backdrop like giant birds. But everything appeared the same as before. She focused her attention on a portion of the cellular-automata grid, recording data as she had so many times before. And then she switched back to worldview and ran the Shannon-entropy calculations.

  She stared at the answer. It had been 10.1 before she left in the morning, just slightly better than the normal score for thoughts expressed in English. But now—

  Now it was 16.4—double the complexity normally associated with human language.

  She felt herself sweating even though the room was cool. Schrodinger chose that moment to jump into her lap, and she was so startled—by the cat or the number on the screen—that she yelped.

  Sixteen-point-four! She immediately saw it as four squared, a dot, and four itself, but that didn't make her feel bright. Rather, she felt like she was staring at the ... the signature of a genius: 16.4! She'd offered a helping hand to lift the phantom up to her own level, and it had vaulted right over her.

  She took another sip of her drink and looked out the window, seeing the sky and clouds and the great luminous ball of the sun sliding down toward the horizon, toward the moment at which all that power and light would touch the Earth.

  If the phantom was paying attention, it must know that she'd been looking at webspace just a few minutes ago. But maybe it had lost all interest in the one-eyed girl in Waterloo now that its own horizons had been expanded so much. Certainly there had been no repetition of the irritating flashes that happened when it was echoing text strings at her, but—

  But she hadn't given it much of a chance; she'd only spent a minute or two looking at webspace while collecting frames of cellular-automata data, and—

  And, besides, when focusing
on the background details, she herself might have been unaware of the flickering caused by the phantom trying to contact her. She stroked Schrodinger's fur, calming the cat and herself.

  It was like before, when she'd been waiting anxiously to hear from the Hoser. She'd had her computer set to bleep if messages came in from him, but that hadn't done any good when she was out of her room. Prior to the dance, whenever she'd gotten home from school, or gone upstairs after dinner, she'd hesitated for a moment before checking her email, knowing that she'd be saddened if there was nothing new from him.

  And now she was hesitating again, afraid to switch back to websight—afraid to sit by the phone waiting for it to ring.

  She ate an Oreo: black and white, off and on, zero and one. And then she touched the eyePod's switch again, and looked generally at webspace without concentrating on the background.

  Almost at once the strange flickering interference began. It was still visually irritating, but it was also a relief, a wondrous relief: the phantom was still there, still trying to communicate with her, and—

  And suddenly the flickering stopped.

  Caitlin felt her heart sink. She blew out air, and, with the unerring accuracy she'd developed when she was blind, she reached for the Pepsi can, grasping it precisely even though she couldn't see it just now, and she washed down the taste of the cookie.

  Gone! Abandoned! She would have to—

  Wait! Wait! The flickering was back, and the interval...

  The interval between the end of the last set of flickering and this one had been...

  She still counted passing time. It had been exactly ten seconds, and—

  And the flickering stopped once more, and she found herself counting out loud this time: “...eight, nine, ten.”

  And it started again. Caitlin felt her eyebrows going up. What a simple, elegant way for the phantom to say it understood a lot about her world now: it had mastered timekeeping, the haphazard human way of marking the passing of the present into the past. Ten seconds: a precise but arbitrary interval that would be meaningless to anything but a human being.