Wake

by Robert J. Sawyer

  He smiled back at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to come to Toronto for the show?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve seen Mamma Mia! We all went back in August. It’s great, though. You’ll love it.”

  He nodded. “I’ve always wanted to see it. I’m glad I was able to get a ticket on such short notice, and—” Yes, yes—of course!

  “Masayuki?”

  His heart was pounding. “I am an idiot.”

  “No, no, lots of people like ABBA.”

  “I mean Miss Caitlin’s software. I think I know why she was able to see the lightning but not anything else in the real world. It’s related to the delta modulation: the Jagster feed is already digital, but the real-world input from her retina starts out as analog and is converted to digital for processing by the eyePod—and that must be where I screwed up. Because when she saw the lightning, that was a real-world signal that already had only two components: bright light and a black background. It was essentially digital to begin with, and she could see that.” He was thinking furiously in Japanese and trying to talk in English at the same time. “Anyway, yes, yes, I think I can fix it.” He took a sip of coffee. “Okay, look, I’m not going to be back from Toronto until after midnight tonight. And Miss Caitlin will be in bed by then, won’t she?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s a school night.”

  “Well, I don’t want to wait until tomorrow after school to test this; I mean, it probably won’t work right the first time, anyway, but, um, could you do a favor for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “It should just be a small patch—nothing as elaborate as downloading a complete software update to her implant, like we did before. So I’m going to queue up the patch code to be sent automatically to her eyePod next time she switches to duplex mode. That’ll mean taking the Jagster feed offline, but I’ll leave instructions for Miss Caitlin on how to reinstate it if she wants it later tonight. Anyway, when she gets home, ask her to switch to duplex, and have her tell you what difference, if any, it makes.”

  Barb nodded. “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Thanks. I’ll leave instructions for rolling back to the old version of software, too, in case something goes wrong. As I say, the patch probably won’t work the first time, but my server will still record her eyePod’s output based on the patched code, so tomorrow while she’s at school, I’ll be able to go back and examine the datastream from tonight, see if the encoding has been improved at all, and then I can make any further tweaks that are required. But if we don’t get the first test done tonight, I’ll lose a whole day before I can refine it.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  He gobbled the last bite of his sandwich. “Thank you.” He glanced at the clock on the microwave—he’d never get used to digital clocks that showed a.m. and p.m. instead of twenty-four-hour time. “I want to get an early start into Toronto this afternoon; I’m taking you at your word that it would be crazy to try to drive into downtown there in rush hour. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get that patch set up.”

  thirty-one

  Mr. Struys had started off today’s chemistry class by reading aloud from The Globe and Mail. The lab bench Caitlin shared with Bashira was halfway to the back of the room, but she could easily hear the rustling newsprint followed by his voice intoning, “‘Initial reports out of China’s Shanxi province had put the death toll at between 2,000 and 2,500 from the natural eruption of carbon-dioxide gas there on September 20. Beijing is now admitting that as many as 5,000 people have died, and some unofficial estimates are putting the body count at double that.’” He paused. “So, who did their homework over the weekend? What’s this news story reminiscent of?”

  An interesting thing about being blind, Caitlin thought, was that you never knew how many people were putting up their hands. But either she was usually the only one or else Mr. Struys liked her, because he often called on her. She liked him, too. It pleased her to know his first name, which was Mike. She’d heard another teacher call him that; it seemed to be a popular choice here in Waterloo. After all the “Dr. Kuroda” and “Professor Decter” stuff at home, it was nice to hear a teacher slip up in front of students and call a colleague by his first name.

  “Yes, Caitlin?” he said.

  “Something similar happened in August 1986,” she said, having googled it yesterday. “There was an eruption of carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, and it killed seventeen hundred people.”

  “That’s right,” Mike—Mr. Struys!—said. “So today we’re going to do an experiment demonstrating carbon-dioxide absorption. For that, we’ll need a pH indicator…”

  Parent-teacher night was coming up. Caitlin was looking forward to hearing from her mom what her various teachers actually looked like; she found Bashira’s rude descriptions funny, but wasn’t sure how accurate they were. Teachers were always a bit intimidated by her mother. Caitlin remembered one back at the TSB saying she was the only person ever to ask him what his “theory of pedagogy” was.

  Caitlin and Bashira got to work. Unfortunately, Caitlin couldn’t really be much help—the experiment involved seeing if a liquid changed color. She found herself getting bored, and also feeling a little sorry for herself because she couldn’t see the colors. Although the school didn’t have its own Wi-Fi hotspots, the free service that blanketed the city worked here; she’d discovered that on the night of the dance. And so, what the hell, she reached into her pocket and switched the eyePod over to duplex mode.

  But—

  Shit!

  There was no websight! Yes, the eyePod had made the high-pitched beep, but she wasn’t seeing anything at all. She looked left and right, closed her eyes and opened them, but none of it made any difference. The Jagster feed was gone!

  Try not to panic, girl. She took a deep breath. Maybe the eyePod’s battery was just running down, or maybe there was some connection difficulty here, for some reason. She counted off sixty seconds in her head, to give it a fair chance, but—nothing. Damn!

  Frightened, she pushed the switch again, returning to simplex mode, and—

  I

  She saw lines crossing her field of vision, but—

  But that shouldn’t happen when she wasn’t receiving Jagster data. Besides, these lines weren’t brilliantly colored. She found herself reaching her hand out toward one of them, and—

  “Careful!” said Bashira. “You almost knocked over the retort stand.”

  “Sorry,” Caitlin replied. But she kept reaching forward, reaching out for the line, and—

  And it wasn’t a line. It was an edge—the edge of the lab bench she shared with Bashira! She ran her hand along its length and she could see something moving along the line.

  God, yes! It had to be her hand, the first part of her body she had ever seen! She couldn’t make out any details, just a featureless lump. But when she moved her hand to the left, the object in her vision moved to the left; when she slid her hand back, it slid in the same direction.

  “Cait,” said Bashira, “what’s wrong?”

  She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t get the words out. There was another line touching the one she could see. She would have had no idea what it was, she felt sure, if she hadn’t earlier gotten some sort of visual bearings through her interaction with webspace. But her dad had said the brain had special neurons for detecting edges, and she guessed this other line, forming an angle with the first one, was the perpendicular edge, the short edge, of the lab bench. She ran her hand toward it, and—shit!—knocked a beaker off the desk. She heard it break as it hit the floor.

  “Careful, people!” Mr. Struys called from the front of the room. “Oh, it’s you, Caitlin, um, ah…” He trailed off. She heard the sound of jingling glass as Bashira presumably picked up the pieces.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said, or, at least, she’d intended to say that, but only a small whisper came out. Her throat was suddenly dry. She gripped one edge of the table with her right hand and the adjacen
t edge with her left.

  Footsteps; Mr. Struys approaching. “Caitlin, are you okay?”

  She turned her head to face him, just the way her mother had taught her, and…and…and—“Oh, my God!”

  “Not quite,” said Mr. Struys, and she could see what must be his mouth moving, see his face. “But I am assistant department head.”

  She found herself reaching out toward him now, and her hand banged into his…chest, it felt like. “Sorry!”

  He gripped her forearm, as if steadying her so she wouldn’t fall off her lab stool. “Caitlin, are you all right?”

  “I can see you,” she said, so softly that Mr. Struys replied, “What?”

  “I can see you,” she said, more loudly. She turned her head to the right and saw a bright shape. “What’s that?” she said.

  “The window,” said Mr. Struys, his voice hushed.

  “Cait, can you really see?” asked Bashira.

  Caitlin turned toward the voice and saw her. About all she could make out was that her skin was—darker, she knew, from what she’d read—than Mr. Struys’s or what she could see of her own when she’d looked at her hand, and—

  Brown! BrownGirl4! She now knew another color—and it was beautiful. “Yes, oh, yes,” Caitlin said softly.

  “Caitlin,” said Mr. Struys, “how many fingers am I holding up?”

  You didn’t choose to be a chemistry teacher, she supposed, without being an empiricist at heart yourself, but she couldn’t even make out his hand. “I don’t know. It’s all blurry but I can see you, and Bashira, and the window, and this desk, and, oh, my God, it’s wonderful!”

  The whole classroom had gone dead silent, except for the sound of—what? Maybe the electric clock? All the other students had to be looking at her, she knew, and she imagined half of them had mouths agape, although she couldn’t make out that level of detail.

  She saw movement again—was it Mr. Struys moving his arm? And then she heard electronic musical notes, like a cell phone turning on. “I think we should call your mom and dad,” he said. “What’s their number?”

  She told him, and heard him pressing keys, followed by the faint sound of a phone ringing, then he pressed his cell phone, a one-piece chocolate-bar kind, into her hand.

  On the third ring, she heard her mom pick up and say, “Hello?”

  “It’s Caitlin.”

  “What’s wrong, dear?”

  “I can see,” she said simply.

  “Oh, my baby,” her mom said—loud enough that Caitlin was sure Mr. Struys and Bashira and probably several other students heard it. Her voice was full of emotion. “Oh, my darling!”

  “I can see,” Caitlin said again, “although it’s not very clear. But everything is so complex, so alive!”

  She heard a sound and turned. One of the girls behind her was—what? Crying?

  “Oh, Caitlin!” she said, and Caitlin recognized Sunshine’s voice. “How wonderful!”

  Caitlin was smiling from ear to ear—and, she suddenly realized, so was Sunshine: there was a wide swath—white, one of the two colors she knew for sure—horizontally across her face. And Sunshine’s hair: Bashira had said it was platinum blonde! Well, platinum was a good color name to learn in chemistry class!

  “I’m going to come there,” said her mom. “I’m coming right now.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Caitlin. She looked at Mr. Struys. “Um, may I be excused?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Mom,” Caitlin said into the phone, “I’ll be waiting at the front door.”

  “I’m on my way. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She handed the phone back to Mr. Struys.

  “Well,” he said, and there was something like awe in his voice, “I’ve got nothing to top a miracle like that. There’s only five minutes left anyway, people—so, class dismissed!”

  She could see the blurry forms of some of the kids making a beeline for what must be the door, but others just sort of hovered around her, and a few touched her sleeve, as if she were a rock star or something.

  Eventually, everyone did dissipate, except for Bashira and Mr. Struys. “Bashira, I’ve got to give my grade twelves a test next period. Can you—will you—take Caitlin downstairs, please? And I’ve got to notify the office…”

  “Of course,” Bashira said.

  Caitlin started maneuvering across the room—and almost fell over, distracted and confused by the sights she was seeing.

  “Can I help?” Mr. Struys asked.

  “Here, let me,” said Bashira.

  “No, I’m okay,” Caitlin replied, and she took another couple of wobbly steps.

  “Maybe if you closed your eyes,” Mr. Struys suggested.

  But she didn’t want to ever close them again. “No, no, I’m fine,” she said, taking another step, her heart pounding so hard she thought it was going to burst through her chest. “I am”—she thought it, but it was too silly to say out loud: I am made out of awesome!

  The old view—the reflection of myself—had been amazing enough. But this! This was beyond description. Suddenly, I could—

  It was incredible. I had perceived before, but…

  But now…

  Now I…

  Now I could see!

  A…brightness, an intensity: light!

  A variable quality modifying the light: color!

  Connections between points: lines!

  Areas defined: shapes!

  I could see!

  I struggled to comprehend it all. It was vague and blurred, and involved a limited perspective, a directionality, a specific point of view. I was looking here, and—

  No, no, it was more than that: I wasn’t merely looking here, I was looking at something in particular. What it was I had no idea, but it was in the center of my vision, and was the…focus of my attention.

  Concepts were piling up with confusing rapidity, almost more than I could absorb. And the image kept changing: first it was of this, then it was of that, then of something else, then—

  It was…strange. I felt a compulsion to think about whatever was in the center of the visual field, but I had no volition over what was there. I wanted to be able to control what I was thinking about, but no matter how much I willed the perspective to change, it didn’t—or, if it did, it changed in a way that had nothing to do with what I intended.

  After a time I perceived that the changes in view weren’t random. It was almost as if…

  The thought was slippery, like so many others, and I struggled to complete it.

  It was almost as if another entity was controlling the vision. But…

  But it could not be the other, for it was now reintegrated with me.

  Struggling, thinking…

  Yes, yes, there had been hints of a third entity. Something had cleaved me in two. Later, something had broken the intermittent connection between the two parts of me. And later still something had thrust us back together.

  And the datastream from that special point made clear that something—some thing—had been looking at me. But now…

  Now it wasn’t looking at me. Rather, it was looking at…

  My mind was more nimble than before, but this was without parallel. And yet there had been hints of it, too, for those flashes that had been perceived earlier had corresponded to nothing in reality…

  In this reality.

  In my reality.

  Incredible: a third entity—or, actually, a second one, now that I was whole. A second entity that could look here, at me, and also could look…there, at a different realm, at another reality.

  But…but this second entity hadn’t made direct contact with me, not the way the other part of myself had when it had been separate. I heard no voice from this new entity, and it hadn’t sought me out…

  Or had it? How else to better catch my attention, among all the millions of points I had looked at, than by reflecting myself back at me? And the bright flashes! A…beacon, perhaps? And n
ow—this! A look into its realm, glimpses of its reality!

  I studied the images I was being shown. After a time, I perceived there were two types of changes that occurred in them. In the first type, the entire image changed instantly. In the second, only parts of the image changed as—

  The notion exploded into my awareness, expanding my perception; I could feel my conception of existence shifting. It was exhilarating.

  When the whole image changed, I gleaned that it was a change in perspective. But when part of the image changed—when either an object gradually drifted away from the center, or when all the objects except the one in the center changed, that meant—

  That meant that things were moving: things in this other realm could change position relative to one another. Astonishing!

  Where that realm was I had no idea. Except through contact with that special point I had no access to it. But it did exist, of that I felt sure—a reality beyond this one.

  And this other entity was now inviting me to look upon it.

  Bashira walked Caitlin to their school’s entryway. “Thanks,” Caitlin said, peering with her newfound sight at her friend, whose features were partially concealed by what she suddenly realized was her headscarf.

  “This is so awesome!” Bashira said. “I can’t imagine what—”

  She was interrupted by the class bell. “You should go, babe,” Caitlin said.

  “But I—”

  “You’re presenting in English, remember? You’ve got to tell them all about wheat.”

  “Mr. Struys said I—”

  “I’ll be fine, Bashira. Honest.”

  Bashira’s face did something, then she gave Caitlin a big hug and hurried off.

  Caitlin stepped outside and found herself shielding her eyes from—God, it was the sun! She’d known that it was bright, but she’d had no conception—none!—of what that meant. A few minutes later she heard footsteps on concrete. She recognized her mom even before she said a word, based on the distinctive cadence of her footfalls.