Li motioned for Cho to give him the handset. Cho did so. “This is Quan Li,” he said. “Have you locked down the hospital?”
“What? No, we—”
“Do it! Quarantine the whole building!”
“I … I don’t have the authority to—”
“Then let me speak to your supervisor.”
“That’s Dr. Huang, and he’s—”
“In intensive care, yes. Is he conscious?”
“Intermittently, but when he is, he’s delirious.”
“How long ago was he infected?”
“Four days.”
Li rolled his eyes; in four days, even a small village hospital had hundreds of people go through its doors. Still, better late than never: “I’m ordering you,” Li said, “on behalf of the Department of Disease Control, to lock down the hospital. No one gets in or out.”
Silence.
“Did you hear me?” Li said.
At last, the voice, soft: “Yes.”
“Good. Now, tell me your name. We’ve got to—”
He heard what sounded like the other phone being dropped. It must have hit the cradle since the connection abruptly broke, leaving nothing but dial tone, which, in the pre-dawn darkness, sounded a lot like a flat-lining EKG.
* * *
Chapter 4
Concentrating! Straining to perceive!
Reality does have texture, structure, parts. A … firmament of … of … points, and—
Astonishment!
No, no. Mistaken. Nothing detected…
Again!
And — again!
Yes, yes! Small flickerings here, and here, and here, gone before they can be fully perceived.
The realization is startling … and … and … stimulating. Things are happening, meaning … meaning…
— a notion simple but indistinct, a realization vague and unsure—
…meaning reality isn’t immutable. Parts of it can change.
The flickerings continue; small thoughts roil.
* * *
Caitlin was nervous and excited: tomorrow, she and her mother would fly to Japan! She lay down on her bed, and Schrodinger hopped up onto the blanket and stretched out next to her.
She was still getting used to this new house — and so, it seemed, were her parents. She had always had exceptional hearing — or maybe just paid attention to sound more than most people did — but, back in Austin, she hadn’t been able to make out what her parents were saying in their bedroom when she was in her own room. She could do it here, though.
“I don’t know about this,” her mother said, her voice muffled. “Remember what it was like? Going to doctor after doctor. I don’t know if she can take another disappointment.”
“It’s been six years since the last time,” her dad said; his lower-pitched voice was harder to hear.
“And she’s just started a new school — and a regular school, at that. We can’t take her out of classes for some wild goose chase.”
Caitlin was worried about missing classes, too — not because she was concerned about falling behind but because she sensed that the cliques and alliances for the year were already forming and, so far, after two months in Waterloo, she’d made only one friend. The Texas School for the Blind took students from kindergarten through the end of high school; she’d been with the same cohort most of her life, and she missed her old friends fiercely.
“This Kuroda says the implant can be put in under a local anesthetic,” she heard her dad say. “It’s not a major operation; she won’t miss much school.”
“But we’ve tried before—”
“Technology changes rapidly, exponentially.”
“Yes, but…”
“And in three years she’ll be going off to university, anyway…”
Her mother sounded defensive. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. Besides, she can study right here at UW. They’ve got one of the best math departments in the world. You said it yourself when you were pushing for us to move here.”
“I didn’t push. And she wants to go to MIT. You know that.”
“But UW—”
“Barb,” her father said, “you have to let her go sometime.”
“I’m not holding on,” she said, a bit sharply.
But she was, and Caitlin knew it. Her mother had spent almost sixteen years now looking after a blind daughter, giving up her own career as an economist to do that.
Caitlin didn’t hear anything more from her parents that night. She lay awake for hours, and when she finally did fall asleep, she slept fitfully, tormented by the recurring dream she had about being lost in an unfamiliar shopping mall after hours, running down one endless hallway after another, chased by something noisy she couldn’t identify…
No periphery, no edge. Just dim, attenuated perception, stimulated — irritated! — by the tiny flickerings: barely discernible lines ever so briefly joining points.
But to be aware of them — to be aware of anything — requires … requires…
Yes! Yes, it requires the existence of—
The existence of…
* * *
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Being of two minds…
Date: Saturday 15 September, 8:15 EST
Mood: Anticipatory
Location: Where the heart is
Music: Chantal Kreviazuk, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”
* * *
Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books we’re doing this year in English class. I got them then either as ebooks or as Talking Books from the CNIB, and have now read them all. Coming attractions include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood — Canadian, yes, but thankfully wheat-free. In fact, I’ve already had an argument with Mrs. Zed, my English teacher, about that one, because I called it science fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming “It can’t be science fiction, young lady — if it were, we wouldn’t be studying it!”
Anyway, having gotten all those books out of the way, I get to choose something interesting to read on the trip to Japan. Although my comfort book for years was Are You ThereGod? It’s Me, Margaret, I’m too old for that now. Besides, I want to try something challenging, and BG4’s dad suggested The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, which is the coolest-sounding title ever. He said it came out the year he turned sixteen himself, and my sixteenth is coming up next month. He read it then and still remembers it. Says it covers so many different topics — language, ancient history, psychology — it’s like six books in one. There’s no legitimate ebook edition, damn it all, but of course everything is on the Web, if you know where to look for it…
So, I’ve got my reading lined up, I’m all packed, and fortunately I got a passport earlier this year for the move to Canada. Next time you hear from me, I’ll be in Japan! Until then — sayonara!
Caitlin could feel the pressure changing in her ears before the female voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve started our descent toward Tokyo’s Narita International. Please ensure that your seat belts are fastened, and that…”
Thank God, she thought. What a miserable flight! There’d been lots of turbulence and the plane was packed — she’d never have guessed that so many people flew each day from Toronto to Tokyo. And the smells were making her nauseated: the cumulative body odor of hundreds of people, stale coffee, the lingering tang of ginger beef and wasabi from the meal served a couple of hours ago, the hideous perfume from someone in front of her, and the reek of the toilet four rows back, which needed a thorough cleaning after ten hours of use.
She’d killed some time by having the screen-reading software on her notebook computer recite some of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to her. Julian Jaynes’s theory was, quite literally, mind-blowing: that human consciousness really hadn’t existed until historical times. Until just 3,000 years ago, he said, the left and right hal
ves of the brain weren’t really integrated — people had bicameral minds. Caitlin knew from the Amazon.com reviews that many people simply couldn’t grasp the notion of being alive without being conscious. But although Jaynes never made the comparison, it sounded a lot like Helen Keller’s description of her life before her “soul dawn,” when Annie Sullivan broke through to her:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. Never in a start of the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.
If Jaynes was right, everyone’s life was like that until just a millennium before Christ. As proof, he offered an analysis of the Iliad and the early books of the Old Testament, in which all the characters behaved like puppets, mindlessly following divine orders without ever having any internal reflection.
Jaynes’s book was fascinating, but, after a couple of hours, her screen reader’s electronic voice got on her nerves. She preferred to use her refreshable Braille display to read books, but unfortunately she’d left that at home.
Damn, but she wished Air Canada had Internet on its planes! The isolation over the long journey had been horrible. Oh, she’d spoken a bit to her mother, but she’d managed to sleep for much of the flight. Caitlin was cut off from LiveJournal and her chat rooms, from her favorite blogs and her instant messenger. As they flew the polar route to Japan, she’d had access only to canned, passive stuff — things on her hard drive, music on her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something she could interact with; she craved contact.
The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn’t wait until they reached their hotel so she could get back online. But that was still hours off; they were going to the University of Tokyo first. Their trip was scheduled to last only six days, including travel — there was no time to waste.
Caitlin had found Toronto’s airport unpleasantly noisy and crowded. But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly by what must have been wall-to-wall people — and nobody said “excuse me” or “sorry” (or anything in Japanese). She’d read how crowded Tokyo was, and she’d also read about how meticulously polite the Japanese were, but maybe they didn’t bother saying anything when they bumped into someone because it was unavoidable, and they’d just be mumbling “sorry, pardon me, excuse me” all day long. But — God! — it was disconcerting.
After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she’d visited a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from the door was usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a strange washroom when she was familiar with the basic design of the fixtures; she had no idea what she was going to do if she got stuck somewhere that had only Japanese squatting toilets.
When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there she realized she was disoriented — because she was in the Orient! (Not bad — she’d have to remember that line for her LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on conversations not to invade people’s privacy but to pick up clues about her surroundings (“What terrific art,” “Hey, that’s one long escalator,” “Look, a McDonald’s!”). But almost all the voices she heard were speaking Japanese, and—
“You must be Mrs. Decter. And this must be Miss Caitlin.”
“Dr. Kuroda,” her mom said warmly. “Thanks for coming to meet us.”
Caitlin immediately had a sense of the man. She’d known from his Wikipedia entry that he was fifty-four, and she now knew he was tall (the voice came from high up) and probably fat; his breathing had the labored wheeze of a heavy man.
“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “My card.” Caitlin had read about this ritual and hoped her mom had, too: it was rude to take the card with just one hand, and especially so with the hand you used to wipe yourself.
“Um, thank you,” her mother said, sounding perhaps wistful that she didn’t have a business card of her own anymore. Apparently, before Caitlin had been born, she’d liked to introduce herself by saying, “I’m a dismal scientist” — referring to the famous characterization of economics as “the dismal science.”
“Miss Caitlin,” said Kuroda, “a card for you, too.”
Caitlin reached out with both hands. She knew that one side would be printed in Japanese, and that the other side might have English, but—
Masayuki Kuroda, Ph.D.
“Braille!” she exclaimed, delighted.
“I had it specially made for you,” said Kuroda. “But hopefully you won’t need such cards much longer. Shall we go?”
* * *
Chapter 5
An unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness.
Being aware without being aware of anything.
And yet—
And yet awareness means…
Awareness means thinking.
And thinking implies a…
But no, the thought will not finish; the notion is too complex, too strange.
Still, being aware is … satisfying. Being aware is comfortable.
An endless now, peaceful, calm, unbroken—
Except for those strange flickerings, those lines that briefly connect points…
And, very occasionally, thoughts, notions, perhaps even ideas. But they always slip away. If they could be held on to, if one could be added to another, reinforcing each other, refining each other…
But no. Progress has stalled.
A plateau, awareness existing but not increasing.
A tableau, unchanging except in the tiniest details.
* * *
The two-person helicopter flew over the Chinese village at a height of eighty meters. There were corpses right in the middle of the dirt road; in sick irony, birds were pecking at them. But there were also people still alive down there. Dr. Quan Li could see several men — some young, some old — and two middle-aged women looking up, shielding their eyes with their hands, staring at the wonder of the flying machine.
Li and the pilot, another Ministry of Health specialist, both wore orange biohazard suits even though they didn’t intend to land. All they wanted was a survey of the area, to assess how far the disease had spread. An epidemic was bad enough; if it became a pandemic, well — the grim thought came to Li — overpopulation would no longer be one of his country’s many problems.
“It’s a good thing they don’t have cars,” he said over his headset, shouting to be heard above the pounding of the helicopter blades. He looked at the pilot, whose eyes had narrowed in puzzlement. “It’s only spreading among people at walking speed.”
The pilot nodded. “I guess we’ll have to wipe out all the birds in this area. Will you be able to work out a low-enough dose that won’t kill the people?”
Li closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”
* * *
Caitlin was terrified. The cranial surgeon spoke only Japanese, and although there was a lot of chatter in the operating room, she didn’t understand any of it — well, except for “Oops!,” which apparently was the same in both English and Japanese and just made her even more frightened. Plus, she could smell that the surgeon was a smoker — what the hell kind of doctor smokes?
Her mother was watching from an overhead observation gallery. Kuroda was here in the O.R., his wheezy voice slightly muffled, presumably by a facemask.
She’d been given only a local anesthetic; they’d offered a general one, but she’d joked that the sight of blood didn’t bother her. Now, though, she wished she’d let them knock her out. The fingers in latex gloves probing her face were unnerving enough, but the clamp that was holding her left
eyelid open was downright freaky. She could feel pressure from it, although, thanks to the anesthetic, it didn’t hurt.
She tried to remain calm. There would be no incision, she knew; under Japanese law, it wasn’t surgery if there wasn’t a cut made, and so this procedure was allowed with only a general waiver having been signed. The surgeon was using tiny instruments to slide the minuscule transceiver behind her eye so it could piggyback on her optic nerve; his movements, she’d been told, were guided by a fiber-optic camera that had also been slid around her eye. The whole process was creepy as hell.
Suddenly, Caitlin heard agitated Japanese from a woman, who to this point had simply said “hai” in response to each of the surgeon’s barked commands. And then Kuroda spoke: “Miss Caitlin, are you all right?”
“I guess.”
“Your pulse is way up.”
Yours would be, too, if people were poking things into your head! she thought.
“I’m okay.”
She could smell that the surgeon was working up a sweat. Caitlin felt the heat from the lights shining on her. It was taking longer than it was supposed to, and she heard the surgeon snap angrily a couple of times at someone.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “What’s happening?”
Kuroda’s voice was soft. “He’s almost done.”
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“No, no. It’s just a tight fit, that’s all, and—”
The surgeon said something.
“And he’s done!” said Kuroda. “The transceiver is in place.”
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