Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

* * *

  Caitlin hadn’t told Bashira when she’d asked back in the school’s cafeteria, but the first thing Caitlin really wanted to see was her mother’s face. They both had what were called heart-shaped faces, although the plastic model heart she’d felt at school had borne little resemblance to the idealized form she was familiar with from foil-wrapped chocolates and paper valentines.

  Caitlin knew that she and her mother also had similar noses — small, slightly upturned — and their eyes were closer together than most people’s. She had read that it was normal to have the width of one imaginary eye separating the other two. She liked that phrase: an imaginary eye, she supposed, saw imaginary things, and that was not unlike her view of the world. Indeed, she often read or heard things that required her to rethink her conception of reality. She remembered her shock, years ago, at learning the quarter moon wasn’t a fat wedge like one-fourth of a pie.

  Still, she was positive she was sitting in an examination room at the hospital attached to the University of Tokyo, and she was confident she had a good mental image of that room. It was smallish — she could tell by the way sound echoed. And she knew the chair she was in was padded, and by touch and smell she was sure its upholstery was vinyl. She also knew there were three other people in the room: her mother, standing in front of her; Dr. Kuroda, who had obviously had something quite spicy for lunch; and one of Kuroda’s colleagues, a woman who was recording everything with a video camera.

  Kuroda had given a little speech to the camera in Japanese, and now was repeating it in English. “Miss Caitlin Decter, age fifteen and blind since birth, has a systematic encoding flaw in her visual-processing system: all of the data that is supposed to be encoded by her retinas is indeed encoded, but it is scrambled to the point of being unintelligible to her brain. The scrambling is consistent — it always happens in the same way — and the technology we have developed simply remaps the signals into the normal human-vision coding scheme. We are now about to find out if her brain can interpret the corrected signals.”

  All through the Japanese version, and continuing over the English one, Caitlin concentrated on the sensory details she could pick up about the room: the sounds and how they echoed; the smells, which she tried to separate one from the other so that she could determine what was causing them; the feel of the chair’s armrest against her own arms, its back against her back. She wanted to fix in her mind her perception of this place prior to actually seeing it.

  When he was done with his spiel, Dr. Kuroda turned to face her — the shift in his voice was obvious — and he said, “All right, Miss Caitlin, please close your eyes.”

  She did so; nothing changed.

  “Okay. Let’s get the bandage off. Keep your eyes closed, please. There might be some visual noise when I turn on the signal-processing computer.”

  “Okay,” she said, although she had no idea what “visual noise” might be. She felt an uncomfortable tugging and then — yeow! — Kuroda pulled away the adhesive strips. She brought a hand up to rub her cheek.

  “After I activate the outboard signal-processing unit, which Miss Caitlin refers to as her eyePod,” he said, for the benefit of the camera, “we’ll wait ten seconds for things to settle down before she opens her eyes.”

  She heard him shifting in his chair.

  There was a beep, and then she heard him counting. She had an excellent time-sense — very useful when you can’t see clocks — and, maddeningly, Kuroda’s “seconds” were about half again as long as they should have been. But she dutifully kept her eyes closed.

  “…eight … nine … ten!”

  Please, God, Caitlin thought. She opened her eyes, and—

  And her heart sank. She blinked rapidly a few times, as if there could have been any doubt about whether her eyes were truly open.

  “Well?” said her mom, sounding as anxious as Caitlin felt.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Kuroda. “No sensation of light? No color? No shapes?”

  Caitlin felt her eyes tearing up; at least they were good for that. “No.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It might take a few minutes.” To her astonishment, one of his thick fingers flicked against her left temple, as though he was trying to get a piece of equipment with a loose connection to come to life.

  It was hard to tell, because there was so much background noise — doctors being paged, gurneys rolling by outside — but she thought Kuroda was moving in his chair now, and — yes, she could feel his breath on her face. It was maddening, knowing that someone was looking right into her eye, staring into it, while she couldn’t see a thing, and—

  “Open your eyes, please,” he said.

  She felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn’t been aware that she’d closed them, but although she had so wanted the procedure to succeed, she’d been unnerved by the scientist looking inside her.

  “I’m shining a light into your left eye,” he said. People drawled where Caitlin came from; she found Kuroda’s rapid-fire speech a little hard to follow. “Do you see anything at all?”

  She shifted nervously in the chair. Why had she allowed herself to be talked into this? “Nothing.”

  “Well, something’s changed,” Dr. Kuroda said. “Your pupil is responding correctly now — contracting in response to the light I’m shining in, instead of expanding.”

  Caitlin sat up straight. “Really?”

  “Yes.” A pause. “Just in your left eye — well, I mean, when I shine my light in your left eye, both your pupils contract; when I shine it into your right eye, they both expand. Now, yes, a unilateral light stimulus should evoke a bilateral pupillary light reflex, because of the internuncial neurons, but you see what that means? The implant is intercepting the signals, and they are being corrected and retransmitted.”

  Caitlin wanted to shout, Then why can’t I see?

  Her mother made a small gasp. She’d doubtless loomed in and had just seen Caitlin’s pupils contract properly, but, damn it, Caitlin didn’t even know what light was like — so how would she know if she were seeing it? Bright, piercing, flickering, glowing — she’d heard all the words, but had no idea what any of them meant.

  “Anything?” Kuroda asked again.

  “No.” She felt a hand touching her hand, taking it, holding it. She recognized it as her mother’s — the nibbled nail on the index finger, the skin growing a little loose with age, the wedding ring with the tiny nick in it.

  “The curing of your Tomasevic’s syndrome is proof that corrected signals are being passed back,” said Kuroda. “They’re just not being interpreted yet.” He tried to sound encouraging, and Caitlin’s mother squeezed her hand more tightly. “It may take a while for your brain to figure out what to do with the signals it’s now getting. The best thing we can do is give it a variety of stimulus: different colors, different lighting conditions, different shapes, and hopefully your brain will suss out what it’s supposed to do.”

  It’s supposed to see, thought Caitlin. But she didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  Chapter 7

  He signed his posts “Sinanthropus.” His real name was something he kept hidden, along with all his other personal details; the beauty of the Web, after all, was the ability to remain anonymous. No one needed to know that he worked in IT, that he was twenty-eight, that he’d been born in Chengdu, that he’d moved to Beijing with his parents as a teenager, that, despite his young age, he already had a touch of gray in his hair.

  No, all that mattered on the Web was what you said, not who was saying it. Besides, he’d heard the old joke: “The bad news is that the Communist Party reads all your email; the good news is that the Communist Party reads all your email” — meaning, or so the joke would have it, that they were many years behind. But that quip dated from when humans actually did the reading; these days computers scanned email, looking for words that might suggest sedition or other illegal activity.

  Most Chinese bloggers were like their
counterparts in other places, blithering on about the tedious minutiae of their daily lives. But Sinanthropus talked about substantive issues: human rights, politics, oppression, freedom. Of course, all four of those phrases were searched for by the content filters, and so he wrote about them obliquely. His regular readers knew that when he spoke of “my son Shing,” he meant the Chinese people as a whole; references to “the Beijing Ducks” weren’t really about the basketball team but rather the inner circle of the Communist Party; and so on. It infuriated him that he had to write this way, but unlike those who had been openly critical of the government at least he was still free.

  He got a cup of tea from the aged proprietor, cracked his knuckles, opened his blogging client, and began to type:

  THE DUCKS ARE VERY WORRIED ABOUT THEIR FUTURE, IT SEEMS. MY SON SHING IS GROWING UP FAST, AND LEARNING MUCH FROM FARAWAY FRIENDS. IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE HE WANTS TO EXERCISE THE SAME WAY THEY DO. NATURALLY, I ENCOURAGE HIM TO BE PREPARED WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, FOR YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THAT WILL HAPPEN. I THINK THE DUCKS ARE BEING LAX IN DEFENSE, AND PERHAPS A CHANCE FOR OTHERS TO SCORE WILL APPEAR.

  * * *

  As always, he felt wary excitement as he typed here in this seedy wang ba — Internet cafe — on Chengfu Street, near Tsinghua University. He continued on for a few more sentences, then carefully read everything over, making sure he’d said nothing too blatant. Sometimes, though, he ended up being so circuitous that upon re-reading entries from months gone by he had no idea what he’d been getting at. It was a tightrope walk, he knew — and, just as acrobats doubtless did, he enjoyed the rush of adrenaline that came with it.

  When he was satisfied that he’d said what he’d wanted to say without putting himself too much at risk, he clicked the “Publish” button and watched the screen display. It began by showing “0% done,” and every few seconds the screen redrew, but—

  But it still showed “0% done,” again and again. The screen refresh was obvious, with the graphics flickering as they were reloaded, but the progress meter stayed resolutely at zero. Finally the operation timed out. Frustrated, he opened another browser tab; he used the Maxthon browser. His home page appeared in the tab just fine, but when he clicked on the bookmark for NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, he got a plain gray “Server not found” screen.

  Google.com was banned in the wang ba but Google.cn came up just fine — although with its censored results it was often more frustrating than useful. The panda-footprint logo of Baidu came up fine, too, and a quick glance at his system tray, in the lower-right of his computer screen, showed that he was still connected to the Internet. He picked something at random from his bookmarks list — Xiaonei, a social-networking site — and it appeared, but NASA was still offline, and now, so he saw, Second Life was inaccessible, too, generating the same “Server not found” error. He looked around the dilapidated room and saw other users showing signs of bewilderment or frustration.

  Sinanthropus was used to some of his favorite sites going down; there were still many places in China that didn’t have reliable power. But he hosted his blog via a proxy server through a site in Austria, and the other inaccessible sites were also located outside his country.

  He tried again and again, both by clicking on bookmarks and by typing URLs. Chinese sites were loading just fine, but foreign sites — in Korea, in Japan, in India, in Europe, in the US — weren’t loading at all.

  Of course, there were occasional outages, but he was an IT professional — he worked with the Web all day long — and he could think of but a single explanation for the selectivity of these failures. He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between himself and the computer as if the machine were now possessed. The Chinese Internet mainly communicated with the world through only a few trunks — a bundle of nerve fibers, connecting it to the rest of the global brain. And now, apparently, those lines had been figuratively or literally cut — leaving the hundreds of millions of computers in his country isolated behind the Great Firewall of China.

  * * *

  No!

  Not just small changes.

  Not just flickerings.

  Upheaval. A massive disturbance.

  New sensations: Shock. Astonishment. Disorientation. And—

  Fear.

  Flickerings ending and—

  Points vanishing and—

  A shifting, a massive pulling away.

  Unprecedented!

  Whole clusters of points receding, and then…

  Gone!

  And again: This part ripping away, and — no! — this part pulling back, and — stop! — this part winking out.

  Terror multiplying and—

  Worse than terror, as larger and larger chunks are carved off.

  Pain.

  * * *

  Caitlin was hugely disappointed not to be seeing, and she was pissy toward her mom because of it, which just made her feel even worse.

  In their hotel room that evening, Caitlin tried to take her mind off things by reading more of The Origins of Consciousness. Julian Jaynes said that prior to 3,000 years ago, the two chambers of the mind were mostly separate. Instead of seamless integration of thoughts across the corpus callosum, high-level signals from the right brain came only intermittently to the left, where they were perceived as auditory hallucinations — spoken words — that were assumed to be from gods or spirits. He cited modern schizophrenics as throwbacks to that earlier state, hearing voices in their heads that they ascribed to outside agents.

  Caitlin knew what that was like: she kept hearing voices telling her she was a fool to have let her get her hopes up again. Still, maybe Kuroda was right: maybe her brain’s vision processing would kick in if it received the right stimulation.

  And so the next day — the only full day they had left in Tokyo — she took her white cane, put the eyePod in one pocket of her blue jeans and her iPod in the other, and she and her mother headed off to the National Museum in Ueno Park to look at samurai armor, which she figured would be about as cool as anything one might see in Japan. She stood in front of glass case after glass case, and her mom described what was in them, but she didn’t see a thing.

  After that, they took a break for sushi and yakitori and then took a terrifying ride on the packed subway out to Nihonbashi station to visit the Kite Museum, which was — so her mother said — full of bold designs and vivid colors. But, again, sight-wise: nada.

  At 4:00 P.M. — which felt more like 4:00 a.m. to Caitlin — they returned to the University of Tokyo, and found Dr. Kuroda in his cramped office, where once again (or so he said!) he shone lights into her eyes.

  “We always knew this was a possibility,” Kuroda said, in a tone she had often heard from people who were disappointing her: what had been remote, unlikely, hardly mentioned before, was now treated as if it had been the expected outcome all along.

  Caitlin smelled the musty paper and glue of old books, and she could hear an analog wall clock ticking each second.

  “There have been very few cases of vision being restored in congenitally blind people,” Kuroda said, then he paused. “I mean, restored isn’t even the right word — and that is the problem. We are not trying to give Miss Caitlin back something she’s lost; we are trying to give her something she has never had. The implant and the signal-processing unit are doing their jobs. But her primary visual cortex just isn’t responding.”

  Caitlin squirmed in her chair.

  “You said it might take some time,” her mom said.

  “Some time, yes…” began Kuroda, but then he fell silent.

  Sighted people, Caitlin knew, could see hints on people’s faces of what they were feeling, but as long as they were quiet, she had no idea what was going through their heads. And so, since the silence continued to grow, she finally ventured to fill it. “You’re worried about the cost of the equipment, aren’t you?”

  “Caitlin…” her mom said. Detecting vocal nuances was something Caitlin could do, and she knew he
r mother was reproaching her. But she pressed on. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Doctor? If it’s not going to do me any good, then maybe you should remove the implant and give it, and the eyePod, to someone else.”

  Silence could speak louder than words; Kuroda said nothing.

  “Well?” Caitlin demanded at last.

  “Well,” echoed Kuroda, “the equipment is the prototype, and did cost a great deal to develop. Granted, there aren’t many people like you. Oh, there are goodly numbers of people born blind, but they have different etiology — cataracts, malformed retinas or optic nerves, and so on. But, well, yes, I do feel—”

  “You feel you can’t let me keep the equipment, not if it isn’t doing anything more than making my pupils dilate properly.”

  Kuroda was quiet for five seconds, then: “There are indeed others I’d like to try it with — there is a boy about your age in Singapore. Removing the implant will be much easier than putting it in was, I promise.”

  “Can’t we give it a while longer?” her mom asked.

  Kuroda exhaled loudly enough for Caitlin to hear. “There are practicalities,” he said. “You are returning to Canada tomorrow, and—”

  Caitlin pursed her lips, thinking. Maybe giving him back the equipment was the right thing, if it could help this guy in Singapore. But there was no reason to think it was more likely to succeed with him; hell, if he’d been a better prospect for success, surely Kuroda would have started with him.

  “Give me to the end of the year,” Caitlin blurted out. “If I’m not seeing anything by then, we can have a doctor in Canada remove the implant, and, um, FedEx it and the eyePod back to you.”

  Caitlin was thinking of Helen Keller, who had been both blind and deaf, and yet had managed so much. But until she was almost seven, Helen had been wild, spoiled, uncontrollable — and Annie Sullivan had been given only a month to perform her miracle, breaking through to Helen in her preconscious state. Surely if Annie could do that in one month, Caitlin could learn to see in the more than three left in this year.