Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  She saw her mother do something with her hand, and the speakers went silent.

  “Say,” Mom said, “have you seen yourself yet?”

  Her heart started pounding again. She’d been so excited seeing other things, she hadn’t even thought about that. “No, not really — just my hands.”

  “Well, you should.” Her mom reached an arm over and flipped something down in front of her.

  “What’s that?” asked Caitlin.

  “A shade to keep the sun out of your eyes. You’ll need it now. And here on the back” — her hand did something else — “there’s a mirror.”

  Caitlin felt her jaw drop. Her face was the same shape as her mother’s! She could tell that without touching it — tell it at a glance! “Wow!”

  “That’s you. You’re beautiful.”

  All she could see was a fuzzy, heart-shaped mass and her hair — her wonderful brown hair. But it was her, and, at least for that moment, she agreed with her mother: she was beautiful.

  The car backed out of the parking space, and they started the wondrous, colorful, complex journey home.

  Chapter 32

  Other things were visible … off to the sides, in my peripheral vision, but although I was aware of them, they weren’t important. And beyond them, beyond those things on the edge, was—

  Fascinating! Surely something was there, but whatever it might be was … was out of my field of view!

  All right, then; all right. My attention was being … directed, and—

  It was an enormous amount to absorb, to comprehend. Hitherto, my universe had contained only points and lines connecting them, but the realm I was seeing now consisted of complex objects: things with edges; things that moved. I had no idea what these things were, but I watched them, fascinated, and tried to comprehend.

  This realm, this strange, hidden realm, was wondrous, and I could not get enough of it.

  * * *

  On the way home, Caitlin’s mom gave a running commentary of all the incredible sights: “That’s a pine tree off to the left. But see those trees there? Their leaves are changing color, now that it’s autumn.” “See that mailbox on the corner? They’re blue back in the States, but they’re red here.” “Now that guy really needs to mow his lawn!” “See that? A woman pushing a baby in a stroller.” “Okay, there’s a traffic light — see, it’s red now, so I have to stop.”

  While they were stopped, some faint, tiny smudges in the sky caught Caitlin’s eye — an expression she finally understood! “What’s that?”

  “Geese,” her mom said. “Flying south for the winter.”

  Caitlin was amazed. If they’d been honking, she’d have known they were there even when she was blind, but they were absolutely silent, moving in a … a…

  She balled her fist in frustration. The shape they made, the formation they were flying in: she knew she should be able to name it, but…

  “Okay,” said her mom, “and green means go!”

  Caitlin had gotten used to the clearly defined points and sharp lines she’d seen in webspace, but the real world was soft, diffuse. She figured maybe that the eyePod, after it processed the garbled output from her retina, was sending back only a low-resolution data-stream to her implant; she’d have to ask Dr. Kuroda if he could increase the bandwidth.

  Still, even blurred, she was amazed to see her house from the outside. She’d had a doll house as a little girl, and had assumed that all houses had the sort of simple symmetry that her toy one had had, but this house was a complex shape, with a variety of angles and elevations, and it was made out of brown brick — she’d thought all bricks were red.

  When they went inside, Schrodinger came down the stairs to greet them. Caitlin was stunned: she knew every inch of that cat’s fur, but had never even imagined that it was three different colors! She scooped him up and he looked into her face. His eyes were amazing.

  “I guess we should call Dad,” Caitlin said.

  “I already did — as soon as you called. But I couldn’t get through to him. And, anyway, Masayuki borrowed his car. I took your father to the Institute this morning; I should go pick him up.”

  Caitlin did want to see her father, but the ride here had been overwhelming and almost incomprehensible, and the sun had been so bright! She wanted to look at things she’d touched before so she could get her bearings, and she didn’t want to be left alone. “No, let’s wait,” she said. She looked around the living room while stroking Schrodinger. “That window’s not too bright…”

  Her mother’s tone was gentle. “That’s a painting, dear.”

  “Oh.” There was so much to learn.

  “So what do you want to see?”

  “Everything!”

  “Well, shall we start up in your room?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Caitlin said, and she followed her mother to the staircase. Even though she’d gone up it hundreds of times now, she found herself counting the steps as if it were a new staircase to her.

  “Wow,” Caitlin said. It was astonishing, perceiving a room she thought she knew in a whole new way. “Tell me what the colors are.”

  “Well the walls are blue — they call that shade cornflower blue.” Her mom sounded a tad embarrassed. “The previous owners, they had a boy living in this room, and we figured…”

  Caitlin smiled. “It’s okay. I bet I’m going to hate pink, anyway. What does it look like?”

  She saw her mother’s head turning left and right as she looked for a sample, then she got an object off a … a shelf, it must be, and brought it back. Caitlin looked at it but had no idea at all what it was, and her face must have conveyed that because her mother said, “Here, let me give you a hint.”

  She did something to the object and—

  “Math is hard!”

  Caitlin laughed out loud. “Barbie!”

  “She’s wearing a pink top.”

  “Tell me some more colors.”

  “Your blue jeans are, well, blue. And your T-shirt is yellow — and a bit low-cut, young lady.”

  They walked around the room, and Caitlin picked up object after object — a plush zebra that hurt her eyes a bit to look at, the jar full of coins, the little trophy she’d won in an essay-writing contest back in Texas.

  And as she heard the names of colors, she finally had to ask. “So the sheets on my bed are white, right?”

  “Yes,” said her mom.

  “And the faceplate on the light switch — that’s white, too, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the venetian blinds, they’re white.”

  “Yes.”

  “But…” she held up her hands and turned them back to front. “That’s not the color I am.”

  Her mother laughed. “Well, no! I mean, we call it white, but it’s, um, I guess it’s more of a light pink with a little yellow, isn’t it?”

  Caitlin looked at her hands again. The idea of mixing colors to get a different shade was still novel to her, but, yes, what her mother had said seemed more or less right: a light pink with a little yellow. “What about black people? I didn’t see any at school, and…”

  “Well, they’re not really black, either,” her mother said. “They’re brown.”

  “Oh, well, there are lots of brown people at school — like Bashira.”

  “Well, yes, her skin is dark, but we wouldn’t actually say she’s black. At least in the States, we’d only use that term for people whose recent ancestors came from Africa or the Caribbean; Bashira was born in Pakistan, wasn’t she?”

  “Lahore, yes,” said Caitlin. “I don’t suppose I should even ask if there’s really such a thing as a red Indian?”

  Her mother laughed again. “No, you shouldn’t. And the term is ‘First Nations’ here in Canada.”

  “Um, shouldn’t that be ‘First National’?”

  “No, that’s a bank. They also call them ‘aboriginals’ here, I think.” Her mother moved along. “And this, of course, is your computer.”
/>   Caitlin looked at it in wonder: that must be the monitor on the left, and the keyboard, and her Braille display, and on the floor next to the desk the CPU, and — and suddenly it hit her: yes, she had seen the Web, but now she wanted to see the Web!

  “Show me,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Show me what the World Wide Web looks like.”

  Her mother shook her head slightly. “That’s my Caitlin.” She reached her hand out and turned on the monitor.

  “Okay,” her mom said. “That’s your Web browser, and that’s Google.”

  Caitlin sat in the chair and loomed close to the screen, trying to make out the details. “Where?” she said.

  Her mother leaned in and pointed. “That’s the Google logo, there.”

  “Oh! Such nice colors!”

  “And that’s where you type in what you’re searching for. Let’s put in — well, where your dad works.” Caitlin leaned to one side and her mother worked the keyboard, presumably typing “Perimeter Institute.”

  A screen that was mostly white with blue and black text came up, and — ah, her mother was using the mouse. The screen changed. “Okay,” her mom said. “That’s the PI home page.”

  Caitlin peered at it. “What does it say?”

  Her mother sounded concerned. “Is it that blurry?”

  Caitlin turned to face her. “Mom, I’ve never seen letters before — even if they weren’t blurry, I still couldn’t read them.”

  “Oh, right! Oh, God! You’re such a bookworm, I forgot. Um, well, at the top it says, ‘Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ and there are a bunch of links, see? That one says ‘Scientific,’ and that one’s ‘Outreach,’ and ‘What’s New,’ and ‘About.’”

  Caitlin was astonished. “So that’s what a Web page looks like. Um, so show me how the browser works.”

  Her mother sounded perplexed — Caitlin guessed she’d never seen herself in the tech-support role. “Well, um, that’s the address bar. And the forward and back buttons…”

  She demonstrated the bookmark list, and how to open tabs, and the refresh button, and the home button — which looked to Caitlin like what a house was supposed to look like. And then they started visiting different Web pages.

  “See,” her mom said, “that’s a hyperlink. Some people underline them, to make them stand out, and some people just use different colors. See what happens when I click on it? Well, okay, what happens is the page it links to opens up, but if we go back” — she did something else with the mouse — “see, the link has changed color, to show that it’s one you’ve already visited.”

  It was all so … so busy! Caitlin actually yearned for the simplicity of her screen reader and one-line Braille display; she was afraid she’d never find her way around all this.

  “Now, let’s have a look at some streaming video,” her mom said. She leaned in and typed something on the keyboard. “Okay. Here’s CNN. Let’s pick a story…”

  She moved the mouse pointer again, and—

  “More now on the revelations coming out of China,” said the anchor. His voice gave away that he was male, and Caitlin could see that he had gray hair and “white” skin — a light pink with a little yellow.

  “The Chinese president spoke on Beijing television today,” continued the anchor. The image changed, and although it was still blurry and indistinct, Caitlin could see it was now showing a different man with black hair and slightly darker skin. He said a few words in Chinese, and then the volume on his voice went down and a translator’s voice began speaking over him. Caitlin had heard such things on the news before but was surprised to see the president’s lips now moving out of sync with what he was saying. Of course, that made sense — but it had never occurred to her that it would happen.

  “A government must often make difficult decisions,” the translator’s voice said. “And none are more difficult than those in times of crisis. We had to take swift and decisive action in the interior of Shanxi province, and the problem has been contained.”

  Caitlin looked at her mother briefly; she was shaking her head in … disgust, perhaps?

  The anchor’s voice again: “World leaders have been quick to condemn the actions of the Chinese government. The President was in North Dakota today, and had this to say…”

  Caitlin watched the moving picture, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Of course, she recognized the US president’s voice — but the face was nothing like what she’d expected. “The American people are outraged by the decision taken by Beijing…”

  Caitlin and her mother listened quietly to the rest of the report, and she realized for the first time that not everything she was going to see would be pretty.

  Chapter 33

  As I’d noted, the datastream from the special point did not always follow the same path to its destination. I mulled over the significance of that for a while, and I finally got it.

  It was a huge leap, a startling conceptual shift: the other entity’s location varied substantially in the realm in which it dwelled, and in order to send data to its intended destination, the entity passed it on to whatever intermediate point was physically closest to it at any given moment. Amazing!

  Still, there was one particular intermediary to which the entity linked most frequently, and that point shot out links of its own to many other points, some of which it reconnected with time and again.

  Perhaps these other points were special in some way. I touched many of them, but still, maddeningly, could make no sense of the data they poured forth; the only datastream I could interpret was the one from the special point, and even then, only some of the time. Oh, for a key to understand it all!

  Caitlin was startled to hear the door open downstairs. She looked at her mother, and could see what must have been a startled expression on her face, too. “Malcolm?” her mom called out tentatively.

  A single syllable: “Yes.”

  Caitlin spun her chair around, got up, and followed her mom down the stairs — and there was her father! She closed the distance between them, trying to bring him into focus.

  “How’d you get home?” her mom asked.

  “Amir gave me a lift,” he said. Amir was Bashira’s father.

  “Ah,” her mom said, apparently wondering whether Bashira had tipped off her own father. “Did he say anything … interesting?”

  “He thinks Forde may be on to something with his civilexity modeling.”

  Caitlin looked him up and down. He was wearing a … a jacket with … with…

  Yes! She’d read about this: the perfect professorial garb. He was wearing a brown jacket — a sports jacket, maybe? — with patches on the elbows, and … and … was that what a black turtleneck looked like?

  He had something in one of his hands, a few white objects, and some light brown ones. He waved them vaguely in her mom’s direction. “You didn’t bring in the mail,” he said.

  “Malcolm, Caitlin can—”

  But Caitlin interrupted her mother, something she very rarely did. “That’s a nice jacket, Dad,” she said, trying not to grin. And then she started counting in her head. One, two, three…

  He began walking and her mom moved aside so he could pass into the living room. He was perhaps sorting the … the envelopes, they must be, shuffling through them.

  Seven, eight, nine…

  “Here,” he said, handing some of them to her mom.

  Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

  “So, um, how was work?” her mom asked, but she was looking at Caitlin and, as she did so, she briefly closed one eye.

  “Fine. Amir is going to — what did you say, Caitlin?”

  She let her grin bloom. “I said, ‘That’s a nice jacket.’”

  He really was quite tall; he had to stoop to look at her. He held up a finger and moved it left and right, up and down. Caitlin followed it with her eye.

  “You can see!” he said.

  “It started this afternoon. It’s all blu
rry but, yes, I can see!”

  And she saw for the first time something that she’d never known for sure ever happened, and it made her heart soar: she saw her father smile.

  * * *

  Even her mother agreed that Caitlin didn’t have to go to school on Tuesday. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, and Dr. Kuroda was looking into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope he’d brought with him from Japan. She was astonished to see faint afterimages of what he told her were her own blood vessels as he moved the device around. “Nothing appears to have changed in either of your eyes, Miss Caitlin,” he said. “Everything looks perfectly fine.”

  Kuroda turned out to have a broad, round face, and shiny skin. Caitlin had read about the differences between Asian and Caucasian eyes, but she’d had no idea what that really meant. But now that she saw his eyes, she thought they were beautiful.

  “And you say the eyePod is already feeding my brain a high-resolution image?”

  “Yes, it is,” Kuroda said.

  “Then if my eye is fine,” she asked, disliking the whine in her voice, “and the eyePod is fine, how come everything is blurry?”

  Kuroda’s tone was light, amused. “Because, my dear Miss Caitlin, you’re myopic.”

  She sagged back against the wooden chair. She knew the word, having encountered it countless times in online news stories about “myopic city planners” and things like that, but had never realized it could be literal.

  Kuroda turned his head away from her. “Barbara, I’ve not seen you wear glasses.”

  “I wear contacts,” she said.

  “And you’re myopic, too, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Kuroda swung back to face Caitlin. “That darn heredity,” he said. “What you need, Miss Caitlin, is a pair of glasses.”