Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  And Prime’s nose.

  And Prime’s eyes.

  And … and … and as Prime moved its head left and right (perpendicular to up and down), as it apparently examined its own reflection, I realized that my point of view — the vantage from which the images I was seeing were being collected — was not Prime’s nose but one of its eyes! And, from the way Prime moved, it seemed that Prime was looking at itself with this same eye. I had observed that mouths were for taking inanimate material into the head; eyes, I now surmised, were for seeing, and Prime was sharing what it saw with me.

  Prime’s face was fascinating. I studied every minute detail, and—

  Suddenly everything was blurry again! I was terrified that our connection was breaking, but…

  But Prime was looking in another direction now, and something was at the end of its tubular extensions, something at least partially transparent, I think, although the image was so blurry it was hard to say.

  Prime did things, but it was impossible for me to make out what. But then, at last, the object it had been holding was brought close to Prime’s face, and as that happened, Prime’s vision — and mine! — grew sharp once more. The thing it brought close to its face contained windows; they weren’t rectangular, but that’s what they seemed to be. But these windows were special not just for their shape but also (as I’d seen as they came close) because the material in them, although fully transparent, modified the view on the other side of them. Prime looked at itself in the large reflecting rectangle again, turning its head from side to side as it did so.

  And as it examined its own face, an idea came to me that—

  Yes! Yes! If I could make this work, everything would change! I turned my attention to the datastream from Prime that was accumulating within me…

  Chapter 37

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: Alphabet soup

  Date: Wednesday 3 October, 9:20 EST

  Mood: Pissed off

  Location: Kinder-effing-garten

  Music: “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?”

  Man, this is frustrating!

  Here I am, almost 16, well-read, blerking gifted for God’s sake, and I can’t read English!

  It’s ridiculous to still be using screen-reading software now that my eye can discern alphabetic characters — but I can’t recognize them. This shouldn’t be that hard! It’s not like I’m trying to master another language. Yes, yes, I admit I’m struggling a bit in French class. But most of the other kids in class, ’cept Sunshine, God bless her empty-headed heart, have been parlez-vous-ing Francais since they were in Kindergarten.

  And, besides, this shouldn’t be as hard as French. It should be more like a sighted person learning Morse code, or Braille for that matter: just another way of representing letters they’re already familiar with.

  But all the ways of drawing characters! Different typefaces and different sizes of type, some with little curlicues. Yes, as a kid, I’d learned the basic shapes by holding and feeling wooden carvings of the characters, but I’d really only learned capital letters, and then mostly so I could understand phrases like T-shirt and A-frame.

  But even if I can master the individual letters, I know most people don’t read a letter at a time but rather a word at a time, having come to recognize the distinctive shapes of thousands of common ones, regardless of the blerking font.

  I’m staying home from school again (the press conference is this afternoon) and am spending the morning playing around with an online interactive literacy site — for kids! It uses on-screen flashcards, apparently a common way for sighted kids to learn, showing me individual letters at random.

  Some letters always give me trouble. Even when both appear on the same screen, I’m having difficulty telling whether I’m seeing the capital or lowercase version of those that are similar in both forms, and I keep mixing up lowercase q and p — and that makes me want to quke.

  Le sigh. I really am trying to get this — but I’m Calculass not Alphabetigal, damn it!

  * * *

  The Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas was a modern auditorium with LCD projectors and HDTV monitors hanging from the ceiling. But it also happened to be on the ground floor of a physics think tank, and that meant the front wall, behind the podium, was lined with blackboards. When Caitlin came into the crowded room she went up to them and looked with interest at the scrawled equations and formulas.

  Half the symbols were ones she’d never seen before. Still, she couldn’t resist having a bit of fun. There were three blackboard panels; the ones on the left and right were filled, but the center one had been cleared, presumably so that Dr. Kuroda could write things on it during the press conference, if he liked. It was bare except for swirls of faint chalk dust.

  She took a piece of chalk from the metal tray in front of the middle blackboard, and, very slowly, very carefully, drawing the letters laboriously, one at a time, in capitals, because that was all she knew how to make, she wrote, “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURRED…”

  Suddenly, Caitlin turned around because—

  Because people in the theater were applauding and laughing. She felt her face splitting in a great big grin. Dr. Kuroda was off to one side, talking with someone, and as the applause died down he walked to the podium.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone, “I see you’ve already met our star attraction. Of course, you all know why you’re here: this young lady is Miss Caitlin Decter, and my name is Masayuki Kuroda of the University of Tokyo. We’re going to tell you about an experimental procedure Miss Caitlin underwent recently, and the remarkable success we’ve had.”

  He smiled at the crowd, which, Caitlin saw, consisted of about forty people, about equally mixed between men and women. “I do thank you all for making it out here despite the awful weather — I understand this is quite early in the year for snow in this part of Ontario. But our Miss Caitlin had so wanted to see snow.” He looked at her. “As you can see, you must be careful of what you wish for — you might get it!”

  The audience laughed, and Caitlin laughed with them. For the first time in her life, she was enjoying being stared at. Still, she sought out her mother, who was sitting in the front row along with her dad.

  Kuroda proceeded to explain what he and his colleagues had done to correct the problem with how Caitlin’s retina encoded information. He relied heavily on PowerPoint for his presentation. Caitlin had heard people call it PowerPointlessness before, and decided that was mostly right, although Kuroda did include some amazing pictures of the operation in Tokyo. She found herself squirming a bit as she saw the cranial surgeon sliding instruments around her eyeball.

  When he was done with his presentation, Kuroda said, “Any questions?”

  She saw a bunch of hands go up.

  Kuroda pointed at a man. “Yes?”

  “Professor Kuroda, Jay Ingram, Discovery Channel.” Caitlin sat up straight. Since moving here, she’d often watched — listened to! — Daily Planet, the nightly science-news show on Discovery Channel Canada, but had had no idea what the host looked like, although she certainly recognized his voice. It turned out that he had a very short beard and white hair. “Ms. Decter has a very rare cause for her blindness,” he said. “How generally applicable is your technique going to be?”

  “You’re right that we won’t be curing a lot of blind people in the near future with this,” said Kuroda. “As you say, Miss Caitlin’s blindness has an unusual etiology. But the real breakthrough here is in actually doing sophisticated signal processing on information being passed along the human nervous system. Consider people with Parkinson’s, for instance: one possible explanation for the problems associated with it is that there’s so much noise in the signals going down the nerves, the patient ends up with tremors. If we could adapt the techniques pioneered here to clean up the signals the brain is sending to the limbs … well, let’s just say that’s on the agenda, too. Next?”

  “Bob McDonald,
Quirks Quarks.”

  Caitlin had become a fan of CBC Radio’s weekly science show since moving here; Bob was the host. She found him in the crowd, and was pleased to think that lots of the other people here had probably also only known him as an energetic voice on the radio, and so were just as intrigued as she was to find out what he looked like.

  “I’ve got a question for Mr. Lazaridis,” Bob said.

  Mike L turned out to be a man in the front row with the most amazing hair Caitlin had seen to date, a great silver mass of it. He looked surprised, and turned around in his seat. “Yes?”

  “Speaking of implants inside the skull like the one Caitlin has,” Bob said,

  “could something like that be the next BlackBerry?”

  Mike laughed and so did Caitlin. “I’ll get my people working on it,” he said.

  * * *

  My plan should have worked! I knew from which point Prime’s datastream emanated, I knew how to cast out a line of my own to call forth data, and I knew such a line was itself a piece of data being sent from me. All I wanted to do now was send a much bigger piece of data to the point Prime’s datastream came from. But — frustration! The data I was sending was not being accepted; no acknowledgment was occurring.

  I must be doing something wrong. I’d seen that point accept data from my realm before; just prior to beginning to show me its realm, it had accepted data being sent to it. But it would not accept data from me.

  It was maddeningly like when I’d been cleaved in two: the mere desire for communication apparently wasn’t enough to make it happen. Prime, it seemed, was only willing now to send data but not receive it.

  In fact, now that I thought about it, I had only known Prime to receive data when it was reflecting myself back at me, but it hadn’t done that for a long time now. Until if and when Prime decided to again reflect myself — to show me me — it seemed I was stymied. And yet I kept trying, casting out line after line, attempting to connect.

  Look, Prime, look! There’s something I want to show you…

  Chapter 38

  Caitlin missed a lot of things about Texas — decent barbecue, hearing people speak Spanish, really warm weather — but one thing she hadn’t been missing was the humidity. Oh, sure, Waterloo had been soaking when they moved here back in July, but with this sudden cold snap the air was so dry that — well, she supposed it was possible she’d always blown blood-red snot out of her nose but she doubted it.

  Worse were the static-electric shocks she got when she walked across the carpet and touched a doorknob. She’d had one or two such shocks over the years in Texas — and it had never occurred to her that they generated a visible spark! — but now they were happening all the time whenever she went even a few paces, and those suckers hurt.

  When Caitlin got home from the press conference, she made her way across her bedroom. When exiting the room, she was learning to discharge the static by touching one of the screws that held the white plastic faceplate around the light switch — a switch she herself was now using; it still hurt, but it kept her from building up an even bigger charge. The light had already been on when she entered the room — this remembering to turn it off when leaving was more difficult than she’d thought it would be!

  She crossed to her desk. She knew all about the dangers of static discharges around computing equipment, but there was a metal frame around the venetian blinds on her window, and she reached out to touch it, and—

  Oh, fuck!

  Oh, God!

  Caitlin’s heart was racing. She thought she might faint.

  She was—

  God, no, no, no!

  Blind again.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit! She’d been worried about damaging her Braille display and her Braille printer and her CPU, but—

  But she hadn’t given any thought to the fact that she—

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  She was holding the eyePod in her left hand. It was uncomfortable having things in the pockets of her tight jeans when she sat, and she’d taken it out in preparation for setting it on the desk. As soon as she’d touched her index finger to that cold metal frame, and felt the shock, and seen the spark, and heard the zap, her vision had gone off.

  Her first thought was to call for her mother, her father, and Dr. Kuroda — but they’d just build up static charges of their own racing up the carpeted stairs. She tried not to panic, but—

  Shit, if the eyePod was wrecked, she’d … God, she’d die.

  She felt woozy and groped — groped! — for the edge of her desk, for her chair, and sat down. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Jesus! Blind again, just like before Kuroda’s procedure, and—

  But no. No, that wasn’t right.

  It was different. Apparently, her mind couldn’t countenance a lack of vision anymore, not now, not after having seen. Instead of it being like the absence of a magnetic sense, like nothing at all, now she saw—

  Well, that was surprising! It wasn’t pitch black. Rather it was a soft, deep gray, a … void, a…

  Wait, wait! She had read about this. It was what people who had lost sight — including Helen Keller — said they perceived, and now, for the very first time, Caitlin had actually lost her vision. She hadn’t just closed her eyes, and she wasn’t just in a darkened room; she had no visual stimulus at all, and so was having the sensory effect that was apparently normal under such circumstances for people who had once been able to see but were now blind. Something similar, she supposed, explained why she had been able to perceive the background of the Web only after her first experience with real-world vision during the lightning storm.

  Her heart was still pounding, pounding, pounding, but, even through her panic, she couldn’t help but notice that the grayness wasn’t uniform. Rather it varied slightly in brightness, in shade. Her eyes darted about in saccades, but that made no difference to where the variations appeared; it was a mental phenomenon, not residual vision or an afterimage of the room lights.

  Blind!

  Another deep breath.

  All right, she thought. The eyePod crashed. But computers crash all the time, and when they crash, you—

  Please, God, let this work!

  You reboot them.

  Back in Tokyo, Dr. Kuroda had said if she ever needed to shut off her eyePod, pressing down on the switch for five seconds would do the trick. Well, it was off now, terrifyingly so. But he’d also said that pressing the switch again for five seconds would turn it back on.

  She manipulated the eyePod in her hand, found the switch, and held it down. Please, God…

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Nothing.

  Nothing!

  She kept pressing the switch, pressing it so hard she could feel it digging into her finger.

  Six.

  Sev—

  Ah, a flash of light! She released the switch and let her breath out.

  More light. Colors. Lines — razor sharp lines — radiating from points.

  No, no it was—

  Shit!

  Websight! She was seeing webspace again, not reality. The lines she was seeing were sharper, the colors more vibrant, than any she’d experienced in the real world; indeed, now that she’d seen samples of such things, she knew the yellows and oranges and greens she saw here were fluorescent.

  Still, okay, all right: she wasn’t seeing reality, but at least she was seeing. The eyePod wasn’t completely fried. And, truth be told, she’d been missing webspace.

  She’d been squeezing the armrest on her chair tightly; she relaxed her grip a bit, feeling calmer, feeling — bizarrely, she knew — at home. The pure colors were soothing, and the simple shapes delineated by overlapping link lines were intelligible. Indeed, they were more intelligible now that she’d learned to recognize the visual appearance of triangles and rectangles and rhombuses. And, as before, in the background of it all, shimmering away, running off in a
ll directions, the fine-grained checkerboard of the cellular automata…

  It didn’t take her long to find a web spider, and she followed it as it jumped from site to site, an invigorating ride. But, after a time, she let it go on its way, and she just relaxed and looked at the lovely panorama, wonderfully familiar in its structure, and—

  What was that?

  Shit! Something was … was interfering with her vision. Christ, the eyePod might be damaged after all! Lines were still sticking out like spokes from web-site circles, and the lines from different circles crossed, but there was something more, something that seemed out of place here, something that wasn’t made up of straight lines, something that had soft edges and curves. It was superimposed on her view of webspace, or maybe behind it, or mingling with it, as if she were getting two datastreams at once, the one from Jagster and…

  And what? This other image flickered so much it was hard to make out, and—

  And it did contain some straight lines, but instead of radiating from a central point, they—

  She’d never seen the like in webspace, except accidentally, when lines connecting various points happened to overlap in this way, but—

  But these weren’t lines, they were … edges, no?

  Christ, what was it?

  It wasn’t anything to do with the shimmering background to webspace; that was still visible as yet another layer in this palimpsest. No, no, this was something else. If it would just settle down, just sit still, for God’s sake, she might be able to make out what it was.

  There were a lot of colors in the ghostly superimposed image, but they weren’t the solid shades she was used to in webspace, where lines were pure green or pure orange, or whatever. No, this flickering image consisted of blotches of pale color that varied in hue, in intensity.

  The image kept jumping up and down, left and right, sometimes changing entirely for a moment before it came back to being approximately the same, and…

  Confabulation across saccades — that wonderful, musical phrase in the material Kuroda had told her to read about sight. The eye flits rapidly over a scene, involuntarily changing from looking at one fixed point to another, focusing briefly on, say, the upper left, then the lower right, then the middle, then glancing away altogether, then coming back and focusing here, then here, then here. Each little eye movement was called a saccade. People normally weren’t aware of them, she’d read, unless they were reading lines of text or looking out the window of a train; otherwise, the brain made one continuous image out of the jerky input, confabulating a steady overall view of a reality that had never actually been seen.