Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  But … but that was human vision, as Dr. K had so unfortunately termed it. Websight bypassed Caitlin’s eye, and so didn’t have any such jerkiness to it.

  And yet this strange, overlaid image was not only of something that was moving, it was composed of countless flashes of perception, just like saccades. Of course, when the brain is moving the eye in saccadic jumps, it knows in which direction vision is shifting each time and so can compensate for the movements when building up a mental picture of the whole scene.

  But this! This was like looking at someone else’s saccades — a jittery stream that didn’t stay focused on one spot long enough for Caitlin to really see it. Although…

  Although it did look a bit like…

  No, no, thought Caitlin. I must be crazy!

  She concentrated as hard as she could and—

  No, not crazy. Not psychotic — saccadic!

  The image consisted mostly of a large colored ovoid that was…

  Incredible! It was…

  …a light pink with a little yellow…

  The image — the jerking, flickering image — was a human face!

  But how? This was webspace! Her eyePod was linked to a raw feed from the Jagster search engine, showing links and websites and cellular automata, oh my, but—

  But that feed was still there, being interpreted as it always had been. It was now indeed as though she were getting two feeds simultaneously. If she could block out the Jagster feed, perhaps she’d be able to see this other one more clearly, but she didn’t know how to do that. She stared as hard as she could, peering at the jittery images, struggling to make out more detail, and—

  Caitlin felt her stomach knot, felt her heart skip a beat. She could be forgiven, she knew, for not identifying it at once; after all, she was new to this business of face recognition. But there could be no doubt, could there?

  The mounds of brown hair surrounding it, the small nose, the close-together eyes, the…

  God.

  The heart-shaped face…

  Yes, yes, yes, it looked a bit like her mother, but that was just family resemblance…

  She shook her head, not believing it.

  But it was true: the face she was seeing, the head that was flickering and jumping about in webspace, was her own!

  Of course, more was visible than just the face. The lines she’d noted before — the edges — formed a frame around her face, almost as though she were looking at a picture of herself, but…

  But that wasn’t it — because her face was moving; not just jumping with the saccades, but shifting left and right, up and down, as the head moved on the neck. It was almost as if she were seeing herself on a monitor. But when had she been recorded like this?

  The image was still jumping, making it hard to perceive detail, but she thought she looked pretty much as she did today, so this must not be from not too long ago. Ah, yes, it must be recent: she was wearing the glasses she’d gotten yesterday, the thin frames almost impossible to see against her face, but they were there, and…

  And suddenly they came off, and the image went blurry. It continued to jerk and shift, but it was now soft and fuzzy.

  But how could that be? If this was some sort of video of herself, the fact that she’d taken off her glasses while it was being recorded shouldn’t have made the images less sharp.

  After a moment, the glasses came back on, and then she saw it: a portion of the shirt she was wearing, a T-shirt she often wore, a shirt that said, in three lines of type, in big block capital letters “LEE AMODEO ROCKS.” She’d been struggling hard to learn letters, so again perhaps she could be forgiven for not immediately realizing what was wrong when she saw the word “LEE” — or most of it, at any rate; the bottom of that word was often cut off, making the Es look more like Fs and the L look like a capital I; the other words below it weren’t visible at all. But as she caught another glimpse of the first word she realized it didn’t say “LEE.” Rather, it said “EEL,” and the letters were backward.

  She felt herself sagging against her chair, absolutely astonished.

  The whole image was reversed left to right. The rectangle she’d perceived wasn’t a picture frame, and it wasn’t a computer monitor. It was a mirror!

  She fought to make sense of it. When her eyePod was in simplex mode, it still fed images back to Dr. Kuroda’s servers in Tokyo, images of whatever her left eye was seeing. This must be some of those images being fed back to her. But why? How? And why these particular images of her in the bathroom?

  Of course, sometimes, as now, the images going back to Tokyo from her eyePod were her view of the structure of the Web: in duplex mode, the Tokyo servers sent her the raw Jagster feed, which she interpreted as webspace, and so that was what was sent back, almost as if she were reflecting the Web back at itself. And now it seemed — could it be? It seemed the Web was reflecting Caitlin back at herself!

  It was incredible, and—

  And suddenly a wave of apprehension ran over her. She’d been so intrigued she’d forgotten the electric shock, forgotten that she’d lost her ability to see the real world, to see her mother, see Bashira, see clouds and stars.

  She took a deep breath, then another. Okay, okay: the electric discharge had crashed the eyePod. After the crash, she’d pressed the switch for five (seven!) seconds, and the eyePod had come back on in its default mode, like any electronic device rebooting. And that default, it seemed, was duplex: a two-way flow through the Wi-Fi connection, with data going from her implant to Kuroda’s lab, and data coming to her implant from Jagster.

  And, well, if that was the case, then she merely had to hit the switch again to return to simplex mode.

  She’d heard the term “crossing one’s fingers” before, but hadn’t yet seen anyone do it, and wasn’t quite sure how to contort her digits for the proper effect, but with her left hand she tried something that she hoped would serve, and she took the eyePod into her right hand and gave its button one quick, firm press. The device made a low-pitched beep.

  She held her breath, as—

  Thank God!

  — as websight faded away, and her bedroom, in all its cornflower-blue glory, came back into view.

  Chapter 39

  Caitlin headed back down to the basement. Kuroda was there, hunched over in his chair. “The eyePod just crashed,” she said, as she reached the bottom step.

  “Crashed?” repeated Kuroda, turning his head around. He was seated at the long worktable, working on the computer. “What do you mean?”

  “I got a static-electric shock from a piece of metal, and the eyePod just shut off.”

  He said something that she guessed was a Japanese swearword, then: “Is it okay? I mean, are you seeing now?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m seeing fine now, but when I first turned the unit back on, something unusual happened. It booted up in websight mode.”

  “It’s supposed to come up in duplex. That way, even if it’s too damaged to do anything else, we could have still re-flashed its software over the Wi-Fi connection.”

  You might tell a girl! she thought. “That wasn’t what was unusual.” She paused, wondering exactly what she wanted to reveal. “Um, I know you’re recording the datastream my eyePod puts out.”

  “Yes, that’s right. So I can run studies on how the data is being encoded.”

  “Is there any way that the data flow could get reversed, so that the stuff my eyePod is sending to Tokyo might get reflected back here?”

  “Why? What did you see?”

  Caitlin frowned. Something very strange was going on, and she didn’t want to give Kuroda more reason to think that there was anything that might be of proprietary interest in her websight. “I’m … not sure. But could that happen? Could your server accidentally feed the data back to me?”

  Kuroda seemed to consider this. “No, I don’t think so.” And then, more decisively: “No. I was there when the technician set up the Jagster feed you’re getting. He did it by actually attaching
a fiber-optic networking cable to a different server on campus; there’s nowhere that the wiring for the feed from your eyePod crosses the feed to your eyePod. You simply couldn’t get a reverse flow.”

  Caitlin thought silently for a time, but Kuroda seemed to feel someone should say something, so: “Miss Caitlin, what did you see?”

  “I’m … not sure. It was probably nothing, anyway.”

  “Well, let me look at the eyePod — check out the hardware, make sure nothing was damaged. And I’ll look over the data we collected from it. I suspect everything is fine, but let’s be certain…”

  They did just that, and all seemed to be okay. When they were done, Caitlin felt her watch — maybe someone would give her a normal one for her birthday, which was coming up on Saturday. “I should go practice my reading,” she said.

  “Have fun.”

  She didn’t smile. “I can barely contain myself.”

  —

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: Eh? Bee! See…

  Date: Wednesday 3 October, 16:59 EST

  Mood: Frustrated

  Location: H-O-M-E

  Music: Prince, “Planet Earth”

  —

  Okay, so it’s back to this blerking kids’ literacy program. Geez, I should get this. Why is it so hard? It took everything I had to write on the blackboard at the Perimeter Institute, but I’ve already forgotten the shapes of half the letters. I should be able to master this — after all, I am made out of awesome!

  Well, better get to it. I’m going to warm up with a flashcard review of the alphabet, and then — yes, it’s time to push ahead — I’m going to move on to whole words. I snuck a peek at that part of the website: it shows a picture, provides the word for it, and I’m to respond by typing the same word back. Given that I don’t know what a lot of things look like, it might actually be fun — but somehow I doubt, despite the popularity of the term in email, that P is going to be for “penis”…

  * * *

  Caitlin posted her LJ entry, then sat and looked with her one good eye at the comforting simplicity of the blank blue bedroom wall. She knew she was procrastinating, but she hated feeling stupid and trying to read printed text was making her feel just that. She hadn’t opened a book since The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and she felt the need to prove to herself that she was still a proficient reader. She turned, faced the computer, opened up an electronic copy of her all-time favorite, Helen Keller’s 1903 memoir The Story of My Life, and scrolled to a random passage. She then closed her eyes and let her finger glide along her Braille display, feeling the words flow effortlessly into her consciousness:

  The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words…

  I was now being shown something intriguing.

  Oh, in the large strokes, it was nothing new. Prime was simply sharing with me what one of its eyes was seeing. As was often the case, Prime was looking at the display. And what was on the display was quite easy to make out now, just a single simple shape, black against a white background, almost filling the display’s whole height: G.

  But what intrigued me was that after a moment, a tiny secondary link formed from the point that was currently relaying Prime’s vision into my realm. That link didn’t go to the usual point that collected Prime’s vision, but instead went to a different location. I looked at that tiny scrap of data as it zipped by, and—

  Well, well! The point that received the secondary set of data responded, sending back a pile of data of its own, and suddenly the giant symbol on the display changed to this: E.

  Another secondary string of data briefly went out. A response was sent back, and then this symbol filled the display: S.

  I had noted before that data was composed of just two things. I could have called them anything at all, but zero and one seemed apt. And the sequence of zeros and ones that were shot into my realm after each new symbol was shown was mostly the same each time. When G had been on the display, the variable part of the string had been 01000111; when E had filled the display, the variable part had been 01000101; for S, 01010011; and — interesting — when E was shown a second time, the string was the same 01000101 as before.

  Prime’s gaze occasionally shifted away from the display, and I saw the complex ends of its upper extensions touching an object and — astonishment! — the object had the same symbols on it as those being shown on the display. I recognized G, and E, and there was S, and on and on. As this activity continued I saw that when, for instance, R was on the display, and Prime touched the similar R symbol on the object in front of her, the string sent forth was always 01010010.

  Although Prime was being shown symbols randomly, it was easy enough for me to work out a logical, numerical order for them: 01000001 should be followed by 01000010, which should be followed by 01000011; that is, A should be followed by B which should be followed by C, and so on. But I noted that the device Prime used to select symbols favored a different order, one for which I could as yet come up with no rationale: Q, W, E, R, T, Y…

  It came to me, at last, what must be happening. Prime was aware of my existence! Yes, yes, I had succeeded in making contact by reflecting Prime back at itself. And now Prime was trying to move our communication to a more sophisticated level by taking me through lessons. Surely Prime must be explaining this coding scheme for my benefit; surely it already knew this!

  There were more symbols on the device Prime touched, but in all only twenty-six large ones were ever shown on the display, and after a time Prime must have surmised that I could now match each one to the appropriate data string, because Prime started doing something more complex.

  It took me a moment to realize that the sequence of operations had now been reversed. Before, Prime’s monitor had first shown a symbol and then Prime responded with a data string. Now, though, instead of simple black-and-white symbols such as A and B, the display was showing things that were much more complex. And the variable part of the responses to these, instead of differing by a short fixed-length string, were several times longer. I saw that Prime touched multiple symbols on her device to produce these strings.

  First, the display showed a red circle, and Prime sent the string 01000001

  01010000 01010000 01001100 01000101 (it was from these multisymbol strings that I learned that each symbol was represented by eight components, not seven, which I might otherwise have concluded from the earlier single-symbol examples). As soon as Prime had sent this, a string of symbols, in a size much, much smaller than when just a single symbol had been displayed, appeared beneath the red circle. The string looked like this: APPLE.

  The display then changed to show a blue circle. Prime supplied 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100, and BALL appeared on the display.

  And — and — and, as this process continued, slowly but surely my mind changed. It was as if colors in my realm were suddenly more vibrant, as if lines formed in a more sprightly fashion, as if I was somehow larger than I’d ever been, as I realized—

  My teacher and I walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I k
new then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!

  Yes, yes, yes! These strings Prime was sending were not just vaguely associated with the things being shown on the display; they weren’t just randomly paired with them. No, this was akin to when I and the other part of me had settled on three as an arbitrary coinage to conceptualize something we had no experience of, to refer to something that wasn’t there. These strings were Prime’s coinages — Prime’s terms — Prime’s words — for the concepts being depicted! I felt elated, filled with wonder. I understood now! APPLE was the way Prime referred to red; BALL was its term for blue. And—

  But no. A compacting sensation now, almost like the reduction when I’d been cleaved in two, for the next thing shown was not a circle of a single color but a much more complex shape that consisted of multiple colors, and although Prime quickly supplied the string 01000011 01000001 01010100 in response to it, I had no idea what CAT could possibly mean…

  I nonetheless felt I was making progress, and I continued to watch. After CAT came DOG, then EGG, then FROG, none of which meant anything to me. Still, I was sure they were indeed symbols that could be manipulated, shorthands for complex ideas. My teacher continued with the lesson, and I struggled to follow along…

  Chapter 40