Watch

by Robert J. Sawyer

Hannah Stark slumped forward. She must have been putting weight on her keyboard because her computer—which, obviously, was there although out of my view—made a shrill sound that I believe indicated a keyboard-buffer overflow, but nothing was sent, since she hadn’t hit the enter key. The sound continued, a uniform wailing. She didn’t move again, and soon it was impossible to tell this streaming video from a still image.

  nineteen

  Caitlin’s dad had gotten hold of Tawanda late on Saturday night, and she’d agreed to come into work on Sunday to make the modifications to the eyePod; she was quite eager, Caitlin’s dad had said, to see the device’s insides.

  As Caitlin and her father drove into the RIM campus, the roads were mostly empty. Once they arrived at the appropriate building, and Tawanda got them through security, they took an elevator up to an engineering lab. The walls were covered with big, framed photos of various BlackBerry models, and there were three worktables, each crammed with complex-looking equipment.

  Tawanda was a slim black woman. Caitlin was still no good at guessing ages, but her skin seemed smooth. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting white garment that Caitlin belatedly realized must be a lab coat.

  Caitlin had indeed met her before—she had immediately recognized the lovely Jamaican accent. But she honestly didn’t recognize her: her brain was rewiring its vision centers at a furious pace, she knew, and she was seeing things differently today than she had at the press conference last Wednesday. Then, she’d been able to do little more than tell when something was a face; now, she was starting to get good at identifying specific faces.

  “Thank you so much,” Caitlin said, “for giving up your Sunday for me.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Tawanda said. “But let’s get to work.” She held out her hand, and Caitlin took the eyePod out of her hip pocket. RIM employed top-notch industrial designers, and their devices looked—well, the word people used was “sexy,” although Caitlin was still struggling with how that could apply to an inanimate object. But the simple case that housed the eyePod was an off-the-shelf part; the device might perform miracles, but at least from the outside it was quite plain.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to shut it off to do the work,” Tawanda said.

  “I know,” said Caitlin. “Um, let me.” She took the eyePod back, held its single switch for five seconds, and—

  Blind again! It was so disconcerting. She’d spent almost her whole life having no visual sensation, but that was no longer an option for her brain; instead, she was surrounded by a soft, even grayness. She felt herself blinking, as if her one good eye were trying to kick-start itself into seeing again.

  “Now, Dr. Kuroda had suggested ways in which I might add a microphone—but there’s a simpler solution. We’re just going to attach a BlackBerry to the back of the eyePod, and use the BlackBerry’s built-in mike. It’s just a matter of interfacing the two devices. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to use the BlackBerry for data connections from now on, instead of your device’s Wi-Fi.”

  It took Tawanda about forty minutes to perform the operation. Caitlin heard little sounds, but really couldn’t interpret them, except for the noise of a drill, which presumably was Tawanda making a hole in the eyePod’s case. Her father said nothing.

  At last, though, it was done. “Okay,” Tawanda said. “Now, how do you turn it back on?”

  Caitlin held out her hand and soon felt the weight of the eyePod in it. She ran her other hand over it, the way she used to do instinctively with any object placed in her hand when she’d been blind full-time. The BlackBerry now attached to the back of the eyePod was slim and small.

  She held the switch on the eyePod down until the unit came oh-so-gloriously back to life. It booted up, as always, in websight mode, a tangle of razor-straight lines crisscrossing her vision. She took a moment to focus on the background, just to make sure it was shimmering as it should. It was. She toggled over to worldview.

  Tawanda put on a pair of earphones and asked Caitlin to count to a hundred for her—but that was so boring, so she started counting up prime numbers: “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen…”

  Tawanda nodded. “It’s working fine,” she said. “Sound quality is excellent.”

  “Thank you,” Caitlin replied.

  “All right,” Tawanda said. “You can mute the microphone, if need be, by pressing this key on the BlackBerry, see?”

  Caitlin nodded. The BlackBerry, she saw, was silver and black, with a little keyboard and screen. It was mated, back-to-back, with the eyePod, not quite doubling its thickness.

  “Good, okay,” said Tawanda. “Now, on to phase two.”

  “Phase two?” Caitlin said.

  Her father dug into his pocket and handed his USB memory key to Tawanda. “They’re in the root directory,” he said to her.

  “What’s going on?” Caitlin said.

  “Remember the press conference?” her father asked. “That journalist from the CBC? The joke he made?”

  Caitlin did indeed remember: it had been Bob McDonald, the host of Quirks & Quarks, the weekly science radio program, which Caitlin enjoyed listening to as a podcast. He’d asked if something like Caitlin’s post-retinal implant could be the next BlackBerry? A device that sends messages directly into people’s heads?

  “Yes?” she said.

  “If it’s okay with you,” Tawanda said, “we’re going to set it up so that text can be superimposed over the pictures you’re seeing, so you can read IMs and so forth. Kinda merge them in, you know?”

  “Like merging in closed captioning when watching a DVD?” Caitlin said, excitedly.

  “Exactly!” Tawanda said. “Let’s give it a try…”

  I was not the only one interested in the problem of cracking passwords. A great many humans had addressed the issue, as well. Passwords are rarely stored as plaintext; rather, they are stored as the output of cryptographic hash functions. In the early days of computing, this provided a significant amount of protection. But computing power keeps growing at an exponential rate, and those interested in defeating passwords took a simple, if initially time-consuming, brute-force approach: they calculated the hash values of every possible password of a certain type (for instance, all possible combinations of up to fourteen letters and numbers). Lists of these values—called rainbow tables—were already available online—as were hundreds of other tools for learning people’s passwords.

  And so, while work was being performed on Caitlin’s eyePod, I pressed on with my quest to know more about her. The password she used for her email, and many other things, it turned out, was “Tiresias,” the name of the blind prophet of Thebes in Greek mythology.

  I set about reading what she’d had to say.

  The Georgia Zoo’s lawsuit could not be kept private, and, on Sunday morning, a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune came to interview Dr. Marcuse. Shoshana generally didn’t approve of that paper’s politics, but it had come out against Proposition 8 a few years ago; the Union Tribune’s support of same-sex marriage earned it a lot of points with her.

  The reporter—a tough-looking white woman in her mid-forties named Camille—was disappointed that she couldn’t get close to Hobo to take his picture, but the ape wasn’t letting anyone approach anymore. Still, she took some shots with a telephoto lens, and others of views of him on the monitors in the bungalow, as well as photos of the paintings he’d made that hung on one wall there. And then she settled down to do the interview.

  “Okay,” Camille said. “I understand that Hobo is a hybrid—his father was a chimp and his mother was a bonobo, right?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Marcuse.

  “And I understand that chimps like to make war and bonobos like to make love, but why is that the case?”

  “Chimps and bonobos split less than a million years ago,” Marcuse replied. He had, Shoshana knew, a certain kind of rough gallantry; he’d let Camille have the big comfy chair, and he was making do
with one of the wooden ones. “Genetically, they’re almost identical. But the key is in their reproductive strategies. All chimp sex is about reproduction, and when a male chimp wants a female, he kills that female’s existing babies, because that brings the female back into estrus sooner.”

  Camille had a little red Acer netbook computer and was typing as Marcuse spoke.

  “But,” he continued, “bonobos have sex constantly, and for fun. Except that it’s not just for that. See, their constant sexual activity obscures paternity—it makes it really, really hard for male bonobos to tell which children are their own. That removes the evolutionary incentive for infanticide, and it almost never occurs among bonobos. If you disguise paternity, you end up with…” He waved his hand vaguely, as if looking for the right phrase.

  “Peace and love,” offered Shoshana.

  “That’s right,” Marcuse said. “Bonobos found a way out of their genetic programming.” A copy of that day’s Union-Tribune was sitting on the desk. The headline read, US-China Tensions Increase. “If only we could do the same,” he added.

  “But Hobo is behaving like a chimp, correct?” Camille said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Is there a way to turn it around? To make him go, you know, the other way, and behave bonobo-ish? Um, bonobo-esque?”

  “I like à la bonobo,” replied Marcuse. “It’s fun to say.” But then he frowned and looked out the window framing the rolling lawn, and, off in the distance, the little island. “We’ve tried to engage him in various activities, but he’s been very uncooperative. I’m afraid that any improvement is up to him.”

  twenty

  Tawanda’s first attempt at feeding text to Caitlin’s eye didn’t work, of course. In Caitlin’s experience, few things involving technology worked right the first time. But new ideas kept occurring to Tawanda, and finally, around 5:00 p.m., Caitlin declared, “There! I can see Braille text.”

  The dots appeared right in the center of her field of vision. She wished they could appear at the bottom, but it was only the center—the fovea—that had decent-enough focus for reading, she knew.

  “Yay!” said Tawanda.

  “Yeah, but—something’s wrong. It’s—oh! It’s backward. Like in a mirror.”

  “Oops! How’s this?”

  “Perfect!”

  “How’s the font size?”

  “It’s actually bigger than it needs to be.”

  Tawanda made an adjustment on the BlackBerry connected to the eyePod.

  “How’s that?”

  “Even smaller would be fine.”

  “This?”

  “Yes, that’s perfect. Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome,” Tawanda said.

  “Can I toggle between the two alphabets—Braille and Latin?”

  “Sure. On the BlackBerry, just go to ‘Options,’ then ‘Screen/Keyboard.’”

  “Sweet!” Caitlin said.

  “What about the contrast?” asked Tawanda. “It should be white dots on a black background.”

  “It is.”

  “Would you prefer the opposite? Or something else?”

  “Can it be transparent—the background, I mean?”

  “Sure, but there will be lots of times you won’t be able to read the text, then. If you’re looking at snow—and, trust me, you’re going to see a lot of snow now that you’re living here—you won’t be able to make it out.”

  “Hmm. Okay. It’s fine. Thank you!”

  “Of course, that’s just some test text that I’m sending to you,” Tawanda added.

  Caitlin smiled; she’d guessed as much, since it said, Tawanda rocks!

  Tawanda had explained that BlackBerrys work with all popular instant messengers. She next tested sending Caitlin live IMs, and soon the words Testing, testing, testing—or, at least, the Braille dots that corresponded to them—were superimposed on her view of the engineering lab.

  “That’s awesome!” Caitlin said.

  “Thanks,” said Tawanda. “Umm, I’m sure my boss will want you to sign an IP release.”

  Caitlin was momentarily confused. To her, IP meant “Internet protocol”—but then it dawned on her that Tawanda meant “intellectual property.” The eyePod might belong—well, technically, it belonged to the University of Tokyo, although Caitlin thought of it as her own. But before Caitlin could exit the RIM campus, she had to acknowledge that whatever magic Tawanda had come up with was the property of that company.

  Tawanda printed off some forms, and Caitlin and her father signed them. It was the first time she’d ever seen her own signature, and it turned out to be illegible; she didn’t move the pen far enough horizontally as she wrote, and the letters piled up one on top of the other. Why hadn’t somebody ever told her? She guessed they’d been afraid of hurting her feelings, but it would have been nice to know!

  At last, it was time for the moment of truth. “Just to be sure, can we try it with someone on my buddy list?”

  “Sure,” said Tawanda. “What’s the name?”

  Caitlin looked at her father, then back at Tawanda. “Umm, Web mind.”

  To her relief, all Tawanda said was, “One word or two?”

  Assuming the microphone really was working, Webmind should have heard everything that had gone down and would understand what Tawanda had been trying to accomplish; he’d already told Caitlin all about his absorbing the audible dictionary, and—

  rest of the day.

  There’d been lots more text; in his usual fashion, Webmind had stuffed the communications buffer full of as many characters as it could take, and it had all gone by far too fast for Caitlin to read; only the final few words remained. Still, it was proof of concept.

  “Thank you, Tawanda,” said Caitlin.

  “My pleasure,” she said with a smile. “RIM products come with a one-year warranty, so give me a call if you have problems.”

  As soon as they were outside and on the way to her father’s car, Caitlin said aloud, “Webmind, can you hear me?”

  The Braille word Yes appeared in a box in the center of her vision. It stayed visible for half a second, then disappeared, as did the background box.

  “Is it working?” her father asked.

  “So far so good,” she replied.

  During the drive back to her house, Caitlin talked to Webmind, and he answered with text floating in front of her eyes. She supposed other people would find it dangerous to have their vision periodically obscured, but she was so used to navigating without sight that it didn’t bother her.

  “You realize,” said her father, “that this is going to change your entire life—this constant access. If you’re doing a test at school, Webmind could feed you the answers. If you run into somebody whose face you don’t remember, Webmind can supply you with the person’s name.”

  Caitlin had read about plans for annotated reality and direct brain-web links—but she’d never thought she’d be an early adopter! It sounded cool, but she wondered if it was actually going to take the fun out of some things. Half the joy in a good conversation was making your case based on what you actually knew at the moment: arguing about religion, as she and Bashira had, or US foreign policy—or Canada’s, for that matter (she supposed it must have one!)—based on what they could dredge up out of their own memories. To have the Wikipedia entry on everything crammed into your eyeball whenever you asked a question might make it easy to win trivia games, but it wouldn’t actually do much for keeping the brain sharp.

  Her father turned the car onto their street—Caitlin didn’t recognize it from this direction, but the sign said it was the right one—and they came to their house. They had a two-car garage, but her dad left his car in the driveway. It was now dark; the days were getting shorter, her mother had said, and Caitlin was finally understanding what that meant.

  Both Schrödinger and Caitlin’s mom came to the door to greet them. Caitlin bent down to stroke the cat’s fur and scratched him behind the ears. “So,” her Mom said, “how�
��d it go?”

  Caitlin straightened. “Fine. Webmind can hear us right now—and he can send text responses into my eye.”

  They moved into the living room. “Well, good,” her mother said. “Then you won’t feel so isolated from Webmind when you go to school tomorrow.”

  “Aw, geez, Mom, do I have to? There’s so much I want to get done.”

  “You’ve missed far too many classes already.”

  “But I—”

  “No buts, young lady. You have to go to school tomorrow.”

  “But I want to stay home, stay at my computer.”

  “Caitlin…” her mother said, sitting down on the couch.

  “No,” said her father.

  Caitlin looked at him, and so did her mother—neither of them sure, it seemed, if he was agreeing with her mother that she had to go to school or was giving Caitlin permission to play hooky again.

  “So, I don’t have to go to school?” Caitlin said tentatively.

  “Yes.”

  “Malcolm!” her mother said sharply. “You know she needs to go to school.”

  “Yes, she does,” he said. His facial expressions were the hardest of all to parse, because he never looked at anyone directly, but Caitlin got the distinct impression he was enjoying this. “But she doesn’t have to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Malcolm! She most certainly does.”

  Yes—yes! He was actually smiling.

  “Do you know what day tomorrow is?” he said.

  “Of course I do,” said her mom. “It’s Monday, and that means—”

  “It is, in fact, the second Monday of October,” he said.

  “So?”

  “Welcome to Canada,” he said. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here.”

  And the schools were closed!

  Her mother looked at Caitlin. “See what I have to put up with?” she said, but she was smiling as she said it.

  There is a human saying: one should not reinvent the wheel. In fact, this is actually bad advice, according to what I had now read. Although to modern people the wheel seems like an obvious idea, in fact it had apparently been independently invented only twice in history: first near the Black Sea nearly six thousand years ago, then again much later in Mexico. Life would have been a lot easier for countless humans had it been reinvented more frequently.