Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  “These flowers are dying,” I told my father as I set the table for dinner. “Do you want me to throw them out?”

  “Dying?” He stepped out of the kitchen and peered at the center-piece, then came closer and examined the individual blooms. “They’re fine, Jake. What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry,” I said stupidly. “It must have been a trick of the light.”

  He frowned, puzzled, but then went back to draining vegetables. I fetched my mother and my sister, and we all sat down to eat.

  Throughout the meal, I kept stealing glances at the flowers. My father grew a few different kinds in a small garden at the front of the house, and though I’d never taken much interest in them I couldn’t help but be familiar with their appearance at various stages of health and decay. In fact, these daffodils hadn’t even wilted: the petals were firm, not drooping. Yet the uniform yellow I was accustomed to had been modified by a flared pattern that I’d mistaken for a kind of withering, with streaks radiating out from the center of each flower that looked like shadows, not so much discolored as subdued.

  It was only when I stopped worrying about the flowers and paid attention to my family that I realized how far the change had progressed. My father’s face looked as if he’d developed a rash, albeit with a strong left-right symmetry, his cheeks flushed red and a roseate Rorschach blot decorating his temple. But if the effect was disconcertingly close to bad-TV-alien makeup, my mother and sister wore much the same mask with a twist: their actual cosmetics, which I usually barely noticed, now looked as if they’d been applied by an eager four-year-old who’d viewed the process as a form of finger painting. Streaks and ridges stood out all over their faces; it was all I could do to keep myself from staring, or making some inane, self-incriminating joke by asking them whether they’d enjoyed their mud baths.

  After dinner, the four of us sat down to watch a sitcom, giving me an excuse to keep my eyes on the screen instead of the garish people around me. But the longer I spent gazing at the electronic image the flatter its colors seemed, until the live action began to resemble some kind of stylized animation. It was not that I’d yet started to think of my family’s facial decorations as normal, but the actors’ skin tones looked as plastic as any mannequin’s, and the sets around them like the pastel story-book castles from a children’s show. I only had to glance across at the couch on which my parents sat to see how much richer and subtler the hues of the simplest real object could be.

  In bed, I lay awake wondering whether I should restore the implants to their original state. If I’d wanted everyone around me to look like a clown, there was an app that daubed face paint over the image from my phone’s camera, but the novelty of that had worn off in half an hour when I was eight years old. I couldn’t believe that my fourteen-year-old cousin had talked me into imagining that I’d be joining some kind of sophisticated elite.

  Just before midnight, I messaged Sean: This is horrible, everything looks ugly. Why did you make me do it?

  He replied: Be patient. Wait a week. If you still don’t like it, it’s not too late to go back.

  I stared into the shadows, still feeling cheated. But I’d been a trichromat for twelve years; I needed to give myself a chance to wrap my mind around the new sensorium.

  As I placed the phone on my bedside table, I suddenly realized how much more clearly than usual I was perceiving the details of the room. It was not that I’d magically acquired thermal night vision—nothing cooler than a clothes iron would emit the kind of infrared my sensors could pick up—but traces of illumination from a neighbor’s house were spilling through the gaps around my curtain, and though once this would have granted me nothing more than a few impressionistic hints in gray, the rainbow app had transformed the view, imbuing it with a subtle palette of colors that made every object stand out from the gloom.

  The effect wasn’t comical, or ugly. It felt as if I was seeing more deeply into the night world: sharpening its edges without diminishing its allure. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was flying across the neighborhood, an eagle-eyed raptor dragging secrets out of the darkness.

  The next few days of school were an exercise in learning not to stare at stained clothes and strangely spackled faces—let alone display any stronger reaction that might lead to violence, disciplinary action, or just the dangerously unanswerable question: What’s so funny? Whenever the temptation to smirk at a particularly zombie-esque schoolmate or Revlon-bombed teacher threatened to overpower me, I reminded myself that I looked every bit as ridiculous. I didn’t need a mirror: just glancing down at the sweat marks on my shirt, which resembled the gray silt left behind by retreating flood waters, brought a pang of humiliation that was enough to wipe the smile from my lips.

  Every painted wall looked slapdash and dirty, and even bare brickwork seemed to be decaying, infested with some exotic new form of mold. A part of me understood full well that this riot of variegation wasn’t really so wild—that the eighteen or twenty different tones I could discern on the surface of every brick all still belonged to what I would once have seen and named as exactly the same shade of red. But it was impossible to shake the impression that these newly revealed distinctions had to mean something: a once-uniform surface that had turned mottled couldn’t possibly hold together for long, and one good kick ought to be enough to break it apart like a rotten floorboard.

  The sky did not look blemished, but when I gazed at any part of its gentle gradient I knew exactly where the sun lay, and before long I could also judge the time of day to the nearest half hour. Sky blue was still sky blue, but now it came in a hundred delicate rings centered on the solar disk—and then imprinted with a second, subtler pattern whose bull’s eye was the zenith. Eleven a.m. had a mood of its own now, as distinct from noon as sunset or dawn.

  The following Sunday, Sean asked me to meet him at the beach. On the bus to the coast, I stared out at the car yards and advertising signs. Even the brand new BMWs looked like grubby plastic shells torn from some fairground ride, and the art-directed posters might have been lifted from a therapeutic crayon-sketching session at a hospital for the criminally tasteless. The strange blush of real human skin was growing on me, though; when I glanced across the aisle at a teenaged girl, her eyes closed as she listened to a track whose pounding base leaked out from her skull and crossed the gap between us, there was nothing comical or repellent about the visible ebb and flow in the capillaries below her cheekbones.

  I waited by the roadside for someone’s older brother to drop off Sean and three friends with their surfboards. As we walked through the dunes, Sean let the others get ahead of us. “How’s it looking now?” he asked.

  “Better, I suppose.” His own face was smeared with sunscreen, but there was an eerie precision to each daub: if I had not already known that we were seeing the world through identical eyes, this would have proved it. I looked around at the low, sturdy bushes that anchored the dunes; their small, dark-green leaves weren’t much different than I remembered them. “At least I’m not freaking out all the time.”

  “Good.” He was smiling sneakily, as if he had a handful of something unpleasant hidden behind his back that he was about to bring forward and drop down the neck of my T-shirt.

  “What?” I asked, getting ready to retreat.

  We came over the top of the dunes.

  My skin turned to ice and my bowels loosened; mercifully they had nothing to expel. The ocean stretched out before us, as alien as if our last dozen steps had carried us a thousand light years. But then, even more alarmingly, the impossibly rich skeins of currents and ripples, patches of seaweed and changes of depth and turbidity, flexed like a vacillating optical illusion and settled firmly inside my old memories of the scene. What I perceived was no longer extraterrestrial: this was the same blue-green, white-foamed water I’d known all my life. Only now, without ever stepping outside the borders of its familiar colors, it was inscribed and annotated with such a richness of new detail that it was like holding
up the palm of my hand to find my entire life story, in a million words and illustrations, discernible in the whorls and ridges of the skin.

  One of Sean’s friends called out to him impatiently, and he broke into a run. I watched him dragging his board into the surf; that wasn’t my thing, but I could imagine—just barely—what he would make of the revelations that the ocean offered up to every glance.

  As I waded into the breaking waves, I ducked down and splashed water on my face to make sure that no one would notice my tears. This was what it meant to see the world. This was my escape from the terror of blindness, from the family curse clawing at my heels: not the first, too-forgiving childhood version, when they’d unwrapped my bandages and over three long months taught me to turn a blur of muddy colors into the pale glimpse of reality that I’d naively accepted as the thing itself.

  As I moved my hands through the swell, overwhelmed by the density of greens-within-green, for a second or two, or perhaps a whole minute, I actually believed that I’d been lied to: that everyone on Earth saw things this way, except for the poor fools with artificial eyes, who, if forced from a young enough age to lower their expectations, had no idea what they’d been missing.

  But as this momentary delusion passed and my unwarranted anger dissipated, the inverted truth that replaced it was almost as disorienting. The world before me remained, undeniably, the world as it needed to be seen, and those to whom it was unreachable were as helpless and pitiful as if their empty sockets had been filled with glass or stone.

  “Two p.m., Sunday the fourth,” I muttered.

  “What?” Mehdi followed my gaze, but saw nothing that could have prompted these words.

  “Forget it.” The message was painted clearly on the billboard we were passing—painted, over a patch of blue, in other shades of blue. In the small park the billboard overlooked, I could see more heptachromatic graffiti on benches and playground equipment, but I forced myself to stop staring and walk on.

  “What did you think, Jake?” Dylan pressed me. Everyone else had spent the last ten minutes raving about the movie, but I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “It was all right,” I conceded.

  “All right?” Quan glared at me as if I’d just spat on his shoes. “It was incredible!”

  “OK.”

  Dylan, Mehdi and Quan had been my friends for years, and we’d got into the habit of seeing all the new 3D blockbusters together. I’d come along to this latest action flick because I hadn’t wanted to offend them, but I’d known from the start that all the stunts and effects that might once have been breathtaking would be lost on me.

  “When they lassoed his helicopter from the train, and he slid down the rope and jumped through that window—” Mehdi thumped his chest emphatically. “It was like doing the whole thing yourself, for real.”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “That was cool.”

  The honest thing would have been to admit how phony every last scene had appeared to me—and why. I couldn’t risk news of my alteration getting back to my parents, but I had no reason to believe that my friends would betray me. The truth was, I didn’t want them to know what I’d done. What was the point, when they had no hope of understanding it?

  The next weekend, I told my parents I was seeing another movie. I arrived at the park at a quarter past one; it was empty of people, but the same message was still there on the billboard.

  I hunted for some of the smaller scrawls I’d noticed in passing. HEP RULES and FOUR MORE FEARS were drawn repeatedly in ornate, almost indecipherable scripts, the style and colors the same each time. I was staring at one of these tags on a bench when someone spoke behind me.

  “You want that as a tattoo?”

  I turned. It was a girl, not much older than me. “Do you sterilize your needles?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I didn’t mean permanent. One day, maybe.” She was carrying a backpack, holding its shoulder straps in her hand; she hefted it onto the bench and unzipped it. “I made the inks myself,” she said, taking out a small bottle. “Six months of trial and error.”

  I peered into the backpack; there must have been forty vials in there. “That’s a lot of work.”

  “The hard part is finding two or three that will be invisible to tris on lots of different backgrounds.”

  “How can you tell?” I wondered.

  She took out her phone, tapped the screen and held it up, showing me its graffiti-free image of the bench. I felt my face flush at the stupidity of my question—and knowing how that would look only intensified the response.

  “Why did you come early?” she asked. “That spoils the fun.”

  “You’re early too,” I countered.

  “I’m not early, I’m here to mark the trail.”

  I’d half guessed that this would be some kind of treasure hunt. “So you’re in charge?”

  She nodded. “My name’s Lucy.”

  “I’m Jake.”

  “Do you want to help me?”

  “Sure.”

  A family had come into the park, a couple and two young kids, heading for the swings. The mother watched us suspiciously as Lucy took out a camel’s hair brush and began painting on a corner of the billboard—but we weren’t wielding spray-cans, and our watercolor vandalism seemed to be having no effect at all.

  Three blocks north then turn left, Lucy wrote. Listen for the sound of squealing brakes.

  “Let’s go,” she said, handing me the backpack. “You can carry this if you like.”

  We set out across the city, starting with a nearby amusement arcade. There was a Formula One game close to the western entrance, the sound effects blaring out onto the street; Lucy squatted down beside the wall and asked me for “number twenty-three.” The vials in her backpack had been sorted into four separate pouches, making it easier to find each one. A few passersby looked at us askance, but if Lucy’s brushstrokes left no mark it was hardly a police matter. I raised my phone and viewed the scene through tri eyes: she seemed to be delicately cleaning the brown-painted bricks.

  When she handed the ink back to me, I looked at the label more carefully. “Cinnamon and cloves? That’s what’s in here?”

  “No. That’s just how I think of it.”

  I turned back to the words she’d written on the wall of the arcade: East until you hit stale bread. I doubted that I’d seen many spices in bulk since I’d run the rainbow app, but even if there was no literal resemblance the name did evoke the hue: a rich, sharp brown that ought to have smelled of those aromatic ingredients.

  “Then what’s it made of?”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m not telling you. Work it out for yourself.” She glanced at her watch. “We need to keep moving.”

  She let me paint the last clue, and the arrow that marked the treasure, though I needed her advice on the color schemes. The loot itself was a sheet of paper that she stuffed inside an empty toilet roll and hid behind a bush in a courtyard outside the museum.

  “What does that number mean?” A long string of letters and digits had been written on the paper, in what I assumed was tri-invisible ink.

  “It’s a kind of code,” Lucy explained. “If you type it into the web site you get another number that lets you prove that you were the winner.”

  “You built your own web site for this?”

  She shook her head, amused. “It’s for anyone. Tris play something similar, but they usually do it with GPS and AR: there are no real-world clues, but you can see them with your phone or your glasses.”

  “So do you stay here and watch?” I asked. “See how long people take?”

  “Sometimes. We can do that if you like.”

  We sat on a bench with a view of the hiding place. Fifteen minutes later, a skinny young boy on a skateboard rolled up and went straight for the prize.

  When he’d retrieved it, Lucy cupped her hands around her mouth and called out to him, “Well done, Tim!”

  Tim skated across the courtyard to join us, thumbing numbers into his pho
ne as he went. He looked about ten, which made me uneasy; Sean had implied that there was some unwritten code fixing the minimum age for the hack at twelve.

  As Lucy was introducing us, two other competitors showed up. Before long there were a dozen people gathered around the bench, debating the merits of the hunt and cracking the kind of jokes about the ramshackle city and its hapless tris that would have been wasted in any other company. Tim was the youngest, but I’d have guessed that nobody was older than fourteen. I stayed quiet, conscious of my position as a newcomer, though nobody showed any sign of snubbing me.

  As the afternoon wore on and people left, the dome of the sky seemed tinged with melancholy. When only Lucy and I were left, she read my thoughts.

  “You think you’ve lost all your old friends,” she said. “And a few random heps are no replacement.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed.

  “You haven’t lost anyone,” she said. “It’s good to get together with the rainbow crowd, but no one’s forcing you to be a snob about it. Would your friends have dumped you if you’d gone blind?”

  I shook my head, ashamed. “Have you told anyone?” I asked her. “Any of your tri friends?”

  “No. But I still hang out with them. I just have to hold my tongue and not offer too many fashion tips.”

  Her own clothing appeared as grimy as anyone else’s—and the technology to make it otherwise probably didn’t exist outside of NASA clean rooms—but I could see her harmonious choices in the elements she could control.

  “We do this on the first Sunday of every month,” she said. “Tim will be marking the course next time—but if you like, we could team up and follow the clues together.”

  I said, “That sounds good.”

  2

  “Call,” I declared. If I couldn’t quite keep my tone neutral, the faint tell in my voice sounded more like fear than confidence. Danny could only make three of a kind, and Cheng the same—albeit higher—while the dark-eyed woman who never gave her name could rise above them both with a straight. Everyone else at the table had folded, some of them needlessly. In that company, my own modest flush was a sure bet, but the last thing I felt was invincible.