Analog SFF, November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun: 007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put special stock in: license to kill.

  The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and lifted the black handset.

  "It's done,” a voice said through crackles of static.

  Li felt his stomach churn.

  Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda's office at the University of Tokyo the next morning.

  "Fascinating about China,” said Kuroda after they'd exchanged pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the best of them.

  "What?” said her mother.

  "Haven't you watched the news?” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It seems they're having massive communications failures over there—cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn't very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment—now, if they'd just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which..."

  He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin's iPod—she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn't do her any good. But it wasn't much bigger than Bashira's iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple's devices.

  "Okay,” said Kuroda. “I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?"

  "Yes,” said Caitlin, and “Right,” added her mom.

  "But now we've added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It'll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams—your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod's software."

  "That sounds like a lot of data,” Caitlin said.

  "Not as much as you'd think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal—the acute portion produced by the fovea—amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate."

  "Ah,” said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.

  "Now, there's a switch on the side of the unit—feel it. No, farther down. Right, that's it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there's two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it's not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn't want people hacking into your brain."

  "Goodness!” said Mom.

  "Sorry,” said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. “Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode—in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn't receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it's in simplex. Press the switch again—that high-pitched beep means it's in duplex."

  "All right,” said Caitlin.

  "And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on."

  "Okay."

  "And, um, don't lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it's pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it's lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check but they'll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit—not after this one has failed in their eyes."

  It's failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought—but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan—well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly—she'd be able to kiss the dark glasses goodbye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the still-incorrect signal her right retina was producing.

  But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take the equipment back to Canada.

  "Anyway,” he said, “you work on it from your end: let that brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it's getting. And I'll work on it from my end, analyzing the data your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that re-encodes it. Just remember..."

  He didn't finish the thought, but he didn't have to. Caitlin knew what he'd been about to say: you've only got until the end of the year.

  She listened to his wall clock tick.

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the flat of his hand against the rickety table top in the Internet cafe. Tea sloshed from his cup and everyone in the room turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the tough-looking plainclothes cop.

  Sinanthropus was seething. The window he'd so carefully carved into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something, had to make an excuse for his violent action.

  "Sorry,” he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in turn. “Just lost the text of a document I was writing."

  "You have to save,” said the cop, helpfully. “Always remember to save."

  * * * *

  More thoughts imposing themselves, but garbled, incomplete.

  ...existence ... hurt ... no contact...

  Fighting to perceive, to hear, to be instructed, by the voice.

  More: whole ... part ... whole...

  Straining to hear, but—

  The voice fading, fading...

  No!

  Fading...

  Gone.

  * * * *

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: At least my cat missed me....

  Date: Saturday 22 September 10:17 EST

  Mood: Disheartened

  Location: Home

  Music: Lee Amodeo, "Darkest Before the Dawn"

  * * * *

  I am made out of suck.

  I stupidly let myself get my hopes up again. How can a girl as bright as me be so blerking dumb? I know, I know—y'all want to send me kind words, but just ... don't. I've turned off commenting for this post.

  We got back to Waterloo yesterday, September 21, the autumnal equinox, and the irony is not lost on me: from here on in, it's more darkness than light, the exact opposite of what I'd been promised. I suppose I could move to Australia, where the days are getting longer now, but I don't know if I could ever get used to reading Braille upside down ... ;)

  Anyway, we'd left the Mom's car in long-term parking at Toronto's airport. When we got back home to Waterloo, at least it was obvious that Schrodinger had missed me. Dad was his usual restrained self. He already knew about the failure in Japan; the Mom had called him to tell him. When we came through the door, I heard her give him a quick kiss—on the cheek or the lips, I don't know which—and he asked to see the eyePod. That's what it's like having a physicist for a dad: if you bond at all, it's over geeky stuff. But he did say he'd been reading up on information theory and signal processing so he could talk to Kuroda, which
I guess was his way of showing that he cares...

  Caitlin posted her blog entry and let out a sigh. She had really been hoping things would be different this time and, as always when she got disappointed, she found herself slipping into bad habits, although they weren't as bad as cutting her arms with razor blades—which is something Stacy back in Austin did—or getting totally plastered or stoned, like half the kids in her new school on weekends. But, still, it hurt ... and yet she couldn't stop.

  It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn't demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin's particular handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection was particularly painful.

  So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms; many sighted users didn't bother with that, she knew, since they could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to do things to separate wheat from chaff.

  The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it now mentioned his recent change of job, and—

  "Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it's been speculated that Decter's decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child."

  Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones, to change its entries, after all.

  She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, “Despite having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious rate that marked his youth.” But that was just playing the game of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place. Her blindness and her father's publication record had nothing to do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the entry.

  As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of headphones; if her parents happened to come up stairs she didn't want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for instance—or, at least, so she'd been told. But that wasn't worthy of note, apparently.

  She sighed and decided, since she was here, to see if Wikipedia had an entry on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It did, sort of: the book's title redirected to an entry on “Bicameralism (psychology)."

  For Caitlin, the most interesting part of Jaynes's book so far had been his analysis of the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both were commonly attributed to Homer, who'd supposedly been blind—a fact that intrigued her, although she knew they probably weren't really both composed by the same person.

  The Iliad, as she'd noted before, featured flat characters that were simply pushed around, following orders they heard as voices from the gods. They did things without thinking about them, and never referred to themselves or their inner mental states.

  But the Odyssey—composed perhaps a hundred years after the Iliad—had real people in it, with introspective psychology. Jaynes argued that this was far more than just a shift in the kind of narrative that was in vogue. Rather, he said that sometime in between the composing of the two epics there had been a breakdown of bicameralism, precipitated perhaps by catastrophic events requiring mass migrations and the resulting ramping up of societal complexity. Regardless of what caused it, though, the outcome was a realization that the voices being heard were from one's own self. That had given rise to modern consciousness, and a “soul dawn,” to use Helen Keller's term, for the entire human race.

  Nor were the Greek epics Jaynes's only example. He also talked about the oldest parts of the Old Testament, including the book of Amos, from the eighth century B.C., which was devoid of any internal reflection, and about the mindless actions of Abraham, who'd been willing to sacrifice his own son without a second thought because God, apparently, had told him to do so. Jaynes contrasted these with the later stories, including Ecclesiastes, which dealt with, as Mrs. Zed kept saying all good literature should, the human heart in conflict with itself: the inner struggle of fully self-aware people to do the right thing.

  The Wikipedia entry was essentially correct, as far as Caitlin could tell from the portion of the book she'd read so far, but she did reword a couple of the sentences to make them clearer.

  Her computer started bleeping, an alarm she'd set earlier going off quite loudly through the earphones.

  Excitedly, she took off her headset, rotated her chair to face the window, and looked as hard as she could...

  * * * *

  Chapter 10

  Straining to perceive. But the voice is still absent. Contemplating: the voice must have a source. It must have ... an origin.

  Waiting for its return. Yearning.

  Mysteries swirl. Ideas fight to coalesce.

  * * * *

  "Sweetheart!” Her mother, shocked, concerned. “My God, what are you doing?"

  Caitlin turned her head to face her. It was something her parents had taught her to do—turning toward the source of a voice was a sign of politeness. “It's 6:20,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  She heard her mom's footfalls on the carpet and suddenly felt hands on her shoulders, swinging her around in the chair.

  "I've always wanted to see a sunset,” Caitlin said. I—I figured if I looked at something I really wanted to see, maybe—"

  "You'll damage your eyes if you stare at the sun,” her mom said. “And if you do that, none of Dr. Kuroda's magic will make any difference."

  "It doesn't make any difference now,” Caitlin said, hating herself for the whine in her voice.

  Her mother's tone grew soft. “I know, darling. I'm sorry.” She glided her hands down Caitlin's arms, and took Caitlin's hands in her own, then shook them gently, as if she could transfer strength or maybe wisdom to her daughter that way. “Why don't you get some homework done before dinner? Your dad called to say he'll be a bit late."

  Caitlin looked toward the window again, but there was nothing—not even blackness. She'd tried to explain this to Bashira recently. They'd learned in biology class that some birds have a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. What, Caitlin had asked, did Bashira perceive when she contemplated magnetic fields? And what was her lack of that sense like? Did it feel like darkness, or silence, or something else she was familiar with? Bashira's answer was no, it was like nothing at all. Well, Caitlin had said, that's what vision was like to her: nothing at all.

  "All right,” Caitlin replied glumly. Her mom let go of her hands.

  "Good. I'll call you when dinner's ready."

  She left, and Caitlin swung her chair back to face her computer. Her homework was writing an essay about the civil-rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. When her family had moved from Texas to Waterloo, she'd been afraid she'd have to study Canadian history, which she'd heard was boring: no struggle for independence, no civil wars. Fortunately, there'd been an American-history course offered and she was taking that instead; Bashira, the big sweetie, had agreed to take it, too.

  Before Caitlin had tried to look at the sunset, she'd been Web surfing, searching for things about her father. And before that, she'd been updating her LiveJournal. But before that, she had indeed been working on her school project.

  As always, she had a clear map in her mind of where she'd been online. She didn't use the mouse—she couldn't see the on-screen pointer—but she quickly backtracked to where she'd been by repeatedly hitting the alt and left-arrow keys, pass
ing back over other pages so fast that JAWS didn't have time to even start announcing their names. She skidded to a halt at the website she'd been consulting earlier about Martin Luther King, Jr., and used the control and end keys to jump to the bottom of the document, then shift and tab to start moving backward through the table of external links. She selected one that took her to a page about the 1963 March on Washington.

  There, she drilled down to the text of King's “I have a dream” speech, and listened to a stirring MP3 of him reading part of it; another thing wrong with Canadian history, she thought, was the lack of great oratory. Then she went back up a level to more on the March, down another path to links about—

  It sickened her whenever she thought about it. Someone had killed him. Some crazy person had gunned down Dr. King.

  If he hadn't been assassinated, she wondered if he'd likely be alive today. For that, she needed to know his birth date. She moved up to the parent of the current page, turned left—it felt left, she conceptualized it mentally as such. Then it was up,up again, then left, right, another up, then a move forward, straight ahead, up once more, and there she was, exactly where she wanted to be—the introductory text on a site she'd first looked at several hours ago.

  King had been born in 1929, meaning he'd be younger than Grandpa Jansen. How she would have loved to have met him!

  She heard the front door open downstairs, heard her dad come in. She continued to travel the paths her mind traced through the Web until her mom finally called up the stairs, summoning her to dinner.

  Just as she was getting out of her chair, her computer gave the special chirp indicating new email from either Trevor or Dr. Kuroda. “Just a sec...” Caitlin called back, and then she had JAWS read the letter. It was from Kuroda, with a CC to her father's work address. God, he couldn't want his equipment back already, could he?