Wake

Chapter 14

“Mom!” Caitlin shouted. “Dad! Come quick!”

Caitlin listened to the thunder of their footfalls on the stairs.

“What is it, dear?” her mother said as soon as she’d arrived.

Her father said nothing, but Caitlin imagined there was curiosity on his face — something else she’d heard of but couldn’t picture, at least not yet!

“I’m seeing things,” Caitlin said, her voice breaking.

“Oh, sweetheart!” her mom said, and Caitlin suddenly felt arms engulfing her and lips touching the top of her head. “Oh, God, that’s wonderful!”

Even her dad marked the occasion: “Great!”

“It is great,” Caitlin said. “But … but I’m not seeing the outside world.”

“You mean you can’t see through the window?” her mom said. “It’s pretty dark out now.”

“No, no,” said Caitlin. “I can’t see anything in the real world. I can’t see you, or Dad, or … or anything.”

“Then what are you seeing?” her mom asked.

“Light. Lines. Colors.”

“That’s a good start!” she said. “Can you see me waving my arms?”

“No.”

“What about now?”

“No.”

“When precisely did you start seeing?” her dad asked.

“Just after we began downloading the new software into my implant.”

“Ah, well, then,” he said. “The connection must be inducing a current in the implant, and that’s causing interference in your optic nerve.”

Caitlin thought about this. “I don’t think it’s interference. It’s structured and—”

“But it started with the downloading,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And it’s still going on?”

“Yes. Well, it stopped when the downloading stopped, but I’m downloading the software again, so…”

His voice had a there-you-have-it tone: “It starts when you start downloading, it stops when you stop downloading: interference due to an induced current.”

“I’m not sure,” Caitlin said. “It’s so vivid.”

“What exactly are you seeing?” her mom asked.

“Like I said, lines. Overlapping lines. And, um, points or bigger points — circles, I guess.”

“Do the lines go on forever?” asked her mom.

“No, they connect to the circles.”

Her dad again: “The brain has special neurons for detecting the edges of things. If those got stimulated electrically, you might perhaps see random line segments.”

“They’re not random. If I look away then look back, the same pattern I saw before is still there.”

“Well,” said her mom, sounding pleased, “even if you’re not seeing anything real, something is stimulating your primary visual cortex, no? And that’s good news.”

“It feels like it is real,” Caitlin said.

“Let’s get Kuroda on the phone,” her dad said. “Damn, what time is it there?”

“Fourteen hours ahead,” Caitlin said. She felt her watch. “So, 11:28 Sunday morning.”

“Then he’ll likely be at home instead of work,” he said.

“Do we have his home number?” her mother said.

“It’s in his sig,” Caitlin said, opening one of his emails so her mother could read the number off the screen.

Even though her mother must have been holding the handset to her own ear, Caitlin could hear the soft bleeps as she punched in numbers, then the phone ringing followed by a woman’s voice: “Konnichi wa.”

“Hello,” her mom said. “Do you speak English?”

“Ah, yes,” said the voice, sounding not quite prepared for this pop quiz.

“It’s Barbara Decter calling from Canada. Is Masayuki-san available?”

“Ah, just a minute,” said the woman. “You wait.”

And, as Caitlin quietly counted seconds in her head, she was amused to note that at precisely the one-minute mark, Dr. Kuroda’s wheezy voice came on the line. “Hello, Barbara,” he said, shouting in the way people sometimes did when they knew they were talking long-distance. “Have we had success?”

“In a way,” her mom said. “Here’s Caitlin.”

“It’s a speakerphone,” Caitlin said, reaching over; she knew her phone well enough to hit the right button in one smooth movement. “Put down the handset.”

She heard it being returned to its cradle, then said, “Hi, Dr. Kuroda.”

“Hi, Caitlin. Has the new software made a difference?”

“Sort of. While I was transferring it to my implant, I began seeing lines and circles.”

“Wonderful!” said Kuroda. “What were they like? What colors?”

“I have no idea,” said Caitlin.

“Oh, right, right. Sorry. But — fascinating! But, um, did you say it began while you were downloading the software?”

“Uh-huh. Right after I started.”

“Well, then it can’t be the new software that did it; the implant would continue to execute a copy of the old version in its RAM until the new one was completely transferred to the flash ROM.”

“It’s obviously just noise,” her dad said, as if this were now the received wisdom. “A current induced by the download.”

“Not possible,” said Kuroda. “Not with that microprocessor.”

“Then what?” her mom asked.

“Hmm,” said Kuroda.

Caitlin could hear key clicks coming over the speakerphone, and — “Hey!”

“What?” her mother said.

“Another line just shot into my field of view!” said Caitlin.

Kuroda’s voice, surprised: “You’re seeing right now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you only saw when you were downloading the software package?”

“That’s right. I’m downloading it again. When it finished downloading the first time, my vision went off, so I’m downloading it a second time.”

“And you just saw a new line appear?”

“Yes.”

More key clicks. “What about now?”

“It’s gone! Hey, how’d you do that?”

Kuroda said a word in Japanese.

“What’s happening?” her mom demanded.

“And now, Miss Caitlin?” said Kuroda.

“The line’s back!”

“Incredible,” Kuroda said.

“What is it?” her mom said, sounding annoyed.

“Where were you looking when the line shot in?” Kuroda asked.

“Nowhere. I mean, I wasn’t really paying attention; I was listening to you, so my field of view had come back to, um, the neutral position, I guess — the spot it always centers on. What did you do?”

“I’m at home,” Kuroda said. “And the software package you are downloading is on my server at work, so I’d just logged on there to download a copy to here, so I could check to see if it had somehow become corrupted, and—”

Caitlin got it in a flash — literally and figuratively! “And when you linked to the same site I’m connected to—”

“The link appeared in your vision,” Kuroda said, his voice full of astonishment. “And when I aborted the download I was doing here, the link line disappeared.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” her dad said.

“I’m an empiricist at heart,” Caitlin said, happy to use a word she’d recently learned in chemistry class. “Make the link disappear again.”

“Done,” said Kuroda. “It’s gone. Now bring it back.”

The glowing line leapt into her field of view. “And there it is!”

“So — so, what are you saying?” her mom said. “That Caitlin is seeing the Web connection somehow?”

There was silence for a while then, slowly, from half a world away, Kuroda said, “It does seem that way.”

“But … but how?” asked her mom.

“Well,” said Kuroda, “let’s think this through: when transferring the software, there has to be a constant back-and-forth between her implant and my server here in Tokyo, with the eyePod acting as the middleman. Packets of data go out from here, and acknowledgment packets are sent back by the eyePod, over and over again until the download is complete.”

“And when the download is over, it stops, right?” Caitlin said. “That’s what happened, but as soon as I started downloading the software a second time I could see again, and — oh, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Kuroda.

“I’m blind again!”

Caitlin felt movement near her shoulder, and — ah, her dad leaning in next to her. Mouse clicks, then his voice: “‘Download complete,’ it says. ‘Connection closed.’”

“Go back to the previous page,” Caitlin said anxiously. “Click where it says, ‘Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.’”

The appropriate sounds, then — yes, yes! — her vision came back on, her mind filling with a view of…

Could it be? Could it really be?

It did fit what she was seeing: a website and the connections to it. “I’m seeing again,” she announced excitedly.

“All right,” said Kuroda, “all right. When the download is done, there’s no interactivity between the implant and the Web. It’s just like when you use a Web browser: once you’ve called up a webpage from Wikipedia, or wherever, you’re not reading it through the Web; rather, a copy is made on your own computer, and you’re reading that cached copy, until you click on a link and ask for another page to be copied to your computer. There’s very little actual interaction between your computer and the Web when loading pages, but when downloading a big software package, there’s constant interaction.”

“But I still don’t understand how Caitlin could be seeing anything this way,” her mom said.

“That is puzzling,” said Kuroda, “although…” He trailed off, the silence punctuated only by occasional bits of static.

“Yes?” her dad said at last.

“Miss Caitlin, you spend a lot of time online, don’t you?” Kuroda said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much time?”

“Each day?”

“Yes.”

“Five, six hours.”

“Sometimes more,” her mom added.

Caitlin felt a need to defend herself. “It’s my window on the world.”

“Of course it is,” said Kuroda. “Of course it is. How old were you when you started using the Web?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eighteen months,” her mom said. “The Perkins School and the AFB have special sites for blind preschoolers.”

He made a protracted “Hmmmmm,” then: “In congenitally blind people, the primary visual cortex often doesn’t develop properly, since it’s not receiving any input. But Miss Caitlin is different; that’s one of the reasons she was such an ideal subject for my exper — ah, why she was such an ideal candidate for this procedure.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Caitlin.

“See,” Kuroda continued, “Miss Caitlin’s — your — visual cortex is highly developed. That’s not unheard of in people born blind, but it is rare. The developing brain has great plasticity, and I’d assumed the tissue had been co-opted for some other function. But perhaps yours has been used all this time for — well, if not for vision, then for visualization.”

“Huh?” said Caitlin.

“I saw you using the Web when you were here in Japan,” said Kuroda. “You zip around it faster than I do — and I can see. You go from page to page, follow complex chains of links, and backtrack many steps without ever overshooting, even though you don’t pause to see what page has loaded.”

“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Of course.”

“And when you did that before today, did you see it in your mind?”

“Not like I’m seeing now,” said Caitlin. “Not so vividly. And not in color — God, colors are amazing!”

“Yes,” said Kuroda, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “They are.” A pause. “I think I’m right. You’ve been online so much since early childhood that your brain long ago reassigned the dormant parts that would have been used for seeing the outside world to let you better navigate the Web. And now that your brain is actually getting direct input from the Web, it’s interpreting that as vision.”

“But how can anyone see the Web?” her mom asked.

“Our brains are constantly making up representations of things that aren’t actually visible to our eyes,” Kuroda said. “They extrapolate from what data they do have to make fully convincing representations of what they suspect is likely there.”

He took a shuddering breath and went on. “You must have done that experiment that lets you discover your eye’s blind spot, no? The brain just draws in what it’s guessing is there, and if it’s tricked — by placing an object in the blind spot of one of your eyes while the other is closed — it guesses wrong. The vision you see is a confabulation.”

Caitlin sat up at hearing him use one of the words she’d been thinking about earlier. He continued: “And the images produced by the brain are only a fraction of the real world. We see in visible light, but, Barbara, surely you have seen pictures taken in infrared or ultraviolet light. We see a subset of the vast reality that’s out there; Miss Caitlin is just seeing a different subset now. The Web, after all, does exist — we just don’t normally have any way to visualize it. But Miss Caitlin is lucky enough to get to see it.”

“Lucky?” her mom said. “The goal was to let her see the real world, not some illusion. And that’s still what we should be striving for.”

“But…” Kuroda began, then he fell silent. “Um, you’re right, Barbara. It’s just that, well, this is unprecedented, and it’s of considerable scientific value.”

“Fuck science,” her mom said, startling Caitlin.

“Barb,” her dad said softly.

“Come on!” her mom snapped. “This was all about letting our daughter see — see you, see me, see this house, see trees and clouds and stars and a million other things. We can’t…” She paused, and when she spoke again, she sounded angry that she couldn’t find a better turn of phrase. “We can’t lose sight of that.”

There was silence for several seconds. And that silence underscored for Caitlin how much she did want to be able to see her father’s expressions, his body language, but…

But this was fascinating. And she had gone almost sixteen years now without seeing anything. Surely she could postpone further attempts to see the outside world, at least for a time. And, besides, so long as Kuroda was intrigued by this, he certainly wouldn’t demand his equipment back.

“I want to help Dr. Kuroda,” Caitlin said. “It’s not what I expected, but it is cool.”

“Excellent,” said Kuroda. “Excellent. Can you come back to Tokyo?”

“Of course not,” her mom said sharply. “She’s just started grade ten, and she’s already missed five of the first fourteen days of school.”

One could always hear Kuroda exhaling, but this time it was a torrent. He then apparently covered the mouthpiece, but only enough to partially muffle what he was saying, and he spoke in Japanese to the woman who was presumably his wife.

“All right,” he said at last, to them. “I’ll come there. Waterloo, isn’t it?

Should I fly into Toronto, or is there somewhere closer?”

“No, Toronto is the right place,” her mom said. “Let me know your flight time, and I’ll pick you up — and you’ll stay with us, of course.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. And, Miss Caitlin, thank you. This is — this is extraordinary.”

You’re telling me, Caitlin thought. But what she said was, and she, at least, enjoyed the irony, “I’m looking forward to seeing you.”