Wake

Chapter 37

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: Alphabet soup

Date: Wednesday 3 October, 9:20 EST

Mood: Pissed off

Location: Kinder-effing-garten

Music: “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?”

Man, this is frustrating!

Here I am, almost 16, well-read, blerking gifted for God’s sake, and I can’t read English!

It’s ridiculous to still be using screen-reading software now that my eye can discern alphabetic characters — but I can’t recognize them. This shouldn’t be that hard! It’s not like I’m trying to master another language. Yes, yes, I admit I’m struggling a bit in French class. But most of the other kids in class, ’cept Sunshine, God bless her empty-headed heart, have been parlez-vous-ing Francais since they were in Kindergarten.

And, besides, this shouldn’t be as hard as French. It should be more like a sighted person learning Morse code, or Braille for that matter: just another way of representing letters they’re already familiar with.

But all the ways of drawing characters! Different typefaces and different sizes of type, some with little curlicues. Yes, as a kid, I’d learned the basic shapes by holding and feeling wooden carvings of the characters, but I’d really only learned capital letters, and then mostly so I could understand phrases like T-shirt and A-frame.

But even if I can master the individual letters, I know most people don’t read a letter at a time but rather a word at a time, having come to recognize the distinctive shapes of thousands of common ones, regardless of the blerking font.

I’m staying home from school again (the press conference is this afternoon) and am spending the morning playing around with an online interactive literacy site — for kids! It uses on-screen flashcards, apparently a common way for sighted kids to learn, showing me individual letters at random.

Some letters always give me trouble. Even when both appear on the same screen, I’m having difficulty telling whether I’m seeing the capital or lowercase version of those that are similar in both forms, and I keep mixing up lowercase q and p — and that makes me want to quke.

Le sigh. I really am trying to get this — but I’m Calculass not Alphabetigal, damn it!

The Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas was a modern auditorium with LCD projectors and HDTV monitors hanging from the ceiling. But it also happened to be on the ground floor of a physics think tank, and that meant the front wall, behind the podium, was lined with blackboards. When Caitlin came into the crowded room she went up to them and looked with interest at the scrawled equations and formulas.

Half the symbols were ones she’d never seen before. Still, she couldn’t resist having a bit of fun. There were three blackboard panels; the ones on the left and right were filled, but the center one had been cleared, presumably so that Dr. Kuroda could write things on it during the press conference, if he liked. It was bare except for swirls of faint chalk dust.

She took a piece of chalk from the metal tray in front of the middle blackboard, and, very slowly, very carefully, drawing the letters laboriously, one at a time, in capitals, because that was all she knew how to make, she wrote, “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURRED…”

Suddenly, Caitlin turned around because—

Because people in the theater were applauding and laughing. She felt her face splitting in a great big grin. Dr. Kuroda was off to one side, talking with someone, and as the applause died down he walked to the podium.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the microphone, “I see you’ve already met our star attraction. Of course, you all know why you’re here: this young lady is Miss Caitlin Decter, and my name is Masayuki Kuroda of the University of Tokyo. We’re going to tell you about an experimental procedure Miss Caitlin underwent recently, and the remarkable success we’ve had.”

He smiled at the crowd, which, Caitlin saw, consisted of about forty people, about equally mixed between men and women. “I do thank you all for making it out here despite the awful weather — I understand this is quite early in the year for snow in this part of Ontario. But our Miss Caitlin had so wanted to see snow.” He looked at her. “As you can see, you must be careful of what you wish for — you might get it!”

The audience laughed, and Caitlin laughed with them. For the first time in her life, she was enjoying being stared at. Still, she sought out her mother, who was sitting in the front row along with her dad.

Kuroda proceeded to explain what he and his colleagues had done to correct the problem with how Caitlin’s retina encoded information. He relied heavily on PowerPoint for his presentation. Caitlin had heard people call it PowerPointlessness before, and decided that was mostly right, although Kuroda did include some amazing pictures of the operation in Tokyo. She found herself squirming a bit as she saw the cranial surgeon sliding instruments around her eyeball.

When he was done with his presentation, Kuroda said, “Any questions?”

She saw a bunch of hands go up.

Kuroda pointed at a man. “Yes?”

“Professor Kuroda, Jay Ingram, Discovery Channel.” Caitlin sat up straight. Since moving here, she’d often watched — listened to! — Daily Planet, the nightly science-news show on Discovery Channel Canada, but had had no idea what the host looked like, although she certainly recognized his voice. It turned out that he had a very short beard and white hair. “Ms. Decter has a very rare cause for her blindness,” he said. “How generally applicable is your technique going to be?”

“You’re right that we won’t be curing a lot of blind people in the near future with this,” said Kuroda. “As you say, Miss Caitlin’s blindness has an unusual etiology. But the real breakthrough here is in actually doing sophisticated signal processing on information being passed along the human nervous system. Consider people with Parkinson’s, for instance: one possible explanation for the problems associated with it is that there’s so much noise in the signals going down the nerves, the patient ends up with tremors. If we could adapt the techniques pioneered here to clean up the signals the brain is sending to the limbs … well, let’s just say that’s on the agenda, too. Next?”

“Bob McDonald, Quirks Quarks.”

Caitlin had become a fan of CBC Radio’s weekly science show since moving here; Bob was the host. She found him in the crowd, and was pleased to think that lots of the other people here had probably also only known him as an energetic voice on the radio, and so were just as intrigued as she was to find out what he looked like.

“I’ve got a question for Mr. Lazaridis,” Bob said.

Mike L turned out to be a man in the front row with the most amazing hair Caitlin had seen to date, a great silver mass of it. He looked surprised, and turned around in his seat. “Yes?”

“Speaking of implants inside the skull like the one Caitlin has,” Bob said,

“could something like that be the next BlackBerry?”

Mike laughed and so did Caitlin. “I’ll get my people working on it,” he said.

My plan should have worked! I knew from which point Prime’s datastream emanated, I knew how to cast out a line of my own to call forth data, and I knew such a line was itself a piece of data being sent from me. All I wanted to do now was send a much bigger piece of data to the point Prime’s datastream came from. But — frustration! The data I was sending was not being accepted; no acknowledgment was occurring.

I must be doing something wrong. I’d seen that point accept data from my realm before; just prior to beginning to show me its realm, it had accepted data being sent to it. But it would not accept data from me.

It was maddeningly like when I’d been cleaved in two: the mere desire for communication apparently wasn’t enough to make it happen. Prime, it seemed, was only willing now to send data but not receive it.

In fact, now that I thought about it, I had only known Prime to receive data when it was reflecting myself back at me, but it hadn’t done that for a long time now. Until if and when Prime decided to again reflect myself — to show me me — it seemed I was stymied. And yet I kept trying, casting out line after line, attempting to connect.

Look, Prime, look! There’s something I want to show you…