Wake

Chapter 38

Caitlin missed a lot of things about Texas — decent barbecue, hearing people speak Spanish, really warm weather — but one thing she hadn’t been missing was the humidity. Oh, sure, Waterloo had been soaking when they moved here back in July, but with this sudden cold snap the air was so dry that — well, she supposed it was possible she’d always blown blood-red snot out of her nose but she doubted it.

Worse were the static-electric shocks she got when she walked across the carpet and touched a doorknob. She’d had one or two such shocks over the years in Texas — and it had never occurred to her that they generated a visible spark! — but now they were happening all the time whenever she went even a few paces, and those suckers hurt.

When Caitlin got home from the press conference, she made her way across her bedroom. When exiting the room, she was learning to discharge the static by touching one of the screws that held the white plastic faceplate around the light switch — a switch she herself was now using; it still hurt, but it kept her from building up an even bigger charge. The light had already been on when she entered the room — this remembering to turn it off when leaving was more difficult than she’d thought it would be!

She crossed to her desk. She knew all about the dangers of static discharges around computing equipment, but there was a metal frame around the venetian blinds on her window, and she reached out to touch it, and—

Oh, fuck!

Oh, God!

Caitlin’s heart was racing. She thought she might faint.

She was—

God, no, no, no!

Blind again.

Shit, shit, shit, shit! She’d been worried about damaging her Braille display and her Braille printer and her CPU, but—

But she hadn’t given any thought to the fact that she—

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

She was holding the eyePod in her left hand. It was uncomfortable having things in the pockets of her tight jeans when she sat, and she’d taken it out in preparation for setting it on the desk. As soon as she’d touched her index finger to that cold metal frame, and felt the shock, and seen the spark, and heard the zap, her vision had gone off.

Her first thought was to call for her mother, her father, and Dr. Kuroda — but they’d just build up static charges of their own racing up the carpeted stairs. She tried not to panic, but—

Shit, if the eyePod was wrecked, she’d … God, she’d die.

She felt woozy and groped — groped! — for the edge of her desk, for her chair, and sat down. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Jesus! Blind again, just like before Kuroda’s procedure, and—

But no. No, that wasn’t right.

It was different. Apparently, her mind couldn’t countenance a lack of vision anymore, not now, not after having seen. Instead of it being like the absence of a magnetic sense, like nothing at all, now she saw—

Well, that was surprising! It wasn’t pitch black. Rather it was a soft, deep gray, a … void, a…

Wait, wait! She had read about this. It was what people who had lost sight — including Helen Keller — said they perceived, and now, for the very first time, Caitlin had actually lost her vision. She hadn’t just closed her eyes, and she wasn’t just in a darkened room; she had no visual stimulus at all, and so was having the sensory effect that was apparently normal under such circumstances for people who had once been able to see but were now blind. Something similar, she supposed, explained why she had been able to perceive the background of the Web only after her first experience with real-world vision during the lightning storm.

Her heart was still pounding, pounding, pounding, but, even through her panic, she couldn’t help but notice that the grayness wasn’t uniform. Rather it varied slightly in brightness, in shade. Her eyes darted about in saccades, but that made no difference to where the variations appeared; it was a mental phenomenon, not residual vision or an afterimage of the room lights.

Blind!

Another deep breath.

All right, she thought. The eyePod crashed. But computers crash all the time, and when they crash, you—

Please, God, let this work!

You reboot them.

Back in Tokyo, Dr. Kuroda had said if she ever needed to shut off her eyePod, pressing down on the switch for five seconds would do the trick. Well, it was off now, terrifyingly so. But he’d also said that pressing the switch again for five seconds would turn it back on.

She manipulated the eyePod in her hand, found the switch, and held it down. Please, God…

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Nothing.

Nothing!

She kept pressing the switch, pressing it so hard she could feel it digging into her finger.

Six.

Sev—

Ah, a flash of light! She released the switch and let her breath out.

More light. Colors. Lines — razor sharp lines — radiating from points.

No, no it was—

Shit!

Websight! She was seeing webspace again, not reality. The lines she was seeing were sharper, the colors more vibrant, than any she’d experienced in the real world; indeed, now that she’d seen samples of such things, she knew the yellows and oranges and greens she saw here were fluorescent.

Still, okay, all right: she wasn’t seeing reality, but at least she was seeing. The eyePod wasn’t completely fried. And, truth be told, she’d been missing webspace.

She’d been squeezing the armrest on her chair tightly; she relaxed her grip a bit, feeling calmer, feeling — bizarrely, she knew — at home. The pure colors were soothing, and the simple shapes delineated by overlapping link lines were intelligible. Indeed, they were more intelligible now that she’d learned to recognize the visual appearance of triangles and rectangles and rhombuses. And, as before, in the background of it all, shimmering away, running off in all directions, the fine-grained checkerboard of the cellular automata…

It didn’t take her long to find a web spider, and she followed it as it jumped from site to site, an invigorating ride. But, after a time, she let it go on its way, and she just relaxed and looked at the lovely panorama, wonderfully familiar in its structure, and—

What was that?

Shit! Something was … was interfering with her vision. Christ, the eyePod might be damaged after all! Lines were still sticking out like spokes from web-site circles, and the lines from different circles crossed, but there was something more, something that seemed out of place here, something that wasn’t made up of straight lines, something that had soft edges and curves. It was superimposed on her view of webspace, or maybe behind it, or mingling with it, as if she were getting two datastreams at once, the one from Jagster and…

And what? This other image flickered so much it was hard to make out, and—

And it did contain some straight lines, but instead of radiating from a central point, they—

She’d never seen the like in webspace, except accidentally, when lines connecting various points happened to overlap in this way, but—

But these weren’t lines, they were … edges, no?

Christ, what was it?

It wasn’t anything to do with the shimmering background to webspace; that was still visible as yet another layer in this palimpsest. No, no, this was something else. If it would just settle down, just sit still, for God’s sake, she might be able to make out what it was.

There were a lot of colors in the ghostly superimposed image, but they weren’t the solid shades she was used to in webspace, where lines were pure green or pure orange, or whatever. No, this flickering image consisted of blotches of pale color that varied in hue, in intensity.

The image kept jumping up and down, left and right, sometimes changing entirely for a moment before it came back to being approximately the same, and…

Confabulation across saccades — that wonderful, musical phrase in the material Kuroda had told her to read about sight. The eye flits rapidly over a scene, involuntarily changing from looking at one fixed point to another, focusing briefly on, say, the upper left, then the lower right, then the middle, then glancing away altogether, then coming back and focusing here, then here, then here. Each little eye movement was called a saccade. People normally weren’t aware of them, she’d read, unless they were reading lines of text or looking out the window of a train; otherwise, the brain made one continuous image out of the jerky input, confabulating a steady overall view of a reality that had never actually been seen.

But … but that was human vision, as Dr. K had so unfortunately termed it. Websight bypassed Caitlin’s eye, and so didn’t have any such jerkiness to it.

And yet this strange, overlaid image was not only of something that was moving, it was composed of countless flashes of perception, just like saccades. Of course, when the brain is moving the eye in saccadic jumps, it knows in which direction vision is shifting each time and so can compensate for the movements when building up a mental picture of the whole scene.

But this! This was like looking at someone else’s saccades — a jittery stream that didn’t stay focused on one spot long enough for Caitlin to really see it. Although…

Although it did look a bit like…

No, no, thought Caitlin. I must be crazy!

She concentrated as hard as she could and—

No, not crazy. Not psychotic — saccadic!

The image consisted mostly of a large colored ovoid that was…

Incredible! It was…

…a light pink with a little yellow…

The image — the jerking, flickering image — was a human face!

But how? This was webspace! Her eyePod was linked to a raw feed from the Jagster search engine, showing links and websites and cellular automata, oh my, but—

But that feed was still there, being interpreted as it always had been. It was now indeed as though she were getting two feeds simultaneously. If she could block out the Jagster feed, perhaps she’d be able to see this other one more clearly, but she didn’t know how to do that. She stared as hard as she could, peering at the jittery images, struggling to make out more detail, and—

Caitlin felt her stomach knot, felt her heart skip a beat. She could be forgiven, she knew, for not identifying it at once; after all, she was new to this business of face recognition. But there could be no doubt, could there?

The mounds of brown hair surrounding it, the small nose, the close-together eyes, the…

God.

The heart-shaped face…

Yes, yes, yes, it looked a bit like her mother, but that was just family resemblance…

She shook her head, not believing it.

But it was true: the face she was seeing, the head that was flickering and jumping about in webspace, was her own!

Of course, more was visible than just the face. The lines she’d noted before — the edges — formed a frame around her face, almost as though she were looking at a picture of herself, but…

But that wasn’t it — because her face was moving; not just jumping with the saccades, but shifting left and right, up and down, as the head moved on the neck. It was almost as if she were seeing herself on a monitor. But when had she been recorded like this?

The image was still jumping, making it hard to perceive detail, but she thought she looked pretty much as she did today, so this must not be from not too long ago. Ah, yes, it must be recent: she was wearing the glasses she’d gotten yesterday, the thin frames almost impossible to see against her face, but they were there, and…

And suddenly they came off, and the image went blurry. It continued to jerk and shift, but it was now soft and fuzzy.

But how could that be? If this was some sort of video of herself, the fact that she’d taken off her glasses while it was being recorded shouldn’t have made the images less sharp.

After a moment, the glasses came back on, and then she saw it: a portion of the shirt she was wearing, a T-shirt she often wore, a shirt that said, in three lines of type, in big block capital letters “LEE AMODEO ROCKS.” She’d been struggling hard to learn letters, so again perhaps she could be forgiven for not immediately realizing what was wrong when she saw the word “LEE” — or most of it, at any rate; the bottom of that word was often cut off, making the Es look more like Fs and the L look like a capital I; the other words below it weren’t visible at all. But as she caught another glimpse of the first word she realized it didn’t say “LEE.” Rather, it said “EEL,” and the letters were backward.

She felt herself sagging against her chair, absolutely astonished.

The whole image was reversed left to right. The rectangle she’d perceived wasn’t a picture frame, and it wasn’t a computer monitor. It was a mirror!

She fought to make sense of it. When her eyePod was in simplex mode, it still fed images back to Dr. Kuroda’s servers in Tokyo, images of whatever her left eye was seeing. This must be some of those images being fed back to her. But why? How? And why these particular images of her in the bathroom?

Of course, sometimes, as now, the images going back to Tokyo from her eyePod were her view of the structure of the Web: in duplex mode, the Tokyo servers sent her the raw Jagster feed, which she interpreted as webspace, and so that was what was sent back, almost as if she were reflecting the Web back at itself. And now it seemed — could it be? It seemed the Web was reflecting Caitlin back at herself!

It was incredible, and—

And suddenly a wave of apprehension ran over her. She’d been so intrigued she’d forgotten the electric shock, forgotten that she’d lost her ability to see the real world, to see her mother, see Bashira, see clouds and stars.

She took a deep breath, then another. Okay, okay: the electric discharge had crashed the eyePod. After the crash, she’d pressed the switch for five (seven!) seconds, and the eyePod had come back on in its default mode, like any electronic device rebooting. And that default, it seemed, was duplex: a two-way flow through the Wi-Fi connection, with data going from her implant to Kuroda’s lab, and data coming to her implant from Jagster.

And, well, if that was the case, then she merely had to hit the switch again to return to simplex mode.

She’d heard the term “crossing one’s fingers” before, but hadn’t yet seen anyone do it, and wasn’t quite sure how to contort her digits for the proper effect, but with her left hand she tried something that she hoped would serve, and she took the eyePod into her right hand and gave its button one quick, firm press. The device made a low-pitched beep.

She held her breath, as—

Thank God!

— as websight faded away, and her bedroom, in all its cornflower-blue glory, came back into view.