Wake

Chapter 41

Caitlin stayed home on Thursday, October 4, as well. Her mother capitulated to the argument that Caitlin could do much better at school in the long run if she first spent a little more time right now mastering the art of reading printed text. Caitlin had dutifully started the morning by spending a few more hours with the literacy site, but then she headed down to the basement again.

Kuroda was delighted to see her. “Hello, Miss Caitlin,” he said warmly, swiveling his red chair to face her. “How are you feeling?”

She knew it was just a pleasantry, but she decided to answer anyway.

“Honestly?” she said. “I’m overwhelmed.” She moved closer to the worktable but did not sit down. “There was a … simplicity, I guess, in being blind. I mean, vision is full of things that you don’t need to know about right now, like…” She looked around the basement. “Well, like, over there: there’s a TV, right? It’s not even on, but I have to see it. And that bookshelf: I don’t need to know right now that it’s there, or that it’s got — say, how come all the spines are the same?”

Kuroda glanced at them. “They’re journals — your dad’s collection. That’s Physical Review D on the top shelf, for instance.”

“Well, right, exactly. I don’t need to know that they’re there right now, but every time I look in that direction, I see them; I can’t help seeing them.”

Kuroda nodded. “Your brain will sort that out as time goes on, I think. Do you know about frog vision?”

“What about it?”

“They see only moving objects. Static things — trees, plants, the ground — simply don’t register; their retinas don’t bother encoding them into the signal being passed on to their optic nerves. Now, in humans, the sorting out of relevant from irrelevant happens in the brain, not the eye, but for most of us it does happen.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’ll give you an example. Your mom is upstairs, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what is she wearing?”

“A green-and-white blouse, and blue jeans.”

“If you say so. I saw her today, too, but I simply didn’t see her clothes.”

Caitlin was startled. She’d read about men mentally undressing women — but she hadn’t thought Kuroda would do that. Her mother the MILF! “You, um, you visualized her naked?”

Kuroda looked shocked. “No, no, no. Of course I saw her as clothed. But fashion is something I’m just not interested in.” He looked down as if seeing his own clothes — a vast Hawaiian-style shirt patterned in red, blue, and black, plus brown trousers — for the first time. “A fact much to the consternation of my wife, I can assure you. But I just don’t see things that don’t interest me, until I need to. Still, yes, you’re right: there’s an awful lot of information in the signal your retina is putting out. I had no trouble figuring out how to fix the way it was encoding data, which is how I cleared up your Tomasevic’s syndrome, but I haven’t been able to actually render the data on a screen when you’re seeing the real world.” He smiled. “But I do have a surprise for you.”

“Yes?”

He motioned for her to sit on the other swivel chair, and she did so. “Have a look at this,” he said, and he began moving the mouse. She followed it with her eye.

“No, Miss Caitlin. Here, on the monitor.”

Oh, right. She still wasn’t used to focusing on the monitor automatically. She shifted her gaze, and—

My God! It was a picture of webspace: glowing lines radiating from circles of different sizes. “How’d you do that?” she asked excitedly.

“Hey, what do you think I do when you’re not down here? Watch soap operas?”

“Well, I—”

“I mean, yes, it does look like Victor and Nikki are going to split once more. And can you believe Jack Abbot is crazy enough to try to take over Newman Enterprises again?”

She looked at him.

Kuroda lifted his shoulders. “I multitask.” He pointed at the monitor.

“Anyway, when we were doing the Zipf plots, you concentrated on the cellular automata in the background. And that let me start to parse the components of the datastream you produce when you’re seeing the Web. After that … well, how’d I do?”

She squinted at the monitor. “I can’t see the background stuff.”

“No, the monitor doesn’t have enough resolution, unfortunately. But, except for that, is that what you see?”

“Just about. It’s not as vibrant, and I don’t think the colors are quite right, but … yes, yes, that’s webspace. Cool!”

“We can adjust the color palette, of course. That’s just one still frame — well, actually, it’s a summation of several samplings of the data-stream; the field of view doesn’t completely refresh each time. Still, as you say, it is cool.”

“Umm, but what about when I’m not in websight mode? What about when I’m in, you, know…” And then it came to her. “Worldview!”

“Pardon?”

“Get it? Call it ‘worldview’ when we’re talking about me seeing the real world, and ‘websight’ when we’re talking about me seeing the Web.”

He nodded. “That’s good.”

But she was still concerned. “Can you, can you do that for worldview? Actually put on a monitor what I’m seeing?” She was mortified to think he could see her the way … the way … whatever it was saw her.

“No. That’s what I was getting at a moment ago, and, in a way, what you were getting at, too. The visual signal from the real world is so complex, I haven’t figured out how to decode it as imagery yet. It’s too bad the retinas don’t encode blinks.”

“They don’t?”

“Does your vision shut off when you blink? No, neither does anyone else’s; you don’t notice that you’re blinking, because the retina doesn’t encode the darkness unless you hold your eye shut for an extended period. It’s like confabulation across saccades — you see a continuous visual stream, even though your vision is actually interrupted many times a minute. If those blinks were coded as simpler information, they’d give me little signposts in the datastream to help parse it. But they’re not.”

“Ah.”

“So, no pictures on the monitor of worldview, I’m afraid, at least not yet. But the websight datastream is highly structured and pretty straightforward. And so — voyla!”

She smiled, pleased to be able to use her newfound French. “That’s voila, Dr. Kuroda.” But then she looked at the screen again. “So, um, what exactly are you going to do with the images?”

He sounded a bit defensive. “Well, as I indicated, there might be commercial applications for this technology, even ignoring the problematic issue of the cellular automata and the NSA, if they really are responsible for them. In fact, I was thinking of trademarking the term websight…”

“You’re not going to call another press conference, are you?”

“Well, I—”

She surprised herself with her vehemence. “Because I’m not going to talk about it.”

“Um…”

“No,” she said flatly. “I understand we had to say something publicly about you restoring my vision. I know I owed you that. But websight is…” She stopped herself before she said, “mine.” Instead, she tried for his sympathy.

“I’m going to be enough of a freakazoid when I go back to school as The Girl Who Gained Sight without everyone making a big deal out of this … this side effect.”

He didn’t look happy, but he did nod. “As you say, Miss Caitlin.”

“Still,” she said, an idea suddenly coming to her, “I’d like to see more of these images. What folder are you storing the files in?” Her heart was pounding. Yes, yes! This would be perfect! This was exactly what she needed.