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seventeen

After watching WarGames, Caitlin and her father went up to her room to see how Webmind was doing; Caitlin’s mother was talking separately to Webmind across the hall.

Did you follow along with the movie? Caitlin typed into the IM window.

She turned on JAWS so her father could listen in, and—now that Webmind was a he—she switched it to using a male voice. “Yes,” came the immediate reply.

What did you think? Caitlin typed.

Webmind didn’t miss a beat. “Best movie I’ve ever seen.”

Caitlin laughed. Has Dr. Kuroda managed to let you watch online video yet?

“Yes. Just eight minutes ago, we finally had success with the most popular format. It is astonishing.”

You’re telling me, Caitlin replied.

She opened another chat window and used the mouse—she was getting used to it!—to select Dr. Kuroda. Webmind says you’ve got it working! W00t!

Hello, Miss Caitlin. It was tricky but, yes, he can now watch video in real time, as well as hear the soundtrack; he can also listen to MP3 audio now. Who’s that singer you like so much?

Lee Amodeo.

Right. Well, send him a link to an MP3 of her. Maybe he’ll become a fan, too.

Will do. And—say, can you make him able to hear what I hear?

Already done. If you activate voice chat with your computer, Webmind should be able to hear you.

Caitlin slipped on her Bluetooth headset and switched to her IM session with Webmind. “Do you hear me?”

No response.

It’s not working, she typed to Kuroda.

It can’t do speech recognition yet, Kuroda wrote back, but it should be picking up the audio feed.

Are you hearing sounds from my room? Caitlin typed to Webmind.

“Yes,” said Webmind.

OK, good, Caitlin typed. She went back to Kuroda. What about when I’m not in my room?

I’ve been thinking about that. It shouldn’t be hard to add a microphone to the eyePod. Could you ship it back to me for a couple of days?

Caitlin was surprised at how viscerally she reacted to the notion of being blind for an extended period again. I wouldn’t want to be without it.

To her astonishment, her father tapped her on the shoulder. “Tell him I can get one of the engineers at RIM to do it.” RIM was Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry; Mike Lazaridis, one of the founders of that company, had provided the initial $100 million funding for the physics think tank her father worked at—not to mention a fifty-million-dollar booster shot a few years later.

“That would be fabulous,” Caitlin said. She typed a message to that effect in the IM window.

The eyePod is valuable, Miss Caitlin. I’ d really rather make a modification like that myself.

“Tell him I’ll get Tawanda to do the work,” her dad said. Tawanda was a RIM engineer who had attended Dr. Kuroda’s press conference; Kuroda had spent a lot of time showing her the eyePod hardware then.

Oh, he replied, after Caitlin had passed on her father’s message. Well, if it’s Tawanda doing it, I suppose that would be all right. It must be almost midnight there, no? I’ll work up some notes for her, and email them to you.

ty! Caitlin sent. That’s awesome!

Caitlin’s mother came into the room and stood leaning against a wall, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. “I’m beat,” she said. “Who’d have thought you could work up a sweat typing? ”

“What did you and Webmind talk about?” Caitlin asked.

“Oh, you know,” her mother said in a light tone. “Life. The universe. And everything.”

“And the answer is?”

Her mother’s voice became serious. “He doesn’t know—he was hoping I would know.”

“What did you tell him?”

She shrugged. “That I’d sleep on it and let him know in the morning.”

“I’m going to send an email to Tawanda,” her father said abruptly, and he headed downstairs. By the time he’d returned, Caitlin’s mom had gone off to take a shower.

“You’re still having trouble reading the Latin alphabet,” her dad said to Caitlin in his usual abrupt manner; whatever segue between topics had gone through his mind had been left unspoken.

It took her a moment to get what he was saying—the Latin alphabet was what English and many other languages used—but when she did get it, she was pissed. Her dad was not big on praise—even when Caitlin brought home a report card with all As, he simply signed it and handed it back to her. She’d learned to accept that, more or less, but any criticism by him was crushing. For Pete’s sake, she’d only just begun seeing! Why did he have to say still having trouble as though she were making poor progress instead of remarkable progress?

“I’m doing the best I can,” she said.

He moved toward her desk. “Caitlin, if I may…?”

“If…? Oh!” She got out of her chair and let him sit down in front of the keyboard. He brought up Word and navigated over the household network to a document on his own computer. He—ah, he had highlighted the whole document now—and he did something to make the type bigger. “Read that,” he said.

She loomed over his shoulder, smelling his sweat, and she adjusted the way her glasses were sitting on her nose. “Umm, A-t, f-i—‘At first I was,’ ah, i-n-c-a… um… is that a p? ‘Incapa… incapable.’ ”

He nodded, as if such poor performance were only to be expected. He then hit ctrl-A to highlight the text again, and he moved the mouse, then clicked it, and the text was replaced with—well, she wasn’t quite sure with what. “Now read that,” he said.

“It’s not even letters,” Caitlin replied, exasperated. “It’s just a bunch of dots.”

Her father smiled. “Exactly. Look again.”

She did and—

Oh, my!

It was strange seeing them like this instead of feeling them, but it was Braille!

“Can you read that?” he asked.

“A-t, f-i-r-s-t, I, was, as incapable as a… s-w-a-t-h-e-d, swathed…” She paused, looked again, stared at the dots. “…infant, um, stepping with… limbs! With limbs I could not see…”

She had never visualized the dots before, but her mind knew the patterns. Beginners read Braille a letter at a time, using just one finger, but an experienced reader like Caitlin used both hands, recognizing whole words at once with a different letter under each fingertip.

“Keep trying,” her father said. “I’ll be back.”

He left the room, and she did keep trying.

And trying.

And trying.

And at last the penny dropped, and she ceased to see the individual dots and saw instead the letters they represented, and—and—and—yes, yes, yes, more than that, she saw the words they spelled, taking in whole words at a glance. Good-bye, C-a-i-t-l-i-n; hello, Caitlin!

When her father returned, she proudly read aloud, “ ‘At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant—stepping with limbs I could not see.’ ” She was reading as rapidly as JAWS did when she had it set to double speed. “ ‘I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.’ ”

Her father nodded, apparently satisfied.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked, gesturing at the screen.

“The Invisible Man,” her father said.

Right. Caitlin had read a lot of H.G. Wells—it was easy to feed Project Gutenberg texts into her refreshable Braille display—but she’d never made it past the first chapter of The Invisible Man; the notion of invisibility had been too abstract for her when she’d been blind.

She realized that she shouldn’t be surprised that her computer could display Braille on its screen; the system had Braille fonts installed for use by her embossing printer; the Texas School for the Blind gave away the TrueType fonts.

“You’ll still have to learn to read Latin characters,” her father said. “But you might as well leverage the skill you’ve already got.” He did some more things on the computer. “Okay, I’ve set Internet Explorer to use Braille as its default for displaying Web pages, and left Firefox using normal fonts.”

“Thanks, Dad—but, um…”

“But you can read Braille just fine with your fingers, right?”

She nodded. “I mean, it is cool to do it with my eyes, but I’m not sure it’s better.”

“Wait and see,” her father said. He fished something out of his pocket, and—ah! The distinctive tah-dum! sound of a USB peripheral being recognized: it was a memory key. “Let me copy the Braille fonts,” he said. “We’ll need them tomorrow.” And when he was done he headed out the door—with Caitlin wondering, as she often did, just what was going through his mind.