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nineteen

Caitlin’s dad had gotten hold of Tawanda late on Saturday night, and she’d agreed to come into work on Sunday to make the modifications to the eyePod; she was quite eager, Caitlin’s dad had said, to see the device’s insides.

As Caitlin and her father drove into the RIM campus, the roads were mostly empty. Once they arrived at the appropriate building, and Tawanda got them through security, they took an elevator up to an engineering lab. The walls were covered with big, framed photos of various BlackBerry models, and there were three worktables, each crammed with complex-looking equipment.

Tawanda was a slim black woman. Caitlin was still no good at guessing ages, but her skin seemed smooth. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting white garment that Caitlin belatedly realized must be a lab coat.

Caitlin had indeed met her before—she had immediately recognized the lovely Jamaican accent. But she honestly didn’t recognize her: her brain was rewiring its vision centers at a furious pace, she knew, and she was seeing things differently today than she had at the press conference last Wednesday. Then, she’d been able to do little more than tell when something was a face; now, she was starting to get good at identifying specific faces.

“Thank you so much,” Caitlin said, “for giving up your Sunday for me.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Tawanda said. “But let’s get to work.” She held out her hand, and Caitlin took the eyePod out of her hip pocket. RIM employed top-notch industrial designers, and their devices looked—well, the word people used was “sexy,” although Caitlin was still struggling with how that could apply to an inanimate object. But the simple case that housed the eyePod was an off-the-shelf part; the device might perform miracles, but at least from the outside it was quite plain.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to shut it off to do the work,” Tawanda said.

“I know,” said Caitlin. “Um, let me.” She took the eyePod back, held its single switch for five seconds, and—

Blind again! It was so disconcerting. She’d spent almost her whole life having no visual sensation, but that was no longer an option for her brain; instead, she was surrounded by a soft, even grayness. She felt herself blinking, as if her one good eye were trying to kick-start itself into seeing again.

“Now, Dr. Kuroda had suggested ways in which I might add a microphone—but there’s a simpler solution. We’re just going to attach a BlackBerry to the back of the eyePod, and use the BlackBerry’s built-in mike. It’s just a matter of interfacing the two devices. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to use the BlackBerry for data connections from now on, instead of your device’s Wi-Fi.”

It took Tawanda about forty minutes to perform the operation. Caitlin heard little sounds, but really couldn’t interpret them, except for the noise of a drill, which presumably was Tawanda making a hole in the eyePod’s case. Her father said nothing.

At last, though, it was done. “Okay,” Tawanda said. “Now, how do you turn it back on?”

Caitlin held out her hand and soon felt the weight of the eyePod in it. She ran her other hand over it, the way she used to do instinctively with any object placed in her hand when she’d been blind full-time. The BlackBerry now attached to the back of the eyePod was slim and small.

She held the switch on the eyePod down until the unit came oh-so-gloriously back to life. It booted up, as always, in websight mode, a tangle of razor-straight lines crisscrossing her vision. She took a moment to focus on the background, just to make sure it was shimmering as it should. It was. She toggled over to worldview.

Tawanda put on a pair of earphones and asked Caitlin to count to a hundred for her—but that was so boring, so she started counting up prime numbers: “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen…”

Tawanda nodded. “It’s working fine,” she said. “Sound quality is excellent.”

“Thank you,” Caitlin replied.

“All right,” Tawanda said. “You can mute the microphone, if need be, by pressing this key on the BlackBerry, see?”

Caitlin nodded. The BlackBerry, she saw, was silver and black, with a little keyboard and screen. It was mated, back-to-back, with the eyePod, not quite doubling its thickness.

“Good, okay,” said Tawanda. “Now, on to phase two.”

“Phase two?” Caitlin said.

Her father dug into his pocket and handed his USB memory key to Tawanda. “They’re in the root directory,” he said to her.

“What’s going on?” Caitlin said.

“Remember the press conference?” her father asked. “That journalist from the CBC? The joke he made?”

Caitlin did indeed remember: it had been Bob McDonald, the host of Quirks Quarks, the weekly science radio program, which Caitlin enjoyed listening to as a podcast. He’d asked if something like Caitlin’s post-retinal implant could be the next BlackBerry? A device that sends messages directly into people’s heads?

“Yes?” she said.

“If it’s okay with you,” Tawanda said, “we’re going to set it up so that text can be superimposed over the pictures you’re seeing, so you can read IMs and so forth. Kinda merge them in, you know?”

“Like merging in closed captioning when watching a DVD?” Caitlin said, excitedly.

“Exactly!” Tawanda said. “Let’s give it a try…”

I was not the only one interested in the problem of cracking passwords. A great many humans had addressed the issue, as well. Passwords are rarely stored as plaintext; rather, they are stored as the output of cryptographic hash functions. In the early days of computing, this provided a significant amount of protection. But computing power keeps growing at an exponential rate, and those interested in defeating passwords took a simple, if initially time-consuming, brute-force approach: they calculated the hash values of every possible password of a certain type (for instance, all possible combinations of up to fourteen letters and numbers). Lists of these values—called rainbow tables—were already available online—as were hundreds of other tools for learning people’s passwords.

And so, while work was being performed on Caitlin’s eyePod, I pressed on with my quest to know more about her. The password she used for her email, and many other things, it turned out, was “Tiresias,” the name of the blind prophet of Thebes in Greek mythology.

I set about reading what she’d had to say.

The Georgia Zoo’s lawsuit could not be kept private, and, on Sunday morning, a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune came to interview Dr. Marcuse. Shoshana generally didn’t approve of that paper’s politics, but it had come out against Proposition 8 a few years ago; the Union-Tribune’s support of same-sex marriage earned it a lot of points with her.

The reporter—a tough-looking white woman in her mid-forties named Camille—was disappointed that she couldn’t get close to Hobo to take his picture, but the ape wasn’t letting anyone approach anymore. Still, she took some shots with a telephoto lens, and others of views of him on the monitors in the bungalow, as well as photos of the paintings he’d made that hung on one wall there. And then she settled down to do the interview.

“Okay,” Camille said. “I understand that Hobo is a hybrid—his father was a chimp and his mother was a bonobo, right?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Marcuse.

“And I understand that chimps like to make war and bonobos like to make love, but why is that the case?”

“Chimps and bonobos split less than a million years ago,” Marcuse replied. He had, Shoshana knew, a certain kind of rough gallantry; he’d let Camille have the big comfy chair, and he was making do with one of the wooden ones. “Genetically, they’re almost identical. But the key is in their reproductive strategies. All chimp sex is about reproduction, and when a male chimp wants a female, he kills that female’s existing babies, because that brings the female back into estrus sooner.”

Camille had a little red Acer netbook computer and was typing as Marcuse spoke.

“But,” he continued, “bonobos have sex constantly, and for fun. Except that it’s not just for that. See, their constant sexual activity obscures paternity—it makes it really, really hard for male bonobos to tell which children are their own. That removes the evolutionary incentive for infanticide, and it almost never occurs among bonobos. If you disguise paternity, you end up with…” He waved his hand vaguely, as if looking for the right phrase.

“Peace and love,” offered Shoshana.

“That’s right,” Marcuse said. “Bonobos found a way out of their genetic programming.” A copy of that day’s Union-Tribune was sitting on the desk. The headline read, US-China Tensions Increase. “If only we could do the same,” he added.

“But Hobo is behaving like a chimp, correct?” Camille said.

“That’s right.”

“Is there a way to turn it around? To make him go, you know, the other way, and behave bonobo-ish? Um, bonobo-esque?”

“I like à la bonobo,” replied Marcuse. “It’s fun to say.” But then he frowned and looked out the window framing the rolling lawn, and, off in the distance, the little island. “We’ve tried to engage him in various activities, but he’s been very uncooperative. I’m afraid that any improvement is up to him.”