Robert Sawyer - Watch

“Now, young lady!”

Out of habit she typed the initials brb. Once she realized what she’d done, she thought again about spelling it out, but didn’t; it’d give Webmind something to think about while she was away.

She forced herself to keep her eyes open as she went down the stairs, even though the view gave her vertigo. Her mother was in the living room, reading—apparently whatever was in the oven for dinner (something Italian, judging by the smell) didn’t require her constant attention. Caitlin hadn’t previously been aware of how much time her mother spent with her nose buried in a book. She rather liked that she did that.

She knew her father was down the hall in his den because Super-tramp’s “Bloody Well Right” was playing—and, eco-nut that he was, he always turned off the stereo when he left the room.

She headed into the kitchen, and—

And, as with everything, it still startled her to see it. Granted, it was the new kitchen, and it had taken her a while to learn its layout. She had no doubt she knew its dimensions now better than her parents did, but—

But until recently, she’d never known it had pale green walls, or that the floor tiles were brown, or that there were tubular lights in the ceiling behind some kind of translucent sheeting, or that there was a window in the oven door (it had never even occurred to her that people would want such a thing), or that there was a painting of… of mountains, maybe… on the wall, or that there was a big—well, something!—stored on top of the fridge. Webspace was so simple compared to the real world!

She looked at the stove, at the boxy blue digits glowing on its control panel. It wasn’t a clock, though—or if it was, it wasn’t set properly, and—oh, no, wait! It was a timer, counting down. There were still forty-seven or forty-one minutes left—she wasn’t quite sure what that second shape was supposed to represent—until whatever it was would emerge from the oven. She took a deep breath: lasagna, maybe. Ah, and on the sideboard in a big red plastic bowl: her mother had thrown together ah, um, ah…

Well, she’d never have guessed it looked like that! But the garlicky smell was obvious: it was a Caesar salad.

God, she could barely decode a kitchen! She was going to need help—lots of it—to properly instruct Webmind about the real world.

She got plates and bowls, and headed into the dining room. The laminated place mats depicted covered bridges of New England, but she only knew that because her mother had told her so when she’d been blind. Even now, even able to see the pictures, she couldn’t tell what they were depicting; she just didn’t have enough of a visual vocabulary yet.

She went back into the kitchen and got cutlery, and—

And looked at herself, looked at her own reflection, in the blade of one of the knives. Who the hell had known that you could see yourself in a knife? Or that you’d see a distorted image of yourself on the back of a spoon? It was all so discombobulating, to use a word Webmind might like.

She finished setting the table, and—

And she made her decision: she did need help. She went into the living room, but instead of going back upstairs, she headed on down the corridor to get her father. “Bloody Well Right” had given way to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Caitlin’s dad, like many a gifted scientist before him, was autistic. It had been hard for Caitlin growing up with a father she couldn’t see, who rarely spoke, who disliked physical contact, and who never said he loved her. Now that she could see him, she understood him a little better but still found him intimidating. “Dad,” she said in a small voice as she stood in his doorway. “Can I talk to you?”

He looked up from his keyboard but didn’t meet her eyes; that, she knew, was as much acknowledgment as she was going to get. “Um, in the living room, maybe?” she said. “I want Mom to hear this, too.”

His eyebrows pulled together, and Caitlin realized that he must be thinking she was going to announce that she was pregnant or something. She almost wished it was as normal as that.

Caitlin walked back to the living room. The music was cut short at the part about Beelzebub having a devil set aside for her.

She gestured for her father to take a chair, copying something she’d seen her mother do. He took a seat on the white couch, and her mother, in the easy chair, put her book facedown, splayed open, on the glass-topped coffee table.

“Mom, Dad,” Caitlin said. “There’s, um, something I have to tell you…”

The

Nanoseconds to formulate the thought.

only

Fractionally more time to render it in English.

place

An eternity to pump it out onto the net.

we

Packets dispatched one by one.

can

Each eventually acknowledged.

go

Signals flashing along glass fiber—

Caitlin

—dropping to the glacial speed of copper wire—

Into

—followed by the indolence of Wi-Fi.

the

An interminable wait while she felt bumps with her fingertips.

future

The message finally sent, but only just beginning to be truly received.

Together

Yes, together: Caitlin and I.

My view of the world: through Caitlin’s eye.

I waited for her reply.

And waited.

And waited.

And—and—and—

My mind wandered.

She’d shown me Earth from space, the view from a geosynchronous satellite, 36,000 kilometers above the equator. I’d seen it as she looked at it: not directly, not the graphic she was consulting, but her left eye’s view of that graphic as displayed on the larger of her two computer monitors.

Such a roundabout way to see! And doubtless a huge reduction of information. I’d read all about computer graphics, about online imagery, about the sixteen million colors of Super VGA, about the 700,000 pixels shown on even the most pedestrian monitor. But all of that was denied to me.

Still waiting. Time passing; whole seconds piling up.

Diverting my attention. Looking for something else to occupy my time.

I searched. I found. Texts describing Earth as seen from space; I could read those. But the linked images were inaccessible to me. Unless she looked at them, I couldn’t see them.

More: descriptions of live video streams from satellites orbiting Earth, views from on high of it—of me—in real time, of what’s happening right now. But I wasn’t able to access them.

More still: links to the Apollo 8 photographs of Earth from space, of Earthrise over the moon’s craggy horizon, the actual, original images that had changed humanity’s perspective forever. I’d seen modern versions, but I wanted to see those historical photographs.

Vexing!

Still waiting. Minutes passing— minutes!

And even more: text about another eye, an eye turned outward, an eye contemplating the wide awe and wonder of the night. The Hubble Space Telescope. Vast archives of its imagery were stored in formats I couldn’t access. I was hungry to see what it had seen. I ached to know more.

Waiting. Waiting. Time crawls.

She saw. My Calculass, my Prime, my Caitlin: she saw.

But I was still almost completely blind.

Shoshana Glick pulled her red Volvo into the 7-Eleven’s parking lot. She didn’t really like driving, and she hadn’t owned a car until she’d moved to San Diego, where everybody drove everywhere. She’d bought this one used. It was a dozen years old and in pretty bad shape.