Robert Sawyer: Wake

Zhang said, “When are you going to give the order to implement Changcheng?”

The president turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. “Me? No, no. That would be…” His gaze roamed about the opulent office, as if seeking a word stashed among the ceramic and crystal art objects. “That would be unseemly,” he said at last. “It would be much more appropriate if you gave the order.”

Zhang was clearly struggling to keep his features composed, but he made the only response he could under the circumstances. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

Caitlin hadn’t told Bashira when she’d asked back in the school’s cafeteria, but the first thing Caitlin really wanted to see was her mother’s face. They both had what were called heart-shaped faces, although the plastic model heart she’d felt at school had borne little resemblance to the idealized form she was familiar with from foil-wrapped chocolates and paper valentines.

Caitlin knew that she and her mother also had similar noses — small, slightly upturned — and their eyes were closer together than most people’s. She had read that it was normal to have the width of one imaginary eye separating the other two. She liked that phrase: an imaginary eye, she supposed, saw imaginary things, and that was not unlike her view of the world. Indeed, she often read or heard things that required her to rethink her conception of reality. She remembered her shock, years ago, at learning the quarter moon wasn’t a fat wedge like one-fourth of a pie.

Still, she was positive she was sitting in an examination room at the hospital attached to the University of Tokyo, and she was confident she had a good mental image of that room. It was smallish — she could tell by the way sound echoed. And she knew the chair she was in was padded, and by touch and smell she was sure its upholstery was vinyl. She also knew there were three other people in the room: her mother, standing in front of her; Dr. Kuroda, who had obviously had something quite spicy for lunch; and one of Kuroda’s colleagues, a woman who was recording everything with a video camera.

Kuroda had given a little speech to the camera in Japanese, and now was repeating it in English. “Miss Caitlin Decter, age fifteen and blind since birth, has a systematic encoding flaw in her visual-processing system: all of the data that is supposed to be encoded by her retinas is indeed encoded, but it is scrambled to the point of being unintelligible to her brain. The scrambling is consistent — it always happens in the same way — and the technology we have developed simply remaps the signals into the normal human-vision coding scheme. We are now about to find out if her brain can interpret the corrected signals.”

All through the Japanese version, and continuing over the English one, Caitlin concentrated on the sensory details she could pick up about the room: the sounds and how they echoed; the smells, which she tried to separate one from the other so that she could determine what was causing them; the feel of the chair’s armrest against her own arms, its back against her back. She wanted to fix in her mind her perception of this place prior to actually seeing it.

When he was done with his spiel, Dr. Kuroda turned to face her — the shift in his voice was obvious — and he said, “All right, Miss Caitlin, please close your eyes.”

She did so; nothing changed.

“Okay. Let’s get the bandage off. Keep your eyes closed, please. There might be some visual noise when I turn on the signal-processing computer.”

“Okay,” she said, although she had no idea what “visual noise” might be. She felt an uncomfortable tugging and then — yeow! — Kuroda pulled away the adhesive strips. She brought a hand up to rub her cheek.

“After I activate the outboard signal-processing unit, which Miss Caitlin refers to as her eyePod,” he said, for the benefit of the camera, “we’ll wait ten seconds for things to settle down before she opens her eyes.”

She heard him shifting in his chair.

There was a beep, and then she heard him counting. She had an excellent time-sense — very useful when you can’t see clocks — and, maddeningly, Kuroda’s “seconds” were about half again as long as they should have been. But she dutifully kept her eyes closed.

“…eight … nine … ten!”

Please, God, Caitlin thought. She opened her eyes, and—

And her heart sank. She blinked rapidly a few times, as if there could have been any doubt about whether her eyes were truly open.

“Well?” said her mom, sounding as anxious as Caitlin felt.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?” asked Kuroda. “No sensation of light? No color? No shapes?”

Caitlin felt her eyes tearing up; at least they were good for that. “No.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It might take a few minutes.” To her astonishment, one of his thick fingers flicked against her left temple, as though he was trying to get a piece of equipment with a loose connection to come to life.

It was hard to tell, because there was so much background noise — doctors being paged, gurneys rolling by outside — but she thought Kuroda was moving in his chair now, and — yes, she could feel his breath on her face. It was maddening, knowing that someone was looking right into her eye, staring into it, while she couldn’t see a thing, and—

“Open your eyes, please,” he said.

She felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn’t been aware that she’d closed them, but although she had so wanted the procedure to succeed, she’d been unnerved by the scientist looking inside her.

“I’m shining a light into your left eye,” he said. People drawled where Caitlin came from; she found Kuroda’s rapid-fire speech a little hard to follow. “Do you see anything at all?”

She shifted nervously in the chair. Why had she allowed herself to be talked into this? “Nothing.”

“Well, something’s changed,” Dr. Kuroda said. “Your pupil is responding correctly now — contracting in response to the light I’m shining in, instead of expanding.”

Caitlin sat up straight. “Really?”

“Yes.” A pause. “Just in your left eye — well, I mean, when I shine my light in your left eye, both your pupils contract; when I shine it into your right eye, they both expand. Now, yes, a unilateral light stimulus should evoke a bilateral pupillary light reflex, because of the internuncial neurons, but you see what that means? The implant is intercepting the signals, and they are being corrected and retransmitted.”

Caitlin wanted to shout, Then why can’t I see?

Her mother made a small gasp. She’d doubtless loomed in and had just seen Caitlin’s pupils contract properly, but, damn it, Caitlin didn’t even know what light was like — so how would she know if she were seeing it? Bright, piercing, flickering, glowing — she’d heard all the words, but had no idea what any of them meant.

“Anything?” Kuroda asked again.

“No.” She felt a hand touching her hand, taking it, holding it. She recognized it as her mother’s — the nibbled nail on the index finger, the skin growing a little loose with age, the wedding ring with the tiny nick in it.

“The curing of your Tomasevic’s syndrome is proof that corrected signals are being passed back,” said Kuroda. “They’re just not being interpreted yet.” He tried to sound encouraging, and Caitlin’s mother squeezed her hand more tightly. “It may take a while for your brain to figure out what to do with the signals it’s now getting. The best thing we can do is give it a variety of stimulus: different colors, different lighting conditions, different shapes, and hopefully your brain will suss out what it’s supposed to do.”

It’s supposed to see, thought Caitlin. But she didn’t say a word.