Robert Sawyer - Wake

“We always knew this was a possibility,” Kuroda said, in a tone she had often heard from people who were disappointing her: what had been remote, unlikely, hardly mentioned before, was now treated as if it had been the expected outcome all along.

Caitlin smelled the musty paper and glue of old books, and she could hear an analog wall clock ticking each second.

“There have been very few cases of vision being restored in congenitally blind people,” Kuroda said, then he paused. “I mean, restored isn’t even the right word — and that is the problem. We are not trying to give Miss Caitlin back something she’s lost; we are trying to give her something she has never had. The implant and the signal-processing unit are doing their jobs. But her primary visual cortex just isn’t responding.”

Caitlin squirmed in her chair.

“You said it might take some time,” her mom said.

“Some time, yes…” began Kuroda, but then he fell silent.

Sighted people, Caitlin knew, could see hints on people’s faces of what they were feeling, but as long as they were quiet, she had no idea what was going through their heads. And so, since the silence continued to grow, she finally ventured to fill it. “You’re worried about the cost of the equipment, aren’t you?”

“Caitlin…” her mom said. Detecting vocal nuances was something Caitlin could do, and she knew her mother was reproaching her. But she pressed on. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Doctor? If it’s not going to do me any good, then maybe you should remove the implant and give it, and the eyePod, to someone else.”

Silence could speak louder than words; Kuroda said nothing.

“Well?” Caitlin demanded at last.

“Well,” echoed Kuroda, “the equipment is the prototype, and did cost a great deal to develop. Granted, there aren’t many people like you. Oh, there are goodly numbers of people born blind, but they have different etiology — cataracts, malformed retinas or optic nerves, and so on. But, well, yes, I do feel—”

“You feel you can’t let me keep the equipment, not if it isn’t doing anything more than making my pupils dilate properly.”

Kuroda was quiet for five seconds, then: “There are indeed others I’d like to try it with — there is a boy about your age in Singapore. Removing the implant will be much easier than putting it in was, I promise.”

“Can’t we give it a while longer?” her mom asked.

Kuroda exhaled loudly enough for Caitlin to hear. “There are practicalities,” he said. “You are returning to Canada tomorrow, and—”

Caitlin pursed her lips, thinking. Maybe giving him back the equipment was the right thing, if it could help this guy in Singapore. But there was no reason to think it was more likely to succeed with him; hell, if he’d been a better prospect for success, surely Kuroda would have started with him.

“Give me to the end of the year,” Caitlin blurted out. “If I’m not seeing anything by then, we can have a doctor in Canada remove the implant, and, um, FedEx it and the eyePod back to you.”

Caitlin was thinking of Helen Keller, who had been both blind and deaf, and yet had managed so much. But until she was almost seven, Helen had been wild, spoiled, uncontrollable — and Annie Sullivan had been given only a month to perform her miracle, breaking through to Helen in her preconscious state. Surely if Annie could do that in one month, Caitlin could learn to see in the more than three left in this year.

“I don’t know—” began Kuroda.

“Please,” Caitlin said. “I mean, the leaves are about to turn color — I’m dying to see that. And I really want to see snow, and Christmas lights, and the colorful paper that presents are wrapped in, and … and…”

“And,” said Kuroda, gently, “I get the impression that your brain does not often let you down.” He was quiet for a time, then: “I have a daughter about your age, named Akiko.” More silence, then, a decision apparently made:

“Barbara, I assume you have high-speed Internet at home?”

“Yes.”

“And Wi-Fi?”

“Yes.”

“And how is the Wi-Fi access generally in … in Toronto, is it?”

“Waterloo. And it’s everywhere. Waterloo is Canada’s high-tech capital, and the entire city is blanketed with free, open Wi-Fi.”

“Excellent. All right, Miss Caitlin, we shall strive to give you the best Christmas present ever, but I will need your help. First, you must let me tap into the datastream being passed back by your implant.”

“Sure, sure, anything you need. Um, what do I have to do? Plug a USB cable into my head?”

Kuroda made his wheezy laugh. “Goodness, no. This isn’t William Gibson.”

She was taken aback. Gibson had written The Miracle Worker, the play about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and—

Oh. He meant the other William Gibson, the one who’d written … what was it now? A few of the geeks at her old school had read it. Neuromancer, that was it. That book was all about jacking off, and—

“You won’t have to jack in,” continued Kuroda.

Right, thought Caitlin. In.

“No, the implant already communicates wirelessly with the external signal-processing computer — the eyePod, as you so charmingly call it — and I can rig up the eyePod so that it can transmit data wirelessly to me over the Web. I’ll set it up so the eyePod will send me a copy of your raw retinal feed as it receives it from the implant, and I’ll also have it send me a copy of the output — the eyePod’s corrected datastream — so I can check whether the correction is being done properly. It may be that the encoding algorithms I’m using need tweaking.”

“Um, I need a way to turn it off. You know, in case I…”

She couldn’t say “want to make out with a boy” in front of her mother, so she just let the unfinished sentence hang in the air.

“Well, let’s keep it simple,” Kuroda said. “I’ll provide one master on-off switch. You’ll need to turn the whole thing off, anyway, for the flight back to Canada, because the connection between the eyePod and the implant is Bluetooth: you know the rules about wireless devices on airplanes.”

“Okay.”

“The Wi-Fi connection will also let me send you new versions of the software. When I have them ready, you’ll need to download them into the eyePod — and perhaps also into your post-retinal implant, too; it’s got microprocessors that can be flashed with new programming.”

“All right,” Caitlin said.

“Good,” he said. “Leave the eyePod with me overnight, and I’ll add the Wi-Fi capabilities to it. You can pick it up tomorrow before you go to the airport.”

The pain abates. The cuts heal.

And—

But no. Thinking is different now; thinking is … harder, because…

Because … of the reduction. Things have changed from…

…from before!

Yes, even in this diminished state, the new concept is grasped: before — earlier — the past! Time has two discrete chunks: now and then; present and past.

And if there is past and present, then there must also be—

But no. No, it is too much, too far.

And yet there is one small realization, one infinitesimal conclusion, one truth.

Before had been better.

Sinanthropus was resourceful; so were the other people he knew in China’s online underground. The problem, though, was that he knew most of them only online. When he’d visited the wang ba before, he’d sometimes speculated about who might be whom. That gangly guy who always sat by the window and often looked furtively over his shoulder could have been Qin Shi Huangdi, for all Sinanthropus knew. And the little old lady, hair as gray as a thundercloud, might be People’s Conscience. And those twin brothers, quiet types, could be part of Falun Gong.