Robert Sawyer - Wake

“Hmm,” said Kuroda.

Caitlin could hear key clicks coming over the speakerphone, and — “Hey!”

“What?” her mother said.

“Another line just shot into my field of view!” said Caitlin.

Kuroda’s voice, surprised: “You’re seeing right now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you only saw when you were downloading the software package?”

“That’s right. I’m downloading it again. When it finished downloading the first time, my vision went off, so I’m downloading it a second time.”

“And you just saw a new line appear?”

“Yes.”

More key clicks. “What about now?”

“It’s gone! Hey, how’d you do that?”

Kuroda said a word in Japanese.

“What’s happening?” her mom demanded.

“And now, Miss Caitlin?” said Kuroda.

“The line’s back!”

“Incredible,” Kuroda said.

“What is it?” her mom said, sounding annoyed.

“Where were you looking when the line shot in?” Kuroda asked.

“Nowhere. I mean, I wasn’t really paying attention; I was listening to you, so my field of view had come back to, um, the neutral position, I guess — the spot it always centers on. What did you do?”

“I’m at home,” Kuroda said. “And the software package you are downloading is on my server at work, so I’d just logged on there to download a copy to here, so I could check to see if it had somehow become corrupted, and—”

Caitlin got it in a flash — literally and figuratively! “And when you linked to the same site I’m connected to—”

“The link appeared in your vision,” Kuroda said, his voice full of astonishment. “And when I aborted the download I was doing here, the link line disappeared.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” her dad said.

“I’m an empiricist at heart,” Caitlin said, happy to use a word she’d recently learned in chemistry class. “Make the link disappear again.”

“Done,” said Kuroda. “It’s gone. Now bring it back.”

The glowing line leapt into her field of view. “And there it is!”

“So — so, what are you saying?” her mom said. “That Caitlin is seeing the Web connection somehow?”

There was silence for a while then, slowly, from half a world away, Kuroda said, “It does seem that way.”

“But … but how?” asked her mom.

“Well,” said Kuroda, “let’s think this through: when transferring the software, there has to be a constant back-and-forth between her implant and my server here in Tokyo, with the eyePod acting as the middleman. Packets of data go out from here, and acknowledgment packets are sent back by the eyePod, over and over again until the download is complete.”

“And when the download is over, it stops, right?” Caitlin said. “That’s what happened, but as soon as I started downloading the software a second time I could see again, and — oh, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Kuroda.

“I’m blind again!”

Caitlin felt movement near her shoulder, and — ah, her dad leaning in next to her. Mouse clicks, then his voice: “‘Download complete,’ it says. ‘Connection closed.’”

“Go back to the previous page,” Caitlin said anxiously. “Click where it says, ‘Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.’”

The appropriate sounds, then — yes, yes! — her vision came back on, her mind filling with a view of…

Could it be? Could it really be?

It did fit what she was seeing: a website and the connections to it. “I’m seeing again,” she announced excitedly.

“All right,” said Kuroda, “all right. When the download is done, there’s no interactivity between the implant and the Web. It’s just like when you use a Web browser: once you’ve called up a webpage from Wikipedia, or wherever, you’re not reading it through the Web; rather, a copy is made on your own computer, and you’re reading that cached copy, until you click on a link and ask for another page to be copied to your computer. There’s very little actual interaction between your computer and the Web when loading pages, but when downloading a big software package, there’s constant interaction.”

“But I still don’t understand how Caitlin could be seeing anything this way,” her mom said.

“That is puzzling,” said Kuroda, “although…” He trailed off, the silence punctuated only by occasional bits of static.

“Yes?” her dad said at last.

“Miss Caitlin, you spend a lot of time online, don’t you?” Kuroda said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much time?”

“Each day?”

“Yes.”

“Five, six hours.”

“Sometimes more,” her mom added.

Caitlin felt a need to defend herself. “It’s my window on the world.”

“Of course it is,” said Kuroda. “Of course it is. How old were you when you started using the Web?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eighteen months,” her mom said. “The Perkins School and the AFB have special sites for blind preschoolers.”

He made a protracted “Hmmmmm,” then: “In congenitally blind people, the primary visual cortex often doesn’t develop properly, since it’s not receiving any input. But Miss Caitlin is different; that’s one of the reasons she was such an ideal subject for my exper — ah, why she was such an ideal candidate for this procedure.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Caitlin.

“See,” Kuroda continued, “Miss Caitlin’s — your — visual cortex is highly developed. That’s not unheard of in people born blind, but it is rare. The developing brain has great plasticity, and I’d assumed the tissue had been co-opted for some other function. But perhaps yours has been used all this time for — well, if not for vision, then for visualization.”

“Huh?” said Caitlin.

“I saw you using the Web when you were here in Japan,” said Kuroda. “You zip around it faster than I do — and I can see. You go from page to page, follow complex chains of links, and backtrack many steps without ever overshooting, even though you don’t pause to see what page has loaded.”

“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Of course.”

“And when you did that before today, did you see it in your mind?”

“Not like I’m seeing now,” said Caitlin. “Not so vividly. And not in color — God, colors are amazing!”

“Yes,” said Kuroda, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “They are.” A pause. “I think I’m right. You’ve been online so much since early childhood that your brain long ago reassigned the dormant parts that would have been used for seeing the outside world to let you better navigate the Web. And now that your brain is actually getting direct input from the Web, it’s interpreting that as vision.”

“But how can anyone see the Web?” her mom asked.

“Our brains are constantly making up representations of things that aren’t actually visible to our eyes,” Kuroda said. “They extrapolate from what data they do have to make fully convincing representations of what they suspect is likely there.”

He took a shuddering breath and went on. “You must have done that experiment that lets you discover your eye’s blind spot, no? The brain just draws in what it’s guessing is there, and if it’s tricked — by placing an object in the blind spot of one of your eyes while the other is closed — it guesses wrong. The vision you see is a confabulation.”

Caitlin sat up at hearing him use one of the words she’d been thinking about earlier. He continued: “And the images produced by the brain are only a fraction of the real world. We see in visible light, but, Barbara, surely you have seen pictures taken in infrared or ultraviolet light. We see a subset of the vast reality that’s out there; Miss Caitlin is just seeing a different subset now. The Web, after all, does exist — we just don’t normally have any way to visualize it. But Miss Caitlin is lucky enough to get to see it.”