Robert Sawyer - Wake

“You walked by yourself? Even if this is a safe neighborhood, you shouldn’t be out alone after dark.”

Caitlin decided to elide over the last few hundred yards. “No, Sunshine — a girl I know — she walked me back.”

“You should have called. I’d have come to get you.”

Caitlin struggled to pull the sodden sweatshirt over her head. “Mom,” she said once it was off. “I saw the lightning.”

“Oh, my God! Really?”

“Yes. Jagged lines, over and over again.”

She was gathered into a hug. “Oh, Caitlin, oh, darling, that’s wonderful!” A pause. “Can you see anything now?”

“No.”

“Still…”

Caitlin smiled. “Yes,” she said, bouncing up and down a bit on her toes.

“Still. Where’s Dr. Kuroda?”

“He’s gone to bed; he was exhausted — he’s totally jet-lagged.”

She thought about suggesting they wake him, but there was nothing happening now, and the data her eyePod produced during the thunderstorm would be safely stored on his servers in Tokyo; he could examine it after a good night’s sleep. Besides, she was exhausted herself. “And Dad?”

“Still at the Institute — the public lecture, remember?”

“Oh. Well, I’m going to go change.”

She headed up to her room, got out of her soaked clothes, put on her pajamas, and lay down on the bed, hands intertwined behind her head. She wanted to relax and she was hungry for more vision, so she touched the button on her eyePod.

Webspace faded into existence: lines, points, colors, but—

Was it her imagination? Was it just that the lightning had been so bright that the colors in webspace now seemed … yes, she could draw the parallel, see how the word she knew from sound could apply to vision: the colors did seem muted now, dulled, less vibrant, and—

No, no, it wasn’t that! They weren’t muted. Rather, they were less sharp because…

Because now, behind everything, there was …

How to describe it? She sifted through words she knew related to visual phenomena. Something … shimmering, that was it. There was a background visible now, shining with a subdued flickering light.

Had something happened to the structure of webspace? That seemed unlikely. No, surely it was her way of visualizing it that had changed — presumably because of the real vision she’d just experienced. The background of webspace no longer appeared as a void but rather was twinkling, and rapidly, too. And at the very limits of … of resolution, there was a … a structure to it.

She got off the bed, went to her desk chair, and had JAWS recite email headers while she continued to look at webspace. Twenty-three messages had come in, and there’d doubtless be lots of new things written on her Facebook wall and new comments to her LJ postings. She switched back to simplex mode, clearing her vision so she could concentrate. She was about to type a response to an email when suddenly, shockingly, her entire field of vision flooded with intense whiteness. What the hell?

But then the crack of thunder came, shaking her bedroom’s window, and she realized that it was more lightning.

Another flash!

One steamboat, two steam—

The storm was only three-tenths of a mile away.

She had missed hearing her mother come up the stairs — what with thunder shaking the whole house — and was startled when she heard her saying, “Well? Can you see this lightning, too?”

Caitlin moved toward the voice, letting her mother’s arms wrap around her.

Yet more lightning, and—

Her mother letting her go, maneuvering so she was standing beside her, instead of holding her. Caitlin took her hand, and—

Another flash.

“You can!” said her mom. “You close your eyes when there’s lightning.”

“I do?” said Caitlin.

“Yes!”

“But I can still see it.”

“Well, sure. Eyelids aren’t completely opaque.”

Caitlin was stunned. Why hadn’t she known that? How much else was there to know about the world?

“Thanks, Mom,” she said.

“For what?”

The storm was moving off; the thunder was taking longer to arrive each time.

She lifted her shoulders a bit. How do you thank someone who has given you so much, and given up so much for you? She turned to face her, hoping against hope that this was the real beginning — that she would soon at last see her heart-shaped face. “For everything,” she said, hugging her tightly.

It was now almost 9:00 P.M. in California. The Silverback was resting his bulk in the one overstuffed easy chair in the bungalow’s main room. Shoshana Glick had propped her rump against the edge of the desk that held the big computer monitor. Dillon Fontana, clad all in black, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb. Werner and Maria had gone home for the weekend.

“What’s noteworthy,” Dillon said, “is that Hobo began doing representational art after he started communicating with Virgil.”

Shoshana nodded. “I’d noticed that, too. But Virgil doesn’t paint — I asked Juan in Miami. He doesn’t do any sort of art. So it’s not like the orangutan gave Hobo a tip or encouragement.”

Marcuse was drinking Coke from a two-liter bottle that looked small in his hands. He took a swig, wiped his face, and said, “It’s the flat screen.”

Shoshana turned to look at him.

“Don’t you see?” Marcuse said. “Until we linked the two apes in a videoconference, all the ASL signs Hobo had ever seen were three dimensional — done by actual human beings in close physical proximity to him. But now he’s seeing someone sign on a flat two-dimensional screen, on a computer monitor.” He gestured at the Apple display behind Shoshana.

“But he’s watched TV for years,” she said.

“Yes, but he’s never seen signing — at least not for any significant amount of time — on TV. And signing is special: signs are exactly that — representations of things, symbols. By seeing Virgil use signs on the flat screen, somehow Hobo saw how three-dimensional objects could be reduced to two dimensions. Remember, he has to concentrate on the signs in a way he doesn’t concentrate on normal TV images. Doing so caused something to click in his brain, and he got it.”

Shoshana found herself nodding. For all that the Silverback could be a blustering blowhard and a pain in the ass as a boss, he was a brilliant scientist.

“There’s precedent, sort of,” he continued. “Some prosopagnosiacs — people with face-blindness — can recognize faces in photographs but can’t recognize them in the flesh; it’s doubtless a related phenomenon.”

“In the land of the blind,” said Dillon, “the one-eyed ape is painting.” He lifted his narrow shoulders. “I mean, he’s got two eyes, but there’s no depth perception when watching TV, right? Sure, stereoscopic vision adds a lot of valuable information, but there’s a simplicity — a huge ramping down of the mental processing required — when dealing with just two-dimensional images.”

“But why’d he draw me in profile?” Shoshana asked.

Marcuse put down his Coke bottle and spread his arms. “Why did cavemen always draw animals in profile? Why did the ancient Egyptians do it that way? There’s something hardwired in the primate brain to make profiles — even though we’re way better at recognizing faces when seen full on.”

That much was true, Shoshana knew. There were neurons in human brains — and ape brains, too — that responded to the specific layout of a face, two eyes above a mouth. She’d grown up with the smiley face used online:

:)

But she remembered her father telling her it had been months after he’d first seen it in the 1980s before he realized what it was supposed to represent. Because it was sideways, it just didn’t trigger the right neurons in his brain. But one of the reasons that the yellow happy-face logo — which, her father had said, had been ubiquitous when he was a teenager — was so universally appealing was that it caused an immediate pattern-recognition response.