Of course, sometimes, as now, the images going back to Tokyo from her eyePod were her view of the structure of the Web: in duplex mode, the Tokyo servers sent her the raw Jagster feed, which she interpreted as webspace, and so that was what was sent back, almost as if she were reflecting the Web back at itself. And now it seemed — could it be? It seemed the Web was reflecting Caitlin back at herself!
It was incredible, and—
And suddenly a wave of apprehension ran over her. She’d been so intrigued she’d forgotten the electric shock, forgotten that she’d lost her ability to see the real world, to see her mother, see Bashira, see clouds and stars.
She took a deep breath, then another. Okay, okay: the electric discharge had crashed the eyePod. After the crash, she’d pressed the switch for five (seven!) seconds, and the eyePod had come back on in its default mode, like any electronic device rebooting. And that default, it seemed, was duplex: a two-way flow through the Wi-Fi connection, with data going from her implant to Kuroda’s lab, and data coming to her implant from Jagster.
And, well, if that was the case, then she merely had to hit the switch again to return to simplex mode.
She’d heard the term “crossing one’s fingers” before, but hadn’t yet seen anyone do it, and wasn’t quite sure how to contort her digits for the proper effect, but with her left hand she tried something that she hoped would serve, and she took the eyePod into her right hand and gave its button one quick, firm press. The device made a low-pitched beep.
She held her breath, as—
Thank God!
— as websight faded away, and her bedroom, in all its cornflower-blue glory, came back into view.
Chapter 39
Caitlin headed back down to the basement. Kuroda was there, hunched over in his chair. “The eyePod just crashed,” she said, as she reached the bottom step.
“Crashed?” repeated Kuroda, turning his head around. He was seated at the long worktable, working on the computer. “What do you mean?”
“I got a static-electric shock from a piece of metal, and the eyePod just shut off.”
He said something that she guessed was a Japanese swearword, then: “Is it okay? I mean, are you seeing now?”
“Yes, yes, I’m seeing fine now, but when I first turned the unit back on, something unusual happened. It booted up in websight mode.”
“It’s supposed to come up in duplex. That way, even if it’s too damaged to do anything else, we could have still re-flashed its software over the Wi-Fi connection.”
You might tell a girl! she thought. “That wasn’t what was unusual.” She paused, wondering exactly what she wanted to reveal. “Um, I know you’re recording the datastream my eyePod puts out.”
“Yes, that’s right. So I can run studies on how the data is being encoded.”
“Is there any way that the data flow could get reversed, so that the stuff my eyePod is sending to Tokyo might get reflected back here?”
“Why? What did you see?”
Caitlin frowned. Something very strange was going on, and she didn’t want to give Kuroda more reason to think that there was anything that might be of proprietary interest in her websight. “I’m … not sure. But could that happen? Could your server accidentally feed the data back to me?”
Kuroda seemed to consider this. “No, I don’t think so.” And then, more decisively: “No. I was there when the technician set up the Jagster feed you’re getting. He did it by actually attaching a fiber-optic networking cable to a different server on campus; there’s nowhere that the wiring for the feed from your eyePod crosses the feed to your eyePod. You simply couldn’t get a reverse flow.”
Caitlin thought silently for a time, but Kuroda seemed to feel someone should say something, so: “Miss Caitlin, what did you see?”
“I’m … not sure. It was probably nothing, anyway.”
“Well, let me look at the eyePod — check out the hardware, make sure nothing was damaged. And I’ll look over the data we collected from it. I suspect everything is fine, but let’s be certain…”
They did just that, and all seemed to be okay. When they were done, Caitlin felt her watch — maybe someone would give her a normal one for her birthday, which was coming up on Saturday. “I should go practice my reading,” she said.
“Have fun.”
She didn’t smile. “I can barely contain myself.”
—
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Eh? Bee! See…
Date: Wednesday 3 October, 16:59 EST
Mood: Frustrated
Location: H-O-M-E
Music: Prince, “Planet Earth”
—
Okay, so it’s back to this blerking kids’ literacy program. Geez, I should get this. Why is it so hard? It took everything I had to write on the blackboard at the Perimeter Institute, but I’ve already forgotten the shapes of half the letters. I should be able to master this — after all, I am made out of awesome!
Well, better get to it. I’m going to warm up with a flashcard review of the alphabet, and then — yes, it’s time to push ahead — I’m going to move on to whole words. I snuck a peek at that part of the website: it shows a picture, provides the word for it, and I’m to respond by typing the same word back. Given that I don’t know what a lot of things look like, it might actually be fun — but somehow I doubt, despite the popularity of the term in email, that P is going to be for “penis”…
Caitlin posted her LJ entry, then sat and looked with her one good eye at the comforting simplicity of the blank blue bedroom wall. She knew she was procrastinating, but she hated feeling stupid and trying to read printed text was making her feel just that. She hadn’t opened a book since The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and she felt the need to prove to herself that she was still a proficient reader. She turned, faced the computer, opened up an electronic copy of her all-time favorite, Helen Keller’s 1903 memoir The Story of My Life, and scrolled to a random passage. She then closed her eyes and let her finger glide along her Braille display, feeling the words flow effortlessly into her consciousness:
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words…
I was now being shown something intriguing.
Oh, in the large strokes, it was nothing new. Prime was simply sharing with me what one of its eyes was seeing. As was often the case, Prime was looking at the display. And what was on the display was quite easy to make out now, just a single simple shape, black against a white background, almost filling the display’s whole height: G.
But what intrigued me was that after a moment, a tiny secondary link formed from the point that was currently relaying Prime’s vision into my realm. That link didn’t go to the usual point that collected Prime’s vision, but instead went to a different location. I looked at that tiny scrap of data as it zipped by, and—
