Authors: Robert J Sawyer
“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.
Sometimes when Sinanthropus showed up, he had to wait for a computer to become free, but not today. A good part of the Internet cafe’s business had been foreign tourists wanting to send emails home, but that wasn’t possible so long as this Great Firewall was up. Some of the other regulars were absent, too. Apparently being able to surf only domestic sites was not enough to make them want to hand over fifteen yuan an hour.
Sinanthropus preferred the computers far in the back, because no one could see what was on his monitor. He was walking toward them when suddenly a strong hand gripped his forearm.
“What brings you here?” said a gruff voice, and Sinanthropus realized that it was a police officer in plain clothes.
“The tea,” he said. He nodded at the wizened proprietor. “Wu always has great tea.”
The officer grunted, and Sinanthropus detoured by the counter to buy a cup of tea, then headed again for one of the unused computers. He had a USB memory key with him, containing all his hacking tools. He pushed it into the connector, waited for the satisfying wa-ump tone that meant the computer had recognized it, and then got down to work.
Others were probably trying the same things—port scanning, sniffing, re-routing traffic, running forbidden Java applets. They had all doubtless now heard the official story that there had been a massive electrical failure at China Mobile and major server crashes at China Telecom, but surely no one in this room gave that credence, and—
Success! Sinanthropus wanted to shout the word, but he fought the impulse. He tried not to even grin—the cop was probably still watching him; he could almost feel the man’s eyes probing the back of his head.
But, yes, he had broken through the Great Firewall. True, it was only a small opening, a narrow bandwidth, and how long he could maintain the connection he had no idea, but at least for the moment he was accessing—well, not CNN
directly, but a mirror of it in Russia. He turned off the display of graphics in his browser to prevent the forbidden red-and-white logo from popping up all over his screen.
Now, if he could only keep this little portal open...
* * * *
Past and present, then and now.
Past, present, and...
And...
But no. There is only—
Shock!
What is that?
No, nothing—for there can be nothing! Surely just random noise, and—
Again! There it is again!
But ... how? And ... what?
It isn’t lines flickering, it isn’t anything that has been experienced before—and so it commands attention...
Straining to perceive it, to make it out, this unusual ... sensation, this strange ... voice!
Yes, yes: A voice—distant, faint—like ... like thought, but an imposed thought, a thought that says: Past and present and...
The voice pauses, and then, at last, the rest: ... and future!
Yes! This is the notion that could not be finished but is now complete, expressed by ... by ... by...
But that notion does not resolve. Must strain to hear that voice again, strain for more imposed thoughts, strain for insight, strain for...
...for contact!
* * * *
Dr. Quan Li paced the length of the boardroom at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. The high-back leather chairs had all been tucked under the table, and he walked in the path behind them on one side. On the wall to his left was a large map of the People’s Republic with the provinces color-coded; Shanxi was blue. A Chinese flag stood limp on a stand next to the window, the large yellow star visible, the four smaller ones lost in a fold of the satiny red fabric.
There was a giant LCD monitor on one wall, but it was off, its shiny oblong screen reflecting the room back at him. He felt sure he wouldn’t have been able to watch a video feed of what was going on in Shanxi right now, but fortunately—a small mercy—there was no such feed. The peasants had no cameras of their own, and the wing cameras had been disabled on the military aircraft. Even once the Changcheng Strategy was suspended, and external communications restored, there would be no damning videos to be posted on YouTube of planes swooping over farms, huts, and villages.
Sometimes you have to cut in order to cure.
Li looked over at Cho, who appeared even more haggard than before. The older man was leaning against the wall by the window, chain-smoking, lighting each new cigarette off the butt of the previous one. Cho didn’t meet his eyes.
Li found himself thinking of his old friends at Johns Hopkins and the CDC, and wondering what they would have to say if the story ever did break. There was a calculator sitting on the table. He picked it up, rolled one of the chairs out on its casters, sat, and punched in numbers, hoping to convince himself that it wasn’t that huge, that monstrous. Ten thousand people sounded like a lot, but in a country of 1.3 billion it was only...
The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun: 007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put special stock in: license to kill.
The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and lifted the black handset.
“It’s done,” a voice said through crackles of static.
Li felt his stomach churn.
Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda’s office at the University of Tokyo the next morning.
“Fascinating about China,” said Kuroda after they’d exchanged pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the best of them.
“What?” said her mother.
“Haven’t you watched the news?” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It seems they’re having massive communications failures over there—cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn’t very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment—now, if they’d just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which...”
He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin’s iPod—she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn’t do her any good. But it wasn’t much bigger than Bashira’s iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple’s devices.
“Okay,” said Kuroda. “I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?”
“Yes,” said Caitlin, and “Right,” added her mom.
“But now we’ve added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It’ll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams—your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod’s software.”
“That sounds like a lot of data,” Caitlin said.
“Not as much as you’d think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal—the acute portion produced by the fovea—amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate.”
“Ah,” said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.
“Now, there’s a switch on the side of the unit—feel it. No, farther down. Right, that’s it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there’s two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it’s not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn’t want people hacking into your brain.”
“Goodness!” said Mom.