edge. She’d felt momentarily dizzy as she crossed the room, distracted by the lights, and she lay down, her face pointing up at the ceiling she’d never seen.
She tried to make sense of what she was seeing. If she held her head still, the same part of the image did stay in the ... the center. And there was a limit to what she could see—things off to the sides were out of her ... her
... field of view, that was it. Clearly this bizarre show of lights was behaving like vision, behaving as though it were controlled by her eyes, even if the images she was experiencing didn’t have anything to do with what those eyes should be seeing.
Some lines seemed to persist: there was a big one of a darkish color she decided to provisionally call “red,” although it almost certainly wasn’t that. And another—might as well call it “green”—crossed it near the center of her vision. Those lines seemed to stay put overhead; whenever she directed her eyes toward the ceiling, they were there.
She’d read about people’s vision adapting to darkness, so that stars (how she would love to see stars!) slowly became more visible. And although she still didn’t know if she was in the dark or in a brightly lit room, as time passed she did seem to be seeing increasing amounts of detail—a finer and more complex filigree of crisscrossing colored lines. But what was causing it? And what did it represent?
She was unused to ... what was it now? That phrase she’d read on those websites about vision Kuroda had directed her to, the phrase that was so musical? She frowned, and it came to her: confabulation across saccades. Human eyes swing in continuous arcs when switching from looking at point A to point B, but the brain shuts off the input, perhaps to avoid dizziness, while the eyes are repositioning. Instead of getting swish pans—a term she’d encountered in an article about filmmaking—vision is a series of jump cuts: instantaneous changes from looking at this to looking at that, with the movement of the eye edited out of the conscious experience. The eye normally made several saccades each second: rapid, jerky movements.
The big cross she was seeing now—red in one arm, green in the other—jumped instantaneously in her perception as she moved her eyes, shunting to her peripheral vision (another term finally understood) when she looked away. She did it again and again, flicking back and forth, and—
And suddenly she was plunged into blackness.
Caitlin gasped. She felt as though she were falling, even though she knew she wasn’t. The loss of the enigmatic lights was heartbreaking; she’d crawled her way up after fifteen years of deprivation only to be kicked back down into the pit.
Her body sagged against the bedding while she hoped—prayed!—that the lights would return. But, after a full minute, she pulled herself to her feet and walked to her desk, undistracted now by flashes, her paces falling automatically one after another. She touched her Braille display. “Download complete,” she read. “Connection closed.”
Caitlin felt her heart pounding. Her vision had stopped when the connection via her eyePod between her retinal implant and the Internet had shut down, and—
A crazy thought. Crazy. She turned on her screen reader, and used the tab key to move around the Web page Kuroda had created, listening to snippets of what was written in various locations. But what she wanted wasn’t there. Finally, desperately, she hit alt and the left arrow on her keyboard to return to the previous page, and—
Bingo! “Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.” She could feel her hand shaking as she positioned her index finger above the enter key.
Please, she thought. Let there be light.
She pressed the key.
And there was light.
Chapter 13
he southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad
She tried to make sense of what she was seeing. If she held her head still, the same part of the image did stay in the ... the center. And there was a limit to what she could see—things off to the sides were out of her ... her
... field of view, that was it. Clearly this bizarre show of lights was behaving like vision, behaving as though it were controlled by her eyes, even if the images she was experiencing didn’t have anything to do with what those eyes should be seeing.
Some lines seemed to persist: there was a big one of a darkish color she decided to provisionally call “red,” although it almost certainly wasn’t that. And another—might as well call it “green”—crossed it near the center of her vision. Those lines seemed to stay put overhead; whenever she directed her eyes toward the ceiling, they were there.
She’d read about people’s vision adapting to darkness, so that stars (how she would love to see stars!) slowly became more visible. And although she still didn’t know if she was in the dark or in a brightly lit room, as time passed she did seem to be seeing increasing amounts of detail—a finer and more complex filigree of crisscrossing colored lines. But what was causing it? And what did it represent?
She was unused to ... what was it now? That phrase she’d read on those websites about vision Kuroda had directed her to, the phrase that was so musical? She frowned, and it came to her: confabulation across saccades. Human eyes swing in continuous arcs when switching from looking at point A to point B, but the brain shuts off the input, perhaps to avoid dizziness, while the eyes are repositioning. Instead of getting swish pans—a term she’d encountered in an article about filmmaking—vision is a series of jump cuts: instantaneous changes from looking at this to looking at that, with the movement of the eye edited out of the conscious experience. The eye normally made several saccades each second: rapid, jerky movements.
The big cross she was seeing now—red in one arm, green in the other—jumped instantaneously in her perception as she moved her eyes, shunting to her peripheral vision (another term finally understood) when she looked away. She did it again and again, flicking back and forth, and—
And suddenly she was plunged into blackness.
Caitlin gasped. She felt as though she were falling, even though she knew she wasn’t. The loss of the enigmatic lights was heartbreaking; she’d crawled her way up after fifteen years of deprivation only to be kicked back down into the pit.
Her body sagged against the bedding while she hoped—prayed!—that the lights would return. But, after a full minute, she pulled herself to her feet and walked to her desk, undistracted now by flashes, her paces falling automatically one after another. She touched her Braille display. “Download complete,” she read. “Connection closed.”
Caitlin felt her heart pounding. Her vision had stopped when the connection via her eyePod between her retinal implant and the Internet had shut down, and—
A crazy thought. Crazy. She turned on her screen reader, and used the tab key to move around the Web page Kuroda had created, listening to snippets of what was written in various locations. But what she wanted wasn’t there. Finally, desperately, she hit alt and the left arrow on her keyboard to return to the previous page, and—
Bingo! “Click here to update the software in Miss Caitlin’s implant.” She could feel her hand shaking as she positioned her index finger above the enter key.
Please, she thought. Let there be light.
She pressed the key.
And there was light.
Chapter 13
he southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad
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