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
The southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student, crossed the little wooden bridge onto the small, dome-shaped island. She was wearing Nike trainers, cut-off shorts, and a sky-blue Marcuse Institute T-shirt that was tied off above her midriff. A pair of mirrored sunglasses was tucked into the shirt’s neck.
On one side of the island was an eight-foot-tall statue of a clothed, male orangutan standing upright — although, with his bangs and lack of cheek pouches, he didn’t look like a real orang. The stone ape wore a serene expression and had a collection of stone scrolls in front of him. Someone had thought it funny to donate a reproduction of the Lawgiver statue from Planet of the Apes to the Marcuse Institute, and apparently in that movie the statue had resided on a little island, so this had seemed the appropriate place to put it.
And in the shadow of the statue, sitting contentedly on his haunches, was a very real, very alive adult male chimpanzee. Shoshana clapped her hands together to get his attention, and once his brown eyes were looking her way, she said in American Sign Language, Come inside.
No, Hobo signed back. Outside nice. No bugs. Play.
Shoshana glanced at her digital watch. The chimp knew it was still well before his bedtime, but for what was about to happen, time zones had to be taken into account — not that there was any way to explain those to him!
Come now, Shoshana signed. Special treat. Must come in.
Hobo seemed to consider this. Treat bring here, he signed, and his gray-black face conveyed how pleased he was with his own cleverness.
Shoshana shook her head. Treat too big.
Hobo frowned. Maybe he was thinking that if the treat were too big for her to carry, he could bring it outside himself. But to get it, he’d have to go inside — and that would be playing right into her hands. His already furrowed brow creased even more, perhaps as he tried to sort out this quandary. What treat? he signed at last.
Something new, Shoshana signed back. Something good.
Something tasty? Hobo replied.
Shoshana knew when she was beat. No, she signed. But I’ll give you a Hershey’s Kiss.
Two Kisses! Hobo signed back. No, three Kisses!
Shoshana knew the bargaining would end there; although he could count higher when he had objects to point to in front of him, three was as high as he could think in abstract terms. She smiled. Okay. Come now, hurry!
When she’d started working here, Shoshana had believed the story on the Institute’s website about Hobo’s name: that a Canadian ex-pat zookeeper had dubbed him that in honor of the ever-helpful German shepherd on the kid’s TV series The Littlest Hobo. She’d been shocked to discover the truth.
Hobo hesitated just long enough to make clear that he was choosing to cooperate, not blindly following orders. He walked across the grass on all fours until he got to where Shoshana was standing. Then he took one of her hands, intertwining his fingers with hers, the way he liked to, and the two of them headed across the little bridge over the moat. They crossed the wide expanse of lawn and reached the whitewashed clapboard bungalow that was headquarters to the Marcuse Institute.
Waiting inside was the old man himself, Dr. Harl Marcuse. Shoshana and the other grad students secretly called him “the Silverback,” although none of them had actually seen him without his shirt, which, as she’d once quipped after a drink or two too many, was probably a good thing.
Marcuse was also sometimes called the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That overstated his weight by a factor of 2.5, but as for the species designation, what’s a 1.85 percent difference in DNA among friends? He certainly had the clout that went with the nickname; his ability to squeeze grant dollars out of the NSF was legendary.
Also present were Dillon Fontana, twenty-four, blond, with a wispy beard; red-headed Maria Lopez, ten years older; and Werner Richter, a dapper little German primatologist in his sixties. Dillon was holding a video camera, and Maria had a still-image camera; both were aiming them at Hobo.
The ape looked around the cluttered room, his jaw slack.
Sit here, Werner signed, indicating a high-back swivel chair positioned in front of a particleboard desk.
Hobo let go of Shoshana’s hand, clambered onto the chair, and sat cross-legged. Spin? he asked. He loved it when people spun the chair with him on it.
Later, said Shoshana. Computer time now.
Hobo’s face showed his pleasure; he was accustomed to having his computer use strictly rationed. Good treat! he signed at her, then turned to face the twenty-one-inch Apple LCD monitor. Movie? he signed.