Shit, if the eyePod was wrecked, she’d … God, she’d die.
She felt woozy and groped — groped! — for the edge of her desk, for her chair, and sat down. She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Jesus! Blind again, just like before Kuroda’s procedure, and—
But no. No, that wasn’t right.
It was different. Apparently, her mind couldn’t countenance a lack of vision anymore, not now, not after having seen. Instead of it being like the absence of a magnetic sense, like nothing at all, now she saw—
Well, that was surprising! It wasn’t pitch black. Rather it was a soft, deep gray, a … void, a…
Wait, wait! She had read about this. It was what people who had lost sight — including Helen Keller — said they perceived, and now, for the very first time, Caitlin had actually lost her vision. She hadn’t just closed her eyes, and she wasn’t just in a darkened room; she had no visual stimulus at all, and so was having the sensory effect that was apparently normal under such circumstances for people who had once been able to see but were now blind. Something similar, she supposed, explained why she had been able to perceive the background of the Web only after her first experience with real-world vision during the lightning storm.
Her heart was still pounding, pounding, pounding, but, even through her panic, she couldn’t help but notice that the grayness wasn’t uniform. Rather it varied slightly in brightness, in shade. Her eyes darted about in saccades, but that made no difference to where the variations appeared; it was a mental phenomenon, not residual vision or an afterimage of the room lights.
Blind!
Another deep breath.
All right, she thought. The eyePod crashed. But computers crash all the time, and when they crash, you—
Please, God, let this work!
You reboot them.
Back in Tokyo, Dr. Kuroda had said if she ever needed to shut off her eyePod, pressing down on the switch for five seconds would do the trick. Well, it was off now, terrifyingly so. But he’d also said that pressing the switch again for five seconds would turn it back on.
She manipulated the eyePod in her hand, found the switch, and held it down. Please, God…
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Nothing.
Nothing!
She kept pressing the switch, pressing it so hard she could feel it digging into her finger.
Six.
Sev—
Ah, a flash of light! She released the switch and let her breath out.
More light. Colors. Lines — razor sharp lines — radiating from points.
No, no it was—
Shit!
Websight! She was seeing webspace again, not reality. The lines she was seeing were sharper, the colors more vibrant, than any she’d experienced in the real world; indeed, now that she’d seen samples of such things, she knew the yellows and oranges and greens she saw here were fluorescent.
Still, okay, all right: she wasn’t seeing reality, but at least she was seeing. The eyePod wasn’t completely fried. And, truth be told, she’d been missing webspace.
She’d been squeezing the armrest on her chair tightly; she relaxed her grip a bit, feeling calmer, feeling — bizarrely, she knew — at home. The pure colors were soothing, and the simple shapes delineated by overlapping link lines were intelligible. Indeed, they were more intelligible now that she’d learned to recognize the visual appearance of triangles and rectangles and rhombuses. And, as before, in the background of it all, shimmering away, running off in all directions, the fine-grained checkerboard of the cellular automata…
It didn’t take her long to find a web spider, and she followed it as it jumped from site to site, an invigorating ride. But, after a time, she let it go on its way, and she just relaxed and looked at the lovely panorama, wonderfully familiar in its structure, and—
What was that?
Shit! Something was … was interfering with her vision. Christ, the eyePod might be damaged after all! Lines were still sticking out like spokes from web-site circles, and the lines from different circles crossed, but there was something more, something that seemed out of place here, something that wasn’t made up of straight lines, something that had soft edges and curves. It was superimposed on her view of webspace, or maybe behind it, or mingling with it, as if she were getting two datastreams at once, the one from Jagster and…
And what? This other image flickered so much it was hard to make out, and—
And it did contain some straight lines, but instead of radiating from a central point, they—
She’d never seen the like in webspace, except accidentally, when lines connecting various points happened to overlap in this way, but—
But these weren’t lines, they were … edges, no?
Christ, what was it?
It wasn’t anything to do with the shimmering background to webspace; that was still visible as yet another layer in this palimpsest. No, no, this was something else. If it would just settle down, just sit still, for God’s sake, she might be able to make out what it was.
There were a lot of colors in the ghostly superimposed image, but they weren’t the solid shades she was used to in webspace, where lines were pure green or pure orange, or whatever. No, this flickering image consisted of blotches of pale color that varied in hue, in intensity.
The image kept jumping up and down, left and right, sometimes changing entirely for a moment before it came back to being approximately the same, and…
Confabulation across saccades — that wonderful, musical phrase in the material Kuroda had told her to read about sight. The eye flits rapidly over a scene, involuntarily changing from looking at one fixed point to another, focusing briefly on, say, the upper left, then the lower right, then the middle, then glancing away altogether, then coming back and focusing here, then here, then here. Each little eye movement was called a saccade. People normally weren’t aware of them, she’d read, unless they were reading lines of text or looking out the window of a train; otherwise, the brain made one continuous image out of the jerky input, confabulating a steady overall view of a reality that had never actually been seen.
But … but that was human vision, as Dr. K had so unfortunately termed it. Websight bypassed Caitlin’s eye, and so didn’t have any such jerkiness to it.
And yet this strange, overlaid image was not only of something that was moving, it was composed of countless flashes of perception, just like saccades. Of course, when the brain is moving the eye in saccadic jumps, it knows in which direction vision is shifting each time and so can compensate for the movements when building up a mental picture of the whole scene.
But this! This was like looking at someone else’s saccades — a jittery stream that didn’t stay focused on one spot long enough for Caitlin to really see it. Although…
Although it did look a bit like…
No, no, thought Caitlin. I must be crazy!
She concentrated as hard as she could and—
No, not crazy. Not psychotic — saccadic!
The image consisted mostly of a large colored ovoid that was…
Incredible! It was…
…a light pink with a little yellow…
The image — the jerking, flickering image — was a human face!
But how? This was webspace! Her eyePod was linked to a raw feed from the Jagster search engine, showing links and websites and cellular automata, oh my, but—
But that feed was still there, being interpreted as it always had been. It was now indeed as though she were getting two feeds simultaneously. If she could block out the Jagster feed, perhaps she’d be able to see this other one more clearly, but she didn’t know how to do that. She stared as hard as she could, peering at the jittery images, struggling to make out more detail, and—