Caitlin felt her stomach knot, felt her heart skip a beat. She could be forgiven, she knew, for not identifying it at once; after all, she was new to this business of face recognition. But there could be no doubt, could there?
The mounds of brown hair surrounding it, the small nose, the close-together eyes, the…
God.
The heart-shaped face…
Yes, yes, yes, it looked a bit like her mother, but that was just family resemblance…
She shook her head, not believing it.
But it was true: the face she was seeing, the head that was flickering and jumping about in webspace, was her own!
Of course, more was visible than just the face. The lines she’d noted before — the edges — formed a frame around her face, almost as though she were looking at a picture of herself, but…
But that wasn’t it — because her face was moving; not just jumping with the saccades, but shifting left and right, up and down, as the head moved on the neck. It was almost as if she were seeing herself on a monitor. But when had she been recorded like this?
The image was still jumping, making it hard to perceive detail, but she thought she looked pretty much as she did today, so this must not be from not too long ago. Ah, yes, it must be recent: she was wearing the glasses she’d gotten yesterday, the thin frames almost impossible to see against her face, but they were there, and…
And suddenly they came off, and the image went blurry. It continued to jerk and shift, but it was now soft and fuzzy.
But how could that be? If this was some sort of video of herself, the fact that she’d taken off her glasses while it was being recorded shouldn’t have made the images less sharp.
After a moment, the glasses came back on, and then she saw it: a portion of the shirt she was wearing, a T-shirt she often wore, a shirt that said, in three lines of type, in big block capital letters “LEE AMODEO ROCKS.” She’d been struggling hard to learn letters, so again perhaps she could be forgiven for not immediately realizing what was wrong when she saw the word “LEE” — or most of it, at any rate; the bottom of that word was often cut off, making the Es look more like Fs and the L look like a capital I; the other words below it weren’t visible at all. But as she caught another glimpse of the first word she realized it didn’t say “LEE.” Rather, it said “EEL,” and the letters were backward.
She felt herself sagging against her chair, absolutely astonished.
The whole image was reversed left to right. The rectangle she’d perceived wasn’t a picture frame, and it wasn’t a computer monitor. It was a mirror!
She fought to make sense of it. When her eyePod was in simplex mode, it still fed images back to Dr. Kuroda’s servers in Tokyo, images of whatever her left eye was seeing. This must be some of those images being fed back to her. But why? How? And why these particular images of her in the bathroom?
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.”
—
LiveJournaclass="underline" 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!