“Goodness!” said Mom.

“Sorry,” said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. “Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode — in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn’t receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it’s in simplex. Press the switch again — that high-pitched beep means it’s in duplex.”

“All right,” said Caitlin.

“And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on.”

“Okay.”

“And, um, don’t lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it’s pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it’s lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check but they’ll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit — not after this one has failed in their eyes.”

It’s failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought — but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan — well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly — she’d be able to kiss the dark glasses goodbye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the still-incorrect signal her right retina was producing.

But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take the equipment back to Canada.

“Anyway,” he said, “you work on it from your end: let that brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it’s getting. And I’ll work on it from my end, analyzing the data your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that re-encodes it. Just remember…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. Caitlin knew what he’d been about to say: you’ve only got until the end of the year.

She listened to his wall clock tick.

Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the flat of his hand against the rickety table top in the Internet cafe. Tea sloshed from his cup and everyone in the room turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the tough-looking plainclothes cop.

Sinanthropus was seething. The window he’d so carefully carved into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something, had to make an excuse for his violent action.

“Sorry,” he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in turn. “Just lost the text of a document I was writing.”

“You have to save,” said the cop, helpfully. “Always remember to save.”

More thoughts imposing themselves, but garbled, incomplete.

…existence … hurt … no contact …

Fighting to perceive, to hear, to be instructed, by the voice.

More: whole … part … whole…

Straining to hear, but—

The voice fading, fading…

No!

Fading…

Gone.

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: At least my cat missed me…

Date: Saturday 22 September 10:17 EST

Mood: Disheartened

Location: Home

Music: Lee Amodeo, “Darkest Before the Dawn”

I am made out of suck.

I stupidly let myself get my hopes up again. How can a girl as bright as me be so blerking dumb? I know, I know — y’all want to send me kind words, but just … don’t. I’ve turned off commenting for this post.

We got back to Waterloo yesterday, September 21, the autumnal equinox, and the irony is not lost on me: from here on in, it’s more darkness than light, the exact opposite of what I’d been promised. I suppose I could move to Australia, where the days are getting longer now, but I don’t know if I could ever get used to reading Braille upside down … ;)

Anyway, we’d left the Mom’s car in long-term parking at Toronto’s airport. When we got back home to Waterloo, at least it was obvious that Schrodinger had missed me. Dad was his usual restrained self. He already knew about the failure in Japan; the Mom had called him to tell him. When we came through the door, I heard her give him a quick kiss — on the cheek or the lips, I don’t know which — and he asked to see the eyePod. That’s what it’s like having a physicist for a dad: if you bond at all, it’s over geeky stuff. But he did say he’d been reading up on information theory and signal processing so he could talk to Kuroda, which I guess was his way of showing that he cares…

Caitlin posted her blog entry and let out a sigh. She had really been hoping things would be different this time and, as always when she got disappointed, she found herself slipping into bad habits, although they weren’t as bad as cutting her arms with razor blades — which is something Stacy back in Austin did — or getting totally plastered or stoned, like half the kids in her new school on weekends. But, still, it hurt … and yet she couldn’t stop.

It was doubtless hard for any child to have a father who wasn’t demonstrative. But for someone with Caitlin’s particular handicap (a word she hated, but it felt like that just now), having one who rarely spoke or showed physical affection was particularly painful.

So she reached out, in the only way she could, by typing his name into Google. She often used quotation marks around search terms; many sighted users didn’t bother with that, she knew, since they could see at a glance the highlighted words in the list of results. But when you have to laboriously move your cursor to each hit and listen to your computer read it aloud, you learn to do things to separate wheat from chaff.

The first hit was his Wikipedia entry. She decided to see if it now mentioned his recent change of job, and—

“Has one daughter, Caitlin Doreen, blind since birth, who lives with him; it’s been speculated that Decter’s decline in peer-reviewed publications in recent years has been because of the excessive demands on his time required to care for a disabled child.”

Jesus! That was so unfair, Caitlin just had to edit the entry; Wikipedia encouraged users, even anonymous ones, to change its entries, after all.

She struggled for a bit with how to revise the line, trying for suitably highfalutin language, and at last came up with, “Despite having a blind daughter, Decter has continued to publish major papers in peer-reviewed journals, albeit not at the prodigious rate that marked his youth.” But that was just playing the game of whoever had made the bogus correlation in the first place. Her blindness and her father’s publication record had nothing to do with each other; how dare someone who probably knew neither of them link the two? She finally just deleted the whole original sentence from Wikipedia and went back to having JAWS read her the entry.

As she often did, Caitlin was listening through a set of headphones; if her parents happened to come up stairs she didn’t want them to know what sites she was visiting. She listened to the rest of the entry, thinking about how a life could be distilled down to so little. And who decided what to leave in and what to leave out? Her father was a good artist, for instance — or, at least, so she’d been told. But that wasn’t worthy of note, apparently.