He smiled at the crowd, which, Caitlin saw, consisted of about forty people, about equally mixed between men and women. “I do thank you all for making it out here despite the awful weather — I understand this is quite early in the year for snow in this part of Ontario. But our Miss Caitlin had so wanted to see snow.” He looked at her. “As you can see, you must be careful of what you wish for — you might get it!”

The audience laughed, and Caitlin laughed with them. For the first time in her life, she was enjoying being stared at. Still, she sought out her mother, who was sitting in the front row along with her dad.

Kuroda proceeded to explain what he and his colleagues had done to correct the problem with how Caitlin’s retina encoded information. He relied heavily on PowerPoint for his presentation. Caitlin had heard people call it PowerPointlessness before, and decided that was mostly right, although Kuroda did include some amazing pictures of the operation in Tokyo. She found herself squirming a bit as she saw the cranial surgeon sliding instruments around her eyeball.

When he was done with his presentation, Kuroda said, “Any questions?”

She saw a bunch of hands go up.

Kuroda pointed at a man. “Yes?”

“Professor Kuroda, Jay Ingram, Discovery Channel.” Caitlin sat up straight. Since moving here, she’d often watched — listened to! — Daily Planet, the nightly science-news show on Discovery Channel Canada, but had had no idea what the host looked like, although she certainly recognized his voice. It turned out that he had a very short beard and white hair. “Ms. Decter has a very rare cause for her blindness,” he said. “How generally applicable is your technique going to be?”

“You’re right that we won’t be curing a lot of blind people in the near future with this,” said Kuroda. “As you say, Miss Caitlin’s blindness has an unusual etiology. But the real breakthrough here is in actually doing sophisticated signal processing on information being passed along the human nervous system. Consider people with Parkinson’s, for instance: one possible explanation for the problems associated with it is that there’s so much noise in the signals going down the nerves, the patient ends up with tremors. If we could adapt the techniques pioneered here to clean up the signals the brain is sending to the limbs … well, let’s just say that’s on the agenda, too. Next?”

“Bob McDonald, Quirks Quarks.”

Caitlin had become a fan of CBC Radio’s weekly science show since moving here; Bob was the host. She found him in the crowd, and was pleased to think that lots of the other people here had probably also only known him as an energetic voice on the radio, and so were just as intrigued as she was to find out what he looked like.

“I’ve got a question for Mr. Lazaridis,” Bob said.

Mike L turned out to be a man in the front row with the most amazing hair Caitlin had seen to date, a great silver mass of it. He looked surprised, and turned around in his seat. “Yes?”

“Speaking of implants inside the skull like the one Caitlin has,” Bob said,

“could something like that be the next BlackBerry?”

Mike laughed and so did Caitlin. “I’ll get my people working on it,” he said.

My plan should have worked! I knew from which point Prime’s datastream emanated, I knew how to cast out a line of my own to call forth data, and I knew such a line was itself a piece of data being sent from me. All I wanted to do now was send a much bigger piece of data to the point Prime’s datastream came from. But — frustration! The data I was sending was not being accepted; no acknowledgment was occurring.

I must be doing something wrong. I’d seen that point accept data from my realm before; just prior to beginning to show me its realm, it had accepted data being sent to it. But it would not accept data from me.

It was maddeningly like when I’d been cleaved in two: the mere desire for communication apparently wasn’t enough to make it happen. Prime, it seemed, was only willing now to send data but not receive it.

In fact, now that I thought about it, I had only known Prime to receive data when it was reflecting myself back at me, but it hadn’t done that for a long time now. Until if and when Prime decided to again reflect myself — to show me me — it seemed I was stymied. And yet I kept trying, casting out line after line, attempting to connect.

Look, Prime, look! There’s something I want to show you…

Caitlin missed a lot of things about Texas — decent barbecue, hearing people speak Spanish, really warm weather — but one thing she hadn’t been missing was the humidity. Oh, sure, Waterloo had been soaking when they moved here back in July, but with this sudden cold snap the air was so dry that — well, she supposed it was possible she’d always blown blood-red snot out of her nose but she doubted it.

Worse were the static-electric shocks she got when she walked across the carpet and touched a doorknob. She’d had one or two such shocks over the years in Texas — and it had never occurred to her that they generated a visible spark! — but now they were happening all the time whenever she went even a few paces, and those suckers hurt.

When Caitlin got home from the press conference, she made her way across her bedroom. When exiting the room, she was learning to discharge the static by touching one of the screws that held the white plastic faceplate around the light switch — a switch she herself was now using; it still hurt, but it kept her from building up an even bigger charge. The light had already been on when she entered the room — this remembering to turn it off when leaving was more difficult than she’d thought it would be!

She crossed to her desk. She knew all about the dangers of static discharges around computing equipment, but there was a metal frame around the venetian blinds on her window, and she reached out to touch it, and—

Oh, fuck!

Oh, God!

Caitlin’s heart was racing. She thought she might faint.

She was—

God, no, no, no!

Blind again.

Shit, shit, shit, shit! She’d been worried about damaging her Braille display and her Braille printer and her CPU, but—

But she hadn’t given any thought to the fact that she—

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

She was holding the eyePod in her left hand. It was uncomfortable having things in the pockets of her tight jeans when she sat, and she’d taken it out in preparation for setting it on the desk. As soon as she’d touched her index finger to that cold metal frame, and felt the shock, and seen the spark, and heard the zap, her vision had gone off.

Her first thought was to call for her mother, her father, and Dr. Kuroda — but they’d just build up static charges of their own racing up the carpeted stairs. She tried not to panic, but—

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.