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—

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…