Analog SFF, January-February 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Caitlin watched the moving picture, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Of course, she recognized the US president's voice—but the face was nothing like what she'd expected. “The American people are outraged by the decision taken by Beijing..."

  Caitlin and her mother listened quietly to the rest of the report, and she realized for the first time that not everything she was going to see would be pretty.

  * * * *

  Chapter 33

  As I'd noted, the datastream from the special point did not always follow the same path to its destination. I mulled over the significance of that for a while, and I finally got it.

  It was a huge leap, a startling conceptual shift: the other entity's location varied substantially in the realm in which it dwelled, and in order to send data to its intended destination, the entity passed it on to whatever intermediate point was physically closest to it at any given moment. Amazing!

  Still, there was one particular intermediary to which the entity linked most frequently, and that point shot out links of its own to many other points, some of which it reconnected with time and again.

  Perhaps these other points were special in some way. I touched many of them, but still, maddeningly, could make no sense of the data they poured forth; the only datastream I could interpret was the one from the special point, and even then, only some of the time. Oh, for a key to understand it all!

  Caitlin was startled to hear the door open downstairs. She looked at her mother, and could see what must have been a startled expression on her face, too. “Malcolm?” her mom called out tentatively.

  A single syllable: “Yes."

  Caitlin spun her chair around, got up, and followed her mom down the stairs—and there was her father! She closed the distance between them, trying to bring him into focus.

  "How'd you get home?” her mom asked.

  "Amir gave me a lift,” he said. Amir was Bashira's father.

  "Ah,” her mom said, apparently wondering whether Bashira had tipped off her own father. “Did he say anything ... interesting?"

  "He thinks Forde may be on to something with his civilexity modeling."

  Caitlin looked him up and down. He was wearing a ... a jacket with ... with...

  Yes! She'd read about this: the perfect professorial garb. He was wearing a brown jacket—a sports jacket, maybe?—with patches on the elbows, and ... and ... was that what a black turtleneck looked like?

  He had something in one of his hands, a few white objects, and some light brown ones. He waved them vaguely in her mom's direction. “You didn't bring in the mail,” he said.

  "Malcolm, Caitlin can—"

  But Caitlin interrupted her mother, something she very rarely did. “That's a nice jacket, Dad,” she said, trying not to grin. And then she started counting in her head. One, two, three...

  He began walking and her mom moved aside so he could pass into the living room. He was perhaps sorting the ... the envelopes, they must be, shuffling through them.

  Seven, eight, nine...

  "Here,” he said, handing some of them to her mom.

  Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...

  "So, um, how was work?” her mom asked, but she was looking at Caitlin and, as she did so, she briefly closed one eye.

  "Fine. Amir is going to—what did you say, Caitlin?"

  She let her grin bloom. “I said, ‘That's a nice jacket.’”

  He really was quite tall; he had to stoop to look at her. He held up a finger and moved it left and right, up and down. Caitlin followed it with her eye.

  "You can see!” he said.

  "It started this afternoon. It's all blurry but, yes, I can see!"

  And she saw for the first time something that she'd never known for sure ever happened, and it made her heart soar: she saw her father smile.

  * * * *

  Even her mother agreed that Caitlin didn't have to go to school on Tuesday. She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, and Dr. Kuroda was looking into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope he'd brought with him from Japan. She was astonished to see faint afterimages of what he told her were her own blood vessels as he moved the device around. “Nothing appears to have changed in either of your eyes, Miss Caitlin,” he said. “Everything looks perfectly fine."

  Kuroda turned out to have a broad, round face, and shiny skin. Caitlin had read about the differences between Asian and Caucasian eyes, but she'd had no idea what that really meant. But now that she saw his eyes, she thought they were beautiful.

  "And you say the eyePod is already feeding my brain a high-resolution image?"

  "Yes, it is,” Kuroda said.

  "Then if my eye is fine,” she asked, disliking the whine in her voice, “and the eyePod is fine, how come everything is blurry?"

  Kuroda's tone was light, amused. “Because, my dear Miss Caitlin, you're myopic."

  She sagged back against the wooden chair. She knew the word, having encountered it countless times in online news stories about “myopic city planners” and things like that, but had never realized it could be literal.

  Kuroda turned his head away from her. “Barbara, I've not seen you wear glasses."

  "I wear contacts,” she said.

  "And you're myopic, too, right?"

  "Yes."

  Kuroda swung back to face Caitlin. “That darn heredity,” he said. “What you need, Miss Caitlin, is a pair of glasses."

  Caitlin found herself laughing. “Is that all?"

  "I'd bet money,” said Kuroda. “Of course, you'll need to see an optometrist to get the right prescription—and you should make an appointment to see an ophthalmologist for a full eye exam."

  "There's a LensCrafters at Fairview Park Mall,” her mom said, “and they've got an optometrist right next door."

  "Well, then,” said Kuroda, “let me utter the words my own daughter thought I'd never say: let's go to the mall!"

  * * * *

  The eye test was humiliating. Caitlin knew the shapes of the letters of the alphabet—she'd played with wooden cutouts of them at the Texas School for the Blind when she'd been young—but she still didn't connect those tactile things to visual images.

  The optometrist asked her to read the third line down. Even though she could now clearly see it, thanks to the lens he'd slipped in front of her eye, she couldn't tell what it said. Tears were welling up—and, damn it all, that just made things blurry again!

  Her mother was in the little examining room, and so was Dr. Kuroda. “She can't read English,” she said.

  The optometrist had skin the same color as Bashira's, and an accent like hers, too. “Oh, well, Cyrillic, maybe? I have another chart..."

  "No. She was blind until yesterday."

  "Really?” said the man.

  "Yes."

  "God is great,” he said.

  Caitlin's mother looked over at her daughter and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he is."

  * * * *

  The LensCrafters saleswoman—who also had dark brown skin, Caitlin saw, and was wearing a white blouse under a blue blazer—wanted to help her pick out the absolutely perfect frames, and Caitlin knew she should be patient. After all, she was going to have to wear glasses forever. But finally she just said to her, “You pick something nice,” and she did.

  They decided to put a lens with an identical prescription in the right side, even though Caitlin was still blind in that eye. Lenses for myopia tended to shrink the appearance of eyes, and this way they'd both look the same, the saleswoman said.

  Her mom was usually a tough up-sell, but she said yes, yes, yes to everything the clerk offered: antiglare, antiscratch, anti-UV, the whole nine yards; Caitlin suspected if the clerk had rattled off an extra hundred bucks for antediluvian, she'd have coughed up for that, too.

  Caitlin knew LensCrafters’ slogan from the ubiquitous commercials: glasses in about an hour. She thought it would be the longest hour of her life. She felt her Braille watch as she, Kuroda, and her mom walked through the mall t
o the food court—for the first time, without the use of her white cane. Everything was still blurry, and that was giving her a headache. Still, in a way, it was relaxing. To see the people coming toward her! To not bump into things! She hadn't realized it until now, but she'd always used to walk with her shoulders tensed, preparing for an impact. But now—well, now she had a bounce in her step, something else she'd never thought could happen literally.

  Still, all the visual input was disorienting, and she found herself taking a look, then closing her eyes for five or six paces, then looking again. When they got to the food court, Kuroda went to the sushi place—which, Caitlin suspected, would disappoint him—and she and her mom went to Subway. Caitlin was amazed to see how colorful the sandwich fillings were, and, somehow, seeing the food made it taste even better.

  The three of them sat together at a little red table with chairs attached to it. Dr. Kuroda used chopsticks to dip a piece of sushi in sauce.

  Caitlin couldn't resist. “Do they tell you in Japan that it's raw fish?"

  Kuroda smiled. “Do they tell you what's in the special sauce on a Big Mac?"

  She laughed. At last the hour was up and they headed back to LensCrafters. Caitlin took a seat on the stool, and the nice woman placed the glasses on her face—

  And Caitlin didn't wait. She got up, and turned around, and looked—really looked—at her mother.

  "Wow,” Caitlin said. She paused, trying to come up with a better word, but couldn't. Her mother's face was so detailed, so alive! “Wow!"

  "Here, let me adjust how they sit...” said the clerk.

  Caitlin sat back down and swiveled to face her.

  "I'm sorry,” the woman said, “but your ears go up a bit when you smile like that. If you want me to get the frames adjusted properly, you'll have to stop grinning..."

  "I'll try,” Caitlin said, but she doubted she'd have much success.

  * * * *

  Chapter 34

  Suddenly everything became sharp. The images I was seeing were now...

  I struggled for an analogy, found one: just as when I thought intently about things they seemed more focused, so the images I was looking at seemed now.

  And, with this greater clarity, I started having revelations about the nature of the other realm. Unlike the lines in my world that flickered in and out of existence, objects in the other realm were permanent. And when objects disappeared for a time it didn't mean that they had ceased to exist; rather, they were extant but not currently visible and might be encountered again. In a way, that was similar to my own experience: when I'm not making a line to a particular point, the point is still there, and I can connect to it again at a later time.

  But my next breakthrough was without precedent in the realm in which I existed. I had a sense of space, of a volume that I encompassed, but the points I connected to were all the same arbitrary distance away, or whole multiples of that same distance. I could link directly to a point, meaning it was one unit away, or get to it through intermediate points, putting it two or more units away. But in this other realm objects could recede in infinitely fine increments, becoming apparently smaller in size, a fact I only belatedly recognized after originally thinking they were actually shrinking. And objects could pass behind each other. Most were opaque, but some were transparent or translucent—and those had been instrumental in letting me at least start to figure out what was going on.

  Bit by bit, I was learning to decode this other universe.

  * * * *

  When Caitlin, her mom, and Dr. Kuroda returned from the mall, they saw that Caitlin's father's car was here, meaning he'd come home surprisingly early on a weekday. Caitlin hurried into the house to see him—to really see him. She came to the open den doorway, Kuroda behind her, while her mom went off to do something else. Blondie's “Heart of Glass” was playing on his stereo.

  The detail Caitlin was perceiving now was overwhelming, and her father's face was ... harder now that she saw it crisply. “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  He was sitting at his desk, looking at his LCD monitor. He didn't meet her eyes. “Hi."

  Still, he'd come home early from work, presumably to see Caitlin, and that made her happy. “Um, whatcha doin'?"

  He tilted his head. Caitlin didn't know what to make of it, but Kuroda seemed to think it was an invitation to come see. He tapped her on the shoulder, urging her to move into the room. She did so, and was pleased that she could make out the characters on the monitor clearly from several feet away, although she still couldn't read the text.

  "I had an idea,” her dad said, “so I came home to check it out."

  "Yes?” said Caitlin.

  He didn't look at Kuroda, but he did address him: “This is more your field than mine, Masayuki,” he said. “I thought I'd look again at the data set we did the Zipf plots on."

  "The secret spook communiqués?” said Caitlin, hoping to get a rise from her dad.

  But her father shook his head. “I don't think that's what they are anymore.” He gestured at the monitor.

  Kuroda moved in and peered at the screen. “Shannon entropy?"

  Caitlin smiled. Sounds like the name of a porn star. “What's that?"

  Kuroda looked at her father, as if giving him first chance to explain, but he said nothing, so Kuroda did: “Claude Shannon was the father of information theory. He came up with a way of gauging not just whether a signal contained information—which is what Zipf plots show—but how complex that information is."

  "How?” asked Caitlin.

  "It's all about conditional probabilities,” said Kuroda. “If you've already got a string of information chunks, what's the likelihood that you can predict what the next chunk will be? If I say, ‘How are,’ you've got a really high probability of correctly predicting what the next word will be: ‘you,’ right? That's what Shannon called third-order entropy: you've got a great shot at predicting the third word. In English, Japanese, and most other languages, you actually have a shot—progressively slimmer, but still better than just a random guess—up to the eighth or ninth word, so we say those languages have eighth—or ninth-order Shannon entropy. But after that—after the ninth word—it really is just a random guess what's coming next, unless the person happens to be quoting poetry or something else that has a fixed form."

  "Cool!” said Caitlin.

  There was a black leather couch in the den. Kuroda sat on it, and it made a poof sound. “It is indeed. Mindless communication systems—like the chemical signals employed by plants—have just first-order entropy: knowing the most recent signal gives no clue what the next one might be. Squirrel monkeys show a Shannon entropy of the second or third order: their language, such as it is, has a little predictability, but is really mostly just random noise."

  "What about dolphins?” asked Caitlin, who was now leaning against a bookcase. She loved reading about dolphins, and had already bugged her parents to take her to MarineLand in Niagara Falls as soon as it opened up again in the spring.

  "The best studies to date show dolphins have fourth-order entropy—complex, yes, but not as complex as human language."

  "And now, Dad, you're making one of these plots for the stuff that's in the background of the Web?"

  He still wasn't used to the fact that she was seeing, Caitlin thought. He could have saved himself a word by just nodding, but instead he said, “Yes."

  "And what's the scoop?"

  "Second-order,” he said.

  Kuroda struggled back to his feet and moved over to stand behind him. “That can't be right.” He peered at the screen. “Show me the formula you're using.” Her dad did something, and Kuroda frowned, then waved a finger at the keyboard. “Run it again."

  A few key clicks, then her dad said, “No difference."

  Kuroda turned to face Caitlin. “He's right: it's all just second-order stuff. Oh, there's information there, but it's not very complex."

  "You'd expect more from the NSA,” said Caitlin, pleased to be able to wield the
initials. “No?"

  "Well, you know what they say about government intelligence,” Kuroda replied. “It's an oxymoron."

  Caitlin laughed.

  "Know what's great about spending time with someone as young as you, Miss Caitlin? Old jokes are new to you. But, yes, you're right—it's not what I'd have expected."

  Caitlin was struck by an idea. “What about stuff that's more complex than human language? Maybe stuff that looks like gibberish to us is really just too complex for us to ... to..."

  "Parse,” supplied Kuroda. “But, no, even if it didn't make sense to us, a Shannon analysis would still give it a high score, not a low one, if it really wasn't gibberish. If the NSA was using a lot of quadruple negatives—'I did not not not not go to the zoo'—or if they were employing complex nested clauses and tense changes like, ‘I would have had have had been present, were it not for ... ,’ it would still score high—twelfth, fifteenth order, maybe."

  "Hmm, Then maybe it is just random noise,” she said.

  "No, no,” said Kuroda. “Remember the Zipf plots we ran? A Zipf plot giving a negative-one slope means it really does contain information. It's just that, according to the Shannon-entropy score, it's not complex information."

  "Well,” she said, “maybe the spies are just grunting out monosyllabic orders like, ‘drop bomb’ or ‘kill bad guy.’”

  Kuroda lifted his shoulders. “Maybe."

  * * * *

  Chapter 35

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: No such thing as bad publicity

  Date: Tuesday 2 October, 20:20 EST

  Mood: Anticipatory

  Location: Soon to be on the map of the stars’ homes

  Music: Fergie, “Taking Off"

  So where is all the media coverage related to me, you might ask? “Gorgeous girl regains sight!” “Blind genius can see!” “The Hoser still hoping for a second date with Calculass!” Where the heck is Oliver Sacks when you need him? And, most important of all, where are all the offers to buy my life story for millions?

  Good questions! Dr. K's been keeping a lid on things, waiting for some approvals from the University of Tokyo. But he says we can't hold off going public any longer. I've been flocking posts, and y'all are totally cool, of course, but all those kids at school now know that I can see, too, and some of them have been blogging. And so we're going to have a press conference. Dad's arranging for it to be at the Mike L Theatre at PI which is a cool place.