Analog SFF, January-February 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  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...

  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 forgiv
en 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.

  To be concluded.

  Copyright ©2008 Robert J. Sawyer

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novella: THE RECOVERY MAN'S BARGAIN by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  * * * *

  Illustration by Broeck Steadman

  * * * *

  Experience is educational, especially when an alien culture is involved—but education isn't always fun for the student!

  * * * *

  The fidelia plant gave off its own light. Hadad Yu recognized it by the faint bluish-purple luminescence that shone like a beacon in the fetid swamp. His hands shook.

  His entire future stretched before him, in the guise of a flower half the size of his thumb.

  Three years. Three years and a dozen false leads had brought him here, to this thousand-kilometer swamp between Bosak City and Bosak's only ocean. He was 632 kilometers in, at the lone stand of colesis trees his scanners had been able to find.

  The colesis trees, warped and twisted by the lack of light, bent over him like adults over a small child. He wasn't sure if a larger man could have fit into the space. He was wiry and thin, something that usually worked to his advantage.

  Like it did now. He wouldn't have seen the tiny bluish-purple light if he hadn't already stepped inside the circle of trees.

  Now the key was to remove the plant without alerting the supporting vines or killing the delicate flowering mechanism. His client was paying for the flowering capability, not for the fidelia itself.

  It was a miracle he had found the thing. Yu was beginning to believe that flowering fidelias had gone extinct centuries ago. He was willing to keep searching on all the inhabited worlds in this small sector because the client was paying expenses and because she was in no hurry to get the fidelia.

  He had worked two hundred other jobs while working on this one, fattening his bank accounts and upgrading his ship. Besides, as he had explained to the client, work on the fidelia had to go slowly. Because of the demand for the flowering version, he had to work alone. Any lead would send an assistant to another client, offering to find a flowering fidelia for one-quarter Yu's price.

  Personally, he had thought the quest for the flowering fidelia an insane one. A plant easily grown in a hothouse had become an interstellar sensation among the very rich. Why? Because the flowering version couldn't grow in a hothouse, and because old legends claimed that the flowering fidelia cast a light so beautiful that nothing compared to it.

  Yu wasn't sure it was the most beautiful light he'd ever seen, but it was soft and delicate, with a strength that took his breath away.

  Part of the light's beauty came from the flower itself. The flower peeked out of the fidelia like a bashful woman. Its petals were silver, the leaves around it a faint veiny green. The light seemed to come from above, illuminating the flower's center.

  He crouched near the flower, careful not to touch it. The old writings said that a flowering fidelia remained in bloom for sixty nights, but would die if removed from its habitat. The only successful removals had taken sections of the habitat, and even then, the flower's bloom only lasted a week after the removal.

  Fortunately for him, his client didn't want the flower for the bloom or its particular light. She wanted it for its genes, hoping to do some hybridization so that all the captive, non-flowering fidelias could be reborn into something much more beautiful.

  Part of Yu's pursuit these last three years had included study with several botanists, who taught him how to work with delicate plants in difficult environments. He hadn't even started his search for the flowering fidelia until he could remove the non-flowering variety from its home tree without killing the tree, the vine, or the fidelia itself.

  Even though he had the skills, he was nervous. The wrong touch and the light—that precious light—would go out forever.

  He slipped on his breathing mask. Usually he hated the damn things—they smelled of cleaning chemicals and recycled air—but he was relieved to put it on now. The stink of the swamp—a combination of rot, feces, and burning sulfur—was supposed to fade the deeper he had gone. But it hadn't.

  He removed his collection kit from his travel pouch. The kit had delicate steel cutters as well as plant resealers. He wrapped the container around his waist, but he didn't open the lid yet.

  The bit of colesis tree inside was different from the trees in front of him. The wood was dry, for one thing, and it wasn't twisted.

  The few botanists who specialized in non-flowering fidelias stressed that the attached vine would need a similar kind of colesis tree or it would recoil, maybe even kill the fidelia itself.

  He didn't dare toss the bit of colesis he had brought with him—no one knew if the trees, which had a hearty (albeit primitive) communications system through the roots, could communicate when they weren't root-bound.

  He didn't want to slog three days back to the skimmer he'd left on the closest mapped island. In that skimmer, he had four more kits as well as two empty containers.

  But he couldn't risk the journey. He could travel the three days there and back, only to find that the flower was gone.

  He really didn't want to camp here until the fidelia flowered again.

  Because that was the other problem: No one knew how often the blooms appeared.

  He had to trust that colesis trees communicated only through touch—whether it was in the root system or through the water that stained his boots. The studies of colesis trees focused mostly on wh
ether that communication ability indicated sentience.

  Like so many similar studies of other plants and creatures found in the known universe, this study proved that the colesis tree had no sentience at all. Yu had a hunch that some future crisis would show that the colesis tree really was sentient in some form or another, and the Earth Alliance would work to guard the species.

  But for now, what he was about to do was perfectly legal—even if it did make him squeamish.

  He stepped back in the muck and examined the fidelia's colesis. The tree was nearly lost beneath the thickness of the vine wrapped around it. He'd seen the vines surrounding colesis trees being grown in large domes, but those vines had been as thin as his fingers.

  This one was thicker than he was. The little hairy tendrils seemed like whiskers or some sort of vine protection device.

  He wasn't even sure his steel tools were strong enough to chop through the vine, let alone the tree.

  But he couldn't use a laser scalpel. Nor could he just blast away. He had to work carefully and quickly so that nothing would sense the injury before he was done.

  So he turned to one of the colesis trees behind him. A separate vine wrapped around the nearest tree. That vine was thick too.

  Yu slipped on his membrane-thin gloves and gently, ever so gently, used his thumb and forefinger to touch the edges of the vine.

  It was softer than the vines he was used to, and the exterior was thin. So thin, in fact, that he was afraid the very presence of his fingers would rupture it.

  Which presented a whole new problem. He didn't want the vine to disintegrate on him.

  He made himself take a deep breath of chemical tinged air. He had to relax. Something could go wrong. And what was the worst case?

  Worst case was that he would move on, see if he could find another flowering fidelia. It might take months, it might take years, but he would be all right.

  He hadn't notified his client of this find yet, so she had no expectations of success. She had warned him that he would only get one chance at getting a flowering fidelia for her. She gave him a time limit—eight years—to find one. If he found one and failed to bring it to her, or worse, killed it in the process, she wouldn't pay him. Worse, she would tell all her very rich friends that Yu was a cheat, a liar, and an incompetent.