Analog SFF, January-February 2009 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:08:29.732000+00:00

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Serial: WAKE

by Robert J. Sawyer

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Illustration by George Kratauer

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Not many of us get to live in two worlds at once....

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THE STORY SO FAR:

Caitlin Decter , 15, blind since birth, has recently moved to Waterloo, Ontario, from Austin, Texas, with her family. She's a genius at math and lives most of her social life online, where she goes by the name “Calculass.” Caitlin's blindness is caused by her retinas failing to properly encode visual information: the signals they pass back to her optic nerve are garbled in a way her brain can't decode.

Masayuki Kuroda, an information theorist in Tokyo, emails Caitlin. He proposes attaching an implant to her left optic nerve that will beam the garbled signals to a small external computer pack, where they will be corrected and sent back to the implant; if the process works, Caitlin will be able to see.

Caitlin is thrilled at the prospect and she and her mother, Barbara Decter, fly to Tokyo. The implant is installed, but although Kuroda's system is indeed correcting her retinal-encoding errors, Caitlin still can't see.

Caitlin begs Kuroda to let her keep the implant and the external computer pack; she dubs the computer pack her “eyePod.” Kuroda agrees to let her keep the devices for three months. Before Caitlin returns to Canada he modifies the eyePod so that it will copy her retinal datastream in real time to his servers in Tokyo, so he can try to figure out why she's not seeing; he also makes it possible for him to upload new software from Tokyo into her implant and the eyePod.

And, shortly after Caitlin gets back to Waterloo, Kuroda does indeed send her new software—and as soon as the upload begins, Caitlin is overwhelmed by vision! She sees lights, colors, lines—but soon realizes that they don't correspond to anything in the real world—nor do they disappear when she shuts her eyes. But when the upload is completed and the connection to Kuroda's computer in Tokyo is broken, Caitlin is suddenly blind again. Could it be that her strange new vision is related to being connected to the Web? She thinks to herself, “Let there be light,” and, as she reconnects to the Web, there is light...

Meanwhile, in China's rural Shanxi province, there's an outbreak of a new, virulent strain of bird flu. The Beijing government decides to execute 10,000 peasants there to contain the spread of the disease. To prevent Western interpretations of this from flooding into China and panicking the citizenry, the Chinese president orders all outside telephone, cell phone, and Internet access cut off. But Chinese hackers, including a young male dissident blogger whose online handle is Sinanthropus, manage to break through, allowing small amounts of contact between the Chinese portion of the Web and the rest of the Internet.

Unbeknownst to anyone, a consciousness has begun to emerge in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web—but this sudden throwing up of the Great Firewall of China has caused it to be cleaved in two.

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