The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 3

Station was ideal for their work as they needed zero gravity for the biolab, the Aleph system for their vision-simulation program.
The retina, however, was such an active processor of data, and the optic nerves were so dense--a million or so fibers in each one--that they were having problems with the sheer weight and complexity of information transfer. "Still, we have accomplished something," she said. "Rather the Frankenstein stage but very interesting. Let me show you."
She reached to the back of her neck with the same gesture a woman uses to let her hair down and pulled off two rectangular strips of flesh. "Plastic flesh. Fastened with VF-Velcro." She picked up two cables attached to the console beside her.
"Come here," she said. "Do you see?" Embedded in her neck were two multiplex light-fiber junctions.
She took off her glasses and turned her face toward me. Her eyes were brown and vacant, unfocused. She was blind.
She reached behind her, a cable in each hand, and snapped them home. She walked toward me and stopped less than a foot away. "You are about five ten," she said. "Hair the color of straw, light complexion . . . though now flushed. You are wearing a red-striped shirt that does not suit you, your pants need pressing, and your shoes are worn. Everything you are wearing is well made, expensive. In short, you look like what you are: a successful, intellectual gamesman, one who can afford an air of neglect. You probably have luck with women--many find that sort of thing appealing."
"What sort of thing?" Something had gone off the rails here.
"The shabby gentility. It's unimportant. We call this the CAV program computer-assisted vision. It is fairly accurate but requires inordinate amounts of hardware. Look around you." She pointed to small cameras ringing the room. "Using I-Sight software, the Aleph system combines views, approximates perspective, and corrects color hue and intensity. The images lack resolution comparable to the eye's, and the field of view is somewhat narrow. Still, I assure you, it is better than nothing . . . much better."
"Yes. I suppose it is."
"In any case, that is our current stage of development. I am afraid that it will be impossible for you to monitor our ongoing work at present. We are far too busy. I would think your concern would be with the Aleph system itself."
"It is, but I need to see things from the other end, the user's perspective. I wouldn't be any bother. Strictly an observer, looking for anomalies in subsystems involvement." Jargon surfaced to mask my confusion.
"No, not now. And I am afraid that is all the time I can give you."
Confused and routed, I left. Part of it was the aggressive freak show, part her unexplained hostility, but there was more. She had reached out with invisible hands and taken a clutch of nerves, not just the sensory ones, but cells deep inside the brain, the ones that when they fire, make you crazy.
Help the handicapped, I thought--fall in love with the blind.
I returned to the Ops Room. Alice Vance, director of IA Systems, was sitting with Toshi. She was fifty or so, pear-shaped, and had hair the color of old grease. We had worked together in Palo Alto, back when Aleph was just a gleam in the SenTrax eye, and we got along well.
"Why didn't you warn me about Diana Heywood?" I said. "She gave me a very hard time . . . took away my guns and ran me out of town."
"How very phallic of her," Alice said. She tapped in a HOLD command, and the four data windows she had been working with faded from the screen.
"Can you not work with other subsystems?" Toshi said. "Biological operations are somewhat marginal."
"No. I'm doing what you pay me for, following my highly trained intuition no matter where it leads." A couple of the KEs stood nearby, listening. I saw them unconsciously nodding their heads in agreement--I was the sharp young priest sent out by the Vatican to diagnose spiritual malaise and so could demand total cooperation. "Just kidding, Toshi, but seriously, I need to see what they're doing."
"Nonetheless, Jerry," he said, "we would not wish to interfere with Doctor Heywood's project."
"I'll talk to her," Alice said. "You've got to understand, Jerry, she's a special case."
"I can see that."
"Let me tell you about her," she said. "MIT, Caltech, Stanford."
"Holy, holy, holy," I said. The main line to high-tech success."
"But with a difference, Jerry. She had just finished her dissertation at Caltech--it was in biochemistry--took a vacation in San Francisco, and was attacked in Golden Gate Park. The man got a handful of plastic cards and a little money. She got multiple depressed skull fractures and blindness--severe bilateral trauma of both optic nerves."
"Jesus," I said.
"Three years later she was in Stanford