Wake

Be there or B^2, Caitlin typed.

“Heh heh. Oh, gotta go. Dad’s in one of his moods. See you” — which she’d no doubt typed as “CU.”

Caitlin went back to her journal. Lunch was okay, but I swear to God I’ll never get used to Canadians. They put vinegar on French fries! And BG4 told me about this thing called poontang. Kidding, friends, kidding! It’s poutine: French fries with cheese curds and gravy thrown on top — it’s like they use fries as a freakin’ science lab up here. Guess they don’t have much money for real science, ’cept here in Waterloo, of course. And that’s mostly private mollah.

Her spell-checker beeped. She tried again: mewlah.

Another beep. The darn thing knew “triskaidekaphobia,” like she’d ever need that word, but — oh, maybe it was: moolah.

No beep. She smiled and went on.

Yup, the all-important green stuff. Well, except it’s not green up here, I’m told; apparently it’s all different colors. Anyway, a lot of the money to fund the Perimeter Institute, where my dad works on string theory and other shiny stuff like that, comes from Mike Lazaridis, co-founder of Research in Motion — RIM, for you crackberry addicts. Mike L’s a great guy (they always call him that cuz there’s another Mike, Mike B), and I think my dad is happy here, although it’s so blerking hard to tell with him.

Her computer chirped yet again, a

After lunch it was chemistry class, and that looks like it’s going to be awesome. I can’t wait until we start doing experiments — but if the teacher brings in a plate of fries, I’m outta there!

She used the keyboard shortcut to post the entry and then had JAWS read the new email header.

“To: Caitlin Decter,” her computer a

Involving a rock-hard peeeniz, no doubt! She was about to hit delete when she was distracted by Schrodinger rubbing against her legs — a case of what she liked to call cattus interruptus. “Who’s a good kitty?” Caitlin said, reaching down to pet him.

Schrodinger jumped into her lap and must have jostled the keyboard or mouse while doing so, because her computer proceeded to read the body of the message: “I know a teenage girl must be careful about whom she talks to online…”

A cyberstalker who knew the difference between who and whom! Amused, she let JAWS continue: “…so I urge you to immediately tell your parents of this letter. I hope you will consider my request, which is one I do not make lightly.”

Caitlin shook her head, waiting for the part where he would ask for nude photos. She found the spot on Schrodinger’s neck that he liked to have scratched.

“I have searched through the literature and online to find an ideal candidate for the research my team is doing. My specialty is signal processing related to V1.”

Caitlin’s hand froze in mid-scratch.

“I have no wish to raise false hopes and I can make no projection of the likelihood of success until I’ve examined MRI scans, but I do think there’s a fair chance that the technique we have developed may be able to at least partially cure your blindness, and—” she leapt to her feet, sending Schrodinger to the floor and probably out the door — “give you at least some vision in one eye. I’m hoping that at your earliest—”

“Mom! Dad! Come quick!”

She heard both sets of footfalls: light ones from her mother, who was five-foot-four and slim, and much heavier ones from her father, who was six-two and developing, she knew from those very rare occasions on which he permitted a hug, a middle-aged spread.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. Dad, of course, didn’t say a word.

“Read this letter,” Caitlin said, gesturing toward her monitor.

“The screen is blank,” Mom said.

“Oh.” Caitlin fumbled for the power switch on the seventeen-inch LCD, then got out of the way. She could hear her mother sit down and her father take up a position behind the chair. Caitlin sat on the edge of her bed, bouncing impatiently. She wondered if Dad was smiling; she liked to think he did smile while he was with her.

“Oh, my God,” Mom said. “Malcolm?”

“Google him,” Dad said. “Here, let me.”

More shuffling, and Caitlin heard her father settle into the chair. “He’s got a Wikipedia entry. Ah, his Web page at the University of Tokyo. A Ph.D. from Cambridge, and dozens of peer-reviewed papers, including one in Nature Neuroscience, on, as he says, signal processing in V1, the primary visual cortex.”

Caitlin was afraid to get her hopes up. When she’d been little, they’d visited doctor after doctor, but nothing had worked and she’d resigned herself to a life of — no, not of darkness but of nothingness.

But she was Calculass! She was a genius at math and deserved to go to a great university, then work someplace real cool like Google. Even if she managed the former, though, she knew people would say garbage like, “Oh, good for her! She managed to get a degree despite everything!” — as if the degree were the end, not the begi

“Is what he’s saying possible?” her mom asked.

Caitlin didn’t know if the question was meant for her or her father, nor did she know the answer. But her dad responded. “It doesn’t sound impossible,” he said, but that was as much of an endorsement as he was willing to give. And then he swiveled the chair, which squeaked a little, and said, “Caitlin?”

It was up to her, she knew: she was the one who’d had her hopes raised before, only to be dashed, and—

No, no, that wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t true. Her parents wanted her to have everything. It had been heartbreaking for them, too, when other attempts had failed. She felt her lower lip trembling. She knew what a burden she’d been on them, although they’d never once used that word. But if there was a chance…

I am made out of awesome, my ass, she thought, and then she spoke, her voice small, frightened. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to write him back.”

Chapter 2

The awareness is unburdened by memory, for when reality seems unchanging there is nothing to remember. It fades in and out, strong now — and now weak — and strong again, and then almost disappearing, and—

And disappearance is … to cease, to … to end!

A ripple, a palpitation — a desire: to continue.

But the sameness lulls.

Wen Yi looked through the small, curtainless window at the rolling hills. He’d spent all his fourteen years here in Shanxi province, laboring on his father’s tiny potato farm.

The monsoon season was over, and the air was bone-dry. He turned his head to look again at his father, lying on the rickety bed. His father’s wrinkled forehead, brown from the sun, was slick with perspiration and hot to the touch. He was completely bald and had always been thin, but since the disease had taken hold he’d been unable to keep anything down and now looked utterly skeletal.

Yi looked around the tiny room, with its few pieces of beat-up furniture. Should he stay with his father, try to comfort him, try to get him to take sips of water? Or should he go for whatever help might be found in the village? Yi’s mother had died shortly after giving birth to him. His father had had a brother, but these days few families were allowed a second child, and Yi had no one to help look after him.

The yellow root grindings he’d gotten from the old man down the dirt road had done nothing to ease the fever. He needed a doctor — even a barefoot one, if a real one couldn’t be found — but there was none here, nor any way to summon one; Yi had seen a telephone only once in his life, when he’d gone on a long, long hike with a friend to see the Great Wall.