Free WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

shuddering breath. “It seems they’re having massive communications failures over there—cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn’t very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment—now, if they’d just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which...”

    He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin’s iPod—she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn’t do her any good. But it wasn’t much bigger than Bashira’s iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple’s devices.

    “Okay,” said Kuroda. “I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post-retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?”

    “Yes,” said Caitlin, and “Right,” added her mom.

    “But now we’ve added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It’ll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams—your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod’s software.”

    “That sounds like a lot of data,” Caitlin said.

    “Not as much as you’d think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal—the acute portion produced by the fovea—amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate.”

    “Ah,” said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.

    “Now, there’s a switch on the side of the unit—feel it. No, farther down. Right, that’s it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there’s two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it’s not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn’t want people hacking into your brain.”

    “Goodness!” said Mom.

    “Sorry,” said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. “Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode—in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn’t receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it’s in simplex. Press the switch again—that high-pitched beep means it’s in duplex.”

    “All right,” said Caitlin.

    “And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on.”

    “Okay.”

    “And, um, don’t lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it’s pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it’s lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check but they’ll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit—not after this one has failed in their eyes.”

    It’s failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought—but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan—well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly—she’d be able to kiss the dark glasses goodbye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down