Part 1: Chapter 0
The following is an audio transmission sent on August 17, 2056.
A: “Hi all out there, we have with us today someone who can validate the fact that the popular new ViZiER headset, produced by APEX TECHNOLOGiES, was actually, in fact, not a new invention (as APEX-T has stated), but is a modified version of a device made by a singular inventor dating to much earlier than the ViZiER’s appearance on the marketplace in 20… Ladies and gentlemen, our guest~” (clapping)
B: “Hi Ava.”
A: “We’re so glad to have you here. You have a big story to tell and I’m so glad you decided to come on our show. – Anyway, you say the ViZiER is not actually developed by APEX-T and you in, in fact, say that you were a nanny for the actual inventor of the ViZiER and were given a demonstration of this item as early as 2027? Please start from the beginning.”
B: “I met Helena in 1983. I lived in Lower Manhattan, off Canal Street, if that means anything to you. It had already become quite hot that year, I remember. The city was a sauna and didn’t bode well for that summer. – Her parents were hiring for a nanny. The first time we all met was at the Bronx Zoo, a cloudy day in May. Helena was five. This was in the day before cell-phones, we met at the gates after talking just once on the telephone.”
A: “But this didn’t end up being just any old job, right?”
B: “No, indeed it did not. Her mother wore a flowered dress, navy with shoulderpads, which were in fashion back then. Brown hair, plenty of hairspray. Her father, too, was serious, as if being out of the office was the true task. They didn’t buy anything but tickets. Helena was near silent. After about an hour of walking around, I realized the child was having trouble seeing. Her nose was nearly in the signs as she tried to focus on the tiny letters.”
A: “This was something the parents hadn’t noticed before.”
B: “She didn’t even have glasses. Perhaps she always had her nose in a book so nothing seemed out-of-the-ordinary. Helena didn’t talk very much but her eyes had an unfocused haze. I’d seen the same from some of the studies I’d seen in school. Her parents were practically furious with rage: ‘Seeing problems?! If I’d have wanted a vision test I’d have called an optician!’ They were both professionals who devoted most of their waking time to work. They just hadn’t seen the signs. – After a week of anxiety; her parents and I fell in together as I could not let this problem go undiagnosed - Helena is taken to the doctor where it is discovered that she has deteriorating sight, ‘Optic Nerve Atrophy’. Within a year, Helena goes completely blind. A quiet child became a sullen one. A tempestuous temper kept her from enjoying school with other children, intensified after the vision disappeared, and her mother eventually gave up that fight.”
A: “And you became the family’s nanny.”
B: “You could say that. I felt like I was a part of the family. A fourth part they’d needed but never had.”
A: “Beautiful. You educated Helena.”
B: “I wish I could say that, but she was always the girl I met at that day at the zoo. She just grew taller. More like I guided her where she was going anyway. I helped her learn how to read Braille, and the things that hadn’t been translated, I read to her. We went on trips, we watched movies together. At first she asked me to describe everything in detail; we would spend an evening watching one film, with her pausing, asking me what was going on, and unpausing. What color hair did the lead have, was she dancing or just lilting about. Oh, and she loved me to brush her hair. Beautiful hair, she had. Blonde. Shiny and flat.”
A: “You narrated the things she couldn’t see.”
B: “But by the time she was a teenager, she rarely asked questions of anyone. She insisted on living just like everyone else.”
A: “How was your relationship with the parents?”
B: “Her parents divorced, Helena lived with her mother. Upper East Side. I got to the apartment at 5:30 each morning, when I didn’t sleep over, and left after her mother returned late in the evening. She poured her life into her work. The most I saw of her was every Thursday night when she’d pay me for the week’s work.”
A: “But you fell out of touch?”
B: “Yes, unfortunately. In 1997, Helena started at Columbia. I didn’t see her much in those years - I married and moved upstate. After she graduated, she and some friends started a computer accessibility company and moved out to Silicon Valley. She and I sent a few e-mails to each other in the early aughts but by and large we lost touch when she moved west.”
A: “Tragic. You saw her just one more time?”
B: “The last time I saw her was in 2027. I was on a flight to China on business, but because of weather, my flight was delayed. The wind was too strong to takeoff. I was stuck in LA. I had received word through the grapevine, perhaps a card from her mother but I forget exactly now, that Helena lived here now. I called her to see if she could put me up for the night. ‘Why not just try?’ – It was so strange, hearing her voice again. She was irritated, she regretted picking up, but something must have stopped her from saying no.”
A: “She gave you the address of her mansion?”
B: “Yeah. It was a sprawling thing, beautiful and sparse. Bright. Lots of windows. – I recall the day seeming to last forever. The afternoon sun was still on when she showed me where to put my things in the living room and pointed out the liquor cabinet. – I spread out my work and let the house go silent. I drank mildly - I felt old even then, and just the smell made me tipsy. – When I saw her then she was wearing dark glasses, maybe they were smart glasses, I really don’t know.”
A: “And it was that evening that she showed you the prototype.”
B: “That evening she comes into the living room - quiet, silently; I remember I had my head stuck in my work and she made me jump – She invites me to come into the workshop, where she’s going to show me something. She takes me to a large workshop - airy, well-ventilated - and she has me sit and goes through a locked door off to the side. – She comes out wearing - if I am to understand this correctly - ‘the Colorizer’.”
A: (nods)
B: “Her version had an black opaque glass pane across the front. But otherwise it looked strikingly like the ViZiER. – She comes out and says, ‘I’m Geordi La Forge!’ – She laughed but I didn’t. Helena was always serious.”
A: “Funny, isn’t it, since Geordi was blind at birth.”
B: (pause) “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose she was just trying to explain to me what she’d made.”
A: “‘The Colorizer’.”
B: “She explained to me that it took in visual input much like a camera or camcorder, and transmitted it through the optic nerve. She implied, though never directly stated, that her eyes had been removed to make room for the implants. Though I grew sad thinking about it in the years afterward, what was there to mourn when she had no sight from them? – My head was spinning at the time, I was drunk even as she brought out more champagne – She gave me a demonstration but all I really remember is how happy she was. Happiness, no, joy like I could never have imagined she ever lost herself in.”
A: (silence)
B: “She had one of the early self-driving cars. Took me to the airport the next morning. We were both sick, I remember feeling completely empty. But I made it on to my flight and went back to work.”
A: “Did you try to keep contact with her after that?”
B: “I sent her a thank-you, to which she acknowledged receipt, but that was the last I heard from her. I can’t believe it’s been nearly thirty years. – It’s not that I didn’t try; her phone number never picked up, e-mails went unanswered. Her mother died, not that the two of them kept up either. – I spent years hoping she was still working, albeit asking for total silence.”
A: “That’s too bad.”
B: “And I didn’t think much of it all, until geez, I was 83 when the UnBlindr came out. 2042. And there were so many problems with it, right?”
A: “Right. That was also made by APEX-T, but more primitive than the ViZiER.”
B: “Oh, right, I know what I forgot. Helena’s design, she said specifically, was solar-powered. And, at least as far as I know, was designed to work with implants replacing the eyes. Did she make a version for those that were sighted? I don’t know, I can’t say, but she specifically mentioned that her defunct optic nerves served as a bridge to the device.”
A: “She claimed to have solved the language of the nerve impulse.”
B: “But the UnBlindr, now, I’ve never used one, but it tracks your eye movements, right? And assumes that you are sighted, I remember the advertisements touted the device but also stated one should spend the majority of the day not using it. ‘Reimagine Recreation; Live in your Own Little Universe.’ Was that before the deaths?”
A: “APEX TECHNOLOGiES included disclaimers for all of their peripherals sold to the wide market. Unfortunately, disclaimers weren’t enough. The ViZiER actually forces someone syncing with it for the first time to take a safety course and tests for understanding before a profile can be made.”
B: “I tried one more time to reach Helena. Something about this product just didn’t seem right. Had she sold the rights? - I tried the e-mail address I hadn’t heard from in fifteen years. But this time, I got a response. – It was from a young lady who claimed she was a friend of a friend looking into Helena’s disappearance. She said she was glad to hear from me, that she had wanted to contact me and ask me some questions. She said Helena had been dead for at least over a decade but had managed to hide it - her invention had been bought (one might say ‘stolen’), altered, and Helena blackmailed into silence until she committed suicide. – She said this wasn’t the only thing APEX TECHNOLOGiES was trying to hide. She had a number of personal accounts that suspected that the UnBlindr was not actually projecting any hologram at all - But was actually waves of ‘nerve pressure’ emitted from the device - inducing not just visions in its users, but sensations and feelings of any type. And just as it could send pressure, could it measure the soft waves coming off of each human, betraying the stream of their mind’s eye. These feelings echoed through the nerves like music, each human a little different, but with a similar set of phonics that Helena had solved. She said this device was much more than the mobile television set it was claimed to be.”