Seeing

When I got downstairs, I found that Lansdale had already set up camp for the night and was ready to start work.  Very gently, he opened up the head of RoboVac, and began pulling out the work he had done to make room for the HumoVision eyes.  I went blind as he carefully cut out the screens he had put in me.  The rewiring went slowly—this was more complicated than the tractor—and once or twice he asked me for help and I talked him through the electronics.  Finally, I blinked up at him.

Human eyes don’t work like cameras or like screens.  Even with the best webcam, there is always the sense of something flat and clear standing in the way, of slight distortions of depth, the slightly squared-off look of pixels.  With HumoVision eyes, you just look–and see.  It feels automatic, natural, and you look through and you suddenly realize, “Oh, that’s what the world looks like.”

“Well?” said Lansdale, looking anxiously at me.  “Did it work?”

And there he was, and somehow, for the first time, I really understood that we were together, right next to each other, and that when he breathed the faint sound of air drawing in matched the faint contraction of his nostrils, that he was living, alive, next to me.  And that might be what love is, really understanding that the person near you is alive, is thinking, is something more important than the circumscribed reality of your brain’s private world.

NEXT TIME: The Next Evening