faced the sound of her husband’s breathing, her blue eyes looking beyond him.
“You have succeeded beyond your expectations.”
Amy had known this as soon as the fog of drugs from the last operation had
lifted. Her mind started making connections, and those connections made
connections, and so on at a geometrical rate of growth. By the time they had
finished putting her wig on, she had reconstructed the entire microsurgical
procedure from her limited readings and conversations with Cletus. She had
suggestions as to improving it, and was eager to go under and submit herself to
further refinement.
As to her feelings about Cletus, in less time than it takes to read about it,
she had gone from horror to hate to understanding to renewed love, and finally
to an emotional condition beyond the ability of any merely natural language to
express. Fortunately, the lovers did have Boolean algebra and propositional
calculus at their disposal.
Cletus was one of the few people in the world she could love, or even talk to
one-on-one, without condescending. His IQ was so high that its number would be
meaningless. Compared to her, though, he was slow, and barely literate. It was
not a situation he would tolerate for long.
The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology, as those of us left who read
with our eyes must recognize every minute of every day. Cletus was the second
person to have the operation done, and he had to accomplish it while on the run
from medical ethics people and their policemen. There were four the next year,
though, and twenty the year after that, and then 2000 and 20,000. Within a
decade, people with purely intellectual occupations had no choice, or one
choice: lose your eyes or lose your job. By then the “secondsight” operation was
totally automated, totally safe.
It’s still illegal in most countries, including the United States, but who is
kidding whom? If your department chairman is secondsighted and you are not, do
you think you’ll get tenure? You can’t even hold a conversation with a creature
whose synapses fire six times as fast as yours, with whole encyclopedias of
information instantly available. You are, like me, an intellectual throwback.
You may have a good reason for it, being a painter, an architect, a naturalist,
or a trainer of guide dogs. Maybe you can’t come up with the money for the
operation, but that’s a weak excuse, since it’s trivially easy to get a loan
against future earnings. Maybe there’s a good physical reason for you not to lie
down on that table and open your eyes for the last time.
I know Cletus and Amy through music. I was her keyboard professor once, at
Julliard, though now of course I’m not smart enough to teach her anything. They
come to hear me play sometimes, in this rundown bar with its band of ageing
firstsight musicians. Our music must seem boring, obvious, but they do us the
favor of not joining in.
Amy was an innocent bystander in this sudden evolutionary explosion. And Cletus
was, arguably, blinded by love.
The rest of us have to choose which kind of blindness to endure.