“Visual data,” replied Shel. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up. There was a tattoo of a snake coiling around his left forearm. “But it’s not encoded in any standard format.”

“How do you know it’s visual, then?”

“Sorry,” said Shel. “I should have said it’s not encoded in any standard computer format. Took me forever to find the format it is in.”

“And that is?”

Shel did something with his mouse. Another window came to the foreground on the center monitor, and—Tony glanced down quickly to confirm it—on Shel’s own monitor, too. It was a PDF of a journal article entitled “Nature’s Codec: Data Encoding and Compression Schemes in Human Retinal Signaling.” The authors were listed as Masayuki Kuroda and Hiroshi Okawa.

“Human vision?” said Tony, surprised.

Shel spoke without looking back at him. “That’s right, and in real time.”

“Human vision… on the Web? How?”

“That’s what I was wondering—so I googled those two scientists. Here’s what I found.”

The PDF was replaced by an article from the online version of the New York Times headlined “Blind Girl Gains Sight.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tony said, after skimming the first paragraph. “I read about that. Up in Canada, right?”

Shel nodded. “Except she’s actually an American.”

“And it’s her visual signals that are being sent over the net?”

“Almost certainly,” said Shel. “The data is usually transmitted from her house in Waterloo, Ontario. She’s got an implant behind her left retina, and she uses an external signal-processing device to correct the coding errors her retina makes so her brain can properly interpret the signals.”

Analysts at other workstations were now listening in. “So it’s like she’s transmitting everything she sees?” Tony asked.