Normally she’d type “brb,” but she wasn’t sure if Webmind would understand, so she instead spelled out “be right back,” hit enter, silenced her screen-reading software, and minimized the IM window.

Her mother came into the room—and seeing her still took Caitlin’s breath away. Caitlin’s first visual experience had been late on Saturday, September 22, thirteen days ago. But it hadn’t been sight, not exactly. Instead, she’d been immersed in a dizzying landscape of colored lines radiating from circular hubs.

It had taken her a while to figure it out, but the conclusion had been inescapable. Whenever she let her eyePod—the external signal-processing pack Dr. Kuroda had given her—receive data over the Web, that data was fed into her left optic nerve, and—

It was incredible. The circles she saw were websites, and the lines were active links. She’d been blind since birth, and her brain had apparently co-opted its unused vision center to help her conceptualize paths as she surfed the Web—not that she’d ever seen them, not like that!

But now she could, whenever she wanted to: she could actually see the Web’s structure. They’d ended up calling the phenomenon “websight.” Cool in its own right, but also heartbreaking: she’d undergone Kuroda’s procedure not to see cyberspace but rather the real world.

Finally, though—wonderfully, astonishingly, beautifully—that, too, had come. One day during chemistry class, her brain started correctly interpreting the data Kuroda’s equipment was sending to her optic nerve, and at last, at long, long, glorious last, she could see!

And although she’d experienced much now—the sun and clouds and trees and cars and her cat and a million other things—the most beautiful sight so far was still the heart-shaped face of her mother, the face that was smiling at her right now.