Seeing leads to Disbelieving

[Sam_SemaJ 0]

Personal Log: S.K. Sema’J

SD 0402.05

- Seeing leads to Disbelieving -

 

Sam sat on the bio bed. “Try to focus on a specific point” the young doctor had told him. Sam was rather possessive about his implants and was having trouble trusting them to a doctor who sounded, and was starting to look (as his vision returned) like he was about ten years younger than Sam. He let it pass and concentrated on the unblurring point above him.

 

As his vision returned, Sam noticed something…they didn’t feel right. There was a certain tension on the muscles, depending on the settings of the implants. He had grown used to the tension in his head, and like an engineer with the hum of his engines, would know if it was off. That usually didn’t matter, because if they were wrong he couldn’t see anyway. But now that he thought hard about it, there wasn’t any tension when his eyes went out of focus on the bridge. He had reached for his temples out of instinct, but there hadn’t been any pain. Now that he could see, they felt wrong.

 

What the hell was going on here? He ran through the theory of the technology in his head. The implants used an intricate lens/sensor system to scan the spectrum and take sensor data from the space in front of him. Then, a microcomputer translated this data in to signals that were sent to electrodes in his visual cortex, his brain was then fooled into thinking this was a picture from the optic nerve. Okay, he was clear on that. The internal settings made his eye muscles, the scanners, the computer and the electrodes work together to create the exact signal that his brain could interpret, the most important ones were those that linked the mechanical parts of the lenses to his ocular muscles, so when he thought about moving his eyes, squinting (zooming, a special feature) and most importantly focusing, the implants reacted. If these settings changed, everything else had to change accordingly. This Doctor Westler just changed the parameters to a very wrong setting (that was starting to be painful) and now his brain saw clearly. That made no sense.

 

As the realization came to him, he began to shudder. What could possibly make his brain interpret signals wrong, the prospect scared Sam very very much.

 

Sam began to wince from the muscle tension in his temples as he prepared to ask Dr. Westler what the exact setting was that he had just changed the implants to…