An Eye Operation

The day after…

David: Replacing the lens under a local anesthetic was more dramatic than I’d anticipated. Think travelling through landscapes like Matrix and Space Odyssey. Bright lights, vivid colors. HAL as doctor, machines pumping and screeching and beeping, nurses flying about like bird flocks. 

Helena: A robot doc?

David: No, he’s a 30 something human doc, joking around with colleagues, and as he installed the artificial lens I could see pink fish, green corals, and a yellow sunset in a turquoise sky.

Helena: A Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds chamber?

David: Yes, but I was certainly conscious that he was putting a knife in my eye. Then at the end he said the op went as planned. Could have been my imagination but he sounded a bit disappointed. He admitted to me once he likes ops that go off like fireworks.

Helena: But now you can see clearly?

David: Plaster removed from left eye this morning. WOW, the clarity, with no glasses. Like when I was a kid. Time travel!
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Voice-over

David passed the doctor’s rolling eyeb
all test the morning the plaster came off the eye. Not out of the woods yet though, pressure still up in the eye. Check on it next week.

Handshaking protocols

The visitor arrives at the Virtual Center.

...

Supervisor: Find your way all right?

Visitor: Something of a journey of uncertainty. But I’m here. Nice office.

Supervisor: I feel lucky to have it. It’s a new building. I thought we’d begin by going upstairs and you can meet Carl. His unit handles the machine translation coding.

Visitor: Sounds fine.

Supervisor: In here. This is Virtual Carl, he handles the translation side of things. He’s working on a modification to Unicode. He can tell more about what this unit does.

Visitor: Virtual Carl. Nice to meet you.

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Voice-over

Getting to the point when introducing people who share an interest but have never met can follow a simple protocol to establish a connection. Something like fax machines or computer modems beeping at each other to establish connection speed, coding, interrupting procedures, etc.

In this case, the supervisor uses a location, identity, task, wh3 approach:

Where (“In here”),

Who (“This is…”),

What (“he handles…” and “he’s working on…”).

“He can tell you…” is the handover for the drill-down phase into the detail substrata.

Interesting that stories of the future (eg scifi) generally still have humans using present-day lexis, grammar and pragmatics. For an example, read the script of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

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