Since the surgery, Isaac found pleasure often in walking the hills that rolled away invitingly from the village he now called home. The weather, he felt, never spoiled a good walk, merely enhanced it in different ways. He marvelled at the ability of fog to make mysterious the environs he had become so familiar with, and of rain to change the hues and shades of the grass and trees, invigorating them with a freshness only seen in these conditions.
It was two years since the first surgery, and the implant had served not only to repair Isaac, but also to improve him. He had realised that the organ it replaced had been causing him problems since long before the cancer was actually found and diagnosed, and its robotic replacement worked flawlessly, giving more of a lust for life than just the effect of having one ailment resolved.
This was the thought that ran through Isaac’s head as he lay, one resplendent afternoon, gazing into the sky. He had taken a break from his walk in order simply to enjoy sunshine, and to marvel at the laws of nature that allowed his environment to change so much from day to day. It was not long before he was once again lost in reverie, marvelling at the Sun, and how its heat and light facilitate and nurture every facet of our existence. He thought of photosynthesis, and radiation, and particles and waves, and of the fragile nature of humans. He started at the Sun and cursed his inability to see more than just a bright dot, and yearned for the ability to process and understand the whole spectrum.
In later years he would often wonder, and never quite be able to say for sure, whether he had kept staring deliberately in order to sear his retinas, or whether he had just been taken in by the moment, and simply given in to the trip, as his collapsing optic nerve desperately sent confusing signals to his visual cortex. The last sights he would ever see with his human eyes, were exquisite and inexplicable - a combination of actual sights, and incomprehensible imagery caused by his delicate nerves being unable to process the light and radiation, and sending overwhelming information to Isaac’s brain.
The first surgery had done no small amount of good for the reputation of ersaTzLabs, who in the wake of their success had found their processes and designs being favourably peer-reviewed, and had received numerous grants and investments to further their work. So it was not a little ironic that as the doctor talked Isaac through the procedure to replace his eyes with far more advanced electronic facsimiles, he was unable actually to see the great advances that had been made in the lab as a result of his first visit there.
Isaac had, on a couple of occasions in his youth, experimented with hallucinogens. Mushrooms, LSD, even once venturing to try mescaline. More than the physical sensations caused by his brain operating outside its usual parameters, what Isaac most remembered was the startling changes he had seen in the world around him, while tripping. Shapes seemed to morph into one another, and light danced from unknown sources, illuminating and colouring everything he laid eyes on.
As he woke from the surgery, and his nerves adjusted to the signals being sent by his new ocular replacements, his first thought was that he was once again hallucinating. He could quite clearly see the room he lay in, could recognise all the shapes, and gauge distances - the clock on the wall, the flowers on the table by his bed - but what really grabbed his attention and gave him the impression he was tripping, was the light through the window. Rather than just observing the light by the way it reflected off the objects in the room, and the dust floating in the shafts of light, he could see movement and colours that he had never experienced. Though he didn’t yet realise what it was, unaccustomed as he was to this new visual data, Isaac was seeing infra-red, and ultra-violet. He was able actually to perceive the waves, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could make his new eyes focus in on detail that he had hitherto been unaware even existed.
As days became weeks, and he grew accustomed to the new information the prosthesis allowed him to digest, he began to acknowledge that in becoming more cybernetic, he was improving himself. He was able to do more, to see more, to feel more, than he had ever thought possible. He was forced to conclude that his unconscious will was now driving his metamorphosis. Though he had not deliberately ruined his biological eyes, the success of the first surgery had given him a confidence in his survival that was quite literally unnatural.
