Status Update • 6 January 2024

After a three-week delay caused by my need to clear a bad head cold and sinus infection, followed by the year-end holidays, my transition to becoming a cyborg is back on schedule. 

In addition to the implant in my right arm that helps to control my blood glucose levels, I now have an implant in my right eye that helps to…

Well, that’s an interesting question. 

People have asked what the surgery was like. I don’t know. I was sedated for most of it. People have asked how I felt afterward. Like I’d had my eye carved out with a melon baller, peeled like an onion, and shoved back into its socket. The actual surgery was nowhere near that invasive, of course, but that’s how it felt. For a while afterward I also felt like I’d been to the vet, as a I had a plastic shield taped over my eye socket to prevent my rubbing or scratching it. At least they didn’t make me wear a cone. 

I knew Martin Caidin. Martin Caidin was a friend. Long ago I read his novel, Cyborg, which you probably know better by the title of the TV series based on it, The Six Million Dollar Man. If Martin was still alive I’d want to have a few words with him right now, about just how awkward and uncomfortable it is to recover from eye implant surgery. Among other things, I’m having to re-learn depth perception.

The strangest and most unexpected side-effect, though, is the way in which it has radically changed how I perceive color. I’m seeing in two very different spectra now, depending on whether I’m looking through my left or right eye. For example, we received the preliminary cover art for Henry Vogel’s latest novel, THE PRINCESS SCOUT, yesterday.

 

I’m no longer confident that I know what anyone else sees. I am seeing two quite different images, depending on which eye I’m using.

This effect is not confined to discrete images. As I move, walk, even turn my head, the colors I’m perceiving are constantly shifting, as objects move relative to my field of view. It’s…unsettling. Hallucinatory, I’ve been told, by a friend who has a lot more experience with that subject than I do. 

As for what this means for Stupefying Stories: now that the first phase of the surgery is done and I have some idea of what to expect following the second phase, I’m learning what adjustments I need to make in order to compensate: scaling font sizes, adjusting monitor brightness and contrast, changing the ambient light, that sort of thing. The plan at this point is to resume running SHOWCASE stories beginning next week, and to ease back into publishing books over the course of the next few weeks. 

One step at a time. Baby steps. And they need to be very careful steps, as my depth perception is still out of whack. Right now my instincts are telling me to go hide in the dark until my vision recovers. Fortunately, this being Minnesota in the dead of winter, even on clear days it’s dark 16 hours a day.

Upward and onward,
Bruce Bethke