Afraid of the Dark Read Online Free

drilled into the floor attached to the man’s ankles. Then he leaned forward in his chair, looking straight at the man in front of him.
    “Yeah, how ’bout that,” said Jack. “In perfect English.”

Chapter Three
    I t was a ten-hour car ride from Miami to Pensacola, like going to Alabama. The flight in Chuck Mays’ new Cessna took a little over two hours. Vince practically kissed the ground upon landing, thanking God that Chuck hadn’t suffered a midair heart attack that would have left Vince at the controls. At the terminal they piled into a rental car—Chuck, Vince, and Sam. Sam was Vince’s golden retriever.
    His guide dog.
    Since losing his sight, Vince had heard all the amazing stories. The guy who blew his nose so violently that his eye popped out. The firefighter whose eye was left hanging by the optic nerve after a blast from a fire hose. The child who ruptured her eye on a bedpost while bouncing on the mattress. What made these cases remarkable was that in each instance the ultimate visual impairment was nonexistent or negligible, or so the tales of medical miracles went. On the other side of the coin were patients who seemed to suffer only minor ocular trauma, the globe still intact, but whose vision was lost forever. They were the unlucky ones, the Vince Paulos of the world.
    “You are going to be amazed by this technology,” said Chuck as he steered into the parking lot.
    Vince heard him, but he didn’t answer right away. All this talk about some kind of military gadget that could effectively restore his vision had him drifting back to the day he’d lost his sight—to that pockmarked door again, the opening to his personal and permanent tunnel of darkness.
    “Vince?”
    “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking for a minute.” It was a lie, of course, at least the part about “a minute.” Vince had done far better than anyone had expected over the past three years, staying on as a full-time instructor with the police force and occasionally serving active duty as a negotiator, providing for himself, leading a surprisingly normal and enjoyable life without sight. Even so, a man couldn’t help thinking and rethinking from time to time, imagining how different things might have been if he just hadn’t pushed open that door.
    The car stopped, and Chuck shut off the engine. “We’re here,” said Chuck.
    Here was the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a not-for-profit research institute where Chuck had some contacts. Vince had never heard of the place, but IHMC research partners included everyone from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to IBM and Boeing. They don’t just think outside the box, Chuck had told him, these guys are reinventing the box. The idea was to fit human and machine components together in ways that exploited their respective strengths and mitigated their respective weaknesses. For Vince, that meant the possibility of a whole new door to walk through.
    “This way, Deacon Blues,” said Chuck.
    Vince smiled as he and Sam climbed out of the car. Chuck had been playing “Deacon Blues” and other old Steely Dan songs on the car stereo ever since telling Vince that one of the board members at IMHC was Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, a self-taught specialist in terrorism, missile defense, and chemical and biological warfare who was better known as a guitarist with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. Skunk was one of those reinventing-the-box guys who worked alongside retired army generals, scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers, and social scientists of various stripes.
    They got a name for the winners in the world . . . call me Vincent Paulo.
    Vince was trying not to get too excited, but if this new technology for the blind did everything Chuck said it could, Vince would literally be looking at life through a new porthole.
    Fuck that door.
    Sam stopped, and so did Vince. They were at the entrance.