Mind's Eye Read Online Free

behind him, which had to swerve blindly into the next lane to avoid a collision, narrowly missing an oncoming car in that lane. In both lanes tires screeched and horns honked, and it was only by blind luck that his action hadn’t resulted in a multi-car pileup.
    “What the fuck is your problem, asshole!”
    “What happened over there?”
    “Damn , ” thought a teenage boy pulling out of a McDonald’s on the corner with a bag full of food. “Just missed . A crash would have been so cool . ”
    Hall picked up dozens of other thoughts related to his reckless maneuver, but he paid them no attention. He was too busy panicking. And struggling to see something other than a massive three-dimensional map that hovered directly in front of his face.
    Suddenly the road came back into view. His mind had made some kind of adjustment. The map was still present in his visual field, but now, so was the road. And he could choose which one to look at. Like having side by side televisions, each with a different football game. He could concentrate on either one to the total exclusion of the other if he wished. Or like bifocals. When one wanted to see something far away, one looked through the top half; close by, the bottom.
    He tilted his head back and blew out a long sigh of relief toward the ceiling, ignoring the horns that continued to honk at the idiot who had decided to take a sabbatical in the middle of a busy street, and a myriad of other choice words he was able to read that were far less charitable than idiot .
    Hall chose to ignore the map and it shrank from his view. He carefully resumed driving. A few minutes later he pulled into the parking lot of a mini-mart. The map was now gone. He guessed that by not focusing on it at all for a period of time, the software behind it had told it to vanish.
    He studied the car’s GPS. It was also displaying directions to La Jolla, but they were standard, not floating far larger than life in front of his face in ultra-high-definition 3-D clarity. He reached over and turned the device off, as well as the car.
    “Give me directions to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography?” he said aloud, and instantly a map sprang into sight once again, hanging in front of his face. He studied it for several long seconds in disbelief. It was a standard Google Map. It even had the Google logo on it, and the directions looked to be accurate. And it hadn’t been generated by the car’s GPS device either, since this device was still off.
    Hall thought about the map disappearing and it promptly complied.
    Coincidence? Or did it somehow respond to his thoughts? Companies had made great strides with game controllers and artificial limbs that could be operated by thoughts alone, so it wasn’t out of the question. He thought about the map reappearing, and there it was.
    So could he do this trick only with maps?
    Show me the Wikipedia entry for Bakersfield, California , he thought, and immediately, like the map, the Wikipedia entry was before his eyes, overlaid with his real vision. Again, he could focus on both views at once, although, like watching two different movies, he could only do so at a very superficial level. But as before, if he focused on one, the other would recede completely until he decided to focus on it again.
    He tried several other searches in rapid succession, each of them appearing instantly. There was no way around it, he was tapping into the Internet. He could surf the web using thoughts alone, and the text or graphics or video would magically be projected in front of his face in ultra-high definition.
    But projected by what? And how?
    He thought about how this might be working for several minutes, coming up blank, when it occurred to him to use the Internet itself to understand what was happening. Search ‘accessing the Internet using thoughts alone,’ he instructed to whatever it was that was responsible for this miracle of technology.
    A results page popped up. It wasn’t Google or