Wool (Visor showing fake view) | Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives

Brief description

When Holston climbs out of the silo in his survival suit, he is stunned to see that everything looks green and lush, completely unlike the brown and gray wasteland he has seen on screens his whole life. The sky is blue and birds fly overhead. Even the skyscrapers in the distance, that looked broken on the screens in the silo's upper level, are whole. He believes that the IT department has fooled the silo's residents into believing that the outside world is toxic. He cleans the lenses of the cameras that capture the images of the outside world out of pity for the people still left inside the silo.

But after a few minutes, he feels sick. Thinking there is too little air in the survival suit, he manages to smash it with a rock and remove the helmet. But when he takes off the helmet and looks at the world with his own unaided eyes, he sees that the world is in fact brown and gray, the skyscrapers are broken, and the body of his wife, who left three years earlier, is lying on the hillside next to him.

In this series, technology or the lack of technology is consistently used to keep the people subdued and to avoid an uprising. The screens in the silo never show the outside world quite as it is, because of dirt on the lenses and dead pixels on the screens. Holston then comes to distrust the images shown as he finds documents showing that the world outside is not really toxic. This appears to be confirmed when he steps outside, but then when he removes the helmet he discovers that the green lushness was a deception too.

These situations are the most obviously relevant to machine vision, but technology more broadly is also heavily manipulated, for instance so that silos cannot communicate with other silos (or even know that other silos exist).

Pull Quotes

He shuffled up the narrow ramp, walls of chipped concrete to either side, his visor full of a confusing, brilliant light. At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he’d been condemned for his simple sin of hope. He whirled around, scanning the horizon, his head dizzy from the sight of so much green!

Green hills, green grass, green carpet beneath his feet. Holston whooped in his helmet. His mind buzzed with the sight. Hanging over all the green, there was the exact hue of blue from the children’s books, the white clouds untainted, the movement of living things flapping in the air.

Holston turned around and around, taking it in. He had a sudden memory of his wife doing the same; he had watched her awkwardly, slowly turning,

Howey, Hugh. Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series) (p. 33). Broad Reach Publishing. Kindle Edition.

And then his vision completely disappeared. All was black. Holston clawed at his face, even as his stomach tangled in a new torturous knot. There was a glow, a blinking in his vision, so he knew he wasn’t blind. But the blinking seemed to be coming from inside his helmet. It was his visor that had become suddenly blind, not him.

Howey, Hugh. Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series) (p. 38). Broad Reach Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Two more cracks before it landed, and the helmet popped free. Holston could see. His eyes burned from the effort, from not being able to breathe, but he could see. He blinked the tears away and tried to suck in a deep, crisp, revitalizing lungful of blue air.

What he got instead was like a punch to the chest. Holston gagged. He threw up spittle and stomach acid, the very lining of him trying to flee. The world around him had gone brown. Brown grass and gray skies. No green. No blue. No life.

He collapsed to one side, landing on his shoulder. His helmet lay open before him, the visor black and lifeless. There was no looking through the visor. Holston reached for it, confused. The outside of the visor was coated silver, the other side was nothing. No glass. A rough surface. Wires leading in and out of it. A display gone dark. Dead pixels.

He threw up again. Wiping his mouth feebly, looking down the hill, he saw the world with his naked eyes as it was, as he’d always known it to be. Desolate and bleak. He let go of the helmet, dropping the lie he had carried out of the silo with him. He was dying. The toxins were eating him from the inside. He blinked up at the black clouds overhead, roaming like beasts. He turned to see how far he had gotten, how far it was to the crest of the hill, and he saw the thing he had stumbled into while crawling. A boulder, sleeping. It hadn’t been there in his visor, hadn’t been a part of the lie on that little screen, running one of the programs Allison had discovered.

Howey, Hugh. Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series) (p. 39). Broad Reach Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“What am I holding?” she asked, waving the scroll of printout.

“It’s a program,” he whispered.

“You mean like a timing circuit? Like a—?”

“No, for a computer. A programming language. It’s a—” He looked away. “I don’t want to say. Oh, Jules, I just want to go back to Mechanical. I want none of this to have happened.”

These words were like a splash of cold water. Scottie was more than frightened—he was terrified. For his life. Juliette got off the desk and crouched beside him, placed her hand on the back of his hand, which rested on his anxiously bouncing knee.

“What does the program do?” she asked.

He bit his lip and shook his head.

“It’s okay. We’re safe here. Tell me what it does.”

“It’s for a display,” he finally said. “But not for like a readout, or an LED, or a dot matrix. There are algorithms in here I recognize. Anyone would …”

He paused.

“Sixty-four-bit color,” he whispered, staring at her. “Sixty-four bit. Why would anyone need that much color?”

“Dumb it down for me,” Juliette said. Scottie seemed on the verge of going mad.

“You’ve seen it, right? The view up top?”

She dipped her head. “You know where I work.”

“Well, I’ve seen it too, back before I started eating every meal in here, working my fingers to the bone.” He rubbed his hands up through his shaggy, sandy-brown hair. “This program, Jules—what you’ve got, it could make something like that wallscreen look real.”

Juliette digested this, then laughed. “But wait, isn’t that what it does? Scottie, there are sensors out there. They just take the images they see, and then the screen has to display the view, right? I mean, you’ve got me confused, here.” She shook the printed scroll of gibberish. “Doesn’t this just do what I think it does? Put that image on the display?”

Scottie wrung his hands together. “You wouldn’t need anything like this. You’re talking about passing an image through. I could write a dozen lines of code to do that. No, this, this is about making images. It’s more complex.”

He grabbed Juliette’s arm.

“Jules, this thing can make brand-new views. It can show you anything you like.”

He sucked in his breath, and a slice of time hung in the air between them, a pause where hearts did not beat and eyes did not blink.

Juliette sat back on her haunches, balancing on the toes of her old boots. She finally settled her butt on the floor and leaned back against the metal paneling of his office wall.

“So now you see—” Scottie started to say, but Juliette held up her hand, hushing him. It had never occurred to her that the view could be fabricated. But why not? And what would be the point?

Howey, Hugh. Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series) (pp. 171-172). Broad Reach Publishing. Kindle Edition.