Other editions of book Be Thou My Vision

Io Mira is skilled at two things: exploration and trouble-making. She takes pride in her expertise, and spends her days sneaking around the deepest corners of the isolated, white-walled city she calls home, stealing food and provoking the guards, pushing the boundaries of her encapsulated existence though she knows that there is no outside world to speak of.The Governors – oligarchical rulers of the city – present all citizens with a choice when they reach the age of fourteen: sight or prosperity. Live a life of luxury without ever seeing the world around you, or live a life of servitude with your vision intact. Become a Plenty, or become an Optic. It’s a senseless ultimatum, Io knows, just another absurd exercise of the Governors’ power over the citizens they claim as their own, but still the decision must be made.So Io chooses sight.A few days later, she wakes up in the darkness with a chip in her head, an involuntary participant in a government program to test a system of vicarious sight. Super-Plenties, Governors who have made the virtuous decision to set an example by sacrificing their vision, are afforded the opportunity to gain it back again through the eyes of another. It is in this moment, her self-assurance shattered, that Io meets her new family: Ruth, the elderly Super-Plenty to whom she will grant her sight, and James, Ruth’s six-year-old companion.Despite her every intention to hate them, Io’s heart is won over by James’ youthful devotion and Ruth’s active decision not to take control of her vision. For six years, they live in uncommon peace, quietly eluding the Governors’ notice and reveling in the hope and freedom that manage to flourish even under the Governors’ stringent regime, all the while hiding the fact that the chip in Io’s brain goes unutilized. But in the space of just a few weeks, with little explanation, the Governors begin to roll out a series of rules and regulations that quickly diminish what little freedom the citizens already cling to. Decreased rations, earlier curfews, and a series of increasingly violent encounters between Optics and government guards threaten the tenuous stability of the city.As tensions rise, fueled by rash agitators, ignorant leaders, and inequality both systemic and systematic, Io finds that the peace and contentment she once took for granted are slipping quickly away. Something is changing within the walls of the city, born of impossible external forces that at times seem out of even the Governors’ control. One afternoon, Io stumbles upon Daniel, a young man beaten to the edge of death by the guards, memoryless but convinced that he has somehow come from outside the city. On impulse, Io takes him in, risking her life for the sake of a stranger and raising the suspicions of the most powerful of the Governors.The stories Daniel tells challenge Io’s certainty with powerful new questions about the city in which she lives. As the consequences of her decisions spin her world out of control, she struggles to face a new reality: something is changing within the walls of the city, but maybe she never truly knew it to begin with.