Veil

by Aaron Overfield

  “Does this—” she started to ask but stopped and contemplated how to sensitively phrase what she was trying to get at. “Is this why … is this what lead to so many suicides when Veil first began to grow and expand? Because people started learning truths about themselves. From other people.”

  Suren immediately flashed back to a foreboding poem some unknown author penned barely two months after Veil was delivered to the world. It was only two lines, but it cut her like Hunter’s tongue could cut the weak.

  Veil is suicide wildfire, follow the leader.

  Lightening flash fast, Veil is a garden weeder.

  That poem deeply haunted Suren, as reports of more and more suicides surfaced. They eventually plateaued, but an unprecedented rash of suicides, which numbered in the millions, marred the First Veil Year. It was something none of them expected or predicted, not even Ken. Not even Ken.

  “Yes, yes,” the doctor nodded. “Oh yes. The Great Reveilation had its positives and negatives, and the rash of suicides—that suicide wildfire—during the First Veil Year was definitely a result of what we’re talking about. Most definitely. Some people simply couldn’t handle knowing truths about themselves, let alone someone else knowing them and experiencing them firsthand.”

  She cringed when he said those two words. Suicide wildfire. She flashed back to the poem again when those words crossed his lips. Her reaction to that poem was always the same.

  Leave those weak souls alone and find him. He’s the weed. Weed him out. Find him.

  Why couldn’t Veil weed out the one soul she begged it to weed out? The one soul that deserved to be weeded out.

  “I see,” Suren whispered and bowed her head.

  Dr. Mulligan saw her reaction and tried to move on. He hadn’t considered how that fact would affect the Mother of Veil. Of course that fact would affect her. Deeply.

  “Please though, please. What I really want you to take away from this is an understanding of what can be available to you through Veil and how, if you simply take the time to learn to access what’s available, there’s truly no part of a person that isn’t accessible. We have the entire iceberg, right in front of us. With training, I think I can teach you how to find whatever it is you’re looking for. Whatever it is that brought you to me.”

  “I understand, doctor. I honestly do. And that is why I summoned you here in the first place. So I am definitely ready to learn. I guess, with my background in education, my main question would be: what is the greatest obstacle to achieving this, from what you’ve seen? The main obstacle to people accessing or learning how to access the entire iceberg, as you put it?”

  “Hmmm … well, that’s definitely a profound question,” he paused. “I think if I had to choose something it would be the shadower’s agenda.” He paused again. “Yes, yes—that would be it, the shadower’s agenda.”

  “Their agenda?”

  “Yes. We’re all still human, still bound by what makes us ‘us’, if you will. So each of us, through Veil, is going to be inclined to look for some things more than other things, for whatever reasons. Each of us is going to choose which part of the iceberg we want to access—which parts we choose to listen for—and that is going to be determined by the shadower’s personality, not by the subject’s.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “Ok—ok,” he paused again. “Say, for instance, what interests me most is human sexuality. Let’s say, for whatever reason, that’s what fascinates me most. Not only how a person’s sexuality manifests itself into thoughts and feelings, but the entire spectrum of human sexuality. How it permeates everything about a person, from the way they walk and talk; to what catches their gaze; to how they give and seek attention—how people will give attention to and seek attention from those who they don’t even consider themselves sexually oriented towards. All in an effort to constantly define and gauge themselves. Women gauge their own attractiveness based upon how attractive they find certain women. Men gauge their own attractiveness based upon how attractive they find certain men. Human sexuality is a complicated, complex, multi-dimensional aspect and, with Veil, it’s all right there. It’s all there to be accessed and witnessed.”

  “Fascinating,” Suren sighed.

  She was being genuine. It was truly fascinating. Ken’s relationship with Hunter caught her completely off-guard at the time. She never suspected any such thing about Ken, and then afterwards she realized that no one should ever suspect such a thing out of anyone either way. She couldn’t believe she was the type of person to assume so much of people and so readily buy into notions of how things “should” be.

  Suren often cursed the culture of the United States for forcing her to live in a society where being “white” was the default and anything else was marginal or came in second. She saw signs of it everywhere, anywhere she went. But, there she was all along, presuming that being “straight” was the default, assumptive sexual preference for anyone and everyone. She realized everyone wasn’t “heterosexual until proven otherwise.”

  Suren understood how Veil taught people rather quickly—perhaps one of the quickest lessons—that sexuality was anything but black-and-white. PreVeil, public discourse was obsessed with all things straight vs. gay; in the New Veil World, those kinds of identities scarcely existed. They held no meaning. Although Suren was familiar with the shift, she never explored the nuances of it, as she did with the shifting of racial identities. And that was only because it didn’t affect her personally, or so she wrongly assumed.

  Suren snapped out of it and realized the doctor was still speaking.

  “…and deeper still, one can discover the lengths people will go in order to deny themselves thoughts and feelings that don’t coincide with the main sexual identity or label they’ve adopted. The lengths to which people will go to hide sexual thoughts and feelings from themselves and others. Sexual thoughts and feelings, even if fleeting, that instill shame, guilt, or fear in them. One could literally spend so much time delving into the sexual aspect of the mind that they don’t listen for anything else—they don’t look for anything else—although sexuality is but one aspect of a person available to us. If my main interest was human sexuality, that’s likely all I would focus on as I proceeded to Veil people.”

  Suren sat silent for a few moments and mulled over her own goals, in terms of what she had planned. She thought about what she intended to do once she hacked into Veil. She knew to achieve her goal, she’d have to follow people’s moral compass. Only the lowest of morals would lead her to what—or who—she sought.

  She leaned forward and asked, “What if it’s a person’s conscience I’m looking for? What if that’s what I’m after? Their guilt, their shame, their sense of right and wrong.”

  “That,” the doctor snapped his fingers and pointed at Suren, “has proven to be the easiest part of a person to access but the hardest thing for any of us to listen for.”

  For once, Hunter was at a loss for words. Suren’s request seemed entirely reasonable and … well, like a pretty damn good idea. Ken’s reaction didn’t make any sense to him. As it turned out, it didn’t make any sense to Suren, either.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic? And that’s saying a lot coming from me,” she asked Ken coolly and condescendingly.

  “No, actually, I don’t at all. When I told you in the beginning I was against Veil, the very idea of it, this is exactly what I meant. Exactly what you’re asking me to do now. That very possibility is what I think would turn Veil into one of the worst perils to ever threaten humanity,” Ken was adamant.

  “Maybe it would help if you explained to us why you think that, Ken,” Hunter attempted to mediate, although he too found himself a bit put off by what Ken was saying. They had countless conversations about Veil, and he never said anything like that before.

  “Ok, fine. Think about what you’re asking, Suren. Think about what it could mean. Sure, you could easily come up with a technology to record and store si
gnals from a brain. You could record and store entire neuroelectrical patterns. Those stored patterns could be reproduced artificially so they could be accessed by a Witness and then provided to another person, another brain. The possibilities are then endless. Absolutely endless. But the most extreme, absolute, and inevitable possibility is that it would lead to the recording, storage, and transmissions of people’s entire lives. Their entire experience. Our lives would become reduced to no more than a bit of storage on a hard drive—available for anyone to access whenever they wanted.”

  “Reduced? What do you mean reduced?” Suren raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

  “Think about it this way,” Ken went on, still exuding the same off-putting, indignant disgust. “Before Veil, you could buy, download, or stream entire seasons of various TV shows. Sometimes, if the show was no longer being aired, you could get the entire series. I guess you can still buy them if you could find a place that sells them. Anyway, once you have one, you can then sit down and watch an entire series from beginning to end within a few weeks. Now, what’s crucial here is how that series represents years of work, years of labor, years of experience. All of which gets condensed down and stored digitally for our consumption. While I find it pretty sad that you can sit down and watch the product of years and years of an entire group of people’s work within a few weeks, that’s not exactly dangerous. Veil would make one thing possible if we allowed storage or recreation of neuroelectrical patterns: literally recreating an entire person. That thing is what I’m talking about—that thing is dangerous. Bone chillingly dangerous.”

  “Ken,” Suren folded her arms across her knees and leaned forward on them, “dangerous how? What do you mean dangerous?”

  “Do I really have to spell it out for you?” he shouted and whacked the desk with both palms.

  “Yes!” Hunter barked. “Apparently you do!” He and Suren were taken aback by Ken’s obvious appall. Ken’s reaction disturbed Hunter because it meant Ken was seeing something, seeing a vision of the world far in the future, which Hunter never considered.

  “Fine. One, we’re not talking about TV shows here. We’re talking about people’s lives. The entirety of people, possibly getting stored and made accessible in perpetuity. Every single thing about them, ready to be consumed and digested. And, the way Veil works, people’s lives could get consumed within minutes. Their entire lives, the sum of all their experiences, turned into a unit of data that’s able to be consumed within minutes.”

  Suren and Hunter looked at each other. What Ken was saying didn’t sit well with either of them. In their gut, they knew what he was saying was right, and they knew it would be wrong to allow it, but they couldn’t fully understand why. They hadn’t had years to think about it like Ken had. Their minds needed time to process the information. Still, they immediately sensed the alarm in Ken’s voice, and it resonated in them.

  “But,” he snapped them out of it, “that’s actually not the worst part.”

  “How can that not be the worst part?” Suren half-laughed.

  “Veilinquishment,” Ken replied. “That’s how. Veilinquishment.”

  “Oh shit,” Hunter groaned and leaned back in his seat, his eyes fixating ahead as the implications of that word sunk in.

  “Veilinquishment?” Suren asked. She knew what the word was, and she was familiar with the phenomenon but didn’t understand how it applied there.

  “Hunt? Do you want to explain?”

  “Yuh—yeah.” He sounded hesitant. “I—I think what Ken is saying, and I think it’s valid, but what I think he’s saying is that we’re seeing Veilinquishment spreading more and more. Where people relinquish their lives over to Veil because they enjoy being someone else more than they enjoy being themselves. At first, it started off with people preferring to be a particular person. Based on their specific idiosyncrasies, they happen upon someone through Veil that they simply feel more comfortable being. Like that person is the perfect key to their lock or something. They literally prefer being that person more than they want to be themselves. They relinquish themselves over to that person. They give themselves up completely through Veil. They spend all their time shadowing and then experiencing life as that person. And after a while it may not only be one person in particular they prefer being, they simply might prefer never being themselves.”

  “Um hello, I understand Veilinquishment. I know what it is,” Suren interjected.

  “Right … right,” Hunter continued. “Well, Veilinquishment is spreading and it’s transforming. It’s no longer people only relinquishing themselves because they like being someone else. It’s spread into the shrinkage of culture in general. Less art is being produced. Less technology is being developed. Less research is taking place. People are relinquishing their own tastes and their own passions. Experience itself is becoming mainstreamed, condensed, and centralized. The world is slowing down.”

  “So what does that have to do with what we’re talking about? What in the hell are you two saying?” Suren stood up and paced the office.

  “I—I think,” Hunter started up again, “and Ken will have to stop me if I’m wrong, but I think it has to do with what will happen when Veilinquishment and realtime merge and explode due to the storage of consciousness.”

  Ken slammed a fist on the desk. “Exactly! Yes!”

  “No!” Suren shouted back. “No! That’s not an explanation.”

  “Yes it is,” Ken laughed. “If you think about it. Everything, like Hunter said, is getting centralized, condensed, mainstreamed. Experience itself is shrinking. So what happens if, all of a sudden, you have the ability to store and transmit—in realtime—an entire person? Their entire life. As things become more and more centralized. As experience itself becomes more condensed and preferentially reduced down. And not just reduced down but also amplified through Veil. All the experiences will get amplified and intensified.”

  Suren thought for a second and suddenly her face reflected the dread and doom the two men were already feeling.

  “Oh God,” she sighed before starting to explain the idea to herself out loud. “People could Veil entire lives in realtime. They could give up—they could Veilinquish—their own lives over to centralized experiences. Given enough time and evolution of Veil, everyone could live out the same life. That’s what the future could look like. Everyone could live out the same life through Veil.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Ken whispered. His voice returned to normal and he elaborated. “It would start off as society being reduced to the most valued people, like these Reality Velebrities we hear about, and then it would be reduced to the most valued experiences until eventually, the end result being all of humanity, all experiences, get reduced to one singular, amplified, centralized narrative. One set of so-called perfected, preferred, heightened experiences.”

  “And people,” Suren finished for him as she sat back down and stared at her hands, which she placed in her lap, “could spend their entire lives Veiling that one single set of combined experiences.”

  “They would,” Hunter spoke up. “Not could—they would. Because, by that time it would be all anyone knew. It would be what was considered life. And it would literally be the best life anyone ever lived. It would be the best life anyone could ever live. It would literally be better than real life.”

  “Oh my God,” Suren looked up at Ken with a tear streaming down one cheek. “What have we done? What have we done?”

  After that first day of what Suren jokingly referred to as “Veil For Dummies,” Dr. Mulligan spent the rest of the week training Suren how to use Veil to plunge the depths of a subject’s mind. With the right discipline and practice, he told her, one needn’t upload in realtime to get results. Depending on what they were looking for, he told her, and how deeply they were required to dig, Veiltime might be enough to get the information they were after.

  Not once did she divulge the purpose of the lessons and not once did she tip her hand. She kept her questions general and
vague enough to lend the impression that she merely wanted to enter the world of Veilers and become fully Inveiled; however, that being said, she wanted to enter the New Veil World fully prepared. Suren did mention to the doctor that it was impossible for anyone to shadow her; although puzzled, he didn’t appear too inquisitive.

  A few of Suren’s curiosities were quelled through the training process. She often wondered about the limitations of Veil in regard to her area of expertise: education. She wondered if Veil could be used to teach children. Absolutely, she was told, and it was already being done. The various levels of the vAcademy institutions started off as more fringe than Montessori schools but they were quickly growing, including the Veilementary schools. They were all gaining momentum and legitimacy.

  The problem, Dr. Mulligan suggested, was that the initial experience of shadowing children and adolescents left such a scar on the Veil world in the beginning that it wasn’t revisited again for quite some time. Initially, he stated, adults tried to shadow children and teenagers and although successful, the aftermath was so painful it made Veiling them nowhere near worth the suffering. While it was absolutely nothing near what vFlatliners endured, it was a thousand times worse than any hangover you could ever possibly imagine. The pain, he said—seemingly from experience—closely bordered on unbearable.

  The theory on why Veiling juveniles resulted in pain, he explained, had to do less with the structure of an adolescent brain and more so the nature of their mind.

  “Kids and teenagers have such a singularity of a mind. Their thoughts and feelings are seldom broad or expansive. They are a singularity. Their minds feel restricted and tight. When a child has a thought or feeling, they are reduced to that single thought—that single emotion. Babies, children, and teenagers do not have the mental capacity to adequately produce, much less hold, more than one complex thought or feeling at the same time.”