Veil

by Aaron Overfield

  So, he went on to explain, after the shadowing was complete, when the adult’s Witness was uploaded back onto them, their mind couldn’t cope with the singularity of a child’s mind. He told her it would be like putting one’s mind through a ringer. The compression and pain were excruciating. The boundaries of a child’s mind were too suffocating, too restrictive for the mind of an adult to endure. He tried to convey how each mind had a spatial feeling to it, like a degree of tightness or looseness. A child’s mind felt unbelievably tight. So tightly wound it felt as if the mind might break. It was the exact opposite, he noted, of how a highly intelligent, open-minded, or enlightened person felt when one Veiled such a mind.

  “I often wondered about that,” Suren interrupted. “About what happens when a person of average intelligence Veils someone who is extremely intelligent. Does it rub off on them? Can they absorb some of that intelligence through some sort of osmosis?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” the doctor chuckled at the suggestion. “Not at all. What happens is a lot like what occurs if one Veils someone who speaks another language. It almost doesn’t register at all. At first, they might remember some of the thoughts and ideas, but they quickly fade—not unlike a dream you can’t hold onto—until the thoughts disappear completely. Even if one could hold onto thoughts that go beyond their natural comprehension, because their mind wouldn’t know how to arrive at such conclusions naturally, they simply wouldn’t make sense. Like a foreign language. The mind would reject them.”

  “Fascinating,” Suren sighed. She also found it disappointing. In her imagination, Veil could work as some sort of way to bring everyone up to the same level of intellectual and emotional intelligence.

  It didn’t work that way, the doctor told her and explained how those things were based more in the physiology of the brain itself. It was built into the wiring and structuring of the brain. Without the right physiology, without the right connections in the brain—which develop over time—one couldn’t simply force their brain to perform in a way in which it wasn’t yet capable. Something it hadn’t been trained to do.

  “Take, for instance,” he said, “if a deaf person were to Veil a hearing-able person. Now, it’s generally not the brain of a deaf person that’s the problem. It’s the ear, the organ itself. If the person has been deaf from birth, although the problem might reside in the actual ear, the part of the brain responsible for hearing hasn’t developed. It didn’t receive any signals, so it didn’t develop properly or make the proper connections.”

  “So, what happens when they do Veil a hearing … hearing-able person?”

  “Interestingly enough, over time, their brain can be trained to process the signals being stimulated by The Witness, which would cause them to hear the sounds in their mind. Since The Witness is essentially bypassing the organs of the ear and going directly to the brain, the person would be able to hear. The Witness would act as kind of a neuroprosthetic in that case, like a cochlear ear implant but created by the Veil process. However, first their brain has to be trained to hear, just as it would’ve been trained from birth.”

  “Has it happened? Are there reports of deaf or blind people benefiting from Veil and gaining hearing or vision?” Suren marveled.

  “There have definitely been reports,” he noted, “of Veil programmers amplifying certain signals from Veil to achieve this and slowly train the brain to receive and process signals, but so far the success has been slow moving. There is hope, but as of yet there hasn’t been any miracle. It seems very promising but people proceed with caution. First, the brain has to be trained. It has to make those connections, and then the person has to learn how to comprehend—how to understand the new information. They have to learn how to hear and understand what they are hearing. But, and this is the kicker, the person is only able to hear through Veil. They still aren’t able to hear through their own ears. They can only experience sound through someone else … through Veil. There is great potential, but it isn’t a total game changer, if you will. Just great potential.”

  Despite the caveats, the news pleased Suren immensely. Everything she learned seemed to indicate that the benefits of Veil far outweighed any detriments. If filled her with pride that her Jin could come up with such a remarkable theory—that he could be responsible for such a world-uniting and life-changing technology. She was more and more, with each day, proud of her Jin. Suren found herself personally proud of Veil.

  “We haven’t done anything yet,” was Ken’s answer to her. “And that future is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid.”

  “That future,” Suren asked, “is what you were predicting back then? Back when it was me and you, at the old house?”

  “Oh, that future was worse than the one I described. Much worse.”

  “Worse?!” Hunter interjected. He was still trying to decide if he should be upset by the fact that he was only then hearing about all those predictions for the first time.

  “Definitely worse. I mean, look at the progression of technology. Look at the path things take,” Ken explained.

  “You know you’re going to have to hold our hands down your line of reasoning, Ken,” Suren rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why you make us ask.”

  That made Ken laugh heartily.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really don’t do it on purpose,” he consoled them. “I really don’t. I always assume you both think like I do. I always assume we’re all on the same page.”

  “We don’t and we’re not,” Hunter grumbled, hoping Ken would pick up on his displeasure. He wasn’t used to being the dumb man in the room. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed, and he wanted Ken to know as much.

  “Ok, ok,” Ken nodded. “Let’s go back to the TV show example, shall we?”

  “I guess,” Suren leaned back into the couch.

  “Well, at first you had DVDs. Later, you could rip those DVDs. You could store them onto a hard drive and stream them from your computer to your TV. Eventually, you could digitally store them right inside your TV. PreVeil, the technology was being built right into TVs. Later, you could stream whatever you wanted to watch over the internet directly to your TV. First, there was Netflix with some TV shows and movies, which was then totally surpassed by the development of PixelNimbus, from which you could stream literally every single bit of digital media in existence straight into your living room whenever you wanted.”

  “So, you predict we’d go from centrally storing experiences that people Veil, to streaming the experiences directly to their Witness?” Suren asked.

  “Yep, exactly. We’d open the door for a Matrix-type scenario, except they’d have no control. They’d be gone; they would simply experience the stream. The technology would allow for streaming consciousness directly to someone’s brain. In realtime. Anyone who was hooked into the vNet could have experience directly streamed to them. Compound that with what I predicted before and, well, it’s apocalyptical type shit.”

  “But, you’ve always said that only the brain can access the information stored in the Witness; the information stored in a brain. That was the cornerstone of Jin’s theory,” Suren argued.

  “That’s still true,” Hunter responded for him. “What Ken’s saying doesn’t change any of that. But it would be quite possible—and easy—to recreate the signals transmitted by the brain. All you have to do is record them and artificially recreate them. It still takes a human brain to receive and interpret the information, but simply recreating the information and delivering it to a brain somehow would be much, much less complicated.”

  “Well then,” she looked at Ken, “if it would be so less complicated to do, what about ‘multiple discovery’? What about the fact that, if it’s possible and if someone can come up with it, then someone eventually will? Based off what you’ve always said yourself, this is inevitable. Isn’t it? Isn’t this what Veil is going to become?”

  Ken sighed and tilted his head back.

  Looking up at the ceiling, his answer sounded like a burden
some confession.

  “I know. I know. Yes. It’s going to happen. No matter what, it’s going to happen.”

  Dr. Mulligan found himself excused with a thanks and a warning. “I could’ve easily used Veil to mark your memory of this timeframe and then later erased everything between those markers, so that you’d have no recollection of any of this. However, I did not,” Suren contemptuously ingratiated him.

  “Th—thank you?” he mustered.

  “You are not to speak with anyone about this, and you are not to sell or share your memories of me.”

  “Yes, I understand, and I never would do such a thing,” he struggled to assure her.

  “You need to realize, if you do, I will hear about it. You will find that I can be most unforgiving when provoked. I kindly suggest that you do—not … provoke—me.”

  “Of—of course. I understand, Suren. Like I said, I—I never would.”

  “Please Auggie,” she finished with him, “address me appropriately.”

  “Ye—yes ma’am,” he lowered his head. “Yes, Ms … Ms. Widow Tsay.”

  Armed with Dr. Mulligan’s teachings from the previous week, Suren used her vKey to access the Veil Network freely and to bypass its security protocols. She began the process of secretly Veiling anyone with some degree of connection with Jin’s killer. First, she started with the friends and family of the two people on the list she received from Mariano; she started with the two people who were killed using Jin’s memory.

  She shadowed their wives, their siblings, their friends. Anyone within the scope of their lives who she could track down and who might have some kind of information on the identity of Jin’s killer. She used the doctor’s training to scan their thoughts for anything that might lead to a clue, even if the clue only led to another person who might also hold the most minuscule bit of information. She looked for the darkest sides of people. She knew that’s where the likes of him would lurk.

  The doctor was right: no amount of discussing the structure and nuances of the human mind could compare to experiencing it for oneself. She found every mind was different; every person was organized in his or her own, unique way. That was the best word she could think of to explain to it to herself: organized. She found people to be made of all the same stuff, although their minds were all organized differently.

  The only common characteristic she found, especially regarding the unconscious, was that there were certain things people told themselves over and over again and certain questions they asked themselves over and over. Suren found that everyone seemed equally unable to release him or herself from a self-inflicted, unconscious paralysis caused by particular standards to which they obsessively held themselves and that they used in order to gauge themselves.

  People would subject themselves to certain concepts with such regularity that they no longer realized they were doing so. They did it so long they forgot they ever did it in the first place and eventually it blended into the background of their mind like static buzz. The content of that looping, unconscious monologue became a determining factor in people’s personalities.

  However, everyone seemed completely unaware of how they were continually creating most of their own personality based off that internal monologue, which was coming from a voice they could no longer hear but also one they could not ignore. Suren figured that was probably why they called it the unconscious. Duh.

  When she branched out and began to Veil without restraint, the most common of those internal monologues she encountered in the unconscious of women focused on how desirable they were to others. The most common ones she encountered in men focused on how masculine they seemed to others. She found the prevalence of those two particular preoccupations to be quite sad, although there were countless more buried deep in the psyches of everyone she Veiled.

  People had multiple—often conflicting—subconscious fixations aimed at determining self-worth; measuring intelligence; gauging morality; comparing abilities; compartmentalizing sexual urges, adhering to gender roles, you name it. On and on and on and on. All below the surface and always churning away. Suren knew if she didn’t already have a particular goal in mind, she could’ve gotten lost in that aspect of people—in the contents of their unconscious.

  Suren was eventually able to take the discovery and apply it to herself. She wondered what kind of things she unconsciously told or asked herself. It proved to be a nearly impossible task to undertake, and she imagined that was what Dr. Mulligan meant when he said people relied on each other to reveal those parts of them. When Suren did unearth something about her unconscious, it happened quite by accident, and she was very pleased it did happen. The self-revelation ended a powerful, yet troubling sensation she experienced throughout her life.

  Suren was often overcome by waves of déjà vu. Some random moment would cause a spark in her. It would make her feel like someone or something grabbed her soul and shook her. Déjà vu would whoosh in and the sensation would overcome her physically and emotionally, so she scoured that moment for some kind of meaning or purpose. As if someone or something were trying to deliver a message; as if she were supposed to pay attention; as if that moment could be used to divine some greater understanding that would put everything into perspective and not only prove life had a reason, but actually reveal that reason.

  Suren was troubled by those occasions for the simple fact that they happened throughout her life. She long ago began to doubt the sensation itself, because it continued despite the fact that she never once arrived at any epiphanies in those moments. PostVeil and post-Dr. Mulligan, when Suren experienced a wave of déjà vu again, she was able to use her understanding of the unconscious to deconstruct the sensation, but do so in a way opposite of how she approached it before: focusing inward rather than outward. Suren went into herself to interpret the déjà vu rather than assume some mysterious, mystical, astral forces were the reasons for the sensation.

  Her revelation was so simple and so curious that it made her laugh, but also made her wonder why or how it ever started.

  Suren uncovered a question she asked herself over and over again: Did I dream this?

  She did always put a lot of stock in dreams, although she didn’t necessarily know why that was the case. Perhaps she figured dreams would be the method and opportunity the universe would choose in order to communicate with humans: in their sleep, when their guards were down. Perhaps she felt dreaming up a moment would mean she was some kind of powerful psychic and that her diving rod of a mind was so finely tuned she could dream up and predict the future. Perhaps she felt dreams held the same potential as those moments of déjà vu: they could actually reveal life’s reason. Perhaps her dreams and déjà vu would intersect in a way that made her the yin to Ken’s yang of logic: she could predict the future and understand the universe through divine intuition rather than logic.

  Well now, that’s just jabberwocky, she decided.

  Suren resolved to stop her unconscious from asking herself that question, because it was a silly question to ask. Once she did stop, she never experienced the sensation of déjà vu again, nor did she miss it. She didn’t want to assume the kinds of things that were behind a question like that, so she stopped asking it.

  So what if she dreamt up something? She still had to get up every morning and brush her teeth, and she still had to eat and poop. However, being able to use something Veil taught her about the unconscious only made her fixation on those looping monologues in others ten times worse when she secretly shadowed more and more unsuspecting people.

  She flashed back to when the doctor gave the example of someone who was interested in human sexuality and how they might focus on all the sexual aspects of a person’s mind. Suren wondered why she found herself so preoccupied with the looping narrative of a person’s unconscious. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why it grabbed such a strong hold on her or why she clung to it so tightly. Had she not deliberately left him in such a state of subjugation, she would’ve contac
ted the doctor to arrange another one of their Veil For Dummies sessions—that time to try to figure out why she became so fixated on the unconscious.

  The deeper and deeper Suren found herself immersed in and familiar with the world of Veil, the more and more detached she felt from Ken, Hunter, Brock, and Roy. The group all had one thing in common: none of them had much real experience with Veil. They were well versed in all things Veil, but simply knowing about it was a far cry from experiencing it. They all practically grew to pride themselves on the fact that they weren’t Veilers—that they never allowed themselves to become Inveiled. They never had a desire to do so.

  Suren eventually deluded herself with the belief that it wasn’t actually Veil she was interested in at all. She initially convinced herself that all she cared about was finding new leads, new clues, new people to Veil so that she could inch closer and closer to finding Jin’s killer. Whereas the real world turned up only dead ends, in the Veil world she had anyone and everyone at her disposal.

  Through the vNet, there was no such thing as a dead end. Everyone was a lead. She wondered how Surveil Enforcement could function. How could they know where to start a Surveillance, in order to solve a crime?

  Then she remembered—even the Department of Surveil wasn’t allowed to do what she was doing.

  Between the five of them, they came up with a plan and an agreement. Ken proposed it was pointless to begin discussing details about the plan until they at least asked Roy for his cooperation. They were his memories, after all.