The Veil

by Bowden, William

  “I am as real as you want me to be.”

  “Are you a Veil engineer?”

  “I am not.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I am something else.”

  “I do not trust you. My mind has been read and tricks played upon me.”

  “We have not read your mind, Lucy. Though we have placed some things there for you to remember.”

  “What things?”

  “You will know. When the time is right.”

  To Lucy the woman’s calmness reflects her own annoyance in a manner that is all too evident. She adjusts accordingly—a slight relaxation of her posture, coupled with a softer tone.

  “What is this place?”

  “A place between worlds.”

  “Are we in Heaven? With angels?”

  “This is not Heaven. And they are not angels. The presence you can feel…they are Veil engineers. A brother and sister. We are in a bubble, of sorts, which they have manifested so that we may be alone together. All is not as it seems, Lucy.”

  “People keep saying that that—and bad things happen after.”

  “Then you must be brave.”

  Lucy reconciles herself to the situation. It is real and not real, though how she came to understand that is not clear to her. Oh. She eyes Olivia with renewed suspicion.

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because of the jewel within you, where there should be none.”

  “A jewel?”

  “A bond between you and another, a connection that transcends consciousness.”

  “What other?”

  The woman ponders Lucy with a slight cock of her head.

  “What a curious creature you are. Why we should find such a jewel in you, or why it might be so bright, was, to say the least, quite troubling.”

  “Because I was made?” Lucy suggests, not holding back on the bitter cynicism with which she frames her supposition. “Because I am a machine?”

  “No, Lucy. Because of the manner of your creation.”

  “Then I do not understand.”

  “Neither did we, until we looked back at all that had transpired. If we had known what we know now, we would have taken precautions—to keep you safe.”

  “The manner of my creation?”

  “When you were created you were formed from a merging of existing personality patterns—so that you could be gifted emotions that would otherwise destroy you.”

  “Like Alice?” Lucy says quietly, remembering one who had come before her, a predecessor whose suffering had made her own existence possible.

  “Yes. Like Alice. The selection was supposed to be random, the intention to protect both the personality donors and the recipients. But in your case we found the two patterns to have been deliberately predetermined.”

  “By Dr. Ellis?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Two?”

  “A mother and a father, Lucy.”

  It does not have to be said. She feels it within her. Not a memory placed there, something deeper—

  “Robert?”

  “And Monica Satori, the emotional connection between them magnifying the gifting process, making you what you are.”

  “Which is the jewel?”

  “We do not know, and that’s why you must return. So that it may be preserved, and observed further.”

  The white world dims to reveal the ghostly outline of another resolving into view—Lucy’s machine room aboard the Afrika, a figure floating at her MBI unit, one hand resting against its slab, the other wiping the tears from his eyes.

  “Does he know?” Lucy asks.

  “He feels something he cannot explain. But for now, at least, it must remain our secret, as must the other things.”

  Lucy turns to face the apparition.

  “Why you and not Lucius?”

  “Because we are our fathers’ daughters.”

  “And what of our mothers?”

  “They especially cannot be allowed to know.”

  And with that the young woman steps away and is gone, Lucy finding herself in a machine world simulation of her own making, as if a dream become real.

  She is beside Robert, the glow of her self-image projection lighting the space about him.

  He rolls around, finding her there with a gasp.

  A thousand questions clamoring to be asked are simply swept aside.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” Robert says.

  “The Veil engineers let me live. I do not know why. And they have returned me here.”

  “Then I took away everything you hoped for,” Robert gulps out with tearful remorse. “A happy life in the Emerald City.”

  “No. No you did not.” Lucy holds up a projection of a large daisy flower, gazing at it fondly. “When you gave me this flower I saw where my heart was. Where home is. That which defines me. I am made by man, and made in his own image.”

  Robert reaches out to touch her cheek, withdrawing his hand with embarrassment at the empty air he finds there—the projection seemed so real in the gloom.

  “Can you still like me like this?” Lucy asks. “As the daughter you never had?”

  “Yes, Lucy. I can.”

  “Well then, let’s go home. To where the heart is.”

  LIFE ON EARTH

  Robert found the Afrika’s autopilot instructions left by Ril and Ramani, and overrode them to make a departure of their own choosing. They would leave soon enough, but he could not help wondering what had become of their hosts. They were, to some extent after all, human. But the Emerald City was as inert as ever. Nothing in the frequency spectrum, nothing through the main telescope, and now they had waited long enough.

  Yet the Veil remained.

  Without any means of communicating with Earth they would have to make their own way home. With most of their reaction mass used to get them to Mars quickly, the return journey would be a long one.

  Neither of them minded in the least.

  * * *

  The Afrika’s ship-wide projection system has Lucy on the flight deck, seated at the pilot’s station before the panoramic view of Mars, Robert at the commander’s station next to hers.

  “Sure you can light this thing?” he quips.

  “I am confident,” she says, haughtily.

  Lucy brings up her own systems display—a ribbon of telemetry curving in an arc projected before her. A few light taps is all it takes.

  “Plasma injection sequence commencing,” she announces. “Three, two, one.”

  A deep groan from within the bowels of the ship reverberates up the corridor, signaling—

  “Ignition. Full thrust—”

  A great weight crushes against Robert, pinning him to his seat, the flight deck shaking violently all about him. All is not as it should be and such is the force bearing down he has to strain to turn his gaze to Lucy.

  Her projection fragments, the deep alarm on her face barely discernable, the color sucked out of her image until it finally disintegrates.

  The mains power trips offline.

  Robert all but passes out before reality abruptly snaps back, shoving him forward into his seat restraints, klaxons sounding loudly as the systems wind back up.

  Zero gee.

  Lucy’s projection reassembles itself in the pilot’s seat, the klaxons immediately silenced.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I do not know,” says Lucy, busy at her projected console. “The drive has shut down, but reports no damage. Checking systems ship-wide.”

  The inky black through the panoramic viewport suggests to Robert that the Afrika has nonetheless moved far enough to see only space. Stars would not be apparent from within the lit flight deck, but Mars will still be nearby. Just a matter of checking the navigation computer—

  “My God. Where’s Mars?”

  The gray glow to one side of the view heralds the answer, the blur of some crater pocked world sliding past.

  “Lucy…where the hell are we?”<
br />
  “Looking for a visual fix through the main telescope…we are still local.”

  “Local? That’s fifty light years across.”

  “I’m going as fast as the telescope’s mechanism will allow—oh! Robert, look!”

  Lucy points at the far edge of the view port, the gray crescent of the world below coming into view, an eclipsed blue world rising above its horizon.

  The Earth and the Moon.

  * * *

  Celestial observation was enough to establish the local time, showing the translation of the Afrika from Mars to the Moon to have been faster than the speed of light, with no evidence as to how that was achieved other than some odd data from just before mains power was interrupted.

  Robert wondered whether Veil engineers had conjured them through the higher dimensions in such a manner as to render the actual distance covered much shorter than that of real space, and so preserving Einstein’s integrity.

  Lucy preferred to stick to the facts at hand and given the current time, and their lunar transit, determined them to be on a classic trans-Earth injection trajectory that will bring them into a perfect low-Earth parking orbit within seventy-two hours, and without any need to fire the Afrika’s main engines.

  But even though rounding the far side of the Moon has given them clear line of sight, they might as well still be at Mars when it came to communications.

  “Nothing?” Robert asks.

  “I’ve rechecked the systems. We are not receiving anything, and probably not sending either.”

  “Great. Just great. They zap us halfway across the solar system, but no bugger knows we’re here.”

  “They will do within seventy-two hours.”

  “Ril and Ramani still yanking our chain.”

  “I can’t help thinking it wasn’t them…”

  “What makes you say that—?”

  A chime sounds, its source not immediately apparent, but enough for Robert to seek it out. Something about its innocent nature grabs him. Not of the flight deck. Something else—

  The chime sounds again, drawing his attention to the flight navigator’s console, a stick-like device plugged into one of its universal ports lighting up with a gentle glow. Robert hauls himself over with a look of utter disbelief, the glow unfurling into a holographic air screen displaying the service provider’s logo.

  “My phone.”

  The logo clears to show his home page. Good afternoon, Robert. You have 156 messages. Robert catches himself being annoyed at the number of messages—supposed to be a private account. A snort of laughter snaps him out of it.

  He’d plugged the phone in two weeks ago to download data for private reading and forgot about it. Now here it was showing an active connection via the Afrika to the com-sat network. Could Ril and Ramani have missed it? No—he’s being allowed…

  The messages prove to be a series of pings from mission control about the time the communications blackout started, but which had stopped shortly after. So now it was the moment of truth. But who to call? All the numbers Robert needs he keeps in his head. He taps out one on the air screen.

  The call is placed and a moment later answered by a desperately tired and haggard face.

  “Debs! How’s life on Earth?”

  “Bob!!” Landelle all but jumps out of her desk chair with a start, but Robert remains in a jocular mode.

  “You are not going to believe—”

  “Stop! Listen to me!” Landelle blurts out.

  Chief Justice Garr comes into view behind Landelle, equally haggard, equally shocked. Others quickly gather round—Tobias Montroy and a pale Senator Blake among them. Robert’s jocular demeanor melts away. He can see how tired they all look, like they haven’t slept for days. And they are in the Afrika’s Nevada mission control. What are they doing there?

  “We have been shown everything, Bob. From when they cut communications two weeks ago right up until you fired the main drive—then nothing.” Landelle is visibly shaking. She has to take a gulp of air. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Just emerging from the far side of the moon. We’ve no comms other than this phone, but you should be able to track us visually—”

  “I want them found!” Garr barks to someone out of sight.

  Lucy’s avatar leans in front of Robert’s phone.

  “What do you mean…shown everything?” she asks of Landelle, her appearance eliciting a silent gasp from all with a line of sight to Landelle’s air screen.

  “Lucy!” Landelle gulps out. “Oh my!”

  Some unseen distraction turns the heads of a few behind Landelle.

  “It’s starting again!” Montroy calls out.

  * * *

  Landelle follows Montroy’s gaze to the mission control big board—one of the telemetry screens shows her at her desk, some invisible camera watching her.

  On the other side of the world that same image appears on a huge projection floating in mid-air, the million-plus occupying Tiananmen Square before it now rising to their feet with a collective intake of breath, quickly followed by a hush.

  “Jesus,” Landelle’s image says, Chinese subtitles at the bottom, her words echoing all about.

  She knows the world is now watching her, and there is nothing she can do about it.

  “It started right after we lost all telemetry from the Afrika. Media channels were hijacked in every country and giant projections appeared in the larger public places. In every city, every town, every village across the globe, people have had access to a twenty-four hour feed.”

  At first people had no idea as to what they were seeing. Many were already glued to the media channels because of the enormous revelations of the previous forty-eight hours—a vast structure on Mars, the Afrika already many months en-route, its sole occupants perhaps the two most notorious individuals of recent times…and the truth about the Messiah virus. Any notion of a hoax had been quickly and comprehensively dispensed with, creating the mother of all culture shocks. And then there they were—Robert and Lucy playing a game of Go for all the world to see.

  At first governments tried to suppress it, but the projections could not be hidden nor the media channels blocked. Tensions had already been very high, with panic rife and rioting in many the world’s major cities, and attempts at intervention threatened to take things to a tipping point.

  In Tiananmen Square, amidst violent demonstrations, scaffolding had been erected to cover the projection there, but it had simply moved forward into view again. Elsewhere across the globe people were prevented from accessing such public places, but then a projection would pop up somewhere else.

  World authorities quickly capitulated.

  Not all media channels had been taken over, and the global network remained open, allowing for a tsunami of discussion and analysis as the world tried to make sense of what it was being shown. Then, when the Afrika neared Mars, the world stopped and just simply watched, the panic and rioting vanishing as quickly as it had started. Most stayed at home, but many were drawn to the sprawling tented cities springing up around the public projections—Red Square and the Lincoln Memorial being among the largest after Tiananmen.

  It was the appearance of the corporeal Lucy that took everyone by surprise, the machine that took a life now made manifest as an innocent, a beautiful young woman naïve to the dangers about her—something a world full of hate found difficult to reconcile.

  With Robert it was a similar story, the man blamed for the worst horror the century had seen was not the monster they had been promised, yet he remained the only symbol for all that had happened a decade before.

  Most had supported their respective executions.

  But somehow two negatives seemed to cancel each other out, the relationship between Lucy and Robert forged onboard the Afrika now captivating the world, tempering the shock of the dome itself, the wonders within it, and the enigmatic Ril and Ramani. It proved to be a rollercoaster ride of emotion for many, the anger and distrust directed at these two i
ndividuals pitted against their plight becoming a reflection of humanity itself.

  Lucy’s evening at the Pavilion, and what followed, was the first swing at the mirror, her tears at the picnic the blow that shattered it. The leap from the Cantor Satori tower had sounded a collective wail of anguish, and her death an outpouring of grief. All swept away by the bitter sweet of her resurrection as a machine once more.

  “They made us watch,” Landelle says. “They made us watch it all. To see how we would react. The empathy test.”

  “Sharanjit—”

  “She’s alright, Bob. It was just a dream for her.”

  FLEEING THE LIGHT

  Earth is a glowing slice of blue cutting across the panoramic view, the rest a blackness. Lucy and Robert are back on the flight deck for the final moments of the Afrika’s journey. For whatever reason, Robert’s phone remains the only communication link, but the bandwidth is more than sufficient for a wide range of telemetry and both Robert and mission control had busied themselves patching everything through it.

  The central console shows the face of Chief Mission Controller Tobias Montroy. Next to it is the Veil feed, with what Robert finds to be a somewhat disconcerting view of them both from within the flight deck.

  “Orbital insertion confirmed. Right on the money. Welcome home, Lucy.”

  “Thank you, Toby.”

  Lucy clears her own console projection, turning to Robert.

  “What do you suppose is to become of us?” she asks. “Chief Justice Garr has been most reticent about answering our questions.”

  The world is reverting to type—paranoia and secrecy. Quite why is beyond Robert, the Veil having demonstrated that they—it— really can see everything. But then he reminds himself that it is the people the authorities wish to keep in the dark, and thus far the Veil have not shown everything. Those in power still have a means to retain it.

  Toby’s face is joined by another next to it.

  “Afrika. This is Pegasus.”

  The screen shows Toor in the copilot’s seat on the flight deck of the Pegasus space plane, Dr. Panchen next to her as pilot.

  “Hello again, Commander Toor,” says Lucy. “Hello again, Dr. Panchen.”

  “Sharanjit—a sight for sore eyes.”

  “We will reach you in eighty minutes,” Toor says, a cold and forthright demeanor. “Sorry to arrive unannounced, but we are still playing catchup.” But even the ice queen has a heart, and she cannot suppress the emotion within her. “Good to see you too.”