The Veritas Project

by C. F. E. Black

  My lips peel apart in disgust, thinking of what some drugs can do.

  Marcus comes to his aid, changing the subject. “What have they got you two doing today? Looks heavy,” he adds, eyeing Flavius’ bar. Flavius can run faster than Marcus, but Crowne’s got him pushing his max today in lifting. Marcus could sling that bar over his shoulder and walk it down to the gen lab like a box of test tubes.

  But why think about that anymore? Who cares how strong Marcus is? I grunt to myself and reach for my bar.

  “What is it today?” he asks me.

  Looking at the heavy bar, I grind my teeth a moment. “Today it’s dead lifts. As many as I can till I can’t.”

  “I meant, what brings you in today?” He looks at his feet.

  “Does it matter?” I glance at Flavius. “We’re not supposed to talk about our rule breaking, right?” To signal that the conversation is over, I rep out ten lifts. The faster I deplete my muscles, the faster I can get out of here.

  Marcus clicks his tongue. “Well, if it were survival of the fittest around here, you’d win, V.” His voice is colder now, almost studied. He eyes my arms, pumped with the hot blood in my veins.

  I want to talk to him more than I want to do these stupid reps, but talking to him will only make things worse.

  “I’ve got to get these done.” I bend down, place my hands back on the bar. Nearby, grunts and heaves are starting as people’s muscles start backing up with lactic acid.

  Marcus sighs. “I get it. Let’s go, Julius.” He turns to leave, then pauses. “You know, just because you and I can’t stream anymore doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

  Standing with a huff, I rake a drop of sweat off my forehead. Hurt by one silly little word: friends. “Actually, that’s exactly what it means.” Can he just blow this new rule off so easily? Is all that raw emotion I felt in his streams so surface-level that he can switch it to friends just like that? I want to see some pain in his face, some indication that this new rule is stifling him like it is me.

  But he just shakes his head and walks away. A concession! He’s not fighting for this—for me—like I want him to!

  Julius cheers Flavius for a few minutes, then, as he’s turning to go, he bends down and whispers in my ear, “It’s okay, Val. I’m a code-breaker too.”

  Then he walks away without waiting for a response.

  I blink after him. Just unload that information on me and walk away. No big deal.

  I keep my hands gripped to the metal bar as Julius’ footsteps die away. What was he talking about? He’s only been punished once, as far as I know. Maybe he’s just kidding, like always. I force myself to grab the bar, and slug out another round of grunt-inducing lifts, and with each yank on the bar, I try to grind Marcus and Julius and everyone else out of my mind.

  Six

  The week trudges on, and I suffer from a handful of brain flashes brought on, Yamaguchi says, from the added stress of our new lab hours. The insides of my cheeks are butchered with sores from my over-active teeth—a bad habit when I’m stressed.

  On Thursday, I actually trip over Julius having an epic—and somewhat terrifying—brain flash that knocks him down just outside the elevator. I’ve never had a brain flash knock me down. No one in our Order has, but I’ve heard of older Order members having them as the stress of labs increases.

  Guess we have that to worry about now. I think of Marcus keeling over into a petri dish full of flu virus. Or Flavius face-planting into the manure of the animal pens. Or me curling up on the floor of the gen lab freezer. Yamaguchi told us these violent, stress-related flashes are rare and less of a threat if we keep up our hours in the Rat. Rare isn’t all that comforting.

  “Valeria,” Yamaguchi says, voice soft, as she catches me outside my lab Sunday afternoon. It’s time to head to the streaming room. She angles her steps alongside mine. “I checked with the Director. I was right.” She nods. “He doesn’t monitor your live feed every day. He just did it that day because he feared you were a little unstable.” Her words are apologetic but a trace of concern hardens the syllables just so.

  “Unstable?” I cough out a laugh. Yamaguchi doesn’t think it’s funny, knitting her brow together in worry. “Thanks for letting me know.” I’m relieved that horrid man doesn’t have someone watching through my eyes all the time. That also makes my next steps easier. The steps I plan to take to be all alone inside my own head.

  She walks with me toward the elevators and will follow me to the streaming room to oversee the weekly dumping and recycling of the findings and failures of our entire Order.

  This week, I won’t get the benefit of simul-streaming with Marcus to help me cope. It’s up to me now to find myself after these full-Order streams. I did this before Marcus arrived. I can do it again.

  I hope.

  I think back to the streams over the past years. They were awful at first. The flood of other minds set us caterwauling and convulsing, puking and panicking. Eventually, our brains adapted. Mammals, especially humans, are good at that. Our brains started accepting the new memories, sorting them and housing them like any other learned information. We became okay with containing the memories of sixteen minds instead of one. If the occasional brain flash and odd panic attack still count as okay. But we got used to those too. After all, much is expected of us.

  But as the years progressed, the recovery after streams became less about vomit and more about panic attacks and screaming fits when, in our minds, we couldn’t find ourselves. Until Marcus and I began streaming, Sunday nights and Monday mornings were filled with moments when I couldn’t remember how my voice was going to sound when I opened my mouth or what color my own eyes were or what my favorite lab was.

  As I lie down in the streaming chair beside Pru, a wave of fear laps at my throat.

  I’ll be all right, I tell myself.

  A voice in my mind whispers, And what if I can’t? What if I’m not?

  An idea pops into my mind, an idea I hope doesn’t show up in the stream I’m about to endure. A way to cope afterwards. A way to circumvent the Director’s new little rule.

  When the stream ends, I’m the first one out of the room. I make a point to avoid looking at Marcus.

  I check my wristband for an open library pod and head to the sixth floor. The Sixth Order is heading down now for their full-Order stream. Exiting the stairs, I turn to the right. To the left is their domus—an exact copy of our own—and to the right are the pods. Sixteen milky white doors in mirrored pairs along the tiled hallway. I’m hoping if this idea works, I won’t succumb to the windmill feeling in my gut trying to pull me into a state of sixteen-souled hysteria.

  The translucent door of the library pod catches my attention for the first time, even though I come down here every day now. Research is mostly reading anyway. The milky white doors lining this long hallway are like our brains: the streams keep a translucent sheath over our thoughts, never really letting us be master of our own minds. I place my palm flat on the wall beside the door. “Access granted” flows into my ear. I grasp the cool metal and slide into the small pod. Behind the door to this library is endless information, and behind the sheath in my mind is Valeria, the true Valeria. How I’d like to see what’s there one day.

  The words Scientia et Veritas blink to life on the wall of the pod.

  The true Valeria. The hilarity of the thought makes me laugh out loud as I let the door slide closed behind me. The white walls light up as the floor registers my presence.

  Staring at the motto of the Center, the temperature of my blood climbs. The two things they prize here, the two things they teach us to prize from our infancy, are knowledge and truth. These words hover near my eyes on the waiting screen, imposed above the dual-helix emblem of the Center. Knowledge—we have sixteen times the head knowledge of other humans. Truth—we have only a sliver.

  I may know of Marcus’ feelings for me. I may know of Prudentia’s brilliance at manipulating nanoparticles. I may know of Julius’
perpetual goofiness. But I do not, in fact, know the true Marcus or Prudentia or Julius because all I know is the Order-mixed versions of who they are. And they do not know me. They know the part-Marcus, part-Julius, part-thirteen-other-people version of Valeria. I do not know the truth of who Valeria is.

  Yet there before me the words glisten on the screen: knowledge and truth.

  What is my veritas?

  Will the Director laugh to himself when he sees this thought? When he cozies up to my weekly musings like the next installment of his favorite show?

  Shaking the thought from my head, I run my fingers down the walls on either side of me. The glass is so smooth.

  To Whom Much Is Given, Much Is Expected flashes at me as the walls come to life, the motto dissolving into the mantra. In here we are reminded that knowledge and truth are our wellsprings, our foundation. Then we are reminded of our role: produce, produce, produce. We exist to produce viable scientific advancements for our society. This is what is expected of us.

  What a load of garbage.

  “Welcome, Valeria V. I sense that you are excited by something.”

  “Hi, Rita,” I say to the computer. “Yes, I am excited. Excited about the possibility of what my research can accomplish.” Truth mixed with a lie, the most exciting of all. They are masters at this kind of truth. Like when they lie about the fact that the Marcus I know is not the only Marcus V there has ever been.

  “Yes, your research is coming along so well. I’ll pull the articles you flagged yesterday about genetic computing.” Instantly, files pop up on the walls around me.

  “No, I’m hunting something else today.” I take a deep breath. “Search: Thought bank,” I say aloud, trembling a little at what I’m about to attempt. My research files drop off the walls around me into little e-piles by my feet.

  A new item hovers in front of me. One I’ve never opened before. But I knew it existed; we all know this. It is the folder that houses all our thoughts, collected by our sensors and shared once a week in our streams. Somewhere in here is the file that the Director reads containing only my thoughts. As Order members, we see inside each other’s heads too often to ever consider opening this vault of human minds. Until now.

  “Search: Marcus V.”

  The file opens and zooms forward into a matrix of small squares, each depicting one of my Order members’ faces. Rita zooms in on Marcus’ face. I wonder if anywhere on this entire server is information on the first Marcus V, the one they replaced. They erased every ounce of him, except for his memories, which they fed to the new Marcus when he arrived. He has all the memories of growing up here, but he’s told me there’s still something from his old memories that they can’t get out, something that reminds him he did not grow up in this Center. But he never told me what this memory is. Perhaps that memory is in this file somewhere.

  What is in here, I wonder?

  “Open file,” I say, not sure what the inside will look like, ignoring the alarms going off in my chest. This is the closest thing to streaming with Marcus that I have now. And this, technically, isn’t off limits. But that doesn’t stop the stickiness in my throat.

  Rita obliges and two files appear, one labeled “past” and one labeled “present.”

  “Past,” I say, curious.

  Thousands of images surround me in the tiny space. All moving like miniature live feeds. They are organized by date in descending order so that the boxes by my feet are several months ago. A blinking scroll bar hovers by my hand. Heart revving, I reach for the scroll bar and slide it across, descending into Marcus’ past.

  I reach his arrival date and the scroll bar keeps zooming along, flying backward into his youth without stopping. I realize these memory feeds are the ones they grafted in, the ones from the first Marcus. Fingers trembling, I click on one.

  A video awakens in front of me, large as life. Standing in ultra-high definition before me is a group of children, all with shaved heads, all wearing the yellow regulation scrubs of childhood. We stopped wearing yellow at age ten, the age we began our apprenticeships in our classes. At that point we wore white, and now we wear black. Black for the rest of our lives.

  This is our Order. We are heading down a hallway, white and long as all the rest, led by Dr. Yamaguchi.

  “Order members,” she begins and we all halt. “This is the floor I hope none of you ever has to see again. This begins the detention ward of our Center. You must be aware of the punishments possible if you break Codex.” She isn’t smiling, but rather looking down at us with damp black eyes that appear to pity us.

  I remember this day. There’s my shaved head in the crowd. I’m taller than the boys at this age.

  “You are old enough now to see what happens when you enter the box.” Yamaguchi steps backward a few times, drawing us forward. “You will see, as we walk down this hall, a demonstration. In these rooms,” she raises her arms, “are older Order members who’ve broken Codex. Observe what you see here today and use it as motivation the next time you think about breaking Codex.”

  A blond boy directly in front of me, really in front of Marcus, turns around. I recognize Flavius’ young face. “She means you, puke face.”

  The video feed seems to be zooming out, but then I realize Marcus has just stopped walking as our Order proceeds down the hall. This is the old Marcus, the one they replaced.

  “Marcus! Come along!” Yamaguchi calls up ahead.

  The scene moves again as Marcus walks. He never looks right or left as they walk down the hall between rows of glass walls displaying the torture chambers within. All that comes through are the clunks and screams of Order members either bucking against their streaming chairs or just waking up to reality.

  I’ve been there many times. I know these screams.

  “Exit,” I say, not wanting to see any more of this.

  The video fades as Rita backs up to the large file of Marcus’ past. I realize only eight months of this material actually belongs to the Marcus I know; the rest belongs to someone else. How odd that I pulled up that memory, the memory of our first tour of the basement. That tour didn’t serve its purpose for me, considering how much time I’ve spent down there. A shiver leaps up my spine.

  “Exit,” I say again, watching as my options are once again past or present. “Present,” I whisper, guilty and angry and longing to see into Marcus’—my Marcus’—mind again. This is his live feed, like the one of mine the Director had monitored when we went into the city. It doesn’t show our thoughts, just what we are seeing, like cameras. The sensors trap everything, but the only way to truly read our thoughts is via stream. The Director must have a way to stream thoughts into his head without having anyone else take his thoughts out. A nice little one-way stream each week to see into my brain. Lovely.

  In front of me, sharpening into focus, is Laelia III, gloved hands tinkering with a knob on the side of a computer screen microscope. Red light glows in front of her, and petri dishes stand in a line on the counter.

  “What is this?” I ask Rita, knowing the answer.

  “Marcus’ live stream.”

  I’m watching Laelia out of Marcus’ eyes as he is. Right now. This is me inside his brain. His lead turns to him, mouth covered with a mask, but I can see the smile touching her eyes.

  Stumbling against the back wall of my library, I stutter out the words “clear screen” and cram my eyes shut. When I have the courage, I peek at the screens around me, met only with the words Scientia et Veritas on blank walls. It feels wrong to have entered his head like that, without him knowing. This is what the Director did when I was at the mall. He crawled into my brain and sat behind my eyes, watching.

  I brush my hands down my bare arms, trying to wash the grime and guilt and filth off of me.

  I’m sorry, Marcus. It wasn’t worth it.

  But it did show me what will be worth it. If I can make it happen. The spike I want to ram into the Director’s plan has finally presented itself.

  What would hap
pen if he clicked on my feed and nothing came up?

  Later that evening, in our domus, one by one, our Order begins to slip off to bed. The green lights above the tiny bedrooms blink to red as an Order member disappears inside. I’m exhausted from the stream, but I’m waiting.

  Across the room, Julius’ face glows blueish in the light of his tablet. He’s sucked into some number puzzle or something, as is his custom late at night. Marcus smiles at me when he departs, and I smile back—hopeful now with this new idea I have brewing like bacteria in my mind. And since we just streamed, and since it’s late on a Sunday, I have a week until anyone, including the Director, spots this disease. I have a week to infect Julius with my idea, to get him to help, if he will. He said he was a code breaker. We’ll see just how serious he was about that.

  I need someone good with tech. Good with hacking. He’s the best we have.

  Mari and Flavius and Pru slip off to three more bed pods. It’s Julius, Crecentia, and myself. I am not even reading the words on my tablet—my eyes gave out a long time ago, the words just bouncing off my irises like raindrops on a blacktop. Go to bed, Crecentia!

  Then finally, she does.

  My opportunity dawns.

  Standing, yawning, I meander closer to Julius, as if heading for one of the two remaining bed pods. The Director won’t see this for another week. I say it over and over in my head. To make it true.

  “Julius?”

  He snaps out of his reverie, eyes wide and curious at the interruption.

  No sense dancing around it. “You said you were a code breaker.”

  Suddenly, this conversation becomes more interesting than his game, and he sets the tablet on the table beside him, all attention on me. “Yes.”

  “I’m not asking you to explain yourself, but I have a proposition for you. It’ll break about every rule there is.”

  He narrows his gaze playfully. “Break the rules? You? Never would have thought!”

  His smile and sarcasm ease the tension building in my neck.