Veil (17 page)

Tears streamed down Suren’s face as she
watched the video. Tears of love and tears of anger. Anger at the
Suren in the video who wasn’t paying any attention. She watched
herself not pay any attention to the overwhelming love and
adoration her husband, still alive and standing right next to her,
could barely contain. As the doors of the elevators opened and the
couple stepped out, she saw Jin skip; she witnessed Jin skip out of
the elevator. When she saw that, Suren released a solitary laugh
through her tears and immediately covered her mouth.

Ken got down on one knee in front of Suren
and looked up at her. “He knew, Suren. Jin knew how much you loved
him. More than anyone in the world has ever—ever known how loved
they were. More than anyone could ever know, Jin knew. Because he
felt it inside you. He experienced it through you by Veiling you.
He knew. Before he died Jin truly knew and experienced your love
for him.”

Suren let herself weep at that and rocked
back and forth. One hand was still over her mouth and the other
rubbed her head from front to back, back to front, front to back,
again and again—as if she were touching Jin himself. She felt Jin
inside her; she felt him throughout every inch of her body like
electricity, starting from her scalp all the way down to the soles
of her feet. She felt filled up by Jin. She rocked and wept so
forcefully that she fell from the chair
.
Her sobs quickly turned into long, heavy, primal howls.

When Jin was alive she never felt so close to
him than in that moment and, as the sensation subsided, she
experienced his death all over again, and so she wept more. She
wept herself to exhaustion and Ken helped her to bed, where she
collapsed on top of the covers, all curled up in her robe. She
remained in that position and wept tears of pure anguish until she
fell unconscious.

Never one to toot on the old horn, Hunter
Kennerly still knew he was smart as all get out. Growing
up
,
he was smart enough to know how to
keep from getting beat up simply for being so smart. When he wasn’t
able to avoid bullying or fights by using his wit, he always had
another trick up his sleeve.

Growing up as a guy, he understood how horny
guys were. Merely the wind blowing against them could arouse most
guys of a certain age. Most guys simply wanted someone—anyone—to
touch their dick. Hell, for someone to
look
at it. The
veracity of teenage male hormones couldn’t be overstated. Girls
never recognized it, but Hunter Kennerly sure as hell did.

He also understood how nearly all guys did
things they never wanted girls to know about. In fact, it became an
aspect of girls that made them less attractive to Hunter: barely
any girls suspected their secret activities, so they seemed
voluntarily naive. Girls desired affection from boys so much that
they were willingly blind to how boys were just horny little
freaks.

Growing up as a smart boy, Hunter also
recognized how intellectually lazy most guys were. Most guys would
use any and every excuse to avoid work that didn’t interest them.
So, generally anything that didn’t involve a ball, a video
game
,
or tits and a pussy. If given any
indication there was someone who would take care of their work for
them, almost every single guy would pounce on it. Even if they had
nothing else in common with that other guy; even if they would've
never associated with him otherwise.

And whaddya know, in the form of Hunter, that
other guy was also willing to take care of that pesky dick problem
for them, too. No, no … no one would find out. No, no … it didn’t
mean they were gay. No, no … they didn’t have to do anything back
if they didn’t want to. He knew all the right things to say and
after all was said and done he knew exactly when to call in a favor
from them.

He would keep doing their work for them and
keep taking care of certain problems they were yet unsuccessful in
convincing any girls to take care of, so long as they kept up their
end of the unspoken arrangement: protection. As long as they stood
up for him when he needed it then as far as he was concerned,
everything else between them would be governed by damn near Fight
Club rules. Before he left junior high, Hunter forged that unspoken
bond with practically all the guys he predicted would eventually
rule their high school.

No matter how smart he was or thought he was,
Hunter Kennerly wasn’t “learn Veil in five days or less” kind of
smart. The General gave him five days, and in five days he got an
overall picture of the theory of Veil but couldn’t begin to grasp
its intricacies. He figured out the “what” of Veil, but the “how”
was weeks, if not months beyond his reach.

What he did learn was what the military
expected the device he originally designed to do and where it all
went wrong. He never encountered a more genius theory than Veil;
the fact someone was able to take it from theory to practice made
him feel about as intelligent as the two knuckle-draggers who
pulled him into the project in the first place.

One thing was certain: those two fools played
no part in creating Veil. Hell, they barely knew what they had in
Veil
,
and that was apparent from how they
instructed him to create the device he created. It was obvious they
didn’t understand the basic principles behind what made Veil
possible.

Shit, before he read some of the material, he
didn’t know those principles were possible. The looming question
became:
Who is Veil’s creator?
Or more accurately from what
the General said, who
was
Veil’s creator? The more he read
the more the question haunted him. And not only out of curiosity
but almost equally out of ego. Almost.

Another thing was certain: if he found out
who was responsible for creating Veil, he could do something with
that information. He realized that information could very well
become the means for him to accomplish his goal of fucking over the
DO motherfucking D. It didn’t take long for Hunter to fall back
onto his adolescent methods of getting what he wanted. The question
then became: which one of the knuckle-draggers had a hankering for
some dick?

Five whole days. Five days was what they gave
Hunter to review Veil so they could confer about what went wrong
with his original device design. Although it wasn’t ample time for
him to fully comprehend Veil, he was relatively sure he could
address some of the problems in order to give Schaffer and Pollock
enough of an idea as to how stupid they were.

He couldn’t really come out and tell them how
stupid they were
,
so he hoped in the
process it would dawn on them. In the meantime, he would continue
to play his role. While things retained a feeling of morbid
seriousness, he was still himself and that meant he would continue
to be on the lookout for a way to turn the tables and do what he
set out to do.

Hunter opened with, “First of all, in case
someone hasn’t already informed you, Subject Two died because you
extracted all of his neuroelectricity. I imagine he died
instantly.”

Maybe a bit of a harsh opening but it was a
good place to start.

“Yes, we know. Our question is—why did that
happen? We told you what we wanted the device to do. Obviously, we
weren’t expecting it to operate in that manner. It wasn’t our goal
to terminate the subject,” Schaffer defended himself and
Pollock.

“Obviously. But all you told me was you
wanted a device that could extract and discharge neuroelectricity.
Which is exactly what my device did. It successfully served that
function every time you used it. What you didn’t inform me, among
many other things we’ll get to later, is that you needed the device
to differentiate between neuroelectrical patterns so it could
extract a specific pattern while leaving the host’s
neuroelectricity intact. If I’d been privy to much more
information, the unfortunate incident would not have occurred.”

“We understand that now,” Schaffer retorted.
“So let’s move on from there. The General has indicated any
possible repercussions from the incident will not affect you, so
you needn’t concern yourself with it.”

“Repercussions?! Repercussions—” Hunter
started to protest but changed his mind; it was pointless. “Right,
ok well then fine, let’s move on. There are several issues that
need to be considered in developing the device you’re seeking. And
I’ll tell you right now it won’t be as compact as you want it to be
any time soon. That technology is years away. It won’t be
pocket-sized.”

“Once we accepted that it wouldn’t be
possible to deploy Veil remotely, we were naturally less concerned
with its portability, though size is still a factor,” Pollock
responded.

“Yes, and now with a better understanding of
Veil, I can reiterate that it will never be remotely deployable,
and not only for the reason I initially stated.”

“Go ahead and give us all the issues you
believe we’re facing,” Schaffer requested.

“Ok. First of all, like I said, the device
has to differentiate between neuroelectrical patterns. So it knows
which to extract. Second, and this is a huge obstacle, it needs to
be able to extract not only the neuroelectrical current itself but
also the network of neuroelectrical vibrations in their entirety.
That’s what makes Veil work in the first place. No one would expect
you to understand all the nuances of neuroelectricity but I can say
without knowing precisely what you’re working with, there’s no way
this project can be successful.”

“Then explain,” Pollock ordered. He sounded
more like General Coffman than himself.

“Think of it like this. You have a guitar
string. It’s a solid metal wire. You can move it and twist it and
pluck it. Once you pluck it, the string is in a state of vibration
and with a guitar string, while it’s in that state, you can see the
vibrations. The vibration is what creates the sound, like the
vibrations and oscillations of neuroelectricity create information
within the brain. They’re the ripples that create experience. The
device you instructed me to design only extracted the guitar string
itself, the neuroelectricity itself, while leaving behind the
vibrational eddy that is so crucial to Veil. It’s crucial because,
as I said, those vibrations are what stimulate the brain to cause
the impulses that produce experience. The Witness isn’t merely the
neuroelectric current; it’s the neuroelectrical network as a whole
and that includes all the vibrations, almost like a total state of
being, like the guitar string in a state of vibrating. Electricity
itself doesn’t hold information. The vibrations do; the frequency
does. That’s what stimulates the brain.”

“Ahhh…” he heard but wasn’t sure which of the
men said it.

“So any device we create has to be capable of
downloading the entire Witness, not simply rip out its skeleton,”
he finished.

“Understood,” Schaffer acknowledged. “Makes
sense.”

“Also, the Witness doesn’t get uploaded back
onto its owner’s brain all at once. It’s not like placing a hairnet
onto a head,” Hunter continued. His choice of words caused Schaffer
and Pollock to glance at each other and chuckle, which Hunter
ignored. “Each vibrational eddy—every electric ripple—of the
Witness represents a separate experience, a moment in time, so each
has to be uploaded linearly, in stages, and not as a whole. Not all
one at a time. Understand?”

“Yes,” both acknowledged.

“Ok good. Moving on. So, after shadowing a
subject, when the Witness is downloaded from the subject and is
ready to be uploaded back on its owner, it can’t simply be uploaded
as-is. It has to be inverted. Turned inside out. Reversed, if you
will. If this isn’t done, the brain of the person receiving the
information from the subject will experience it all backwards; that
person will experience time in reverse. So, in light of all this,
the device you seek has to be capable of not simply uploading and
downloading neuroelectricity and differentiating between different
neurological patterns, but it also has to be able to manipulate and
rearrange neuroelectricity. It is going to be a complicated piece
of technology.”