Veil (68 page)

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
un
conscious. 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 contacted 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.

Roy agreed emphatically and said he’d do
whatever it took. He loved the idea.

“See, I told you she’d have a plan for you,”
Brock smirked from his chair.

It was Suren’s idea to use the demand for
Jin’s memory as their bargaining chip. Actually, it was Hunter’s
idea
,
but he knew if it came from him it
would’ve been taken completely differently, so he steered the
conversation to a point where Suren thought she arrived at the
epiphany herself. The only person in the room who realized Hunter
had done so was Brock. When Suren “came up” with and announced the
idea, Brock told her she was a genius and quipped at Hunter that
being so cunning was usually
his
trademark.

The five decided Ken and Hunter would develop
the technology to record and store a memory of Jin that they
obtained from Roy
.
After that, they’d
offer the memory to the public on one condition. One unbreakable
condition: the Tsay Trustees would agree to give everyone unlimited
and free access to a memory of Jin, provided the technologies used
to record and store the memory were never used for any other
purpose.

Although they would not initially explain the
reasoning behind the ultimatum—they knew there would be much
speculation—they agreed among themselves that, after all was said
and done, after the policy was enacted and the technology was in
place, they should start educating the public on the potential
dangers of Veil. They should start sharing Ken’s vision of what the
future could hold for Veil should certain avenues be made
available. They hoped they could persuade people to understand how,
as good as Veil had been for their lives, it could become equally
as bad under certain conditions, maybe more so. It could become the
Veil Apocalypse.

Hunter joked that maybe they should try to
get permission to coin a motto telling the people to, “Use Veil’s
Force for good, Luke.” Suren wasn’t amused, which didn’t surprise
Hunter much; Hunter seldom amused Suren.

Take a joke, Condoleezza Fried Rice.

Still reluctant to Veil after what happened
when he shadowed Suren, Ken had Hunter begin shadowing Roy to
assemble memories that Roy possessed of Jin. Ken hoped the process
would help them compile enough memories of Jin to create one
linear, vibrant, intact memory, which would provide the people an
overall aura or impression of Jin. Ken explained how he didn’t
merely want to broadcast one single, bland memory of Jin that Roy
happened to possess.

Rather, Ken wanted to create a montage of
memories that would follow Jin from the time he entered the front
door of the hospital until he reached the elevator, out of sight of
Roy’s security station. Ken envisioned a time-lapse montage of
memories that, if delivered effectively, would paint a living
picture of Jin that stretched throughout the years as Roy saw him
nearly every morning. Not only would it be Jin, he told the group,
it would be unbelievably powerful and gratifying—visually and
emotionally fulfilling.

Ken grew increasingly frustrated by the
results he got from having Hunter shadow Roy to obtain the
memories. He decided to take a different approach. Rather than
extract the memories from Roy using Hunter, he would obtain them
through the process he was going to use to record and artificially
recreate the final memory.

Ken and Hunter developed a way to detect the
specific wavelengths created by Roy’s neuroelectrical pattern
whenever he remembered Jin. They discovered each component of a
memory produced different wavelengths—different frequencies—and
similar memory components would have similar wavelengths, if not
identical ones. By isolating the specific wavelengths that
represented Jin in Roy’s memory, they could reliably isolate all of
Roy’s memories of Jin as he actively recalled them.

All they needed to do was create a series of
questions and images that would prompt Roy to remember being at
work day-by-day over the course of five years. While recording his
neuroelectrical pattern, they talked Roy through every calendar day
of work for those five years and then digitally singled out each
wavelength that represented his memory of Jin, contained in his
neuroelectricity.

They found it didn’t matter if Roy remembered
seeing Jin on a particular day; it didn’t matter if Roy remembered
anything at all about that day. As long as they triggered Roy’s
mind effectively enough to recall a specific day, they could scan
the entire span of that memory for the wavelength whose frequency
represented Jin. They could scan Roy’s memory for Jin and then
pluck Jin right out of Roy’s memory.

In reviewing the logs of his vKey to
calculate how often he had to enhance the visual components of
Roy’s memory, Ken noticed an unusually high amount of activity
indicated by the logs from Suren’s key. Higher activity than all
the other keys combined.