Veil (15 page)

“Calm down, Hunter.” Schaffer tried to pacify
him. “No one broke anything. Pollock didn’t break anything, did you
Pollock?”

“Fuck you both,” Pollock snapped and crossed
his arms.

“Can someone tell me why I’m here, then?
Because the three of us in this room know this device works,”
Hunter disputed as he held it up and shook it. “Because we all
three tested it. All three of us.”

“Ok, ok—just calm down … When the General
gets here he’ll explain everything … We couldn’t let you leave
until we got it right … It’s not right yet,” Schaffer hemmed and
hawed and continued to play diplomat.

Pollock leaned over and placed both hands on
the table; he held himself up by his finger pads.

He scowled at Schaffer. “It’s your ass. If he
blows this, it’s your fucking ass. I’m not going down just because
your little fucking boyfriend over here didn’t do what we asked him
to do and so now it doesn’t work,” he growled.

“Dude,” Schaffer huffed. He took a step back
and pulled up his shoulders in a disarming half-shrug.

Pollock was unrelenting.

“Fuck you
.
He was
your choice. I had no say in it. I like you well enough,” Pollock
turned his head toward Hunter, “and it’s nothing personal,” he
looked back at Schaffer, “but this is all on the two of you.”

And people say science is no fun
,
Hunter thought and headed to the water cooler to distract himself
so he wouldn’t start laughing. He wasn’t sure why Pollock was so
angry, but he was pretty sure he was going to enjoy the show once
the General arrived.

A few minutes later the lab doors slid open
with their familiar hiss. Hunter was certain they were designed to
make that noise on purpose so it’d sound like Star Trek. He was
surprised they weren’t wearing fucking Communicators and mock ray
guns up in there.

General Coffman walked through the door; he
was alone.

“In the back,” he barked and headed toward
the conference room in the rear of the lab. The three men
submissively trailed behind.

The General didn’t instill any sense of fear
in Hunter and didn’t intimidate him in any way. He could tell it
wasn’t the same for Schaffer and Pollock. He, of course, made it
appear he was intimidated or the General wouldn’t feel like he was
respected. Schaffer and Pollock weren’t feigning anything; the two
dudes were truly scared of the General.

Shit, y’all should meet my queen bitch of
a mother
, he joked to himself.

Once inside the room, the General threw all
the chairs aside except one, which he sat in. The three other men
were forced to stand. Hunter stood idly by with his hands behind
his back. He was entertained and curious about the level of
seriousness in the room. Then again, he figured, it was the
military.

“Who wants to tell me how in the name of
Mary-the-motherfucking-mother-of-god this happened?” the General
boomed.

“Schaffer, sir, Schaffer and—” Pollock
started to say.

“Shut the fuck up, Luke,” Schaffer stopped
him.

“Then you explain,” the General directed
Schaffer.

“Ok … ok, sir.” Schaffer took a considerable
pause before he continued. He knew he needed to be mindful of every
single word he was about to utter. “Well, sir, after several
successful dry test runs of the device, Dr. Pollock and I were
rather confident the device was ready to be implemented for our
purposes so Dr. Kennerly,” he glanced over at Hunter and then back
to the General, “was given the go ahead to depart. After you
debriefed him of course.”

The General nodded. He leaned back and folded
his arms across his chest. He still liked the Kennerly kid. Had him
over for dinner once. Never had Schaffer or Pollock over before.
Never would either, so he knew that was saying something. As far as
the General was concerned, Hunter clearly wasn’t at all to blame in
that debacle
.

“Pollock and I scheduled a test run for…”
Schaffer cleared his throat and nervously glanced at Hunter and
then at Pollock and then back to General Coffman, “the Veil
project.”

Hunter perked up upon hearing those words but
immediately cursed himself for doing so. It was too late; his
posture had already straightened slightly and his arms had come
from behind his back. As soon as he heard the words “Veil project”
for the first time, Hunter felt his overwhelming curiosity become
visible to the other men in the room. He hated when anything real
about him was made visible. Hunter focused so intently on how to
transition back to seeming casual that he almost missed the rest of
what Schaffer said.

“With the two subjects ready, using the
device, we downloaded the neuroelectricity from Subject One and
uploaded it into Subject Two,” Schaffer continued.

“You did what?” Hunter blurted out and turned
his entire body to face Schaffer. He repeated himself, the second
time much louder, “You did what!”

“Dr. K.,” the General hushed Hunter with a
quick bark and glare. He then resumed eye contact with Schaffer to
signal that he was to continue.

Hunter relaxed and resumed his position. He
leaned backwards to casually support himself using the eraser ledge
on the bottom of the whiteboard.

You know what? Screw these assholes
,
he decided. He did what they asked him to do. What they did with it
was their fault.

The General directed Schaffer to finish.

“Subject Two was then released from the lab
and instructed to return in four hours, which he did. Subject One
remained hooked up to life support in the lab while his
neuroelectricity was inside Subject Two. When Subject Two returned,
we prepared to download Subject One’s neuroelectricity from Subject
Two in order to return it to Subject One and complete the
process.”

“What in the hell?” Hunter mumbled and shook
his head back and forth while he stared down at his shoes.

Schaffer ignored Hunter and continued.

“When we used the device to download Subject
One’s neuroelectricity from Subject Two, the device must have
malfunctioned or something because Subject Two instantly collapsed.
Despite all resuscitation efforts, Subject Two was determined to be
deceased. Subject Two had been immediately terminated
,
due to the device’s apparent malfunction.”

Unable to contain himself, Hunter spoke up
again in utterly disgusted disbelief.

“Malfunctioned? What the fuck did you
think
was going to happen?”

H
unter sat in the
conference room and waited for the three men to return. At first he
could hear a lot of shouting and although he couldn’t make out what
was being said, most of the shouting seemed to come from General
Coffman. After a while the shouting ended and he couldn’t hear
anything. Over an hour later
,
the three
men still hadn’t returned.

He didn’t enjoy the show. Not one damn bit.
It was all fun and games until he ended up personally involved in
something that led directly to another man’s death. He struggled to
hide how deeply it affected him. He would have to wait and process
it later, most likely over a few thousand drinks. Right then
however, he needed to focus on making good on what led him to
accept the job in the first place: the chance to screw over, in any
way, shape, or form, the Department of goddamn motherfucking
Defense.

Out of laziness, stupidity
,
or impatience, the military neglected to notice how
all of Dr. Hunter Kennerly’s work was directed at helping people.
Helping people, not hurting people or killing them or torturing
them or interrogating them. Maybe they didn’t know what the word
“neuroprosthetics” meant. Still, all the General ever needed to do
was pick up the phone and call his father to get a never ending
earful about what an ungrateful little faggoty shit Hunter was and
how he had no respect for the uniform or the so-called “real” men
who wore it.

If they simply did their work, he wouldn’t
have stepped foot inside that lab
,
and in
that case perhaps someone wouldn’t have ended up dead. Although the
outcome made Hunter wish they had done their fancy footwork, since
they hadn’t and since someone was in fact dead, Hunter Kennerly was
more intent than ever on fucking shit up for them; he simply didn’t
know how he was going to accomplish that feat … yet.

After an hour-and-a-half
,
the three men returned to the conference room.
Schaffer was carrying a coil-bound book, about as thick as two New
York City phone books.

Do they still have phone books?
Hunter
wondered.

The General was the first to enter, followed
by Pollock and then Schaffer. Schaffer and Pollock looked exhausted
and distraught. As Schaffer walked through the door
,
the General snatched the book from him and threw it
on the table. The powder blue card stock cover was stamped “VEIL”
in black and below that, “TOP SECRET
,
” in
red.

Oh, how cute
, Hunter smirked.

“That,” the General pointed at the book, “is
what these two cocksucking faces with assholes for mouths thought
your device would do.”

“O—Ok,” Hunter responded. He sounded so
sheepish it surprised himself.

He also wondered how an asshole mouth could
suck cock, since it was an asshole and all. His asshole couldn’t
suck things. Perhaps the General’s could? He figured there was
probably a fetish for that kind of thing—people who had assholes
for mouths, not the General’s ability to suck things with his
ass—so he decided he needed to Google it later. It could prove
quite interesting.

“So now,” General Coffman resumed as his eyes
bore into Hunter, “you’re going to help them build something
capable of doing exactly what’s described in the book. When you’re
finished maybe I won’t need to have you killed like I did the guy
who wrote it. I kinda like you.”

The General exited the lab. The hateful stomp
of his shoes against the linoleum echoed in the ears of everyone
present. The three scientists stood silently and stared at the book
on the table. Hunter felt as though suddenly all the games were
over and everything was
real
. He couldn’t remember a time
when he ever felt like things were so real.

“Technically, we wrote that book,” Pollock
eventually half-joked.

Without the slightest hesitation, Schaffer
turned, punched Pollock in the face, left the room and closed
himself in his office.

Pollock laughed nervously and wiped blood
from his nose with the side of his hand. His eyes were watering.
Hunter felt dizzy and sick. He sat down in one of the chairs the
General threw aside a few hours earlier. Where the hell was he and
who the fuck were those people?

Hunter Kennerly always had a knack for
reducing the most serious of situations to a joke. For the first
time in his life he had a thought that, while anyone else would’ve
considered it funny, couldn’t have been more serious.

No wonder my father drank
.

Ken played and replayed the video of Suren
and Jin riding the elevator to the 13
^th
floor. She must
have watched it at least ten times. She’d taken a seat beside Ken
and stared at his computer screen. She barely blinked.

“I really don’t understand what I’m looking
at. This never happened,” she finally claimed.

“It did happen, Suren.”

“I know it happened. I … I … you know what I
mean.”

“Yeah.” Ken wanted to console her and paused
the video before he continued. “You know he would
never
—you
know Jin would
never
.”