Veil (66 page)

Suren snapped out of it and realized the
doctor was still speaking.

“…and deeper still, one can discover the
lengths people will go in order to deny themselves thoughts and
feelings that don’t coincide with the main sexual identity or label
they’ve adopted. The lengths to which people will go to hide sexual
thoughts and feelings from themselves and others. Sexual thoughts
and feelings, even if fleeting, that instill shame, guilt, or fear
in them. One could literally spend so much time delving into the
sexual aspect of the mind that they don’t listen for anything
else—they don’t look for anything else—although sexuality is but
one
aspect of a person available to us. If my main interest
was human sexuality, that’s likely all I would focus on as I
proceeded to Veil people.”

Suren sat silent for a few moments and mulled
over her own goals, in terms of what she had planned. She thought
about what she intended to do once she hacked into Veil. She knew
to achieve her goal, she’d have to follow people’s moral compass.
Only the lowest of morals would lead her to what—or who—she
sought.

She leaned forward and asked, “What if it’s a
person’s conscience I’m looking for? What if that’s what I’m after?
Their guilt, their shame, their sense of right and wrong.”

“That,” the doctor snapped his fingers and
pointed at Suren, “has proven to be the easiest part of a person to
access but the hardest thing for any of us to listen for.”

For once, Hunter was at a loss for words.
Suren’s request seemed entirely reasonable and … well, like a
pretty damn good idea. Ken’s reaction didn’t make any sense to him.
As it turned out, it didn’t make any sense to Suren, either.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little
dramatic? And that’s saying a lot coming from me,” she asked Ken
coolly and condescendingly.

“No, actually, I don’t at all. When I told
you in the beginning I was against Veil, the very idea of it, this
is exactly what I meant. Exactly what you’re asking me to do now.
That very possibility is what I think would turn Veil into one of
the worst perils to ever threaten humanity,” Ken was adamant.

“Maybe it would help if you explained to us
why you think that, Ken,” Hunter attempted to mediate, although he
too found himself a bit put off by what Ken was saying. They had
countless conversations about Veil, and he never said anything like
that before.

“Ok, fine. Think about what you’re asking,
Suren. Think about what it could mean. Sure, you could easily come
up with a technology to record and store signals from a brain. You
could record and store entire neuroelectrical patterns. Those
stored patterns could be reproduced artificially so they could be
accessed by a Witness and then provided to another person, another
brain. The possibilities are then endless. Absolutely endless. But
the most extreme, absolute, and inevitable possibility is that it
would lead to the recording, storage, and transmissions of people’s
entire
lives. Their entire experience. Our lives would
become reduced to no more than a bit of storage on a hard
drive—available for anyone to access whenever they wanted.”

“Reduced? What do you mean reduced?” Suren
raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

“Think about it this way,” Ken went on, still
exuding the same off-putting, indignant disgust. “Before Veil, you
could buy, download, or stream entire seasons of various TV shows.
Sometimes, if the show was no longer being aired, you could get the
entire series. I guess you can still buy them if you could find a
place that sells them. Anyway, once you have one, you can then sit
down and watch an entire series from beginning to end within a few
weeks. Now, what’s crucial here is how that series represents years
of work
,
years of labor
,
years of experience. All of which gets condensed
down and stored digitally for our consumption. While I find it
pretty sad that you can sit down and watch the product of years and
years of an entire group of people’s work within a few weeks,
that’s not exactly dangerous. Veil would make one thing possible if
we allowed storage or recreation of neuroelectrical patterns:
literally recreating an entire person. That thing is what I’m
talking about—
that thing
is dangerous. Bone chillingly
dangerous.”

“Ken,” Suren folded her arms across her knees
and leaned forward on them, “dangerous how? What do you mean
dangerous?”

“Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
he shouted and whacked the desk with both palms.

“Yes!” Hunter barked. “Apparently you do!” He
and Suren were taken aback by Ken’s obvious appall. Ken’s reaction
disturbed Hunter because it meant Ken was seeing something, seeing
a vision of the world far in the future, which Hunter never
considered.

“Fine. One, we’re not talking about TV shows
here
.
We’re talking about people’s lives.
The entirety of people, possibly getting stored and made accessible
in perpetuity. Every single thing about them, ready to be consumed
and digested. And, the way Veil works, people’s lives could get
consumed within minutes. Their entire lives, the sum of all their
experiences, turned into a unit of data that’s able to be consumed
within minutes.”

Suren and Hunter looked at each other. What
Ken was saying didn’t sit well with either of them. In their gut,
they knew what he was saying was right, and they knew it would be
wrong to allow it, but they couldn’t fully understand why. They
hadn’t had years to think about it like Ken had. Their minds needed
time to process the information. Still, they immediately sensed the
alarm in Ken’s voice, and it resonated in them.

“But,” he snapped them out of it, “that’s
actually not the worst part.”

“How can that not be the worst part?” Suren
half-laughed.

“Veilinquishment,” Ken replied. “That’s how.
Veilinquishment.”

“Oh shit,” Hunter groaned and leaned back in
his seat, his eyes fixating ahead as the implications of that word
sunk in.

“Veilinquishment?” Suren asked. She knew what
the word was, and she was familiar with the phenomenon but didn’t
understand how it applied there.

“Hunt? Do you want to explain?”

“Yuh—yeah.” He sounded hesitant. “I—I think
what Ken is saying, and I think it’s valid, but what I think he’s
saying is that we’re seeing Veilinquishment spreading more and
more. Where people relinquish their lives over to Veil because they
enjoy being someone else more than they enjoy being themselves. At
first, it started off with people preferring to be a particular
person. Based on their specific idiosyncrasies, they happen upon
someone through Veil that they simply feel more comfortable being.
Like that person is the perfect key to their lock or something.
They literally prefer being that person more than they want to be
themselves. They relinquish themselves over to that person. They
give themselves up completely through Veil. They spend all their
time shadowing and then experiencing life as that person. And after
a while it may not only be one person in particular they prefer
being, they simply might prefer never being themselves.”

“Um hello, I understand Veilinquishment. I
know what it is,” Suren interjected.

“Right … right,” Hunter continued. “Well,
Veilinquishment is spreading and it’s transforming. It’s no longer
people only relinquishing themselves because they like being
someone else. It’s spread into the shrinkage of culture in general.
Less art is being produced
.
Less
technology is being developed. Less research is taking place.
People are relinquishing their own tastes and their own passions.
Experience itself is becoming mainstreamed, condensed, and
centralized. The world is slowing down.”

“So what does that have to do with what we’re
talking about? What in the hell are you two saying?” Suren stood up
and paced the office.

“I—I think,” Hunter started up again, “and
Ken will have to stop me if I’m wrong, but I think it has to do
with what will happen when Veilinquishment and realtime merge and
explode due to the storage of consciousness.”

Ken slammed a fist on the desk. “Exactly!
Yes!”

“No!” Suren shouted back. “No! That’s not an
explanation.”

“Yes it is,” Ken laughed. “If you think about
it. Everything, like Hunter said, is getting centralized,
condensed, mainstreamed. Experience itself is shrinking. So what
happens if, all of a sudden, you have the ability to store and
transmit—in realtime—an entire person? Their entire life. As things
become more and more centralized. As experience itself becomes more
condensed and preferentially reduced down. And not just reduced
down but also amplified through Veil. All the experiences will get
amplified and intensified.”

Suren thought for a second and suddenly her
face reflected the dread and doom the two men were already
feeling.

“Oh God,” she sighed before starting to
explain the idea to herself out loud. “People could Veil entire
lives in realtime. They could give up—they could Veilinquish—their
own lives over to centralized experiences. Given enough time and
evolution of Veil, everyone could live out the same life. That’s
what the future could look like. Everyone could live out the same
life through Veil.”

“Yes, exactly,” Ken whispered. His voice
returned to normal and he elaborated. “It would start off as
society being reduced to the most valued people, like these Reality
Velebrities we hear about, and then it would be reduced to the most
valued experiences until eventually, the end result being all of
humanity, all experiences, get reduced to one singular, amplified,
centralized narrative. One set of so-called perfected, preferred,
heightened experiences.”

“And people,” Suren finished for him as she
sat back down and stared at her hands
,
which she placed in her lap, “could spend their entire lives
Veiling that one single set of combined experiences.”

“They would,” Hunter spoke up. “Not
could—they would. Because
,
by that time it
would be all anyone knew. It would be what was considered life. And
it would literally be the best life anyone ever lived. It would be
the best life anyone
could
ever live. It would literally be
better than real life.”

“Oh my God,” Suren looked up at Ken with a
tear streaming down one cheek. “What have we done? What have we
done?”

After that first day of what Suren jokingly
referred to as “Veil For Dummies
,
” Dr.
Mulligan spent the rest of the week training Suren how to use Veil
to plunge the depths of a subject’s mind. With the right discipline
and practice, he told her, one needn’t upload in realtime to get
results. Depending on what they were looking for, he told her, and
how deeply they were required to dig, Veiltime might be enough to
get the information they were after.

Not once did she divulge the purpose of the
lessons and not once did she tip her hand. She kept her questions
general and vague enough to lend the impression that she merely
wanted to enter the world of Veilers and become fully Inveiled;
however, that being said, she wanted to enter the New Veil World
fully prepared. Suren did mention to the doctor that it was
impossible for anyone to shadow her; although puzzled, he didn’t
appear too inquisitive.

A few of Suren’s curiosities were quelled
through the training process. She often wondered about the
limitations of Veil in regard to her area of expertise: education.
She wondered if Veil could be used to teach children. Absolutely,
she was told, and it was already being done. The various levels of
the vAcademy institutions started off as more fringe than
Montessori schools but they were quickly growing, including the
Veilementary schools. They were all gaining momentum and
legitimacy.