Veil (67 page)

The problem, Dr. Mulligan suggested, was that
the initial experience of shadowing children and adolescents left
such a scar on the Veil world in the beginning that it wasn’t
revisited again for quite some time. Initially, he stated, adults
tried to shadow children and teenagers and although successful, the
aftermath was so painful it made Veiling them nowhere near worth
the suffering. While it was absolutely nothing near what
vFlatliners endured, it was a thousand times worse than any
hangover you could ever possibly imagine. The pain, he
said—seemingly from experience—closely bordered on unbearable.

The theory on why Veiling juveniles resulted
in pain, he explained, had to do less with the structure of an
adolescent brain and more so the nature of their mind.

“Kids and teenagers have such a singularity
of a mind. Their thoughts and feelings are seldom broad or
expansive. They are a singularity. Their minds feel restricted and
tight. When a child has a thought or feeling, they are reduced to
that single thought—that single emotion. Babies, children, and
teenagers do not have the mental capacity to adequately produce,
much less hold, more than one complex thought or feeling at the
same time.”

So, he went on to explain, after the
shadowing was complete, when the adult’s Witness was uploaded back
onto them, their mind couldn’t cope with the singularity of a
child’s mind. He told her it would be like putting one’s mind
through a ringer
.
The compression and pain
were excruciating. The boundaries of a child’s mind were too
suffocating, too restrictive for the mind of an adult to endure. He
tried to convey how each mind had a spatial feeling to it, like a
degree of tightness or looseness. A child’s mind felt unbelievably
tight. So tightly wound it felt as if the mind might break. It was
the exact opposite, he noted, of how a highly intelligent,
open-minded, or enlightened person felt when one Veiled such a
mind.

“I often wondered about that,” Suren
interrupted. “About what happens when a person of average
intelligence Veils someone who is extremely intelligent. Does it
rub off on them? Can they absorb some of that intelligence through
some sort of osmosis?”

“Oh, heavens no,” the doctor chuckled at the
suggestion. “Not at all. What happens is a lot like what occurs if
one Veils someone who speaks another language. It almost doesn’t
register at all. At first, they might remember some of the thoughts
and ideas, but they quickly fade—not unlike a dream you can’t hold
onto—until the thoughts disappear completely. Even if one could
hold onto thoughts that go beyond their natural comprehension,
because their mind wouldn’t know how to arrive at such conclusions
naturally, they simply wouldn’t make sense. Like a foreign
language. The mind would reject them.”

“Fascinating,” Suren sighed. She also found
it disappointing. In her imagination, Veil could work as some sort
of way to bring everyone up to the same level of intellectual and
emotional intelligence.

It didn’t work that way, the doctor told her
and explained how those things were based more in the physiology of
the brain itself. It was built into the wiring and structuring of
the brain. Without the right physiology, without the right
connections in the brain—which develop over time—one couldn’t
simply force their brain to perform in a way in which it wasn’t yet
capable. Something it hadn’t been trained to do.

“Take, for instance,” he said, “if a deaf
person were to Veil a hearing-able person. Now, it’s generally not
the brain of a deaf person that’s the problem. It’s the ear, the
organ itself. If the person has been deaf from birth, although the
problem might reside in the actual ear, the part of the brain
responsible for hearing hasn’t developed. It didn’t receive any
signals
,
so it didn’t develop properly or
make the proper connections.”

“So, what happens when they do Veil a hearing
… hearing-able person?”

“Interestingly enough, over time, their brain
can be trained to process the signals being stimulated by The
Witness, which would cause them to hear the sounds in their mind.
Since The Witness is essentially bypassing the organs of the ear
and going directly to the brain, the person would be able to hear.
The Witness would act as kind of a neuroprosthetic in that case,
like a cochlear ear implant but created by the Veil process.
However, first their brain has to be trained to hear, just as it
would’ve been trained from birth.”

“Has it happened? Are there reports of deaf
or blind people benefiting from Veil and gaining hearing or
vision?” Suren marveled.

“There have definitely been reports,” he
noted, “of Veil programmers amplifying certain signals from Veil to
achieve this and slowly train the brain to receive and process
signals
,
but so far the success has been
slow moving. There is hope, but as of yet there hasn’t been any
miracle. It seems very promising but people proceed with caution.
First, the brain has to be trained. It has to make those
connections, and then the person has to learn how to comprehend—how
to understand the new information. They have to learn how to hear
and understand what they are hearing. But, and this is the kicker,
the person is only able to hear through Veil. They still aren’t
able to hear through their own ears. They can only experience sound
through someone else … through Veil. There is great
potential
,
but it isn’t a total game
changer, if you will. Just great potential.”

Despite the caveats, the news pleased Suren
immensely. Everything she learned seemed to indicate that the
benefits of Veil far outweighed any detriments. If filled her with
pride that her Jin could come up with such a remarkable theory—that
he could be responsible for such a world-uniting and life-changing
technology. She was more and more, with each day, proud of her Jin.
Suren found herself personally proud of Veil.

“We haven’t done anything yet,” was Ken’s
answer to her. “And that future is exactly what I’ve been trying to
avoid.”

“That future,” Suren asked, “is what you were
predicting back then? Back when it was me and you, at the old
house?”

“Oh, that future was worse than the one I
described. Much worse.”

“Worse?!” Hunter interjected. He was still
trying to decide if he should be upset by the fact that he was only
then hearing about all those predictions for the first time.

“Definitely worse. I mean, look at the
progression of technology. Look at the path things take,” Ken
explained.

“You know you’re going to have to hold our
hands down your line of reasoning, Ken,” Suren rolled her eyes. “I
don’t know why you make us ask.”

That made Ken laugh heartily.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really don’t do it
on purpose,” he consoled them. “I really don’t. I always assume you
both think like I do. I always assume we’re all on the same
page.”

“We don’t and we’re not,” Hunter grumbled,
hoping Ken would pick up on his displeasure. He wasn’t used to
being the dumb man in the room. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed, and
he wanted Ken to know as much.

“Ok, ok,” Ken nodded. “Let’s go back to the
TV show example, shall we?”

“I guess,” Suren leaned back into the
couch.

“Well, at first you had DVDs. Later, you
could rip those DVDs. You could store them onto a hard drive and
stream them from your computer to your TV. Eventually, you could
digitally store them right inside your TV. PreVeil, the technology
was being built right into TVs. Later, you could stream whatever
you wanted to watch over the internet directly to your TV. First,
there was Netflix with some TV shows and movies, which was then
totally surpassed by the development of PixelNimbus, from which you
could stream literally every single bit of digital media in
existence straight into your living room whenever you wanted.”

“So, you predict we’d go from centrally
storing experiences that people Veil, to streaming the experiences
directly to their Witness?” Suren asked.

“Yep, exactly. We’d open the door for a
Matrix-type scenario, except they’d have no control. They’d be
gone; they would simply experience the stream. The technology would
allow for streaming consciousness directly to someone’s brain. In
realtime. Anyone who was hooked into the vNet could have experience
directly streamed to them. Compound that with what I predicted
before and, well, it’s apocalyptical type shit.”

“But, you’ve always said that only the brain
can access the information stored in the Witness; the information
stored in a brain. That was the cornerstone of Jin’s theory,” Suren
argued.

“That’s still true,” Hunter responded for
him. “What Ken’s saying doesn’t change any of that. But it would be
quite possible—and easy—to recreate the signals transmitted by the
brain. All you have to do is record them and artificially recreate
them. It still takes a human brain to receive and interpret the
information, but simply recreating the information and delivering
it to a brain somehow would be much, much less complicated.”

“Well then,” she looked at Ken, “if it would
be
so
less complicated to do, what about ‘multiple
discovery’? What about the fact that, if it’s possible and if
someone can come up with it, then someone eventually will? Based
off what you’ve always said yourself, this is inevitable. Isn’t it?
Isn’t this what Veil is going to become?”

Ken sighed and tilted his head back.

Looking up at the ceiling, his answer sounded
like a burdensome confession.

“I know. I know. Yes. It’s going to happen.
No matter what, it’s going to happen.”

Dr. Mulligan found himself excused with a
thanks and a warning. “I could’ve easily used Veil to mark your
memory of this timeframe and then later erased everything between
those markers
,
so that you’d have no
recollection of any of this. However, I did not,” Suren
contemptuously ingratiated him.

“Th—thank you?” he mustered.

“You are not to speak with anyone about this,
and you are not to sell or share your memories of me.”

“Yes, I understand, and I never would do such
a thing,” he struggled to assure her.

“You need to realize, if you do, I will hear
about it. You will find that I can be most unforgiving when
provoked. I kindly suggest that you do—not … provoke—me.”

“Of—of course. I understand, Suren. Like I
said, I—I never would.”

“Please Auggie,” she finished with him,
“address me appropriately.”

“Ye—yes ma’am,” he lowered his head. “Yes, Ms
… Ms. Widow Tsay.”

Armed with Dr. Mulligan’s teachings from the
previous week, Suren used her vKey to access the Veil Network
freely and to bypass its security protocols. She began the process
of secretly Veiling anyone with some degree of connection with
Jin’s killer. First, she started with the friends and family of the
two people on the list she received from Mariano; she started with
the two people who were killed using Jin’s memory.

She shadowed their wives, their siblings,
their friends. Anyone within the scope of their lives who she could
track down and who might have some kind of information on the
identity of Jin’s killer. She used the doctor’s training to scan
their thoughts for anything that might lead to a clue, even if the
clue only led to another person who might also hold the most
minuscule bit of information. She looked for the darkest sides of
people. She knew that’s where the likes of
him
would
lurk.

The doctor was right: no amount of discussing
the structure and nuances of the human mind could compare to
experiencing it for oneself. She found every mind was different;
every person was organized in his or her own, unique way. That was
the best word she could think of to explain to it to herself:
organized. She found people to be made of all the same stuff,
although their minds were all organized differently.