Veil (83 page)

Hunter’s head jerked back and his eyes
widened. Over twenty-five years of his own obliviousness struck
him. She didn’t know; Suren didn’t know; Ken never told her. All
those years she worried and aged and wrinkled and had no idea. She
probably worried and fretted that whole time, while marinating all
up in her own urine and stench. The realization brought him such a
victorious smile. The Great Geisha Tsay didn’t know.

Suren doesn’t know … Suren doesn’t know …
Suren doesn’t know … Suren doesn’t know.

Hunter sucked air through his teeth and
smacked his lips. Holy fuck balls, the satisfaction tasted so
sickly sweet. He let the candied, succulent words shoot at Suren
from his mouth like jagged pieces of crystalized molasses. He
wanted each shard from his tongue to tear into her skin as
painfully as Jin’s memory tore apart Ken’s brain.

“Ken had a plan. We already put it in place.
It’s in the Temple.” He started to leave but stopped and poked his
head back through the door. He
had
to take that one final
lick. “In fact, we had to use—
what
Jin
did
to
you
.”

With a smile so broad it threatened to tear
at the corners of his mouth, Hunter slammed Suren’s bedroom door
and swaggered down the hall, gaily switching his hips and swinging
the glass skull to and fro.

“I
only have one
condition, in terms of what you’ve made.”

“Oh … ok.”

“Take Lundy out.”

“Wh—what do you mean? Take him out? He’s …
he’s … crucial to—”

“Don’t take his part of the story
out
.
You can leave that in. I mean take
him
out. Remove any trace of him as a physical being. I
don’t care how you do it, but I don’t want there to be any
representation of him in this. Not his body, not his face, not his
voice. Nothing. At all. It’s non-negotiable. No one should ever be
forced to look at, hear, or experience that demon again.”

“So, leave him in the story but don’t show
him?”

“Precisely.”

“I … I … I guess I could make him like an
empty space. Like a cutout—yeah, like a black cutout. He’d be an
empty space. Veilers would see he’s there, but they wouldn’t see
him
.”

“Perfect. Whatever you have to do to make it
work. That’s my only condition in terms of what you’ve created. The
Veil story.”

“Ok.”

“Roy?” Suren inquired, although she already
knew his answer.

“Oh, I’m fine with it. Totally fine with it.
Totally.”

Peyton smiled
.

“Hunter?” Suren asked.

He looked at Suren and rolled his eyes. He
couldn’t stand the sound of that sow’s voice. Hearing her say his
name was especially traumatic. About as traumatic as … say … being
stuck in an elevator for eternity with a coked-up Gilbert Gottfried
arguing with a methed-up Fran Drescher while a drunk Harvey
Fierstein attempted to mediate.

Oh god, kill it with fire
.
Someone please harness the power of the sun and
kill Suren with slow, painful drips of liquid fire. Like water
torture.

The thought of so much delicious, deadly heat
made Hunter’s mouth dry and reminded him that he needed a
drink.

He realized everyone was staring at him. Oh
yeah, it was his turn to speak. He slipped back into his old
Caltech composure. Ignoring Suren, Hunter directed his statement at
Peyton. “Actually, I have some questions. Or concerns maybe.”

“O—ok.” Peyton braced herself. She didn’t
look forward to interactions with Dr. Hunter Kennerly. It was
easier to look forward to flying spiders that were as big as her
head and stung like hornets. Their company would probably be much
more pleasant and entertaining.

“Mainly, I’d like to know where you got your
information. Your accuracy is … well, it’s shocking to be honest.
What I’m concerned with are some of the scenes. There are a few
that are pretty close to accurate, and that’s the problem—because
of who all was present in those scenes and who wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example, take the scene of your
Veillusion that you showed off. It took place in Ken’s lab, and it
was myself, Ken, Brock and—
her
,” he titled his head in
Suren’s direction and rolled his eyes.

“That’s right.”

“My question is—how could you know anything
about that? How could you know the details? It was only the four of
us, and I know for a fact none of us four squealed. None of us told
anyone what took place during moments like those.”

“Ok, I see what you mean.”

“Good. Now explain.”

Suren realized Hunter asked a question she
was unconsciously curious about as well. There was a nag tugging at
her, but she didn’t know what it was before Hunter verbalized it.
It was as if her mind hadn’t fully gone there yet, so Hunter did it
for her.

“The data came from different sources. Most
of it is out there. Almost everything about each of you is out
there. Articles, books, court documents, interviews, vMemories, and
Mr. Elsbeth’s journals that you allowed to be published after he …
after he passed away. Using that, I was able to piece together a
pretty specific, detailed timeline of what happened and when. All
the way up from the beginning to the end. I had dates, names,
places, people, all of that. And most importantly, I had the
beginning and end—not only of the story but also of each scene in
the story. Everything that propelled the story along. Surely, you
must realize that the steps you five took to make Veil happen and
catch Lundy are documented in lots and lots of places.”

“I figured as much,” Hunter nodded. “However,
that still doesn’t get to what I’m asking. That’s the cake. For the
most part, you have the whole cake; I’ll give you that. But, you
also have the icing. That’s not out there. I’m asking who gave it
to you. Who gave the icing that I know for a fact you didn’t
have?”

“I wrote a program,” was Peyton’s flat
answer.

“A program?” Hunter scoffed. She must think
him to be a damn fool.

“Yes, a program. After I had the skeleton and
organs, all I needed was the flesh. So I created a program—an
algorithm—where I input the story scene-by-scene, and for all the
scenes where I had no record of what transpired between any of you,
I told the computer to make it up, in a sense. To predict the
progression of the scene and author the most likely dialog. I
programmed the computer to make it up.”

“To make it up?” Hunter pressed her. He
wasn’t entirely buying it … yet.

“In a sense, yes. I’ll give an example. From
years of appearances, interviews, and testimony from other people,
I already had all your personalities. All those things. I was able
to create extensive personality templates and profiles for each of
you. Templates that could be used to predict how you’d act or react
in certain situations. When I inserted your personalities into the
program, it could algorithmically project how each of you would get
from point A to point B. That is, based on your individual
personalities. Add that algorithm to the things I did know and toss
in the records of your appearance, your voice, your mannerisms. Mix
it all up together and there you go … there’s the icing.”

“For example?” Suren pressed her that
time.

“Ok, let’s take that same scene Hunter used
as an example. Everyone knew the four of you met up after Dr.
Kennerly stole the plans for Veil from the military. He and Mr.
Elsbeth met up with you and Dr. Wise at the lab. Dr. Wise’s lab,
where they built the museum after he died. Your meeting at the lab
is common knowledge, and it placed all four of you in the scene.
Even if no one could know the exact details of your conversations,
everything that happened in the lab that day is totally common
knowledge, ”

“Yes,” Suren agreed and nodded.

“I had almost everything I needed. Every
single detail. The only things I didn’t have were the tiny details
of what happened during the meeting inside the lab. Like your
conversations and stuff. But, it didn’t take much research to find
Dr. Kennerly made three phone calls that day. Those phone calls
wrote his role in that scene, and the program could use the
algorithm of his personality in that particular situation to script
Dr. Kennerly’s most likely performance. All I needed to do was plug
in the phone calls. The one to the manufacturer of those prototypic
Veil devices, the one to that Anderson Cooper guy, and the one to
some woman who he met up with the next day, which was described in
one of Mr. Elsbeth’s journals. She might’ve been a hooker or
something. That was kinda unclear. Anyway, once I plugged in those
factors and Dr. Kennerly’s personality, the scene pretty much wrote
itself.

“That’s how I approached every scene that was
a donut scene—that is, every scene where only a combination of you
four could’ve known the details … the middle. For a handful scenes,
I only had the outer ring, so all I had to do was fill in some of
the missing middles. Luckily, because of how famous the story is, I
had at least the beginning and end of every scene, so I let the
program fill in the rest. I let it fill in the missing holes, and
to be honest there weren’t many. If it was anyone but the four of
you, I don’t think it would’ve been possible. There’s so much
information floating around out there about each one of you. About
the story of how Veil happened and how Dr. Jin’s killer was caught,
with you scanning the vNet. Plus, Mr. Elsbeth’s journals had an
incredible amount of information. Some stuff was unclear, like how
exactly you traced Lundy. But I could logically piece everything
together. I hope that answers your question enough.”

“Ken would’ve liked her.” Suren looked at
Hunter and raised her eyebrows.

“How long did it take you?” Hunter asked,
ignoring Suren. He refused look at
her
.

“For the story itself, about seven months,
starting with Suren’s perspective as the main one. To take that
framework and then write the story from all the other
perspectives—each one of those took about three months. Then after
each was done, I had to go back and compile them to make sure all
the perspectives matched up throughout the story in order to form
an overall cohesive Veillusion. Continuity, you know? Like you
know, people couldn’t be talking at the same time, and I couldn’t
have you do something from your perspective but have it be
different from another character’s perspective. Compiling
everything and fixing the continuity took another five months, give
or take.”

“So it took you pretty much two years to
write this Veillusion,” Hunter summed it up.

“Yes, a little over two years.”

“And you did it, according to
her
, to
sway us to revoke our opposition to storing neuroelectrical
patterns. Specifically artificial ones.”

“Only artificial ones, yes.”

“What if we say no fucking way?” Hunter asked
bluntly.

“Well, if we’re being honest, if you say no,
I hold onto the drives that are storing the Veillusion I wrote and
us Veillusionists sit around and wait for you all to get it over
with and finally die already. Then hopefully, by Jin’s Good Grace,
when I’m your age they’ll rewrite the law, and I can release it and
write others. Until then, there’s not much I can do except hide the
fact that I have those,” she frowned and pointed at the boxes
spread out in front of Hunter.

Hunter laughed. “Ken would’ve liked you.” He
said it as if Suren hadn’t said it minutes earlier.

They sat in silence for a while until Hunter
clapped his hands once and startled them.

“I’m all for it. But I have two conditions of
my own,” he announced.

“Ok.”

“First, I want to take a peek inside that
program you wrote. That algorithm.”

“That’s not a problem at all. I’m sure it’s
linguistically similar to the ones you and Dr. Wise used to create
The Jin Experience
and to catch Lundy.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Hunter gave her
a thumbs up.

Peyton smiled.

“And second—and this is the most important
one … I want you to make Suren fat. And maybe a transsexual. But
definitely fat. You have to make that bitch really fucking fat.