Veneer (36 page)

Looking up, Sebo narrowed his eyes. “He talked to you too?”

“Yeah. I think he hit everyone. Did Rosalia get interviewed?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

“I saw her between classes this morning. She looks sad.”

“Ha!” His laugh was just a little too loud. “Now he cares!”

I’ve always cared, thought Jalay. How many women had he collected in how many folders, each one bearing a resemblance to whatever veneer Rosalia happened to be wearing that day? A hundred? A thousand? Each of them reminded him of her, whether they were on his walls at home or following him in an endless stream as he dragged his fingers along a fence after school.

“More than likely, she’s upset that I didn’t spend all night riding the trams again.”

“Is that what you’re doing after school?” asked Jalay. “Because I could come over and help you install Jordan and Felicity. I’ve done it a few times already. It just takes a certain touch.”

He was aware of how hollow his words sounded, how desperate he was for company, for a friend. Worse was that Sebo seemed to take a long time considering the proposal.

“Alright,” Sebo agreed. He touched his palette and reconciled his address into the chat window. “We have to do it right after school because I’ve got a clan meeting tonight.”

“Sure, sure,” replied Jalay, moving the address to the map generator. Once he had directions, he pulled up his block list only to find forty-eight messages from Russo. Grabbing one out of the garbage, he examined the formless mixture of color, finding no meaning in it.

“What the fuck do you want?” he reconciled hastily. He paused before sending it and downed the last bite of his pizza. Joy filled him up again, gave him the confidence to send the message hurtling into the abyss.

For the remainder of lunch, he kept glancing at his block list nervously, but no further messages came.

46 - Russo

Russo sat very still in the expansive lobby, a complete reversal of his first reaction, namely to panic and thrash around blindly, running into walls and furniture. After sustaining a few bruises, he began to realize what was happening to him. It mostly had to do with Agent Ruiz, whose voice he heard beyond the shadows, laughing and taunting. It was all a show for him and Russo was getting tired of it. He found a clear area on the floor, turned his face towards the warmth of the sunlight, and sat down.

The funny thing was that he could still reconcile, albeit on a completely blank construct. With his eyes open just in case, he looked down at the floor, touched it with his hand, and pushed color into it, a nice hardwood grain. As the texture spread, it became uneven, but Russo concentrated harder, forcing the landscape into the infinite distance. Even when he looked away, the veneer remained, making it appear as if he were on a wooden plane with no end. There were walls though, even a receptionist’s desk with a chair on his left. He groped for it, found the underside of its arm, and reconciled an off-white veneer to give it shape. He spun it around slowly, painting each surface.

“Impressive,” said Ruiz from somewhere in front.

Russo estimated the distance, reconciled a beige wall, and put his last memory of the agent’s face on it.

“It usually takes new recruits several days to do what you’re doing.”

“Shouldn’t you be out enjoying life while you can?” asked Russo. Threatening the agent wouldn’t win him any points, but there wasn’t much more the man could do besides take away all his senses. That the agent could blind him was unsettling, but if new recruits went through it, then it had to be reversible.

“I’m noting a skew towards violence in your record.”

Laughing, Russo pulled himself into the chair. An endless plane and one wall, he thought. It needed more. He began pushing the chair around the lobby, touching the walls and translating one sense into the other. It took a while, but eventually the entire room appeared around him. Looking up, he guessed the height of the ceiling, gave it a pocked-grid design he had seen somewhere before. Just as the last piece was falling into place, every veneer in sight began vibrating violently. Despite his protest, the entire world cracked and shattered. All the colorful pieces fell to the ground where they sank through an unseen membrane before falling out of sight.

“There are answers to your questions, Russo. And those answers will give rise to more questions and having this knowledge will weigh heavily on you. It will change how you see the world, how you view history. It will tell you why I let you live instead of putting you to death immediately.”

Russo raised his middle finger in the darkness, realized he couldn’t see it, and then reconciled color onto his body. It was easier to gesture when his fingers were visible.

“Before we do any real training, we put new recruits in a room and blind them like I blinded you. Do you know why we do that?”

“Because it’s the only way you get hard anymore?”

A chuckle. “A fringe benefit,” the agent admitted. “But the real reason is because truth is so much more powerful when it is demonstrated. Children hardly blink when you tell them they can reconcile anything they want. It’s not until they do it that first time that they realize their true potential. Suddenly the world opens up for them. That’s what I did for you. I could tell you the secrets of the Vinestead Veneer, but to simply show you... well, judging by your face.”

Russo winced, confused. It was the second time the agent had looked through his veneer. The first time, he thought it was a fluke, a lucky guess. The man wasn’t in the same room, yet he could see his true face. That meant he was looking through a portal and seeing something real, both looking at the veneer and under it.

Un-fucking-believable.

Reconciliation was supposed to be a personal experience, shared only indirectly. Someone touched a wall, the other person could see it, but never could the idea pass without some kind of medium. If someone could disable veneers on a whim, if they could take his sight without gouging out his eyes, then it suggested a larger system. One thing was for sure; it really wasn’t magic.

“Of course not,” said Agent Ruiz. He added a condescending chuckle. “What you and the populace call a magic veneer, we call augmented reality. It’s machinery, hardware, and circuitry that makes all of this possible. Do you really think we’d trust control of the veneer to the unwashed masses? You of all people should know how dangerous that is.”

What the fuck did that mean? The question slipped onto his face.

“You have incredible arrogance in you, Russo. I noticed it the first time I put my eyes on you. All you need is real justification. And I’m sorry to say that if you’ve been basing that on reconciliation, or even InSight, then you’re going to be disappointed. We’ve got the same hardware running inside us, Russo. We have the same chips in our necks, the same grow-wire running through our spines. The only difference is our level of access. Bits, Russo, bits in a database make me more powerful than you. I can update your record and give you the same power. Or, I can delete everything about you. Erase you from Easton forever.”

“Forever?!” cried Russo. He made a dismissive gesture and turned his back to the agent’s voice.

“You should be more appreciative of what I’m offering you. Not many people get the opportunity to become agents, especially those who spend their early years at reform school. Good men have worked themselves to death for this program, men who knew the right way to treat their company. Some argue that doing what is right for your family or God or your country will make you a good person. But to excel as an agent, you have to be willing to do what is best for the company, for Vinestead.”

“I don’t know who that is. If they control the veneer, why aren’t they bigger?”

“Companies change,” explained Ruiz. “Sometimes they get big, other times they constrain themselves to save resources. Sometimes a forward-thinking conglomerate just has to step back from the spotlight for a while, whether from government pressure or public outcry, it doesn’t matter. You go back to Vinestead’s heyday and you’ll find people spitting at the mention of their name. But they hold the patents on some fundamental technologies: the veneer, Guardian chips, and even the grow-wire. All of it is Vinestead R&D.”

“Turn the lights back on.” It was fine to play games, but if the agent was going to stand there and lecture, the least he could do was show himself.

Without a response, the lobby snapped into view. Russo waited for his eyes to adjust and then faced the wall where the agent was looking down at him with amusement.

“Thanks,” Russo muttered. Every muscle in his body wanted to reach through the portal and strangle Ruiz to death and yet he was at the man’s mercy, forced to play the docile student. It would be prize enough, he concluded, that if at the end of this he could cut the agent’s head off slowly. Or another eye-gouging. Not a complete removal, just enough to blind him, let him spend some time fumbling in the darkness. Or better yet, maybe he could get access to the database, turn off all their eyes, and see how they liked it. The possibilities made him smile.

Pushing himself over to the desk, Russo reconciled a portal and brought up his searches for Vinestead. He wanted to show Ruiz the picture of a building he had found, but instead, his instant messenger popped into the forefront with a pending message from Jalay.

What the fuck did
he
want?

“I can take your toy away if you can’t pay attention,” warned Ruiz.

“Can you make Jalay blind?”

The agent huffed and replied, “Of course I can. Will I? No. You can’t just go blinding people for no good reason. We do try to keep a low profile.” A pause. “Jalay Chapman,” he recited from memory. “I met him yesterday. Squat kid, right?”

“More like fat-ass,” said Russo. “Why’d you talk to him?”

“It was part of my search for Deron Bishop.”

Russo flashed on the first meeting between him and Agent Ruiz, to the picture he had held up of Deron. At the time, it seemed like a fair question. But based on what he knew now, it no longer seemed necessary. “You know where I am, right? How?”

In the portal, the agent tapped the back of his neck.

“Then—”

“Why don’t I go pick up Deron Bishop wherever he is? Because there’s something wrong with that boy.”

“No shit,” agreed Russo.

“With his Guardian chip, I mean. It went off the grid on Sunday. No one noticed until his mother called the locals. By then, there was no trace of him. Until last night.”

Russo widened his eyes, prompting for more information.

“He pops up intermittently now, but we can’t trust the data because at one point, it showed him outside the walls. And no one goes outside the walls.”

“Why not?”

Agent Ruiz sighed. “The signal only reaches so far. If you’re not on a networked road, the veneer stops working. Could you imagine what that would do to someone who had depended on it all their lives?”

It sounded like a challenge. “We should do that,” said Russo, unable to stop himself. “We should bring the whole damn thing to the ground!”

“And strike two,” said Ruiz.

“Shit, don’t shake your head at me! You’re the one that can’t find one little boy even with a tracking chip in his neck. I don’t even know why I’m listening to you anymore.”

“Because you know the alternative.” His voice was surprisingly stern. Something flashed on his veneer, replacing the slight anger with a friendly façade. “Besides, I think Deron would be a great test mission for you. All you have to do is bring him in and your acceptance into the program is assured. Why is that funny?”

Russo considered the question. How about the fact that the people who were supposed to be looking for a missing person cared so little that they would put his classmate on the case? How insignificant did that make Deron? It was almost vindication for the way Russo had treated him over the years.

“Nothing,” he replied at last. “I accept your mission.” He flourished his best salute.

Yes, he thought to himself, I’ll find Deron. But when I do, I’m going to put his chip to rest.

Permanently.

47 - Rosalia

There was magic happening at school, some kind of spell that made the classes drag on without end, that made the clocks take twice as long to change to the next minute. Rosalia tried to keep her eyes off the time, but it was either that or acknowledge the daydreams that had been haunting her since arriving at school. At first, she thought they were just random ideas not unlike the myriad of things going through her head at any given time. But then after lunch, as time slowed even further, she began to reconcile what she could only catch glimpses of in her subconscious. Sitting in the back of the classroom with her palette tilted away from prying eyes, she transformed her fantasies into veneer. The results were confusing at best.

Some of the images were still vague: what appeared to be a leg, slender fingers, and even a lock of hair suspended in mid-air. There was always the chance that her conscious mind was affecting the veneer, an excuse she used when faces started to appear, first hers, then Ilya’s. As the colors changed under her finger, the images became more defined, until she was looking at the outline of Ilya on her side, returning an intense gaze, her hand extending into the foreground and out of frame. The bean bag chair under her began to glow, as did the walls behind. Rosalia recognized her room, but the memory of Ilya in that pose wasn’t there.

A sexual fantasy, she thought, about Ilya.

Rosalia swiped at her palette, erasing the image and banishing it from her memory. She concentrated on the clock, unable to hear the teacher’s voice over the ones in her head that were now questioning things that were better left unanswered. Deron popped into being, a head to toe reproduction suspended in an empty construct. Piece by piece, she stripped him down until he was completely naked. Then, appearing from the left, Rosalia, equally nude, walked into his embrace. Even in the confines of a poorly defined daydream, she could see the love in his eyes, even though she could not match his passion.