Veil (8 page)

The questions then became:
What can Veil
do? What do the wolves intend to do with it?

Schaffer was annoyed, which said about as
much as saying Andrew Dice Clay was angry.

It was one thing to sit there while he was
degraded and belittled by General Coffman, who was only so angered
because he was too stupid or stubborn to understand the simplest of
theories. It was entirely another thing to have no say in being
teamed up with Pollock. Ugh, Pollock. He loathed Pollock, who he
also found to be so slow and dense that a totally politically
incorrect, but seemingly appropriate, pronunciation of Pollock’s
last name became a private joke for Schaffer:
Polack
. True,
it was phonetically different and a totally wrong pronunciation,
but it worked well enough for him.

Eh, who gives a frak? Maybe the Poles don’t
find it offensive anymore.

Schaffer despised the very presence of
Pollock. Ugh, Pollock, who swore relation to Jackson Pollock and
bragged about it every time he met someone even mildly interested.
Schaffer waited for the opportune time to tell him how he thought
Jackson Pollock made shit for art. Utterly deranged, alcoholic,
absolute shit. Schaffer was certain he would find the opportune
time.

The only thing about the entire situation
that perhaps annoyed Schaffer more than Pollock was how he adopted
the military’s asinine tendency to refer to everyone by their last
name. It was like being in the friggen Boy Scouts again. Ok, no—it
was annoying as frak, but it wasn’t more annoying than Pollock.

Still, all Dr. Carl Schaffer wanted—besides
being referred to as ‘Dr. Schaffer,’ or even ‘Dr. Carl,’ or simply
friggen ‘Doctor’—was to build something. Until he got his hands on
Jin Tsay’s work, he didn’t care what he built. He would’ve been
content building friggen Erector Sets.

Now all Carl Schaffer wanted to do was build
Veil.

So, he tried.

“What’s the plan?” Pollock asked and
quickened his step to catch up with Schaffer. The two men were on
their way back to the lab after their second briefing with General
Coffman.

The meeting went considerably better than the
first. Since he knew the General required visualization to
understand damn near anything, Schaffer brought in a few pieces of
equipment, which they built using Dr. Tsay’s schematics. With those
in hand, Schaffer proceeded to explain Dr. Tsay’s process and how
the military could utilize it. Schaffer also explained how the Veil
hardware specifications, as Dr. Tsay designed them, would not
suffice for the military’s needs. Simply put, Dr. Tsay’s design
wasn’t efficiently small and portable enough for their purposes.
The General seemed to understand that part of Schaffer’s
presentation.

Ironically enough, but not surprisingly,
Pollock did not.

“What do you mean?” Schaffer asked.

“What do we do now?” Pollock rephrased.

“We do exactly what I said in there,”
Schaffer replied. He thumbed over his shoulder toward the General’s
office. He made no attempt to mask his contempt for friggen
Pollock.

“Yeah, I know.” Pollock tried to save face.
“But you told the General we could make Veil portable and remotely
deployable. We’ve both used Tsay’s version of Veil. We both know
how much machinery it takes to do what Tsay made possible. That
crap took up like a whole room, dude. Do you really think we can
make it portable and remotely deployable?”

Schaffer responded smugly, “Think about how
large computers were when they were invented. Now look at the phone
in your pocket,
dude
. It can do more than computers two
years ago could. What do you think,
dude
?”

“I think you better have a phone-sized Veil
up your sleeve,
Carl
,” Pollock smirked.

“I do,” Schaffer grinned and inserted his
card into the lab door, which slid open with a hiss. They entered
their lab; it was a military lab that made Jin Tsay’s look like a
high school science classroom. After the two men entered, the doors
slid closed behind them and sealed. Schaffer immediately turned to
the right and said, “Catch ya later,
Polack
,” as he walked
to his office in the lab and closed his door without another word.
He knew Pollock hated being called that. He knew Pollock hated it
when he closed himself in his office. He smiled. Schaffer loved to
make Pollock hate things.

Luke Pollock, who was frozen in the place
where he stopped after Schaffer called him that name, shouted
across the lab.

“You know that’s not how my name is
pronounced!”

Schaffer leaned back in his chair, propped
his feet up on the windowsill behind his desk, and worried. Problem
was, Pollock was right: Schaffer didn’t have a phone-sized Veil up
his sleeve. It took him almost two months to get through Dr. Tsay’s
research and principles to understand how to operate the machines
in Tsay’s lab. It wasn’t like sitting down at a computer and
intuitively figuring out a new program.

Programs ran on platforms that all used
similar, if not identical, language, so it was never hard to figure
out how programmers got from point A to point B, without so much as
Schaffer picking up a manual. A girlfriend once told him that his
mind must work like a computer, because talking to him was like
using the internet. Schaffer always prided himself on figuring
things out using logic and intuition alone, especially anything and
everything technological.

Not Veil, though. While he could follow the
formulas and see how Tsay’s work developed, he had to read and
digest every single page of notes. Frak, just to see how it all
came together, he had to reach as far back as Tsay’s college
dissertation. Tsay performed a test run—a successful test run, at
that—but there was no development report and, to Schaffer’s dismay,
no manual.

The problem was everything started with the
brain and how the brain worked, how its friggen weird ass brand of
electricity worked. Schaffer didn’t have time to become a frakking
brain electricity expert. Instead, he focused on what he did know:
the formulas, mechanics, and technology. What he did know about
Veil only allowed him to accomplish one thing, and it wasn’t much
of an accomplishment. All he accomplished was learning Tsay’s lab
well enough to understand how to use Tsay’s equipment.

In the General’s words,
woopty-goddamn-doo
!

Tsay’s lab consisted mainly of two
single-crank examining beds positioned side-by-side, each with
electrode-covered helmets attached to the head. Wires ran between
the two helmets and then from each helmet to two massive mainframes
on opposite sides of the beds. Tsay’s setup filled an 800 square
foot space. After Tsay’s unfortunate disappearance, the military
seized full control of one of the hospital elevators and allowed
the two scientists unfettered access to Tsay’s lab and
documents.

Schaffer and Pollock were able to learn
Tsay’s operation in the first two months and by the third each
conducted their own Veil test run. In the first run, Schaffer—using
another of Tsay’s terms—“shadowed” a subject for four hours and in
the second Pollock shadowed the subject from the beginning of a
wake cycle all the way through to the end of the day, nearly
sixteen hours total.

After they acquired every bit of information
they could from Tsay’s lab and completed their development reports,
the lab was dismantled and the equipment destroyed. There was no
practical reason to remove all Tsay’s equipment, only to reassemble
it in their lab on base. Not when they could recreate the setup
themselves using newer, more advanced equipment. Besides, Schaffer
believed he didn’t fully understand a design if he couldn’t build
it himself.

Armed with Tsay’s data and their combined
development reports, when they entered the General’s office the
first time a couple of days earlier, Schaffer and Pollock were
proud of what they accomplished. The General was actually right
about that: the two whitecoats
were
quite proud. Equally
proud.

Schaffer felt fundamentally changed by the
experience of Veil, by the experience of “shadowing” someone. The
experience brought Schaffer to the brink of obsession when it came
to working on Veil. It took everything in him not to include a
personal account of his test run in the development report. The
information and language alone wouldn’t have been appropriate for a
scientific document, and he realized his personal account was
irrelevant to the military anyway.

Schaffer already knew how the military
intended to utilize Veil, and that utilization didn’t have anything
to do with consciousness, psychology, or existentialism. On the
other hand, Pollock’s experience of shadowing the subject was more
in line with how the military planned to use Veil. Pollock
described his experience as though he were inside an alien
virtual-reality video game, where he operated as some kind of
secret agent or spy. Leave it to Pollock to act like it was a damn
video game.

Frak, Carl Schaffer friggen hated Luke
Pollock.

“Espionage” was exactly the word the General
wanted to hear, and that was precisely why Schaffer used it so many
times.

However, that was also what made Schaffer’s
follow-up presentation a couple of days after their first meeting
so much more frustrating for the General, although it was more well
received. At least it was straightforward, clear, and concise.
Plus, it was in the General’s language. The General appreciated all
of that, so the frustrating bad news was taken a little softer.
Schaffer tried to follow the bad news with some good news, which
was possibly also an exaggeration, but at least it was good
news.

To lead up to the bad news, Schaffer provided
an explanation of Veil that was more in line with what the General
sought. He listed precisely what details about a subject the
military could expect to obtain through Veil. Schaffer outlined all
those juicy, crucial tidbits the military could extract from a
subject’s mind when they used Veil. Schaffer told the General that,
yup, they were definitely talking straight-up espionage. It was
pretty much the epitome of espionage. Things couldn’t get more
espionage-ish than Veil. His last little zinger made the General
clap once and shout,
Hot damn!

Schaffer then delivered the bad news: as
initially designed by Dr. Tsay, the Veil technology could not be
used as some kind of clandestine spying machine. The way Tsay left
things, Veil wasn’t so much a device as it was one big, huge ass,
giant, massive machine. It would require the government to have
enough access to a subject to hook them up to Veil and upload the
Witness who’d be shadowing them. Then, they’d need to be released
and returned to their normal life, only to be brought back before
their next sleep cycle, in order to be reattached to Veil.

At that point, The Witness who was shadowing
the subject could be extracted and returned to its owner. Only then
could the owner of The Witness that performed the shadowing provide
the military with the information they sought.
Confusing, I
know
, Schaffer acknowledged when he could tell the General no
longer understood what he was saying. It wasn’t really that
confusing, though. Only if someone was a friggen idiot.

Basically, Schaffer explained, the way Tsay’s
machine was originally designed, the military would actually have
to kidnap the subject they wanted to Veil. They’d have to kidnap
the enemy they wanted to spy on. Then, they’d have to release the
subject for a day.
Then
, the military would have to kidnap
the subject
once again
in order to complete the process.
And
, the military would have to conduct the second
kidnapping before the subject fell asleep. If not, or if the
subject happened to take a damn nap, the military would lose
everything in the Veil.