Veil (96 page)

Cheyenne could smell the theater and feel the
cold, hard, wooden stage beneath her feet. At the end of each
rotation in Dominika’s fouetté en tournant, when she faced front
and her foot flattened on the stage, in the instant before she rose
onto her toe again to make another turn, she could see the audience
staring at her with wonder. She could feel as Dominika’s only
emotion was the dance. She could hear as Dominika’s only thought
was of perfected movement. She could feel her heart racing, her
blood flowing, and her lungs filling. She could feel herself flying
through the air for the final pirouette.

She was
Dominika Alexandrovna
.

She didn’t feel the asphalt under her feet or
the aching of her out-of-shape, untrained, disproportionate
body.

When the dance ended, she took her bow and
received her standing ovation. She swelled with the perfect mixture
of pride, humility, and appreciation. She soaked in the applause
and cries of the crowd and stood before them, their perfect Black
Swan. The world’s most perfect Black Swan ever. She took another
bow and headed off stage. She waited precisely the appropriate
amount of time before returning to the stage to take her perfect
final bow.

As Dominika left the stage for the second
time, Cheyenne reached down to her wrist and pushed the button on
the side of her vHost.

Cheyenne looked down at her feet, which hurt
and were raw and bleeding. She limped over to the yellow line and
toward her bag. She sat, took off her socks, and readjusted her
bloody bandages. She pulled another fresh pair of socks out of her
bag. She put the new socks on and put the bloodied ones inside her
bag. She adjusted her vHost to resume muting her body’s physical
responses that her brain received from the Veil.

She pressed the button to resume her life as
Dominika Alexandrovna. She followed the path back to the train
station by instinctually navigating the line between being Cheyenne
Modesto and Dominika Alexandrovna. She climbed the stairs and
proceeded to the closest bench. Cheyenne sat on the bench with her
eyes closed and lived as Dominika until she could hear the train
approaching. Even then, she only kept her eyes open long enough to
board the train. Cheyenne’s eyes remained closed as much as
possible
,
so she wouldn’t miss anything
that Dominika’s eyes had seen.

She greeted her adoring fans with an
exemplary mixture of gratitude and confidence. She gave them the
perfect smile and in return was given the most perfect, beautiful
roses. She excused herself only at the most appropriate time and
returned backstage where she placed the flowers in a pristine
crystal vase. She bent over to smell the flowers with genuine love,
and they smelled more succulent than any roses could ever hope to
smell; there were no roses of comparable quality left in the world.
She returned to the studio in the back of the theater and sat down
to put on a fresh pair of slippers, so she could resume her ideally
rigid schedule of practicing and perfecting her dance. Cheyenne
quickly pressed a button on her vHost to stop the stream again. She
would save that practice until the following day
,
when she could return to her private patch after
work.

Cheyenne was alone on the train
.
She sat lifelessly quiet and motionless until the
train arrived at her destination. She detrained and began her walk
home. The street was empty and she walked in the middle of it,
along a path that had been worn through the weeds. She arrived at
her house, and as she fought her way through the thick weeds that
blocked the path to her front door, her vHost vibrated. She took
her phone out of her bag and opened her email. The Department of
Surveil approved her official name selection. Her employer would be
informed that in two weeks, on her eighteenth birthday, her name
selection of Dominika Alexandrovna would be effective. Surveil
thanked her. Cheyenne dropped her phone in her bag and walked up
the stairs to her front door, as void of expression and as lifeless
as she’d been on the train.

“I thought this was broken?” Roy teased as he
lifted Suren’s original platinum vCollar from the vandalized chest.
The collar with the encrusted diamond initials. The one she used in
order to Veil him that fateful night. The one she ripped off her
head when she witnessed herself inside the Veil actually speak to
him
.

“I lied,” she whispered and took the collar
from Roy.

The moment she had it in her hand, Suren
noticed every diamond from the letter “J” had been removed. Someone
pried out each diamond. Someone crudely carved into the metal where
the diamonds originally were.
Someone
carved the initial,
“H.” Suren groaned again—much louder that time—and showed Roy the
defacement.

“Oh no. Oh God. What a bastard,” Roy gasped.
He is such a bastard.

Suren nodded her head in agreement and
prepared to cry.
Oh my God, Roy. What did that bastard
do?

Suren spun her vCollar around so she could
view its touchscreen. She powered it up and used the controls to
mute the signals responsible for the other person’s thoughts and
emotions. She selected the portion of the stored neuroelectricity
that represented the part of the Veil she wanted to experience. She
tried to put on the collar but was too weak to lift it high enough
while also pulling her head off the bed, so Roy helped.

Suren didn’t have to tell Roy what was in the
Veil; he already knew. He distinctly remembered what point the two
of them reached inside the Veil when Suren abruptly stopped its
upload, so he knew what all remained of that Veil. Roy would be
astonished if after all those years—over a quarter of a
century—Suren’s collar still worked and the neuroelectricity inside
remained intact.

Suren pushed the button on the side, and the
collar beeped. Suren smiled at Roy as the silicone snaked the
contour of her skull. She closed her eyes and rested on her pillow.
Roy took one of Suren’s cold, dry hands and held it with both of
his warm, loyal, pudgy paws.

He had such an advantage: most of his work
could be done from home, and he was smarter than most people. So
many people wasted their time because they were stupid; most people
were going to miss out on so much. He developed as many automated
systems as he could to ensure his job in the Basic Needs Division
barely took up a third of the daily time that Surveil projected his
position to require.

He still had a few years before his seniority
advanced him to a position with a shorter daily time projection, so
was forced had to make do with what he had. You could never have
enough time; every Veil second mattered. More time meant more Veil:
time was Veil.

His vChair was fully loaded and then some.
Sure, he had the vitals. Who didn’t? Every vChair base model had
those: heating and cooling, massage capabilities, food and beverage
delivery systems, and basic lavatory components. Of course, he also
had the more elite upgrades like custom leather, decked out handles
and swivels, selectable firmness, and sexual stimulators. He didn’t
stop there, though. He modded his vChair to go above and beyond.
Time was Veil.

He attached three additional monitors to his
chair. Each of them was for work, so he could occasionally survey
the progress of his automated systems. That was strictly forbidden
for Surveil employees—utilizing a vChair during the course of
performing job functions—but it wasn’t as if anyone would come
check up on him. Besides, he programmed a different vibration in
his chair for every alert created by his automated systems, so he
could stay apprised of the more crucial progress indicators. For
times when he was really deep in a Veil. That way, he sounded
up-to-speed should his supervisor ever buzz him. Not that his
supervisor ever had a reason to buzz him, but he needed to be
prepared.

Getting caught Veiling on the job was an
automatic demotion to a position with a daily time projection five
levels longer than your current position. Getting caught utilizing
a vChair meant permanent demotion to the lowest position. If that
happened to someone, they were stuck—for the rest of their lives—at
the level with the absolutely longest daily time projection: four
hours of work per day. He swore to Jin, there was no way in vHell
he’d spend the rest of his life in the Basic Needs Division doing
four hours of work every day.

He stocked up on chips, sodas, lotion,
tissue, and cans of cream corn. He loved downing cream corn
straight from the can while he Veiled. Juxtaposed with the
sensations being simultaneously delivered through Veil, the
metallic tang from the canned corn as it hit his tongue made his
head tingle all over and sent shivers through his spine. He started
his vChair, switched on all the monitors attached to it, and booted
up his vHost. His Veil Queue was already loaded, and the next five
vEssential Experience Sets scrolled up onto one of the monitors.
The screen displayed a list of all the experience episodes
contained in each of the five sets up next in his queue.

The Peyton Principle was continually scanning
the network and vServers to detect any new, incoming experiences
whose power and intensity outranked any of the vEssential
Experiences. However, there were no ‘New vEssential
Recommendations’ listed alongside his queue. He couldn’t remember
the last time someone’s Veil Barometer caused them to outrank a
vEssential Experience.

It had to have been ten years; it was
probably more than that. The last one occurred totally by chance
when that one girl whose name he didn’t remember just so happened
to witness the explosion at that power plant, which killed over
seven hundred people. Her vBarometer went off the charts and from
what he could recall she outranked like the bottom five or six
vEssential Experience Sets. The VeilTrackers went crazy. There
hadn’t been an outranking that powerful for over fifty years. That
was one lucky chick, he figured. Hell, that was only
one
experience; it wasn’t even a full set.

He scrolled down to the bottom of his vQueue
to check the kind of progress he was making. The total number of
vEssential Sets he queued would take him fifty-six years to Veil
through. Considering the current life expectancy rates, he was in
no hurry to keep adding more spaces in his queue. He set up his
vQueue to add the next vEssential Set automatically—based on his
personal filter preferences—every time he completed a set. Veilers
could filter and sort sets in any way they wanted, and the top
vEssential Sets inevitably fell under four or five different Veil
Categories. That’s how they got to be the top ones. The more
categories the experiences fell into, the more likely the
experience episodes or experiences sets would outrank others.

In order, his category filtering preference
was: Sex, Violence, Death, and Justice. He could sub
-
filter with genres like Orgy, Gore, Murder, and
Execution but from his main filters alone, each of his top five
queued vEssential Experience Sets contained all four of his
filters. According to the synopsis, his next queued set was from
the life of the infamous Alabaster Sneed, who was considered the
last century’s most perfectly heinous serial killer.

The set consisted of fifty-five main
vEssential Experience episodes. The main episodes contained
firsthand experiences of Sneed’s rape, torture, and slaughter of:
twenty-six women, five men, eighteen boys, and six girls. Those
fifty-five incidents were interspersed with additional experience
episodes of the Surveillors who eventually proved Sneed’s guilt.
The final three episodes were of Sneed’s trial, his Veil
Atonements, and then his execution. There was also an optional—and
rather expensive—bonus experience episode whose synopsis sounded
downright twisted and enticing enough to him.