Drawing the Veihl

The place used to be a duplex. My grand­pa con­vert­ed it back to a sin­gle-fam­i­ly dwelling before he passed the place to my mom and moved into a home. It still had its own kitchen and facil­i­ties in the base­ment, and my folks let me use it as my own pad after I got back. 

The guys from the pro­gram told my folks it would be bet­ter for me to have my own space. They said I need­ed com­plete free­dom of expres­sion for my brain to engage the pat­tern map­ping that the pro­gram was so inter­est­ed in learn­ing about. Apparently, I had some abil­i­ty to either notice or cre­ate non-organ­i­cal­ly occur­ring micro-pat­terns in the envi­ron­ment that I shouldn’t be able to. Apparently, that’s a thing.

Furthermore, if a per­son were able to con­scious­ly, pur­pose­ly orig­i­nate such a con­trolled cas­cade of micro-events in the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment, such a per­son could exert a dan­ger­ous lev­el of influ­ence over the much larg­er events that grew from them, even to the point of influ­enc­ing glob­al, polit­i­cal, or com­mer­cial inter­ests. The suits and shields and sun­glass­es of the pro­gram assured me that such a per­son would be both of inter­est and con­cern to the NSA and gave me the option of decid­ing which. 

The CIA, whose long his­to­ry of clan­des­tine manip­u­la­tion was always up for advance­ment and fine-tun­ing, thought that a detailed study of the brain func­tions of such a per­son at the cel­lu­lar lev­el would be a fine way to sharp­en the knife. Who knew what won­ders might come from such an oppor­tu­ni­ty. The NSA agreed that what could be learned from such a per­son could be very valu­able indeed to the ever-accel­er­at­ing bat­tle for intan­gi­ble assets to National Security.

The assets in the war of the future wouldn’t be the self-dri­ven atom­ic jets of war, or robots, or sub­mersible ani­ma­tron­ic Kraken-like killing machines pre­dict­ed in sci­ence fic­tion and scrip­ture. Though those things might exist or be cre­at­ed, the real assets were the algo­rithms that drove them, and by exten­sion, who­ev­er wrote those algo­rithms. Make them search like a pack, fly like a flock, build like a hive… also attack like bees, or crows, or wolves… or pira­nhas, for that matter.

Every sur­face of every­thing, every­where on the Earth, is crawl­ing with preda­tors who have hunt­ing pat­terns we can map and mim­ic, from sin­gle-celled organ­isms to blue whales. Everybody’s got­ta eat, and every­thing has devel­oped a way to do it for spe­cif­ic advan­tage in its envi­ron­ment. The peo­ple who can see those pat­terns and turn them into math—those will be the real new engines of war.

In the pro­gram, they intend­ed to gath­er tem­plates of those behav­iors in data­bas­es. Those data­bas­es will be used to cre­ate action maps. They want to zap com­plete sets of com­bat actions to indi­vid­ual com­bat­ants across a glob­al the­ater. From an oper­a­tional stand­point, phys­i­cal actors no longer have to think. They don’t have to make deci­sions, allow­ing both syn­thet­ic and organ­ic resources to act sub­stan­tial­ly faster and more reli­ably, not just in com­bat but in espi­onage as well.

The geeks in the glass­es intend to build a data­base that includes all known human con­flict pat­terns. Over time and vast hard­ware advances, the sys­tem being devel­oped by the pro­gram would be able to iden­ti­fy the inter­sec­tion of human aggres­sive behav­ior pat­terns and our ani­mal coun­ter­parts and from that inter­sec­tion pre­dict, with star­tling clar­i­ty (I was assured), the move­ments and inten­tions of our aggres­sors far before any ene­my could enact any unde­sired action. Wouldn’t that be bet­ter for the whole world, con­sid­er­ing? Isn’t there an inher­ent tie between the secu­ri­ty of the United States and the safe­ty of the world at large? It’d be bet­ter for every­one, son… I’m paraphrasing.

For a rea­son unknown to me, the pro­gram’s admin­is­tra­tors believe I am such a per­son. One who can see those pat­terns. They say they can watch me react to stim­uli they’ve added to the envi­ron­ment that a nor­mal per­son wouldn’t even notice. They say they can even pre­dict my reac­tions to events they have staged in oth­er parts of the world; events of which it would be impos­si­ble for me to have knowl­edge. They believe if they watch me long enough, they’ll be able to con­struct a lan­guage, a primer of sorts, that will allow them to pre­dict events in oth­er places in the world by read­ing my behav­iors; any they had pre­vi­ous­ly believed were ran­dom. They know they can cre­ate behav­iors in me. They believe I’m hav­ing sub­con­scious reac­tions to events staged by oth­er actors. If they can learn how to read me well enough, they can get ahead of every­one in my pattern-recognition’s field of vision. It’d be like read­ing a rune that rolled your Wisdom up to 30 before enter­ing con­flict in D&D.

I’m aware of none of this. I mean, I have no “pow­ers” I’m aware of. I don’t believe I even stand up to Roger Waters’ “amaz­ing pow­ers of obser­va­tion”, much less “sec­ond sight.” And it’s not that I care… I can’t even imag­ine how the pro­gram could iden­ti­fy such a per­son. What are they doing, watch­ing every American in infi­nite detail every moment post-birth, look­ing for signs of this ten­den­cy toward latent pat­tern-recog­ni­tion? Is this a tech­no­crat­ic search for a eugenic Dalai Lama?

But when they asked me to join the pro­gram, when they asked me if they could turn on the net that they had put over my brain when they per­formed the surgery that saved my life, I said Sure, have a look. I wasn’t hav­ing any fun any­way, so why not? And, of course, this was 1989. None of this stuff, none of the war games, or data­bas­es, or cyber-sim­u­la­tion, could actu­al­ly be done yet. But the pro­gram didn’t care. These guys weren’t fight­ing the war of now. They were gear­ing up for the war of 2050, because if they could get to the gear for the war of 2050 before a war breaks out in 2021, well, they win. Every time.

In return, I got my own apart­ment under my folks’ house, lots of free time, and per­mis­sion to do almost any­thing I want­ed under the program’s super­vi­sion. That includ­ed the safe­ly con­trolled sup­ply of the par­ty favors that me and Gerri used to peel our­selves off my mom’s base­ment car­pet and up the stairs to Gerri’s Chevette, green poly-fuzz and all.

It was gonna be a long night. The Posthumous Oscars had a show that night down at the reser­voir. We were meet­ing Gilly and Shaker at Rat’s grandpa’s barn to pick up the kit. It was the only place we could unpack Tripod’s drum set that the neigh­bors wouldn’t call the cops.

An unex­pect­ed vehi­cle hun­kered, low on the hard-pack when we stopped in our rolling dust cloud on the grav­el in front of the barn. Just some old junk truck with mis­matched pan­els and a bumper dan­gling from a coat hang­er in back. Something was wrong though, because the bang­ing that was com­ing from the barn wasn’t com­ing from Tripod’s skins. This rhythm was met­al on wood on some­thing crunchy and wet that squealed and gur­gled. Then there was the sound of a cym­bal crash­ing, and I could see it jut­ting through the side of the old red wood about a half inch from Gerri’s head.

There was anoth­er rea­son I had so lit­tle hes­i­ta­tion when they asked me to join the pro­gram. They saved my life, I mean, TelpEm did, and I kin­da felt like I owed them, and I real­ly didn’t have any­thing bet­ter to do. I real­ly was hav­ing a mis­er­able time in my for­mer life, or I wouldn’t have been in the hos­pi­tal in the first place, but that wasn’t it either. Had I been waver­ing, and I don’t think I ever real­ly was, the pro­gram admin­is­tra­tors offered me the fol­low­ing per­spec­tive: regard­less of what I believed about myself, if the NSA had become con­vinced of my capa­bil­i­ties, they were unlike­ly to be the only ones. I was free to go. The surgery was pro bono… ‑ish. The only cost of sav­ing my life was the oppor­tu­ni­ty to study my brain through­out the surgery and recov­ery. But just because my coun­try­men weren’t pur­su­ing me, didn’t mean some else’s wouldn’t.   

God-lev­el secu­ri­ty was one of the perks of being the NSA’s favorite pet lab rat on loan to the CIA. I nev­er had to think about my safe­ty, and I mean that in ways you can’t imag­ine. I mean, I could walk up to any stranger, any­where, under any cir­cum­stances, and ask to bum a cig­a­rette with­out flinch­ing. It didn’t mat­ter what they looked like or what brand they were flash­ing; I was safe as a house. But my secu­ri­ty was way beyond that. My secu­ri­ty was so good I didn’t even have to look for traf­fic before cross­ing the street. Any street. Seriously. My depres­sion was still real­ly bad when I first came back from the hos­pi­tal. I thought I noticed the lights chang­ing every time I approached an intersection—there’s that latent pat­tern recog­ni­tion. Maybe not true, but I’m just sure I’m catch­ing it out of the cor­ner of my eye.

So, I test the sys­tem. I stopped look­ing while walk­ing around the city. I nev­er look at the traf­fic lights. I look at the oncom­ing traf­fic, and I adjust my speed to slip between them, but I nev­er stop walk­ing. Over time, I became so con­fi­dent that the traf­fic is timed to me and not vice ver­sa, I stopped look­ing alto­geth­er. I just keep walk­ing. And I’m right. My secu­ri­ty is so good, I don’t even have to watch where I’m walk­ing. The traf­fic is timed to me. That was anoth­er rea­son I said ok.

Godiya Lambro pulled the pri­va­cy screen around Max’s bed­room suite. She was his full-time care­tak­er here, at the facil­i­ty; a deci­sion she only regret­ted on cer­tain Wednesday morn­ings in the fall, when it rained, and the air was chill. She set­tled back into the reclin­er across from where Max lay with his brain con­nect­ed to a mil­lion machines that aver­age peo­ple could not imag­ine, and she could not dis­cuss. She picked up the next nov­el on the stack she kept by her chair and began William Gibson’s Neuromancer while rumi­nat­ing on Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come.