Free Veil by Aaron Overfield Page A

the shadower couldn't understand, a language
foreign to the shadower, then the overall Veil experience would be
limited. Upon uploading The Witness back onto its owner’s brain,
the mind of the shadower wouldn't be able to absorb and process any
of the subject's thoughts, as they would be in a completely
incomprehensible language .
    They didn’t live inside Star Trek, Ken joked
with Suren, and so the brain didn’t contain some built-in universal
translator. Jin hypothesized that , in a
Veil involving a foreign language, the shadower would be limited to
only experiencing what the subject sensed and felt, without
understanding what the subject was thinking. Unlike a movie, Veil
couldn’t be dubbed or include subtitles. Suren didn’t get the Star
Trek reference and gave Ken that blank Jin-esque stare, which
pretty much creeped Ken the heck out when she gave it to him,
because it was so much like Jin’s. However, she did get the
“subtitle” reference and nodded.
    The files contained dozens of rules that Jin
speculated. Ken could picture Jin's excitement in mapping out each
one and developing the ways in which he would come to test
them , until each was proven or refuted. If
one were proven, Ken knew Jin would be sure to explain it in full
detail; that was simply how Jin worked. Heck, even if Jin disproved
a theory, he would still take the time to explain his process in
full detail.
    Ken couldn’t imagine Jin wasting precious lab
time postulating all those rules and principles, especially because
Jin was constricted by the military’s purposes for Veil. Instead,
he pictured Jin, in his spare time at home or while at the grocery
store or while riding the Metro, pondering those things and then
furiously scribbling them down as soon as he completely fleshed out
a rule. Jin always carried a small notebook with him for such
epiphanies; he always had a place to write down his random thoughts
and ideas. Ken would’ve loved to get his hands on some of those and
made a mental note to ask Suren if she knew where Jin kept
them.
     
    In addition to the rules Jin proposed were
some guiding principles. Many of them answered the questions
already starting to form in Ken as his mind began to accept the
nature and implications of Veil. One of the first principles
addressed the main question that palpably hung in the air up until
the day Ken left the project: How can one access and extract the
information and experience that’s produced when the
neuroelectricity of The Witness stimulates the brain?
    Jin eventually deduced that only a human
brain could use the vibrations of The Witness to access, extract
and, most importantly, transform the information into experience.
According to Jin, only a brain could understand and mirror another
brain. Ken was inclined to agree . The
complicated structure of the human brain, and the specific form of
consciousness it produced, was unlike any structure imaginable. So,
it made sense to Ken that only a brain could access a brain.
    There was a caveat from Jin that stated
enormous technological advances over time may one day allow
artificial access to the information, but he suggested current
technological trends wouldn’t lead to it any time soon. Jin also
suggested the technology in question would have to be more advanced
than the human brain , as it would be
obligated to access, extract, interpret, and communicate data in a
way the human brain itself could not. In that sense, so-called
artificial intelligence would actually have to be more
intelligent—more conscious, more aware—than humans themselves. At
least, in order to accomplish what was possible through Veil.
    Jin's principles elaborated on how the
information produced by The Witness was too complex and reliant on
simultaneous, interconnected functions of the brain for it to be
interpreted by anything but another brain. One couldn’t simply
single out an aspect of the human experience, like a solitary
thought or feeling, and expect to