VEE 2.0
Chapter Four: Mydoom
A candle burned on the kitchen counter, filling the apartment with scents of bergamot. If Veronica was honest, she wasn't entirely sure what bergamot actually was. She liked the scent, though. Clean, sweet, with a little something spicy hidden in there. It was calming. She burned this one on days when she was tense and upset and needed to get her head right. And that was certainly today.
It wasn't working. Stress and fear jangled up her nerves like runaway trolley cars, leaving her feeling breathless and tight. She could barely detect the smell of the candle through the soft stink of fear-sweat she was giving off. Her palms were slick. Her left hand clenched rhythmically, working in and out of shaky fists. Her right bore white knuckles as she clutched her kitchen shears.
For the tenth time, she prodded the point of the shears back behind her ear. The home base device nestled there, hugging tightly to the upper shell of her ear. She'd grown so used to it that she barely noticed it anymore. Until the last couple of weeks, that is. Until it had become a threat.
Every day she got more messages - texts, emails. She'd deleted all of her social media, or else those would surely still be choked with abuse and taunts and threats. Sneering, angry nerds, promising to hack into her head and have their way with her. It wasn't possible - or so she insisted to herself - but god, the idea was terrifying.
And so this thing had to go. Had to come out.
The only thing was, she didn't know how.
She tried simply yanking it up and off at first. No luck there. The skin had healed at the insertion site, closed up like an old wound, bound to the device. She could feel the tissue stretch and strain when she pulled. First slow and steady, making her wince as she waited for it to give. Then one hard, sharp yank that she held back on out of fear. That left her teary-eyed with pain and with a thin rivulet of blood slinking down to her jawline.
It'd probably come free eventually, but a few seconds of dedicated tugging made it clear it was going to take a lot of skin and tissue with it. Whatever method the techs at HDS had used to attach this thing, it was holding fast. Pulling at it gave Veronica a mental image of wires burrowing like roots down and into her skull, and that made her nauseous.
The next plan was to break the device somehow. Snap it, crush it, something. But despite how small and delicate it felt, the plastic casing of it was more robust than she'd expected. She couldn't seem to hurt it with her fingers, and any attempt to hit it or harm it with some kind of tool or weapon was just as hopeless. Hard to get a good swing at something mounted on the side of your own skull - nevermind the fact that collateral damage seemed almost guaranteed.
So now she was onto her current plan. There was one major wire she could feel, emerging from the base of the home base and extending below her skin. The very skin that crawled when she imagined the device wired up to her brain like this. A tiny loop of fragile wire connecting circuitry to tissue. If she could sever that, surely it'd cut off the operations of the gadget, right? It'd disconnect her from Vee and keep her safe from losing herself again and again and again.
Of course, she didn't know what else it would do.
When they'd installed it, there'd been little comments about not messing with this or trying to remove it by herself. Blue Eyes, the kinda-handsome tech who worked with her joked that trying to take it out would - his words - fry her brain. He assured her afterwards that he wasn't serious, but... how confident of that was she?
Her hands trembled rapidly as she guided the blade of the shears up behind her ear. She opened them just enough to slip the small wire between them. One squeeze and it'd be cut off. Come what may. It'd free her, probably. Probably it wouldn't give her a seizure or a stroke. Probably she'd survive. Right?
Her hand shook so badly that the wire slipped out from between the blades. Veronica sighed angrily and steadied herself. It was now or never. This was the moment when she freed herself. This was the place.
The absurdity hit her then -
this
was the place? Here? In her kitchen? Using the same shears she used to cut open packets of chicken breast. That's the tool best suited for cutting-edge untested tech-centric brain surgery?
How the fuck did she possibly convince herself this was a good idea?
Veronica hurled the shears into the sink, where they noisily scraped and clattered along the metal basin before coming to a rest. She slumped to the floor. She leaned back hard, curve of her spine banging into a cabinet door. She buried her face in her hands and let out a choked sob. What the fuck was she going to do?
***
hey v, guess what they call your brain in the techspecs for the app? 'the template material' lmfao
its like your entire personality is just a prompt for something more important
u should see how much detail hds used to talk about teh brain implant, compared to how they barely even refer to ur actual brain
kek u are barely a spare part on these docs
yea btw we found the hds patent documents so were really starting to figure out how the whole thing works, should be fun to crack remote deployment soon
Veronica's hands shook as she read the email on the small, grainy screen. She'd picked up a crappy ancient laptop at a secondhand store the other day. It was missing the 'w' key and the it had a crack in the screen. It had that weird little nubbin in the middle of the keyboard instead of a trackpad, and the ports were so old she didn't even know what kind of peripherals they were for. She needed to plug a cable into the wall to get it to connect to the internet, something she barely realized was ever a thing. The blocky case was a little grimy and it felt like it weighed about forty pounds. But it was cheap and it was way too old to run something like Vee, so she felt safe using it.
Using it meant exposing herself to the foul and taunting emails that clogged her inbox lately, though. She still checked her messages a few times a day, because she was sending frequent requests to both HDS and Panoply. They ran the gamut of tone - casually friendly, desperately pleading, sharply demanding, fearfully confused. She even tried faking a request from a lawyer using some phony letterhead she'd googled. No response.
She'd tried getting an
actual
lawyer, of course. She couldn't afford much. Even those she couldn't pay weren't interested. Panoply commanded a fleet of white-shoe litigators and could burn through billions without blinking. She was just one confused young actress who regretted a contract and was too scared to leave her house. Hardly a slam dunk.
And so here she was, two glasses of wine deep, skimming through an inbox of silence from the tech companies and abuse from men on 8chan. Half-formed tears blurred her vision as she angrily mashed out a reply to the anonymous jackass who boasted about patent documents. Her barely-functional keyboard and her slightly-drunk anger worked together to resist her attempts to write sharply and coherently.
Hi asshole,
Guess hat? Go fuck yourself.
I don't even believe in your hole 'deployment' thing anyay, you're just trying to scare me because god forbid a oman
She jammed the little plasticky gasket where the 'w' key should be, mashing it in frustration.
because god forbid a lady do anything, right? You and your misogynist incel loser friends can't handle that, it fucks up your entire pathetic little orldvie, doesn't it?
Veronica grit her teeth and slammed the laptop lid down. Forget it. It was probably for the best. There was nothing to be gained from antagonizing those creeps. It just let them know they were getting to her.
And while she didn't want them to know it, they absolutely were getting to her.
***
Veronica still had her phone, of course, but only for emergencies. Only for actual phone calls. She kept it on Do Not Disturb and certainly didn't use it for unimportant, silly things like scrolling the internet. She knew better than that.
It's easy to know better in the daylight, though. Late at night, kept up with worry and confusion and fear for the future, none of us really know better. We need comfort and routine. We need distraction and grounding. We need something other than the quiet and the dark and the things a frightened mind can summon.
And Veronica, in those moments, needed a burner Instagram account that she used to keep tabs on Trevor. A shameful habit that she'd deny to her friends, if she was still in regular contact with them. She didn't speak to much of anybody these days, though. She'd changed her work schedule, going in early and leaving late, allowing bigger swaths of every day to be swallowed up by Vee and the Worker Bee personality. She arrived before the rest of the staff and stayed until nearly everyone was gone, making sure she bumped into as few people as possible. She was a recluse now.
These hidden late-night cyberstalks of her ex were the most she still interacted with people she knew. Her face lit only by the glow of her phone, curled on her side in bed, Veronica scrolled through Trevor's feed. She'd held out a few days since doing this last, giving Trevor plenty of time to add lots of new pics. That boy never missed a chance to take a photo, or to post one. Veronica hoped this habit would let her watch Trevor's comeuppance in real time. Watching as his show got cancelled, his work dried up, his apartment got too expensive, and he had to move back to the east coast and work at his dad's garage. It was going to be so cathartic.
It hadn't happened yet, though. So far it was the opposite. His character was a hit with the fans and he'd been offered a bigger contract. He'd signed with a new agent with a legitimate agency. And his profile was full of him at restaurants and parties and beaches and pools and galleries with legitimate stars and producers and directors Veronica recognized. He was rising fast, a new young light on the scene.
It was infuriating. She was the one was supposed to have that! They used to talk about it, the successes they were working towards. What it'd look like to finally break through. And yes, in those talks, the fantasy was both of them succeeding. But in her heart Veronica always knew she'd be the bigger star of the two of them. She'd never be so cruel as to suggest that to Trevor, but... well, it seemed so clear. She had real, honest, actual talent. She worked ten times as hard as him. It was just... it
