Haley Thistle
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A Diary of Veils (complete)
🕑 Added 2020-06-10 19:00:02 +0000 UTC
January 1st, 20xx
This isn’t exactly my New Year’s resolution. I don’t even really see the need to count the years these days. All I want to do is write down my account before anyone misconstrues my place in this world, and history paints me in a harsh light. I am a loving husband and doting father, and I’ve worked for my truth until the end.
When the Veils first appeared, or really, when we first realized they were here, we barely understood them. Over the years, as more and more come to the light of day, they have made their presence known. They’ve put their foot down and they’ve shown us their anger at the world. Their voices have risen, and they will not be pushed down again.
It was a slow wave, sometimes undetectable. Their presence, at first, was unrecognized. When the Veils were first discovered, the truth was kept hidden from the public. In scans, the creatures looked like a sheer veil over the brain. It was theorized at first that the Veils were some sort of terrorist plot, which was a ridiculous notion. No one in the world had the technology, let alone the money, to create something so intricately organic. So simple and yet so complicated, the Veils soon became known as extraterrestrial. Bodysnatchers, like the olden days of cinema, like Cold War propaganda. Everyone became suspicious of everyone.
Who would have ever guessed this supposed threat came from the ocean? The deep, dark abyss held more secrets than anyone could have assumed. The Veils came from another world, alright, but it was a part of our world. Bit by bit, beaches were closed off, and walls were built around them to keep people from falling victim to the Veils. But perhaps it was already too late.
I can remember, vaguely, playing on the beach when I was little. I could look up and see the huge expanse of the ocean stretched out before me - endless like a void, beyond my understanding, beyond the horizon. I remember the fear more than anything. I was so small, and it didn’t make sense to me how something could be so big. Even as I grew older, it never made sense to me. I continued to harbor a fear of the ocean well into adulthood.
I married a woman who loved the ocean, and made it her life’s work. I suppose I became interested in her so that she could explain the mysteries of the deep to me. Emily Elizabeth was working at the same college as me, giving lectures on her explorations into the unknown. I listened in at one point, much like how people go to movie theatres to watch killer clowns. It was fascinating, but quelled none of my fears. Instead, it felt like it justified them.
I didn’t meet Emily Elizabeth in person for another few weeks, and it was a while before the idea of a date sprung up. We were introduced because my friends at the college knew of my phobia, so they invited her to one of our gatherings.
At this point the Veils were unheard of. It would take a while for them to come around. Emily Elizabeth and I discussed my fears of the ocean, and she seemed to find it all so funny.
“Easy for you to laugh at it when you have the knowledge - maybe even the foolishness - to set foot inside such a creature.”
“Perhaps I am a fool for what I do.” She seemed pissed by what I said, and I don’t blame her. I was uncomfortable with the interaction and spoke harshly. “But why do you call the ocean a creature? What is it you’re afraid of, really? Some people are afraid of seaweed, others fear the creatures within the water. You seem to fear the ocean as its own entity.” Each question was a jab at me, and she wanted me to spill like a pinata.
“How can you look at it and not consider it a living, breathing thing?” I asked.
Her expression shifted, and she looked both bewildered and contemplative. “I can see that line of thinking. It certainly is strange. But the ocean holds life. It isn’t alive itself. The ocean can’t hurt you.”
“Tell that to a drowning man.”
It wouldn’t be for another few weeks that we would meet again, and after that I kept finding myself drawn to her. I was fascinated by her, and despite an ugly first impression, I eventually became her friend, and then her lover. For a while we kept the relationship casual, both of us working in very different directions. Falling in love and having a serious relationship didn’t seem like a good idea. We cared for one another, but didn’t want to hurt the other if our career paths suddenly skewed even further apart.
I was working towards a career in government - not for any patriotic reasons, but because I knew my work in biochemistry could help save lives. Back then, I thought it was a good idea, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. I wanted to combat viruses, to work on cures, and to further the basic human understanding of how life works.
Emily Elizabeth - who by now had earned the affectionate nickname of Lilybet - was working on getting grants to do research on pollution and cleanup of the oceans. She had a theory that, within twenty years’ time, the damage to the ocean would become irreparable, and if she started now she could raise awareness and hopefully stop the flood of pollution into the water.
We separated for a while as our careers took us different places. We kept in contact often, always talking on the phone when we could. She told me about life by the ocean, and how she could see it from her window at night. I told her about the sterile environment I saw every day, and we would laugh at our different worlds.
One cold November day, we were able to meet. It was raining and blustery outside, and we went to her hotel room with the intent of having coffee and cake while catching up. We ended up having sex all afternoon. We were insatiable and starving, not realizing, or admitting, how much we truly missed one another.
Two months later, I received the phone call that changed my life. Lilybet was pregnant, and I was going to be a father. I instantly got into my car and drove to Lilybet’s home, forgetting the beach and the ocean right beside me as I proposed to her.
We got married at the courthouse before our daughter was born. Lilybet wore a white shirt and pink shorts, and I was still in my lab clothes from work. I moved to be closer to her, and I was lucky the college needed professors in biochemistry. It wasn’t my dream job, but Lilybet was a bigger dream.
Our daughter, Lana, was born smack-dab in the middle of August. It wasn’t long after she was born that I was offered a position as a research associate at a government lab. Lilybet said I should take it, and she could take time off for Lana as well as work on her book. I was hesitant, and even considered turning it all down, but with Lana now in our lives, this job meant stable and possibly lifelong security. I wish I knew then what I know now.
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“How is progress coming on translating that diary?”
I look up from the pages, glancing over my shoulder as my supervisor hovers over me.
“I’m doing my best,” I assure him. “But there is a lot to it, and I don’t know yet what all he’s written in it.”
My supervisor seems frustrated, but I am the only one who can possibly complete this job. If he had feathers, he would be fluffing up to look intimidating. “Yes, well, keep at it. No need to be talking with me.”
He walks away, and I look back down at the diary. The cover has water damage, but the interior pages are pristine. They look rather unassuming, but they’re stuffed full of some strange code. I’ve been given the job of decoding it, but so far all it is is a diary. The man who wrote it has been missing for years, and the work he left behind was encrypted in such a way that no one has been able to figure it out. Cures and studies on diseases are halted, and the research has come to a literal standstill.
They believe the key to unlocking his encryptions will come from this diary. Why he felt the need to even hide his diary is uncertain so far - all it is is an autobiography. Still, it’s my job to find the answers, but every time I open this book, I am in pain.
It is hard to explain. Most of my life, I barely knew my father. When the Veils made themselves known to the world, he hid himself away, terrified of what would happen. He became a shell of who he was, and who I knew when I was little. Dr. Sidney Kriesel’s diary is a magic mirror for me, an open window to the past.
Dr. Kriesel was hired to study people afflicted by the Veils. Originally, it was thought to be a disease of the body, some sort of mutagenic strain that attached itself to the hereditary gene of dementia. At the time, people were walking around, and they seemed to be themselves but, at the same time, they weren’t. There were stories of changelings and doppelgangers going around, and these people were taken in for study.
It was in Dr. Kriesel’s own lab that they found the first evidence of the Veils. The picture on the initial scan was clear as day, and became the image that signaled the change in human history. It was faint, but it was obvious to the trained eyes at the lab that there was a very sheer, extremely thin membrane over the entire brain, with small tendrils attached to the spinal cord. Surgery was immediately performed on the patient to get samples and see if the membrane could be removed. Unfortunately, as soon as the membrane was exposed to air, the patient died.
Trial and error is one thing, but over fifty people died in that lab alone. Some say it was the guilt that caused Dr. Kriesel to lose his mind and disappear. I think there was something more to it than that. Yes, those surgeries were carried out in secret, and their findings weren’t reported in any shape or form, but that’s what leads me to believe there was more going on in those labs.
This diary is a key to more than just Dr. Kriesel’s research and cures. It’s the whole hidden history of the beginning of the relationship between the Veils and humanity.
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January 4th, 20xx
When I was a young man, my father passed away and had his body donated to science. It was a baffling thing that I had to get over. My father was nothing more than a slab of meat to these people, but the body wasn’t my father anymore. In the same way, I had to get over the fears I felt in my new job.
I was working with some very esteemed and powerful people in the field, and I was excited as could possibly be. I was happily married to a beautiful and brilliant woman, with an equally beautiful and brilliant baby girl, all while working my dream job. But reality hits you harder than a steel beam, and soon, my dream job became a nightmare.
I had been aware of this strange ‘disease’ afflicting people. News reports were vague, but whispers in the scientific community had expressed concern about it. A contagious form of dementia? It was baffling, unheard of! Sure, there were diseases and outside forces that could increase the effect of dementia, but dementia itself wasn’t something that could be spread like the flu.
I was shown a hospital wing full of patients who were affected by this new disease. All of them were who they were, and yet they weren’t. We were to see what was causing this strange malady. I pored over so many blood samples and put them through so many tests, and I couldn’t find anything strange.
It wasn’t until a chance encounter with a blacklight that I noticed something strange. On a whim, I brought it into the lab and placed some samples under it, and I noticed particles that glowed. They were iridescent flakes that I had never seen before, nor could I describe without it sounding like I was talking about my daughter’s craft box.
We eventually worked on separating these cells from the blood and running tests on them alone. They were foreign to the body, and not human cells at all. Around the time of this discovery, the infamous scan was produced. Somehow they were able to work the blacklight into the scan, and it allowed the partial image of the first Veil to be produced.
We were all in shock. Was this a mutation of the human body itself? Was it an infection? Was it biological warfare? I heard so many theories being bandied about, it felt like children on the playground arguing.
Looking at that image, I felt like a child again, sitting on the beach and looking at something so much bigger than myself, a void endless and unknown. I grew terrified of that image the same way I was of the ocean. It wasn’t something, it was alive to me. It was a creature, a monster, and it was inside the people I knew, the people I was trying to help.
That first night, when I got home all I could do was cry. I couldn’t even tell my wife what was the matter. I didn’t want to make her worry, and on top of that I had signed a non-disclosure agreement. I just cried, terrified for what was happening to the world and what it meant.
I loved sci-fi stories in my youth, and they always made me wish for something more exciting to happen. You want aliens to come to earth, you want molemen to come up from the earth’s crust. You want something more to come into your life and make it exciting. But when it really happens, all you want to do is get rid of it. You want life to go back to normal, you want comfort, you want ease. But change is rarely comfortable or easy, especially when life is on the line.
There are no superheroes to come save the day in these situations. Instead you have humans who err and have bias. You have people like me, on the frontlines of a war they never saw coming. There were people unprepared for what was happening, watching innocents take grenades and bullets. But it was these very same people holding those grenades and bullets, with their scalpels and saws as they continued to open bodies to study these Veils up close. The patients dropped like flies before our curiosity was sated. Fifty people died before we realized it would never work. Fifty.
After that, things at work became much more tense and stifling. Then came the first exploratory surgery. I sat in the theatre, watching with a crowd of others as they opened up the first subject. Even if they couldn’t remove this membrane, they could at least get samples and see what they were working with. There was no fear for the patient.
As soon as the skull was opened, though, the monitoring equipment began shouting alarms, and the body on the table started to thrash and twitch. It felt like we spent hours watching the doctors panic while the machines screamed their horrible prophecy. The monotone beep came like the wail of a banshee. The patient was dead thirty seconds after the skull was opened.
Thirty seconds felt like hours, and after that it felt like the air had been taken from the world. Everyone stood in stunned silence. What was there to say? What could possibly be done? They tried to take samples, but eventually the sheet was pulled over the subject, and the theatre was emptied out.
I can recall the dread that settled upon me in those moments. It looked like they didn’t even care that someone was dead, someone they set out to save and help. They just watched them die on that table. If anything, they seemed angry, irritated that they couldn’t get the samples they needed, or see the thing producing them.
They killed someone, and they were angry they died.
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It’s hard to pinpoint when the Veils first started to advance onto the land. For all we know, they’d been around for centuries, and we just had no way of detecting them. Even now, I can’t help but wonder if we would have ever figured it out. The Veils are part of life now. They’re all around us.
When my father was young, he went on a family vacation to the beach. He says he has a hard time recalling all that happened, but he got swept under a current and pulled far away from shore. He went under, and was missing for hours. He eventually reappeared on shore, alive and well if not a little terrified. His parents immediately took him to the hospital, where nothing wrong was found at all. But he had been missing for hours, and there was evidence that he had ingested a lot of water and even breathed it in. What happened in those hours? Where did he go? What did he see?
My grandparents noticed he started acting differently once they got home, but he was a growing boy, and boys change. Nothing much was thought about it. It was normal for growing kids to go through phases, and it was normal for some memories to fade away and be forgotten. It wasn’t questioned at all, and aside from lack of oxygen, they never considered anything else could possibly be wrong.
That was until people started undergoing tests to see if they were a Veil or not. These involuntary tests were given to everybody; man, woman, child, it didn’t matter. This was even before they came to realize that the Veils came from deep within the ocean. Everyone was tested, and if you were discovered to be housing a Veil, you were sequestered, taken from family, friends and home.
My father’s test revealed he was a Veil, and that was when our lives changed forever.
It’s hard to look back on my youth sometimes. I have memories that are wonderful, but I still recall the brush strokes of tragedies all around me. I see dark strokes under the eyes of my father, and the soft pastel tears in my mother’s eyes. The magic mirror that is this diary is helping me to understand these images.
My memory is not the usual photo gallery or clipshow that some people describe. In my mind, memory is like a long gallery in a museum. On either side there are paintings that are still and unmoving, but have texture and feelings I can recall. Thick brush strokes and globs of paint remind me of the tension in my throat. Pastels and watercolors flow through me with the serene moments of my life. Images are ripped apart and pieced back together on the canvas into a new story, making me realize how scattered my life had been. My father was always hiding, but I know he was searching for himself. He feared he was never who he really was, that he wasn’t him at all. He was a stranger in his own body, a stranger to his family. He felt like a liar.
How could he lie when that was all we had ever known? He was no monster who performed this illusion out of malice. He was a victim of circumstance. Whoever he was and whenever he became him, he was all my family and I had ever known. But my father never knew himself, which I think is what affected him the most. While he loved us, he could never trust what was real. He couldn’t remember becoming a Veil, and he didn’t know how such a thing would happen. He swore to us he never knew.
We did question, but seeing his pain, I knew he was telling us the truth. It made me wonder - when he was little and drowned in the ocean, was that when my father was really born?
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January 9th, 20xx
There was a containment breach one afternoon, just before I was supposed to go home. I was trapped inside the facility as they tried to hunt down one of the infected. I was told to stay where I was, in the lab where I did most of my work.
I decided to stay busy by looking over the papers and findings that were readily available to me. I studied my own words over and over, reading them back until they no longer made sense. By all accounts, these were people, ordinary humans. You would never know there was anything wrong with them. In fact, I was starting to wonder if this was even wrong at all.
It was that feeling of looking at the ocean again, that endlessness and unknowing. This was becoming more than a scientific or even medical discovery for me, it was becoming a moral one, and the more I looked at it, the more gray it became.
I wasn’t alone in the lab. In the adjoining room, I could hear someone moving around. It was against protocol for me to move from my location, but something inside me urged me on. I stepped inside to find one of the patients rummaging through the sample freezer. They stopped and turned to look at me, uncertainty filling their eyes as I looked at them.
“It’s best you don’t disturb them, please.” I don’t know why I said ‘please’. I don’t know why a strange sense of calm came over me.
The escapee regarded me, looking more gaunt and tired the longer we stood there. He seemed like a mourner, and I understood him. “Put them down,” I coaxed gently. “What could you possibly do with them?”
“They belong to us,” he said in a rushed, raspy tone. “You’ve learned nothing from them. All you’ve done is take.” He spoke slowly, but very deliberately. He was hiding anger inside him, and I understood that too.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
He shook his head, and I can still remember his words clearly to this day. “I want out of this place. I don’t want to be a rat anymore. We were told we needed help, but we didn’t need anything.”
“We the Veils, or we the humans?” I asked.
He stood stiffly for a moment. “Does it matter? I’m alive, same as you. I feel pain. I hunger. I mourn.” The slick sheen of tears that came into his eyes turned into a downpour on his cheeks. “You people here have murdered, and you call it science. You murder and say it’s nature’s way. That is why we started to escape. You’re killing us.”
There was something more to his words, something I wouldn’t understand until much later. The Veils had yet to tell us their origins, but only because they feared what we would do to them. Had we known then they came from the ocean, who knows what we, as feckless humans, would have done. Untold damage to the ecosystem, irreparable harm to countless living creatures. Extinction. Chaos. All for our own selfish preservation. The oceans would have been destroyed.
To this day I don’t know what came over me, but I gave the escapee a pair of scrubs from my locker, and I helped him get out of the building once the lockdown was ended. He vanished into the crowd. I called this an act of kindness, but perhaps it was my own fear that made me act.
Not long after that, the entire lab was shut down. Everything I worked on, and everything we could possibly know about the Veils, was taken away. It was as if the research and the project had never existed. They were wiped away like chalk, and we were told to forget everything we had seen.
Easier said than done. I would sooner forget my own mother than the things I saw in the building. I would remain haunted, and I turned to civilian life to escape those ghosts. Lilybet, Lana, and I moved away to where Lilybet could take a job with an old friend. They were doing deep-sea dives at the time, still researching how the ocean was being impacted by pollution and human interaction.
I took a part-time job editing research papers, and became a stay-at-home parent for Lana. I would work in the afternoons and evenings, doing household chores and playing with Lana in between. It was a relief to have escaped that lab, but it was an albatross around my neck, one that would eventually drag me under.
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The facility where I work has both Veil and human influence. It’s one of the few places where the two work together. In part, it is trying to repair some of the damage done to the ocean. The Veils cannot live there for much longer without some action being taken, and in order to preserve both our species, efforts must be made to clean it up. If we can’t achieve that, the Veils will surely take us over.
The tension here is thick enough to cut with a knife. Each of us has to wear a badge indicating whether we are human or Veil-affected human. It all sounds offensive to me, but I do my best to keep my head down and stay unnoticed while I am at work. When I was first offered this job, I insisted I work alone. I had my own methods of working, and I did not want to get spoken over by others. Aside from my supervisor, I got my way.
The sector I work for while translating Dr. Kriesel’s diary is in the biochemistry lab, where Dr. Kriesel’s research is held, from the records of the first lab where he studied the Veils to the studies and cures he made with the Veils. Everything is encrypted on a stack of playing cards. Each card is unique, bearing different pieces of his work, but no one can unlock it.
The lab is mostly humans, with only two Veils in the entire sector. They are not allowed to see, touch, or get near the cards. Each card is held in its own case, stored away in a giant, flat, hermetic chamber, with only a handful of people given access to them. I have not been told why they are here, or why Dr. Kriesel felt the need to hide his work this way. Maybe he was bitter towards the Veils he was forced to work for, or maybe he didn’t want his work getting into the wrong hands. I feel as though I will find answers in the diary - I just have to be patient. It takes time to find answers, but I love the hunt. I’ve always loved solving problems.
Dr. Kriesel’s diary is more like a confession to me than anything else. It feels like he is laying his heart out, rather than anything to do with encryptions or codes. He speaks of the love he has, the fear he holds, and not the scientific work he devoted his life to. He speaks of the soul, of memory, of loss. He is not concerned with his work, but with the sins he witnessed and helped commit.
His research had yet to show him perhaps the final nail in the coffin for the Veils. It was something everyone had overlooked, for various reasons. I can remember looking up at the television, when I was little, to watch the news, and in that moment I could hear a pin drop. The Veils couldn’t infect and harm living humans - they could only find hosts on dead bodies. My father didn’t know yet, but he died when he was young. When the tests became involuntary, the memories he had as a child would all make sense, and yet none at all.
The fact the Veils took over dead bodies became a heated topic. Which was better? To be taken over alive, or taken over dead? The body is no longer that person. The dead deserve dignity. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers became the Night of the Living Dead. It increased the vitriol and bile spewed at those confirmed to be Veils. They were disgusting, rotting corpses, and nothing more.
It was around this time that Veils rights groups started popping up. Laws were being passed. Protections were being put in place. The groups grew and grew until there were three major ones fighting for the liberties of Veils. More walls, bigger walls, were erected around the beaches. There was fear that Veils could sneak in through the fish supply, so there were harsher restrictions and higher taxes on seafood. Fishermen were vilified, until eventually there was no more fishing. Seafood became a black market commodity, and cheap imitations started being produced, as well as massive farms proffering labels claiming seafood to be ‘sea free’.
Surprisingly, this was a victory for the Veils. What they wanted was less traffic and less fishing in the oceans. But the way it came about, they couldn’t fully claim it as a victory.
I didn’t miss seafood. I was allergic. But I missed the ocean greatly, which was the worst part of all of this.
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January 18th, 20xx
I watched my father grow sick and feeble, then die of disease, all because there was no understanding of what he had. He was barely treated as human during his illness, and was looked down upon for even having it. I was hurt and confused as to why no one wanted to help. The doctors didn’t even act like they wanted to. He wasn’t alone in his death; there were many, many others who died during this crisis. To me, it felt like murder. It felt like my father had been crying out for help while those who had the means looked at him and laughed before putting the final nail in his coffin.
I wanted more than anything to be the person who could have saved my father, given the chance. I wanted to help people and find cures, figure out why the disease spread like it did, why it hurt, what could stop it, why that even stopped it.
As Lana grew, it became obvious to my wife and I that she was special. She was a fast learner, had a photographic memory, and was able to read on her own by the time she was three. We fostered her growth and her education, homeschooling her as soon as she could read. By the time she was five, she was making complicated and elaborate puzzles for us to figure out. With all this good came some bad - she could get overstimulated easily, and would pitch nuclear temper tantrums. Things had to be very specific for her, or else she wouldn’t want them. She was picky with her food and clothing, which was not a surprise in children her age, but everything had to be just so, very particular, and just right for her.
I continued to homeschool her for most of her life, and I watched her grow into something I could never have dreamed. She loved problems and fixing them - better yet, she loved creating them. Her riddles and puzzles and treasure maps were not just her creative outlet, but her way of showing what she was capable of. She created her own language and set of codes, and she taught them to me as I taught her.
Two of our favorite activities were chess and poker. I never won, and somehow that girl always bested me. She could read me even when I was a blank page. I was so proud of her, and wanted to see nothing but the best for her. She could accomplish important things in the world, I just knew it.
It wasn’t long after her eighth birthday that I was approached by some strange men. I kept them outside, not letting them in my home. They gave me classified documents, proving I had helped someone escape the lab I had worked at before. They had pictures, evidence, and even a confession from the escaped man himself saying he could identify me. They told me it would all be kept under wraps if I came to work for them.
The Veils Rights Group, or Verge as they called themselves, were doing their own research to better their image. They wanted me to come help them create cures and treatments for diseases. They were working on establishing their own pharmacological company, which would create cheaper, healthier alternatives to modern medicine, like non-habit-forming alternatives to painkillers. They wanted to advance modern medicine to what it could be.
When I questioned them about why they felt the need to blackmail me, their response was glib - a pat on the shoulder and a “sometimes that’s how it works.”
Yes, had I just been asked, I would have turned it all down. I didn’t want to work with Veils. I didn’t even want to work with humans. I’d seen too much back at that lab, and I was tired. I was happy staying home with Lana. I felt like, after all I had seen, my medical research could only hurt people rather than help them.
But I needed to protect my family, so I took the job. I didn’t want to uproot Lilybet and Lana, so for a while I moved out of the house for the work. I would come home and visit on weekends, but the separation got to me. I wanted to be home, so Lana and Lilybet moved for me. It was never something I wanted them to do. I wanted Lana to know stability. I could tell the move made her uncomfortable, and it would probably take her time to cope with her new surroundings.
New discoveries had been made about the Veils, and involuntary testing to see if you were a Veil was being forced upon the populace. Verge was trying to fight this, but already mass testing was under way. It started in schools, which terrified me to my core. Why would they start with children like this? When Lana had to be tested, she went nuclear. She screamed and fought whoever tried to touch her. Eventually, she had to be sedated. They were forcing my child to do something against her will, something that made her scared and anxious, and she wasn’t alone. Children everywhere were terrified. And that was what made me realize I wanted to work for Verge, and that I wanted to help the Veils.
Much like my daughter, humans were pitching a nuclear tantrum. They were swinging and bucking, trying to hit whatever they thought was hurting them. Unlike my daughter, humans were acting out of selfishness, while the Veils were merely seeking a way to show us we were hurting ourselves in the long run. Humans were doing more harm than good out of fear.
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The talk around Dr. Kriesel’s work says that they want to make their money back from it. Money back from what? I want to know why they think they can turn a profit off of this when they had no input, and when Verge and Dr. Kriesel intended to make this medicine and research available to the public for next to nothing. But I’m just supposed to decode the diary of a ‘crazy man’ and not ask questions.
It seems strange to me that they want to vilify this supposedly crazy man. All I see in the diary is someone pushed to an edge. He had seen things for most of his life that left him only questioning what the purpose was. All his life he wanted to help, but his intentions were twisted. I’d make enemies too if I had been twisted like that for too long.
When I was little, I invented a game with my dad. We would build a tower of playing cards, using a specific order depending on the card we drew. The suit would dictate the position of the card, up, down or sideways. The number would tell us where to put it. Then the color indicated if it was meant to be faced forwards or backwards. Together we created all sorts of really interesting card houses. But it was never about what we built, it was about just the two of us.
When my father was discovered to be a Veil, my name was changed. My mother and I were given new identities, while he went into hiding. Verge kept him safe, but hidden away from us. For a long time, we never got to see him, but I heard from him constantly. He wrote to me in the language we created. Together we honed it and created something really unique and special. Only he and I knew how to translate it.
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February 1st, 20xx
I died as a young boy, or at least, the first me died. The me that came out of the ocean that night was different, changed. Due to my youth and the fact that my body and brain were still growing, the Veil connected to me suffered some complications of their own. Since my body was changing so rapidly, the Veil could not keep up, and it forgot what it was. To the outside world, I was just a growing boy who was learning and figuring out who I truly was. Inside, I was a Veil who had forgotten who they were, lost and confused.
It was hard to come to grips with, and I barely had my family to make it all seem better. To keep me safe and out of harm's way, Verge kept me hidden for a long time. Lana and Lilybet were given new identities to keep moving through the world. When I got to see them, it was a blessing, but every time, Lana was just a bit bigger, just a tad older. It broke my heart.
I continued my work, wanting now more than ever to help the Veils progress in the world. They were being elected to government positions which helped further the cause. But it was inches compared to the miles we had to take.
I worked alongside great minds, and eventually our research started to bear fruit. We had medicines ready for the public, papers to be shared. But we soon caught wind that we were in danger. We began working on keeping our progress safe should it fall into the wrong hands. Our work was supposed to be for the good of the world, not for lining pockets.
I was afraid of the ocean my entire life. I never knew it had given birth to me. Looking back now, I understand why my earliest memories are so jumbled and so foggy. I thought it was part of growing up to forget, but now I realize it was because those weren’t my memories. I wasn’t the first Sidney Kriesel.
From my window now, I can see the ocean over the top of the walls. The walls keep people out, but it does not stop the ocean from being as vast and endless as it always was. It is the unknown which we fear most, and it has been something we have feared since we were small. The Veils and humans barely know one another. The Veils didn’t know the world they were coming to as they searched for a way to keep themselves alive. They feared death like the rest of us, and it is through them we will be able to see new life.
It is not invasion that we want, it is merely cohabitation. But there are those who are unwilling to share and will continue to argue that because we are different, because we are unknown, we should be feared at all costs. I just want to live again. I want my child and my wife with me always. I want stability again. I am tired and I am angry. I just want peace.
It never occured to me to question my humanity, until it was humanity that questioned me. I fought with myself after the discovery I had been a Veil all this time. I felt like a liar, and I questioned everything in my life until that moment. I questioned my goals, my emotions, my desires, and even the things I loved. I feared for my wife, my amazing Lilybet, and my remarkable daughter, Lana. Did I truly love them all this time? Did I really, truly love them?
Lana found me in one of my fits. She started crying with me and told me she loved me. She was afraid, but not of me. She was afraid of losing me. Me. All she knew was me. All Lilybet knew was me. I was me, no matter what I was. Everything I felt and did was me. I was a Veil, but that was me.
I took Lana into my arms, because she was a part of me, a part I needed to know better. I wanted to understand this world and why the Veils were in it, so I continued my work.
Verge was able to get Lilybet funding for her studies and research, and helped send Lana to school. Both were successful and working hard. Lilybet was spearheading green initiatives, focusing on ocean cleanup and preservation. Lana continued her studies, graduating and going on to become a cryptographer with her own company.
I could not be more proud of you, Lana.
I sent one final letter to you, Lana, and after that I had to go into hiding. All my work was confiscated, but they would not have it so easily. You know this. You’ve been with this process from the beginning. I used the card system we created when you were young to hide away all our hard work in a deck of playing cards. Now it’s up to you, Lana, to return all of it to the right hands. You are the only one who can do it.
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One of the most important people in my life is a Veil. He is not a monster, nor is he deserving the hatred being slung at him. My mother and I have been working so hard to be able to bring him home.
I’ve given them my translation of the journal, as well as a supposed code that will unlock the encryption on the cards. In reality, it will delete the files hidden in the program, after a copy is sent to an undisclosed email address.
Maybe, once this is all done - once it comes to light what has been done - I can have my father back.
