Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,114

designed to foil facial-recognition algorithms.

Zula wasn’t using a VEIL. By exposing her face in a public area, she had, therefore, announced her location to any camera capable of seeing her and of checking her features against a database. Most people had become accustomed to this a long time ago and did not particularly care. But many preferred to opt out. You could avoid being recognized by wearing a physical veil and a pair of sunglasses, but most people in the industrialized world opted for its information-age equivalent.

To say that Verna and Maeve Braden had invented the Virtual Epiphanic Identity Lustre wasn’t quite right, since it incorporated a number of separate technologies. It had been more of a systems integration and branding play than an invention. But they had conceived it, named it, and made it a thing.

The VEIL was more likely to be worn by persons in the Venn diagram intersection of “young,” “geeky,” and “countercultural.” It was no surprise to find people like that on Capitol Hill. Zula was pretty sure that these three young ladies were on their way to the prep school a few blocks away. Over the coming half an hour, as she made her way down the hill into the South Lake Union district, the ambient culture would shift; it would still be geeky as hell, but the average age would trend upward, and people’s countercultural instincts would be muted or absent. Up here, though, wearing a VEIL was no more remarkable than having a stud in your nose. The building’s security system noticed VEILed passersby and marked them as mildly interesting—hence the yellow signal in Zula’s glasses—but it wasn’t quite the same thing as wearing a black ski mask.

“Epiphanic Identity” had not been thrown in just to make the acronym work. The words had particular meanings.

“Epiphany” was a deep, crazy, metaphysical/religious term. The last two syllables came from a Greek word meaning “to show” or “to appear.” The prefix was what made it interesting. “Epi-” meant “upon” or “on top of” or “in addition to” and thus suggested that epiphany was not just appearance in a naked, bald sense but something a little more indirect, more layered. In the Bible when you saw an epiphany you weren’t seeing God directly but some kind of avatar or manifestation thereof.

“Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”

The VEIL had been engineered as a double-edged weapon. Yes, it jammed the facial-recognition algorithms that would enable any camera, anywhere, to know your true name. But the pattern of lights that a VEIL projected on the user’s face wasn’t mere noise. It was a signal designed to convey data to any computer vision system smart enough to read it. The protocol had been published by ENSU and was formidable in its sophistication, but the upshot was that a VEIL could, if the user so chose, project the equivalent of a barcode: a number linking the user to a PURDAH.

It was all completely optional and unnecessary, which was part of the point; most people didn’t know or care about any of this and simply did things openly under their own names. But it was easy, and free, and recommended, that when you were starting out in life you establish at least one PURDAH, so that you could begin compiling a record of things that you had done. You could link it to your actual legal name and face if you wanted, or not. And either way you could punch it into your VEIL system so that as you walked down the street, computer vision systems, even though they couldn’t recognize your actual face, could look up your PURDAH and from there see any activity blockchained to it.

All three of the laughing, coffee-toting, VEIL-wearing schoolgirls had done this as a matter of course. It was probably a free-and-mandatory service offered by their prep school. The security cameras on the front of Zula’s condo building had looked them up. For that matter, Zula’s glasses had outward-looking cameras that could have done the same thing, had she shown any interest. She didn’t bother. But the odds were that their PURDAH records were all carefully gardened and censored by some combination of their parents and their school. Their names and faces would be concealed. But there was probably enough public data to suggest that they were