“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.