Bailer leaned a little farther back in his chair and nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you’d think that, but you have to understand that Christian sees America and its military as a force for good. Though admittedly an imperfect and self-interested one. He believes very much in the potential of humanity, but understands that there’s evil in the world that needs to be dealt with. In fact, with his background, he probably understands that better than anyone in the room. What he sees here is an opportunity to help the U.S. be a bit more surgical than wiping out an entire Pakistani neighborhood to kill one suspected terrorist or destroying an entire country to depose a single dictator.”
“Gentlemen…”
Smith spun in the direction of the familiar voice and saw a screen set into the wall come to life with Christian Dresner’s image. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, I hope that Craig is taking good care of you.”
“He is,” Pedersen acknowledged, but Dresner didn’t seem to hear.
“Dr. Smith. I’m a great admirer of your work with prosthetics.”
“Thank you. I’m anxious to see how we can integrate the Merge to make them more useful.”
“We still have some work to do on that front, but the potential is almost unlimited. As you are a doctor and scientist I know you’ll agree that the devil is often in the details. People are so impressed by the integration of the Merge with the human mind, but they have no idea of the incredible challenges presented by complex inputs. Or how much I wanted to include a real-time factual evaluation of what people are saying in conversation but couldn’t because of the glacial speed of the cellular data networks.”
His eyes became a bit distant as he lost himself for a moment in his own incredible mind. When he spoke again, he seemed to be talking to himself. “And then there’s the problem of sarcasm and humor. Absolutely impossible to code for…”
“Maybe you should have just built it to make everybody happy,” Smith said, only half joking. “Then no one would care about the details.”
An enigmatic expression crossed Dresner’s face but then disappeared when Pedersen inserted himself into the exchange.
“I’m interested to learn more about the Merge’s offensive capabilities…”
Dresner nodded politely but his eyes suggested that he was already disconnecting from the conversation. “Craig would be able to tell you more about that than I can. I’ll excuse myself and let him get on with the demonstration.”
Smith chewed his lower lip to hide the anger he felt at Pedersen driving the man away. In truth, though, he wasn’t sure that’s what had happened. While he was normally fully prepared to blame the general for just about anything, the change in Dresner’s demeanor had come not at the question about offensive capability, but at his own comment about happiness.
Pedersen pushed back his chair and stood, looking impatiently down at Craig Bailer. “Did I hear something about a demonstration?”
12
When he was young, the darkness had crept up on him slowly — disguising itself as a passing shadow, using the constant chaos of his mind as camouflage. Now it attacked without hesitation or pretense, often prompted by nothing more than an innocuous comment or a brief scent from a forgotten past. And other times it came for no reason at all.
Christian Dresner stepped out into the sweeping garden, his Merge sensing his position within the compound’s walls and shutting down everything but vision correction. The snow was falling in large, drifting flakes that absorbed the sound of his footsteps as he weaved through trees dusted white.
Brushing off a lone bench, he sat and let the cold sink into him. Behind, the bunker-like building he’d just exited stood silent and, in many ways, equally cold. It was one of a collection of similar structures spread across the world. How many now? Ten? Fifteen? Maybe it was his aging mind that kept him from remembering. Or maybe it was that he felt nothing for any of them. They were less homes than self-appointed prisons meant to make him feel safe. And while he recognized it was probably an illusion, it was at least a comfortable one. In these gardens, for brief, precious moments, he could sometimes make everything outside disappear.
Not today, though. Today, his mind had decided to seize on the stories his long-dead father had told about the concentration camp. About how his initial confusion and fear had faded into a numbness impervious to the death and suffering of others. About how the cruelty of the guards and the desperation of the prisoners eventually became indistinguishable. And finally, about what it was like to watch your humanity slip away.
When Dresner had first heard the stories — at what now seemed like an impossibly young age — his father was still trying to understand what had happened to his people and had been strangely desperate not to place blame. The average German had known nothing of what was happening, he’d said. Only a twisted few were responsible for the evil that had overtaken his country.
He’d believed deeply in the communist ideal and had been proud to use his scientific gifts for the collective good. But then he began to change. The drinking had started, as had long bouts locked alone in the cold, mold-scented basement. He spoke less and less, but when he did, his words no longer forgave. Of course, the German people had been lied to, he would slur beneath the dim light hanging over their rickety kitchen table. But the truth had been right in front of them. They’d just refused to look at it.
And so it had come as no surprise when Christian’s parents scooped him up and took him away in the middle of the night. Marxism hadn’t delivered the contentment and equality it had promised. Instead, it had become just another weapon to be wielded by men with no conscience — men willing to do whatever was necessary to hold the reins of power.
It wasn’t the Nazis, his father had told him as they hid beneath the false floor of a farm truck. It was humanity itself. We were nothing more than hairless monkeys, driven by the same violent urge to survive that had been built into our primitive ancestors.
Of course, they had been captured at the first checkpoint. His father, a man of otherwise extraordinary intellect, had little in the way of guile. The German secret police, on the other hand, was populated by paranoid and sadistic men who understood how to use the dark side of human nature to turn neighbor against neighbor, to create a nearly inescapable web of informants, betrayers, and spies.
He’d never seen his family again. It was only in the last few years that the Stasi records chronicling their fate had surfaced. His father had continued to work under the unveiled threat against the lives of his wife and child, but died after only a few years of being forced to labor eighty-hour weeks. No longer of any particular use, his mother had died of tuberculosis in a Russian gulag, and he had been abandoned to an orphanage in central Germany.
His own intellectual gifts had been identified almost from birth but, as he grew, they became increasingly difficult for the local apparatchiks to ignore. He was eventually transferred to a boarding school where the state could decide whether he could be of use to the great Soviet experiment.
For a short time he, like his father, had been a rabid believer. After years living in violence and squalor as the son of a traitor, he’d seen the bureaucrats enslaving him as saviors, and he’d seen the opportunities they gave him as proof of the egalitarian superiority of communism.
Dresner could still remember the force of his need to belong to something greater than himself. To be understood and respected. To emerge from the shadow of his traitorous family and prove his devotion to the country that had embraced him despite his lineage.