Taxi drivers slowed as they drove by but he waved them off and kept moving along the sidewalk, avoiding eye contact with the people he passed. Sirens were still audible as the police and military responded to the shooting, but that was more than three kilometers east now.
He came to an innocuous door on a street dedicated to the sale of scrap metal and gave a complex knock calculated to sound clandestine. A moment later the door swung open and he stepped into the dim interior of an apartment he’d found on the Internet. It looked just like a safe house should: dilapidated and austere with curtains tucked carefully around the lone window.
“Is he all right?”
“Nothing serious,” Randi said, continuing to stand next to the door with her gun drawn while Eichmann sat frozen in a chair. Most of his right pant leg was cut off and a makeshift bandage was wound around his thigh.
“Were you followed?” she asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to milk the illusion of imminent danger.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. But we probably shouldn’t stay long.”
“I don’t understand,” Eichmann said, exhaustion and fear clear in his voice. “Who are you?”
“We’re the people keeping you alive,” Randi said.
“You’re American. Do you work for the government?”
Smith took a seat across the small dining table from the scientist. “I’m Dr. Jon Smith.”
The immediate recognition wasn’t surprising. Eichmann would know the name of the man in charge of the U.S. military’s Merge program.
“Why are you here? What do you want from me?”
“We’re here because the Merge was used in Afghanistan before its official release.”
Eichmann was an academic, not a spy — something that was obvious in the way his every thought played out across his face. He knew about Afghanistan and was terrified that Smith did too.
“Yesterday, someone leaked that I’m looking into what happened there,” Smith lied. “And that I knew about you. We were concerned for your safety and came as fast as we could. Good thing we did.”
“Leaked?” Eichmann said. “Leaked to whom?”
Smith leaned back in his chair. “Christian Dresner.”
“I…I don’t understand,” he said, but again his face gave him away. He understood perfectly.
“There’s a lot of money on the table, Doctor. Not to mention Dresner’s entire legacy. If it were to become public that he was involved in these kinds of experiments…”
“But we’re…We’ve been…” the aging scientist stammered, suddenly incapable of getting a sentence out. His hesitation suggested that Smith had guessed right. Dresner was involved.
“What happened in Sarabat?” Randi said, getting impatient.
When Eichmann didn’t answer, she reached for the knob of the door and opened it. “I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want to talk, get out.”
“What?” the German said. “But—”
“But your old friend will have you killed?” she said. “That’s right, Gerd. He will. In fact, I doubt you’ll last two hours without our protection.”
When he didn’t move, she closed the door again. “I believe we were talking about Afghanistan?”
Again, Eichmann didn’t respond. He was clearly having a hard time processing the seismic shift in his universe — that his benefactor and oldest friend was now a mortal enemy.
“He’s a different man than he was when you escaped the Soviets,” Smith prompted. “Wealth, power, fame. Those things can change you.”
The German nodded numbly. “I’m nothing. Nothing compared with him.”
“Why didn’t the people in Sarabat fight back?” Randi said, but Smith subtly waved her off. He wanted to give the good cop some stage time.
“Doctor?”
Eichmann stared at the floor for a few seconds and then looked up to meet his eye. “It was the dream.”
“What dream? What were you trying to do? Influence people’s behavior?”
“Christian just wanted to help. After everything that happened to him — the Nazis, the Soviets — he realized that our primitive instincts were combining with modern technology, media, and politics to destroy us. He wanted to change that.”
“I remember that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on educational research,” Smith said. “But that was more than thirty years ago.”
Eichmann licked his lips nervously. “Yes. We set up charter schools all over the world and educated tens of thousands of children for free. What wasn’t clear to the public was that the students were carefully chosen. Randomized.”
“So that you could test various educational theories,” Smith said. “Year-round school, separating boys and girls, classroom size, home intervention…”
“We tried them all. Every teaching technique and idea that had ever been conceived.”
“And it was a huge success. I learned about it in college.”
The German shook his head. “No. We made it look that way by choosing what data we released. The truth is that different educational techniques have almost no effect on intelligence and behavior. And what little impact they do have disappears in adulthood. But he didn’t believe it. Neither of us did. School and parenting virtually useless? The majority of our destiny written at birth? How could this be true?”
“So you created the study that I saw back at your house.”
“Christian decided we needed to try more drastic interventions — and to get the remaining cultural noise out of the data.”
The old man fell silent and Smith walked to the sink to get him a glass of water. “We’re not here to judge you, Dr. Eichmann. We’re here because the U.S. military needs to understand the technology it’s going to be relying on for the next hundred years. We’re not people who like surprises.”
Eichmann accepted the glass and took a hesitant sip from it. “As I’m sure you surmised, we took children from all over the world.”
“Took?” Randi said, but then fell silent when Smith shot her an angry glance.
“Some parents are willing to accept money, others are open to the promise that their children will be given opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise. Hospital workers are amenable to mixing up paperwork for the right price. And sometimes it’s as simple as directing and facilitating adoptions.”
In his peripheral vision, Smith could see Randi’s horrified expression turn to anger. And as a human being, he understood completely. But as a scientist, he couldn’t help being intrigued.
“So you created a perfectly controlled behavioral study.”
“The first — and almost certainly last — in history. We put children from poor or abusive backgrounds into ideal environments, we put children from privileged backgrounds into brothels and on the street. We split up fraternal and identical twins. We even populated an isolated village in North Korea with children from all over the world and controlled every aspect of their life and upbringing.”
“Gathering data the whole time.”
“We had various ways of giving parents and children personality and IQ tests — through school, extracurricular activities, job interviews, and the like. We looked at every aspect of life outcomes and I just recently finished a comprehensive analysis of all the data. Though, in truth, we’ve known what we would discover for a long time.”
“And what was that?”
“Our minds are just sophisticated computers. Some are very powerful, others aren’t. And all come with preexisting software. A child of wealthy, highly intelligent Chinese parents taken at birth and put on the street in Cambodia will retain an IQ and personality closely related to the birth parents she never met. The reason parenting and education techniques change constantly with no real effect on society is because they don’t matter. Who we will become is largely determined before we’re born.”