'She's, not who you think she is, Goodbook,' Neil said from his periphery. 'She's NSA, a product of the Flat Affect Neuroplasty Program.'

Thomas understood the words well enough, but they were gibberish all the same.

Sam? NSA?

She slipped something sharp about Thomas's left wrist, pulled his right arm back, looped whatever it was about his left wrist around his right, then yanked it excruciatingly tight.

'She's government owned and operated,' Neil continued. 'A radiosurgical psychopath.'

The room seemed to contort and flatten about her smirking face. Neil's voice fell out of the narrowing corners. 'I performed the procedure, myself, Goodbook. Compassion. Guilt. Shame. I scrubbed her clean, old buddy.'

'Sam,' he heard himself whisper, but he could taste no spit on his tongue.

'Did you hear that?' she cooed close to his neck. He could smell the Aveeno moisturizer she used every morning out of the shower. 'I've been tweaked. My amygdalas have been stripped down to their predatory essentials.' She licked his ear lobe and whispered, 'Imagine being locked up and helpless with Jeffrey Dahmer.'

The incomprehension evaporated. Thomas became afraid.

'About a decade or so ago,' she continued, pressing him arm's-length against the wall, 'certain planners in certain quarters concluded the human race was trapped in a game-theory nightmare. The Great Scramble, they called it. For resources—peak oil and all that. For food in the face of environmental collapse. For stability in the midst of catastrophic, technologically driven social change. They ran scenario after scenario, and in every projection, the greatest liability turned out to be you.'

She brushed some lint from his collar. Her smile was anxious and hopeful—another glimpse of the old Sam.

'Well, not you exactly, but people like you. People who think with their hearts instead of their heads. In all the simulations, the only bargainers who survived were those who acted without sentiment. The idea was to create a shadow bureaucracy, to position flat affect bargainers at every level of the government and the military. But where to find them? Mother nature? Please. I mean, look at the Chiropractor. We couldn't have fuck-ups like that running the show, could we?'

Somehow, Thomas had no difficulty with these abstract things. He could see it with B-movie clarity: the generals, the analysts, the money men, leaning over Scotches, exercising their God-given ability to confuse self-interest for natural law. 'So they turned to Neil,' he heard himself say.

'They call us "Graduates",' she explained. 'People surgically unfettered by your stone-age biases. People capable of driving the hard bargains, who don't need to bullshit themselves when it comes to choosing the projection of US power over the dissolution of the Knesset, or Orinoco drilling rights over starving Venezuelans. People who protect their own, come what may. And thanks to us, America will survive to pick up the pieces, believe you me.'