The life-sized images of the people in front of him glazed over with greed, causing Dresner’s interest in the meeting to fade. It had been Whitfield’s money, of course, and based on the speed with which he was able to deliver, he had almost certainly anticipated the request. Once again, he’d demonstrated a level of cleverness that would undoubtedly become dangerous in the future. But not yet. At this point, he was still useful.

“I must leave you,” Dresner said. “I think we have every reason to be proud of the Merge’s success and to continue to expect great things.”

He shut down his feed and replaced it with a set of projections from the marketing department. Graphs rose more than three meters high in front of him and he leaned back in the soft leather chair to study them.

Sales projections had been increased to thirty-three million units worldwide by the end of the first twelve months and eighty-four million at the end of the two-year window he was interested in.

Dresner switched views to a set of bar graphs showing Merge units broken down by country. The United States had the best penetration, followed by Western Europe. Sales were also substantial in China, primarily due to the sheer size of the market. Russia was lagging, though the technology was being adopted by its politicians, soldiers, and industrialists—the most important people to him. The Muslim world was one of their weakest markets due to poverty and Islamic prohibitions. His people continued to create Koran apps, court imams, and refine their Arabic-language offerings, though, and the effort appeared to be showing some reward.

He switched views again, reconfiguring the charts in a way that could only be done from his personal Merge. A block of red began rising from the bottom of the bar graphs, representing the people LayerCake’s core processors deemed destructive to society: corrupt politicians, the swelling ranks of financial industry robber barons, criminals, warmongers, and twisted religious leaders, to name only a few of the categories.

It was an ugly view of humanity, with the red portion of the charts rising to almost twenty-four percent—just shy of one and a half million people. Of course, it was also a skewed view. The method of his product’s rollout, which confused so many, had been designed to target those who victimized society.

With every passing year, technology magnified the destructive forces available to the ruling class and brought humanity closer to causing its own end. It was only a matter of time before greed combined with waning resources and ideological fanaticism to wipe out billions of innocents while those responsible profited.

He couldn’t let that happen. Not now. Not when humanity was so close to perfecting itself.