“Maybe someone’s figured it out. I’m guessing that if we asked your neurologist friends a few months ago about projecting Angry Birds onto my visual cortex they’d have said no chance in hell.”

“Touché.”

Marty shook his head. “It’s possible, but really unlikely. Even if you could figure out how to do it, the magnetic fields you’re talking about would take so much juice. Seriously, if you were eating breakfast, you’d be in danger of your spoon flying up and sticking to your head. That’s just physics. Ever wonder why you have to have the unit plugged in for the sleep function? Power. And sleep is light-years easier than changing someone’s personality.”

“So you’re saying there’s no way to affect someone like that.”

Another shrug. “You could make people dizzy and nauseous. That’d make them not want to fight or go to church.”

“Yeah,” Smith said. “But if the Merge really started screwing with you—made you sick, changed your personality, or whatever—why wouldn’t you just turn it off?”

“Someone could disable the switch.”

“Sure,” Marty said. “But there wouldn’t be anything stopping you from taking it off and walking out of range. Or hitting it with a hammer. Or throwing it in a pool. Or—”

“I get the point, Marty. Thank you. What about something permanent?”

“You think Christian Dresner is trying to give us brain damage?” he said, squinting a bit as he examined Randi. “Why are you asking all this stuff?”

Smith wasn’t prepared to tell him about Afghanistan and that reticence made this line of questioning less effective than it could be. Science was about the free exchange of ideas and he always seemed to be in the position of having to hide something.

“We’re just brainstorming here. We’d like to make sure we cover all the angles before we hand it out to our entire military.”

Marty didn’t seem entirely convinced. “The short answer to Randi’s question is no. Doing physical damage to the brain would take still more power. Even if you suddenly emptied an entire Merge battery into one skull implant, it’d just give you a nasty shock and confuse you for a few seconds.”

“Very brief, very weak electroshock therapy,” Smith agreed.

“Maybe our question needs to be broader,” Randi said. “Marty, is there any way you could use this thing to do mischief?”

It was a beautifully phrased challenge. Marty’s job, his passion—in fact all he really ever thought about—was new ways to do mischief. And in light of that, his answer was surprising.

“Not without getting Dresner to approve apps that he’d never get behind in a million years.”

“I can’t believe you’re so easily defeated.”