Everyone in the café was on their feet, surging toward the accident and then retreating when a pickup slammed into a car parked at the curb. Eichmann, now completely forgotten by everyone around him, stood, fighting off a wave of nausea and slipping the precious flash drive into his pocket.

He stayed close to the wall, clutching his laptop to his chest until he was able to slip into an empty, urine-scented alleyway. He increased his pace, daring a glance behind him at the frantic people swarming the road and the bloodstained front of the mattress van.

Apparently, Géroux’s curiosity had not been excused.

6

Las Vegas, Nevada
USA

CHRISTIAN DRESNER BEAMED from the lectern as the dull click of thumbs on cell phones filled the convention center. Smith didn’t have anyone to text since he still had no idea why he was there, so he just sat quietly and tried to wrap his mind around the potential of Dresner’s new hardware.

To call it revolutionary was an almost laughable understatement. Smith was one of the few people who had recognized Dresner’s hearing aid for what it was: a first hesitant step on the road to changing humanity forever. What made it so new—so extraordinary—was that it had been the first prosthetic that wasn’t a wildly imperfect facsimile of what had been lost. Instead, it was an order-of-magnitude improvement over what evolution had spent millions of years creating. In the end, his great accomplishment hadn’t been helping impaired people to hear. It had been demonstrating that we were entering a world where Mother Nature could be beaten at her own game.

This step, though, was in no way hesitant. Dresner was throwing humanity headlong into what could be the next phase of its existence. Where would it go? Where would it stop? Hell, where should it stop?

Smith looked over at Janine, but she was completely immersed in her iPhone—a device that had seemed so sophisticated a few minutes ago but now seemed a little like a steam-powered stone tablet.

Having said that, a few critical questions needed to be answered. First, did it really work? Innovative technology was great but if it was hard to use or impractical, it tended to fade pretty quickly. Touchscreens, headsets, and standard voice interfaces already worked pretty well.

The second was about the body modifications. He’d spent his life trying not to be perforated and, with the exception of a few stray bullets and a knife or two, had been fairly successful. Would average people want to have bolts screwed into their skulls for the privilege of getting rid of their smartphones?

He glanced at Janine again, noting the diamond nose stud and the colorful tattoo on her upper arm. There was his answer. The generation after his seemed to look at body modification with the same trepidation he felt when changing his shirt.

The sound of thumbs on plastic died down and Dresner began pacing again, the screen behind him following along as though it were connected to cameras embedded in his retinas. “As all of you know, a piece of hardware is only as useful as the software available for it. In the end, the Merge is just a platform. It’s what we’re putting on that platform that really interests me. Of course, we have all the basic apps you’d expect: phone, email, social networking, GPS, and the like. But we’ve also created applications for the financial services industry and politics—two areas that are critical to society and I think everyone agrees need help.”