“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.”

Smith thought about his own parents, trying to calculate the effect of the environment they’d provided. The truth was that his intelligence had been recognized at a very early age despite the fact that they hadn’t been particularly interventionist on that front. And both had been horrified when he joined the military.

“So the real purpose of the Merge isn’t augmented reality,” Randi said, making an unconvincing effort to mimic Smith’s calm, friendly tone. “It’s to change the way the human mind works. The men in Sarabat lost their faith and didn’t fight back because the Merge destroyed that part of their brain—”

“No!” Eichmann responded. “It doesn’t destroy anything. It just regulates brain waves. And the unit we used there is very different from the one you’re familiar with—much larger, with enormous rates of power consumption. Our hope was that we could—”

“Strip us of who we are?” Randi said, finishing his sentence.

For the first time, Eichmann met her eye. He was a scientist first and foremost, and his fear was starting to be overshadowed by the subject matter. It was something Smith understood and he was unashamedly hanging on the man’s every word. It appeared that Dresner’s brilliance and ambition went well beyond anything anyone had ever imagined. Unfortunately, so did his insanity.