He settled in again and the image darkened, transporting him to the Afghan village of Sarabat just as it was attacked. Women fought desperately, children screamed in terror, livestock bolted. And the men did nothing.

It took barely fifteen minutes to turn a village full of people going about the mundane business of life into a battlefield strewn with bleeding corpses and cheering victors. He’d always thought the study of the past was a bizarre avocation. What use were dates and names and details when a short video like this one could encompass the entirety of human history so completely?

Of course, this scene was set apart somewhat by the Merge prototypes worn by Sarabat’s adult males. Convincing them to use the bulky units had been almost as difficult as developing them, but eventually the villagers had been won over by money, weapons, and the obvious combat benefits of the system. Of course, when the attack came, the software they’d become accustomed to had been shut down in favor of something much more interesting.

Despite its incredible sophistication, though, the application had been the same abject failure in the real world as in the lab. Test subjects derived no happiness or pleasure from the inputs—only confusion and a profound loss of identity.

Above all things, the human brain was an exercise in pointless complexity. It had been modified countless times over millions of years, adding a new function or hijacking an old one for a new purpose in reaction to the constantly changing demands of survival. Now it generated an endless maze of carefully crafted delusions, barely resolved dissonance, and outright lies. A maze that he had failed over and over again to negotiate.

If religiosity was taken away, a profound sense of loneliness was generated—along with an inexplicable degradation in the test subject’s ability to count above the number three. If the propensity toward violence was taken away, empathy was paradoxically compromised. But even those were trivial matters compared with the much more individual concepts of happiness and well-being. For every person who derived contentment from love and peace, another derived it from hate and conflict.

And though he had failed miserably to realize his dream, he had started something that would be taken up by the next generation, building momentum that could never be stopped. It would begin slowly and innocuously, probably with the Merge being used to treat serious mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia. Or maybe by replacing the illicit narcotics trade with much less harmful lines of code that generated the same effect. These first steps would be necessarily crude, but they’d lead inexorably to a day when humanity would be free to take the path of reason, enlightenment, and peace.