“Sir?” Grayson said, wanting feedback on the shot.

Smith just shook his head in disbelief. “That’s a kill. You’re one-on-one now.”

22

Near Santiago
Chile

EVERYTHING IN THE ROOM was a perfect white, every inch of wall, ceiling, and floor glowing with the same soft light. The temperature was controlled at exactly seventy-two degrees by radiating panels so that there was no movement of air.

It was his blank canvas—a place that Christian Dresner could quiet his mind enough to think. Or at least that had been the plan.

In the far corner, a fifty-inch computer monitor was built into the wall and a keyboard sat beneath it on a small shelf. Despite their inconspicuous design, they seemed to dominate the room, an archaic intrusion bordering on vulgar. A reminder of his failure to remake the world.

The monitor displayed a ribbon of yellow-tinted road and the dusty, mountainous landscape moving past its edges—a direct feed from Craig Bailer’s Merge.

Generally speaking, it was impossible to hack into the units and display their input. The software and bandwidth necessary for that kind of upload would be quickly discovered by a media already obsessed with outdated privacy issues. However, the company-issued units didn’t have those constraints, leaving him the ability to provide important players in his world with hardware he could access at the press of a button.

Dresner stood beneath the monitor and watched as Bailer glanced over at David Tresco in the passenger seat and then faced the windshield again to negotiate a treacherous corner. The image seemed hazy and unwieldy, but the use of the monitor had proved necessary when viewing this type of output. Trying to run the images directly into his own visual cortex induced nausea.

He chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. It always came back to vertigo and nausea. The mind had evolved to be very rigid about how it received input. If the information didn’t come from the eyes, nose, ears, skin, or tongue, the brain wanted to reject it. Perhaps more youthful adopters would learn to handle the dissonance. The young mind was incredibly adaptable.

The road on screen straightened and the image moved back to Tresco before the limitations of the cellular network carrying the data caused it to freeze. Dresner moved forward a few steps, examining the man’s horrified expression for a few seconds before the feed started again.

“You used the North Koreans like lab animals?” he said. “Jesus Christ, Craig. How many died? How many were permanently disabled?”

“I don’t know the exact number. It—”

“You don’t know the number? My God, it’s so many you don’t know the number? How could you get involved in something like this? How could Dresner get involved in something like this? He—”

“Why, when, how,” Bailer said, the hidden speakers in the wall picking up the increasing volume of his voice. “It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that it happened and we need to deal with it.”

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Tresco said, trying futilely to calculate a way to save himself. “I wasn’t told.”