“Not exactly. And while I doubt you’ll believe it at the moment, there was full disclosure and free will involved in all of it. Nari divided up volunteers by their nationalities, and representatives of each nation inhabited a perfect holographic replica of a standard town in their country. The thousands of Americans who were recruited were all set up on the asteroid within a holographic representation of a small town in Ohio. Current TV and radio broadcasts from the actual town were piped in to keep everyone in the cultural loop. Later, internet, streaming services, and the like were also added.”
Tessa sighed. “So when I told you I was raised in a small town in Ohio, that wasn’t entirely a lie. For the first eight years of my life, I really thought I was in Ohio. Who knew that the Buckeye State orbited Saturn?” she added with a smile, hoping to thaw me out.
I scowled, making sure she knew her attempt at levity had failed. “Go on!” I demanded.
“They did inject us all with nanites, which were able to record our brain patterns and keep a perfect record of our hormone levels, emotions, and so on. And they did observe our day-to-day interactions with each other, our culture, and our behavior. And their AI put us through certain holographic simulations—tests—which seemed all too real. These were designed to assess different facets of our ethics, sense of loyalty, creativity under pressure, savagery, self-sacrifice, passion, competitiveness, and so on. In a controlled setting.
“They wanted to get a handle on the yin and yang of humanity. The extent of both the positive and negative ends of our behavioral spectrum. This data was fed into their AI to help it make even better predictions about us. They also wanted to choose a few handfuls of us to seed back into the world to assist them in preventing our self-destruction.”
“You mean when they finally got over World War II and decided this was a good idea again.”
“Come on, Jason. Can you blame them for waiting? You know the basics of that war. Fascism everywhere. Six million Jews exterminated by Hitler. Estimates of up to eleven million Russians starved or overworked to death by Stalin, or directly executed. Over fifty million dead from the war around the world, and as many as thirty million dead from disease and famine.
“Between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered as many as six million Chinese, Koreans, and others, many of them civilians. During something called the Nanking Massacre alone, the Japanese slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese and raped thousands of women.”
She paused to catch her breath. “And there’s plenty more. Pearl Harbor. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Joseph Mengele conducting deadly experiments more atrocious than anything out of the worst horror film, and so on.”
I had to admit, she had a point. This was an ugliness so pure that even Satan himself would be appalled by it, let alone the sheep of the Galactic Federation. Hard to complain too much if the Galactics had concluded at the time that humanity wasn’t worthy of saving. I might have concluded the same.
“And we tend to think of this war as the pinnacle of our dark side,” continued Tessa. “But it isn’t even close. It’s true that more people than ever were killed. But only because the world population was so much larger than it had been in our early history.
“The An Lushan Revolt in China in the eighth century likely killed almost twenty million people, over ten percent of the world’s population, which would equate to nearly a billion deaths today. The Mongol conquests of China in the thirteenth century resulted in at least this many deaths. The Fall of Rome thinned the human population by an amount that would be equivalent to hundreds of millions today. And so on.”
She paused. “So it’s easy to understand why the Federation would want to study us more thoroughly before deciding if we really had the potential to be their friend and ally. And especially if we had the potential to lead them, or to be their savior. To be honest, I’m surprised they concluded we’d eventually evolve away from our savagery.”
“If they did,” I said.
“They obviously did. Or else they would have left us to rot.”
“That remains to be seen. I’m not taking anything at face value.”
Tessa nodded unhappily. “Fair enough,” she said.
“Go on,” I snapped again.
“They also wanted to measure how quickly we could assimilate their science and technology. And how quickly we could adapt to the nanites and learn to optimize our performance.”
“Were all newborns genetically enhanced in the womb?” I asked. “Like you were?”
Tessa stared at me in dismay. “How do you know so much?” she said. “These can’t just be random guesses. But I can’t think of anyone who could have told you.”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
She sighed. “My genetics were modified slightly in the womb, yes. But that wasn’t the norm. A small percentage of the humans born on the asteroid were genetically enhanced, but most were not.”
“So they could compare and contrast the optimized and unoptimized versions.”
“That’s right.”
“So when did Nari send you back to Earth to work your way into the Deltas?” I asked.
Most soldiers had to ratchet up their effort and performance to a hundred and fifty percent of normal to have any hope of making such an elite unit. Tessa had been forced to ratchet hers down.
“Almost nine years ago now,” she replied.
“And then Nari arranged for you to join Brad’s PMC under false pretenses.”
She nodded.
“So I was just an assignment, wasn’t I?” I whispered, unable to hide my anguish at the prospect. “Nothing more. Were you told to get me to fall in love with you? To pretend you had fallen in love with me?”
“It wasn’t like that,” protested Tessa, looking like she might break into tears once again, as though she cared deeply that I was hurting. “The AI did get it into its head that we’d be good together. It somehow calculated that your chances of being instrumental in the defeat of the Swarm were slightly greater if we fell in love than if we didn’t. Again, taking a nearly infinite number of interrelationships between many trillions of data points into account in a way far too complex to explain.”