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software and bandwidth necessary for that kind of upload would be quickly discovered by a media already obsessed with outdated privacy issues.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.”
The image kept flicking from the increasingly panicked David Tresco to the winding road ahead.
“Whether you or anyone else on the board knew isn’t going to matter, David. If this comes out, no one is going to care about the details of who knew what when. Dresner Industries will collapse, I’ll be tried for crimes against humanity, and you’ll spend the rest of your life either in prison or fighting to stay out of it. The public will demand its pound of flesh. Whether you’re guilty or not won’t make any difference at all.”
Tresco froze again, but this time it wasn’t the network. He seemed paralyzed, staring sightlessly through the windshield at a world he’d taken so much from. A world that now seemed to want it all back.
Bailer returned his attention to the road. “We can fix this.”
“Fix it? How could this ever be fixed?”
It was an interesting question and Dresner listened as he turned away from the monitor and focused on the blank white of the wall behind him. The car noise and wind were being filtered out by his own Merge but the audio was still degraded—the result of Bailer continuing to use the primitive structure of his inner ear instead of the microphones that had proved so superior.
“As you know, we have no signed exclusivity agreement with the U.S. military and we’ve received no payment from them that would obligate us. It’s nothing more than a verbal agreement that Dresner made. Another example of him trying to save the world.”
“So?”
“I’ve quietly spoken to the Chinese government and they’re willing to use a number of private corporations they control to infuse enough cash for us to cover our short-term obligations. In return, we’ll provide them with the same ability to link to offensive weapons that we gave to America.”
“And do they know about the Koreans?”
“No. And there’s no reason for them to. They aren’t buying a controlling stake in the company. They’re essentially paying us to abandon our exclusive agreement with—”
Dresner shut off the sound and accessed LayerCake’s mapping program, bringing up a satellite image of the area Bailer was driving through. His position came up, as did the position of another car about two kilometers behind.
The man in that car had been following the CEO for two months and Dresner sent him a brief text. One that he’d hoped wouldn’t be necessary.
The dots representing the cars began to merge as the chase vehicle accelerated and closed the distance between them. When they appeared to be nearly touching, Dresner turned back to the monitor to once again see through Bailer’s eyes. The car was visible in the rearview mirror but Bailer didn’t seem to notice, continuing to shift his gaze between the road and Tresco, who was speaking silently on screen. There was no need to turn the sound back on. What the two men had to say was no longer of any importance.
Dresner pulled up an icon that existed only on his unit and could be activated only by commands from his mind. A list of names fanned out and he selected Bailer’s, bringing into existence a pulsing “activate” button at the edge of his vision.
He watched for a few more minutes, waiting until Bailer started into a sharp right turn. He would have preferred something more tangible like a rock wall, but the satellite image showed no such obstacles ahead. The curve, and more specifically the steep slope at its edge, would have to do.