65
Near Washington Circle, District of Columbia
USA
CHRISTIAN DRESNER SAT WATCHING a massive computer monitor on the wall. It was an irritatingly archaic technology, but transmitting a feed from someone else’s Merge directly to the mind of another had turned out to be problematic. The complexities were slowly being ironed out but for now it did little more than create confusion as the brain struggled to differentiate its own experiences from the experiences of the person at the other end of the connection.
The image of Jon Smith performing CPR on Whitfield was coming in real time from Deuce Brennan and Dresner leaned forward, watching carefully. Russell was looking around, undoubtedly for a weapon, but her expression suggested she knew she’d be dead before she could use it. Zellerbach—a man whose genius he’d managed to completely overlook—was panicking, knocking things off his desk and tripping over them as he backed away.
The sweat was hot and slick in his palms, but Dresner forced himself to remain calm. While the discovery of his subsystem so soon was a potential disaster, it appeared that control could be regained. In fact, he might one day look back at this moment as the day his mounting problems were resolved.
Dresner glanced at an icon hovering in his peripheral vision but instead of activating it, he stood and walked closer to the monitor. He’d experimented extensively with the effect of shutting down his subsystem after four seconds in order to simulate the experience of headsets being knocked off. The survival rate was twelve percent with no intervention and forty-nine percent with immediately administered CPR.
With implants and the full eighteen-second cycle, though, fatalities were nearly one hundred percent, even with medical intervention. Whitfield’s situation—a shutdown halfway through the cycle—was something he hadn’t considered. Could he be revived?
“You told me this couldn’t hurt anyone,” Randi Russell said over the speakers. “That even with a full battery discharge, it would only give you a little shock.”
“It can’t,” Smith responded, sounding understandably perplexed as he continued to hammer the motionless man’s chest. “I don’t understand it. There’s just not enough power.”
While extremely intelligent—perhaps even borderline brilliant—Smith’s thinking was too linear. A common failing of men who spent their lives in the confines of the military.
Dresner’s curiosity was satisfied a moment later when Whitfield’s eyes opened and he grabbed Smith’s arm. Similar to the Koreans who were brought back, he seemed to suffer few ill effects. Not surprising. There had been nothing wrong with his heart.
Smith helped him to his feet and he managed to stand on his own, blinking at the people around him for a moment before speaking. “What happened?”
“It looks like it stopped your heart,” Smith said.
Whitfield remained silent for a moment, but when he spoke again he had shaken off his confusion. “Deuce. Give the colonel back his phone. Jon, use it to tell your people what happened. We need to call a meeting with the president and the Joint Chiefs.”
It was precisely what Dresner had wanted to hear. The implication was clear: All the people who knew of Zellerbach’s discovery were in that room. What had been a potentially insurmountable problem now looked like a permanent solution.
There would be questions about their deaths, of course, but it was hard to imagine that they would lead to the rediscovery of his subsystem—particularly with the further precautions he intended to put in place. Once again, Castilla would want this to simply go away. To propagate his own power and the power of his country.
“Lieutenant. Did you hear me? Give Smith his phone back,” Whitfield said.
So arrogant. So foolish to believe that he was in command.
Dresner activated an icon in his peripheral vision, opening a direct link to Deuce Brennan’s Merge. “I think it’s time we took control of this situation, Lieutenant.”