they can kill in self-defense.”
“It varies from individual to individual. Some would rather die than kill, even in self-defense.”
“Is that what happens to people like Candi?” I asked.
“Not really. People like her are chosen for empathy, for gentleness. You would expect being jacked to enhance those qualities in them.”
“You just used random people in the experiment?” Reza asked.
He nodded. “The first one was random paid volunteers, off-duty soldiers. But not the second group.” He leaned forward. “Half the second group were Special Forces assassins. The other half were civilians who had been convicted of murder.”
“And they all became . . . civilized?” Amelia said.
“The verb we use is ‘humanized,’” Marty said.
“If a hunter/killer platoon stayed jacked for two weeks,” I said, “they’d turn into pussycats?”
“So we assume. This was done before hunter/killers, of course; before soldierboys were used in combat.”
Asher had been following this quietly. “It seems to me absurd to assume that the military hasn’t duplicated your experiment. Then figured out a way around this inconvenient aberration, pacifism. Humanization.”
“Not impossible, Asher, but unlikely. I’m jacked, one-way, with hundreds of military people, from private to general. If anyone was involved in an experiment, or had even heard a rumor of one, I would know.”
“Not if everyone in authority was also jacked one-way. And the experimental subjects isolated, like yours, or disposed of.”
That was worth a moment of silence. Would military scientists have inconvenient subjects killed?
“I’ll admit the possibility,” Marty said, “but it’s remote. Ray and I coordinate all the military research on soldierboys. For someone to get a project approved, funded, and implemented without our being aware . . . possible. But it’s possible to flip a coin and come up heads a hundred times in a row.”
“Interesting that you bring up numbers, Marty,” Reza said. He’d been scribbling on a napkin. “Take a best-case scenario, where you have everyone agreeing to become humanized, and lining up to get jacked.
“First of all, one out of ten or twelve dies or goes crazy. I’m already trying to figure ways to get out of it.”
“Well, we don’t know—”
“Let me go on just a second. If it’s one out of twelve, you’re killing six hundred million people to ensure that the rest of them won’t kill anybody. You’re already making Hitler look like an amateur, by two orders of magnitude.”
“There’s more, I’m sure,” Marty said.
“There is. What do we have, six thousand soldierboys? Say we build a hundred thousand. Everybody has to spend two weeks jacked—and that’s after they spend five days getting their brains drilled out and recovering. Call it twenty days per person. Assuming seven billion survive the surgery, that’s seven thousand people per machine. It sounds like a hundred forty thousand days to me. That’s almost four hundred years. Then we all live happily ever after—the ones who live at all.”
“Let me see that.” Reza handed the napkin to Marty. He traced the column of figures with his finger. “One thing that’s not in here is the fact that you don’t need a whole soldierboy. Just the basic brain-to-brain wiring, and IV drips for nourishment. We could set up a million stations, not a hundred thousand. Ten million. That reduces the time scale to four years.”
“But not the half-billion deaths,” Belda said. “It’s academic to me, since I only plan on living a few more years. But it does seem a high price to ask.”
Asher pushed the button for the waiter. “This didn’t come off the top of your head, Marty. How long have you been thinking about it, twenty years?”
“Something like that,” he admitted, and shrugged. “You don’t really need the death of the universe. We’ve been on a slippery slope since Hiroshima. Since World War One, actually.”
“A secret pacifist working for the military?” Belda said.
“Not secret. The army tolerates theoretical pacifism—look at Julian—so long as it doesn’t interfere with work. Most of the generals I know would call themselves pacifists.”
The waiter shambled in and took the order. When he left, I said, “Marty’s got a point. It’s not just the Jupiter Project. There are plenty of lines of research that could ultimately lead to the planet being sterilized, or destroyed. Even if the rest of the universe is unaffected.”
“You’re already jacked,” Reza said, and finished his wine. “You don’t get a vote.”
“What about people like me?” Amelia said. “Who try to be jacked and fail? Maybe you can put us in a nice concentration camp, where we can’t hurt anybody.”
Asher laughed. “Come on, Blaze. This is just a