ignore LayerCake’s potential. Think about those speed limit signs that tell you how fast you’re going. That kind of immediate feedback has been incredibly successful in changing people’s behavior. Now consider a hypothetical app that uses brain wave analysis to tell you when you’ve had too much to drink and puts a little icon in your peripheral vision. That’s a powerful piece of data. And then expand that—create an environment where you know that the things you do will bear immediately on the way people see you. That’d make you think twice about your behavior, wouldn’t it?”
Klein scowled. “Dresner believes there’s a perfect angel in every one of us just dying to get out. I can tell you that isn’t my experience.”
“I admit it’s a little naive. But you could dedicate your life to worse things than trying to make the world a better place. I mean, it’s hard to overestimate his contributions, Fred. His work on the way the brain controls the immune system is on its way to wiping out autoimmune diseases. And his new class of antibiotics is making resistance an unpleasant piece of history instead of the looming disaster I guarantee you it was. Then there’s his impact on the hearing-impaired, the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s pumped into education, the—”
Klein put up a hand, silencing him. “Fine. I’ll concede he’s on the short list for the Nobel Prize for Medicine and if his apps can actually get our political and financial systems working again, I’ll give him the Peace Prize too. But in the meantime, I’m going to stay cynical and ask just what it is we really know about the man.”
“Personally? Not much,” Smith admitted. “From what I’ve read, his parents survived a concentration camp and ended up in East Germany. He grew up there and escaped when he was in his twenties.”
“That’s the public story.”
“There’s a private story?”
Klein nodded and took a drag on his pipe. “His father was a physicist and his mother was a medical doctor. Both were extremely talented and were put to good use by the Soviets, but then fell out of favor for some reason and ended up in prison. It appears that they were captured trying to escape to the West. Christian, who was six at the time, got sent to an orphanage. Then, a few years later, his own talents were recognized and he was given the opportunity to earn PhDs in biology and neuroscience, which he did by the time he was eighteen. When he got out he went to work for the communists, but we’ve never been able to determine in what capacity—bioweapons would be a good guess. After a few years, he and a young psychologist named Gerhard Eichmann managed to jump the wall and Dresner went to work for a Munich company that did pharmaceutical research. He proved too unstable, though, and was fired after less than a year. That was 1973. A year later, he’d put together enough private capital to finance a start-up and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Okay,” Smith said. “But I still don’t understand your interest in all this and how I fit in. You didn’t call me to air Steve Jobs’s dirty laundry when the iPad came out.”
“The iPad doesn’t link directly to people’s brains and it doesn’t constantly gather information to create its own universe of good and evil. If this thing is as indispensable as everyone says, half the industrialized world is going to be hooked up to it within a few years. That gives a man we don’t know much about a hell of a lot of power.”
“Dresner isn’t twenty-four anymore, Fred. Was he unstable at the time? Why wouldn’t he be? It sounds like his parents were probably executed and by all reports, those East German orphanages weren’t all sunshine and candy canes.”
Klein just sat there and pulled on his pipe.
“Come on, Fred. You didn’t call me in here to tell me about Christian Dresner’s spotty work history. There’s more, isn’t there?”
“A bit.”
“You have me on the edge of my seat. How did the Merge get on Covert-One’s radar?”
“In fact, it’s not. You’re here today as a soldier.”
Smith’s brow furrowed. “Okay. You’ve got my attention.”
“Dresner’s created a military version of the Merge and he’s cooked up some scheme to give the U.S. exclusive rights to it.”
Smith couldn’t hide his surprise. “A military version? Dresner’s never gotten within a mile of creating something that could be used as a weapon. And