Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment - By Kyle Mills Page 0,23

lip to hide the anger he felt at Pedersen driving the man away. In truth, though, he wasn’t sure that’s what had happened. While he was normally fully prepared to blame the general for just about anything, the change in Dresner’s demeanor had come not at the question about offensive capability, but at his own comment about happiness.

Pedersen pushed back his chair and stood, looking impatiently down at Craig Bailer. “Did I hear something about a demonstration?”

12

Outside Storuman

Sweden

WHEN HE WAS YOUNG, the darkness had crept up on him slowly—disguising itself as a passing shadow, using the constant chaos of his mind as camouflage. Now it attacked without hesitation or pretense, often prompted by nothing more than an innocuous comment or a brief scent from a forgotten past. And other times it came for no reason at all.

Christian Dresner stepped out into the sweeping garden, his Merge sensing his position within the compound’s walls and shutting down everything but vision correction. The snow was falling in large, drifting flakes that absorbed the sound of his footsteps as he weaved through trees dusted white.

Brushing off a lone bench, he sat and let the cold sink into him. Behind, the bunker-like building he’d just exited stood silent and, in many ways, equally cold. It was one of a collection of similar structures spread across the world. How many now? Ten? Fifteen? Maybe it was his aging mind that kept him from remembering. Or maybe it was that he felt nothing for any of them. They were less homes than self-appointed prisons meant to make him feel safe. And while he recognized it was probably an illusion, it was at least a comfortable one. In these gardens, for brief, precious moments, he could sometimes make everything outside disappear.

Not today, though. Today, his mind had decided to seize on the stories his long-dead father had told about the concentration camp. About how his initial confusion and fear had faded into a numbness impervious to the death and suffering of others. About how the cruelty of the guards and the desperation of the prisoners eventually became indistinguishable. And finally, about what it was like to watch your humanity slip away.

When Dresner had first heard the stories—at what now seemed like an impossibly young age—his father was still trying to understand what had happened to his people and had been strangely desperate not to place blame. The average German had known nothing of what was happening, he’d said. Only a twisted few were responsible for the evil that had overtaken his country.

He’d believed deeply in the communist ideal and had been proud to use his scientific gifts for the collective good. But then he began to change. The drinking had started, as had long bouts locked alone in the cold, mold-scented basement. He spoke less and less, but when he did, his words no longer forgave. Of course, the German people had been lied to, he would slur beneath the dim light hanging over their rickety kitchen table. But the truth had been right in front of them. They’d just refused to look at it.

And so it had come as no surprise when Christian’s parents scooped him up and took him away in the middle of the night. Marxism hadn’t delivered the contentment and equality it had promised. Instead, it had become just another weapon to be wielded by men with no conscience—men willing to do whatever was necessary to hold the reins of power.

It wasn’t the Nazis, his father had told him as they hid beneath the false floor of a farm truck. It was humanity itself. We were nothing more than hairless monkeys, driven by the same violent urge to survive that had been built into our primitive ancestors.

Of course, they had been captured at the first checkpoint. His father, a man of otherwise extraordinary intellect, had little in the way of guile. The German secret police, on the other hand, was populated by paranoid and sadistic men who understood how to use the dark side of human nature to turn neighbor against neighbor, to create a nearly inescapable web of informants, betrayers, and spies.

He’d never seen his family again. It was only in the last few years that the Stasi records chronicling their fate had surfaced. His father had continued to work under the unveiled threat against the lives of his wife and child, but died after only a few years of being forced to labor eighty-hour weeks. No longer of any particular use,