Captain Sanderson effected the introductions. ‘This is Professor Septimus Bole, who developed the Demi- Monde. Professor, this is Miss Ella Thomas, our first-choice candidate for Operation Offbeat.’
Operation Offbeat?
Ella held out her hand. The Professor looked at it warily, then with what appeared to be extreme reluctance shook it. The man’s fingers were cold and clammy and her feeling of revulsion was heightened when he squirmed them hurriedly out of her grasp. It was as though he was disgusted by her touch.
‘I am delighted to meet you, Miss Thomas. I hope what you see today will persuade you to help us.’ This little announcement was made, unexpectedly, in an English accent, which had a strange mechanical cadence to it. The Professor noted Ella’s surprise. ‘Yes, Miss Thomas, I am a Brit, though I trust you won’t hold that against me. I, for my sins, am head of ParaDigm CyberResearch’s Demi-Monde Project Team, ParaDigm being the company behind the Demi-Monde. I am here on secondment from ParaDigm to help the US Army sort out its problems.’
Problems?
Introductions made, Captain Sanderson slotted his ID tag into a scanner set on the wall by the side of the elevator and placed his palm on the reader next to it. Immediately a door in the steel wall sighed open and Sanderson nodded Ella and the Professor through to the conference room beyond. The door slid shut behind them.
The room they entered was small, cold and impersonal, and, rather disconcertingly, reminded Ella of a hospital waiting room. The only furnishings were a line of five very uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs set in front of a low stage which had a lectern standing at its centre. At a sign from the Captain, Ella took the middle chair. Professor Bole sat next to her, and after taking an age to coil his long body into the seat and ensure that the immaculate creases in his trousers weren’t being compromised he turned to Ella.
‘As I think the General will have explained to you already, Miss Thomas, the Demi-Monde was designed to replicate the chaos and anarchy associated with an Asymmetric War Environment. The demonstration you are about to see will, I hope, inform you of two things. The first and most obvious will be to convince you of the realism of the Dupes populating the Demi-Monde, a realism so profound that they are as close to real life as makes no difference.’
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ella kept her face bland: she would believe this when she saw it. There was no way she was ever going to believe that a computer-concocted Dupe was a real person.
‘The second point,’ the Professor continued, ‘which to my mind makes the Demi-Monde such a triumph, is that it accurately conjures up the type of people who rise to leadership positions in Asymmetric Warfare Environments. For the leaders in the Demi-Monde we have selected individuals from history famous for their brutality and their barbarism, and have mimicked their aberrational personalities using state-of-the-art DNA- mapping techniques. As a consequence these PreLived Dupes look, think and act just as their real-life equivalents did. I tell you this not to frighten you, but to prepare you.’
The Professor flicked a switch on the remote control he was holding. ‘I’ll just dim the lights, Miss Thomas, and then I think our guest will be ready to present himself.’
Even before the lights had fully faded a tall, slim man dressed in a perfectly fitting black uniform of an officer in the Nazi SS strode out of the right-hand wall. His jackboots shone, his leather belt and holster sparkled and the silver death’s-head badge on the brow of his tall peaked hat twinkled under the room’s fluorescent lighting. That the man was a Dupe, Ella had absolutely no doubt – no one she knew of could walk through a solid steel wall – but…
But in all other respects the man who came to stand on the stage behind the lectern was a perfect representation of a living, breathing human being. Ella stared at him, awed by the way in which the man’s body – the Dupe’s body – so precisely imitated the shadows and highlights that would have been seen if it had been rendered from solid flesh and blood. In sum, it was an amazing, disturbing display of computing power; a display of verisimilitude such as Ella had never imagined could be achieved. It was impossible to distinguish the Dupe from the real thing.
‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to introduce yourself?’ Captain Sanderson asked quietly.
The Dupe turned his bleached, narrow-set eyes towards the Captain and smiled the most chillingly arrogant smile Ella had ever seen. And as he smiled he seemed to suck all the heat and goodness out of the room. She shivered in cold and fear: the man standing before her was the very personification of evil.
‘As you wish.’ The man gave a sharp click of his heels and a slight bow of his head. This done, he took his cap from his head, placed it precisely to the left of the lectern, and slowly and deliberately ran a hand over his short, sleek blond hair. He wasn’t a handsome man, decided Ella, but he was striking, what with his prominent nose and his long, narrow face. But what she particularly disliked was the way his cold, cold eyes didn’t seem to look at her but into her.
‘I am Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, SS-Ober gruppenfuhrer, Chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich’s Main Security Office, and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.’
Jesus.
Ella sat open-mouthed in amazement. The nuances of speech were so astonishingly correct that she was having trouble remembering that the man standing not six feet away from her was a piece of computer fabrication. Even the tone and resonance of his voice – a little too light and effeminate, she thought, for a man of his size – by its very wrongness added an authenticity to the masquerade.
She turned to the Professor. ‘Just who is this Heydrich of yours? Is he a fiction?’
The Professor tapped a button on his control pad and immediately a red sign illuminated over the Dupe:.
The figure of Heydrich froze in mid-gesture.
Professor Bole smiled in a disdainful, condescending way. ‘I had thought the teaching of history in British schools was the worst in the Western world but…’ He shook his head sadly. ‘No matter. Whilst Reinhard Heydrich has, as a consequence of his assassination by Czech resistance fighters in May 1942, not generated quite the public disdain and infamy of other leading Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering, Heydrich was, in my humble opinion, the most evil, the most callous and the most dangerous of the whole pack of them. The man so wonderfully represented here in this room is the individual whose organisational genius, superhuman capacity for hard work and total and utter disregard for human suffering made the triumph of the Third Reich possible. The man standing before you, Miss Thomas, masterminded the Holocaust. He was the man who enabled the Nazis to send six million Jews to their death.’ He smiled bleakly at Ella. ‘Shall we continue?’
‘I must congratulate you, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer,’ said the Professor in a ridiculously conversational tone, ‘on your recent promotion to Reichsprotektor.’
The Dupe nodded his appreciation of the compliment.
‘Perhaps,’ the Professor continued, ‘you would be so kind as to describe your career for my young friend here? She is quite an admirer of yours.’
The dead eyes of the German settled upon Ella and a contemptuous smile flickered over his full, fleshy lips. ‘I am wondering why I should be obliged to discuss my career with one such as her.’
‘One such as me?’ asked Ella, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice.
‘A black… a negro… a member of a more primitive race.’
Ella was jolted back in her seat by the scorn in the Dupe’s voice. Struggling to remember that Heydrich was just digital make-believe, she did her best to hide how upset she was by what the bastard had just said. Taking a deep, calming breath she continued the conversation in as equable a manner as she was able.
‘I am student president at my high school. I have achieved a SAT score which places me in the top one per cent of all students in the USA. I am intent on reading genetics at university. I am a skilled musician. Surely that gives the lie to your proposition that I am a member of an inferior race?’
Heydrich slid a silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and with infuriating slowness went through the pantomime of selecting and lighting a cigarette. He drew heavily on the cigarette then breathed out, snaking a stream of perfectly imitated virtual smoke into the room. A miasma of malevolent vapour, ashen and feathered, settled around his head like a diabolical halo. ‘That you are capable of rote learning merely confirms the inferiority of your race. You are the exception that proves the rule. And anyway, I have seen chimpanzees performing in the circus. Even apes can, through diligent training, be made to perform tricks surprisingly well.’ He sneered. ‘Perhaps that is what you are: a trained ape.’
If this guy had been for real Ella would have given him a real mouthful. But he wasn’t for real: he was just a
