"I guess I just miss my parents," the girl said, looking at David Meyer with an antagonistic, almost challenging expression.
"There's nothing wrong with that," he said, nodding to Adrianna. "While we've tried to ensure that your fellow cadets become friends, it is natural to still have an emotional attachment to your family."
David paused, as he tried to come up with a way of explaining the potential problems to the strong-willed Spartan cadet. Perhaps something that reminded her that her actions had immediate consequences not just for herself, with the punishments, but with her friends?
"Nonetheless," he continued, deciding to try that approach. "Trying to steal a Pelican put yourself, Jai, and Michael at risk. What if you had crashed? What if your friends had died?"
"We wouldn't have crashed," Adrianna muttered, looking away from him.
Doctor David Meyer, M.D. and Ph.D., bit back an instinctive urge to get up from his chair and wrap the nine year old in a hug.
He hated this damn program for so many reasons, from the kidnapping of children, to the planned experimental surgeries on them, to the cultural indoctrination towards a life of endless service – but most of all, he hated that it forced him to betray one of the foremost edicts of his two professions.
Primum non nocere. First, do no harm.
The phrase had been one of the standard oaths in the medical community for nearly three thousand years. Not just because it sounded good, not because it encouraged doctors to be healers, but because it acknowledged the most common and most deadly of sin that any doctor could have – pride.
With all their knowledge, it was very easy for a doctor to assume an ideal outcome. They could visualize how precise their incisions would be, how there would be no complications, and even how well the patient would recover… and in doing so, they could ignore the potential of failure. The risks of the procedure. The consequences.
There was no such thing as a perfect surgery. The numbers alone proved it, as Catherine used to argue in the Party House. Even if every single surgery was 'safe', and had a literal one-in-a-million chance of having complications, then statistically, those 'rare' chances added up to millions of individual people in the UNSC, every single year.
And in reality, most surgeries were not lucky enough to have that 'safe' one-in-a-million number. Many were far, far riskier.
No doctor ever imagines that it might happen to them, but it does. Things go wrong. The patient has an undiscovered allergy to the general anesthetic. The body reacts too quickly or strongly and tears itself open even further. Even the supposedly flawless auto-surgeons could have calibration errors, mechanical fatigue, or other problems.
Worse, most surgeries were not on perfectly healthy individuals who just wanted to see what a general anesthetic did, but on people who had something wrong with them. They had pre-existing conditions, either temporary like a sucking chest wound, or long term, like lingering knee issue.
Every time a doctor performed a surgery, he had to consider the potential that their intervention might aggravate that condition. That they might make things even worse, rather than better.
In other words, given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.
And even in psychology, the same principle applied.
David would have loved to tell Adrianna that she was not wrong to miss her family, and that yes, what had been done to her was evil. That any attempt to fight back, to return to her family, was the right thing to do.
But he couldn't say that. Even here, in the Spartan-II compound, where it had become a relatively 'open' secret that nobody in the program was happy with the concept. It didn't matter that the trainers treated the cadets like favored pupils, or the scientists treated them like nieces and nephews.
In ONI's eyes, his Psychology Team was the weakest link in the chain of secrecy. The trainers were UNSC military personnel, with long careers and proven track records. The scientists were primarily research focused, and only interacted with the kids very rarely. Catherine had created the whole idea, and thus could be trusted to stay on task – at least in ONI's misguided view.
But the Psych Team was full of experts in human psychology, and they knew exactly what ONI was doing to these kids, because they were the tip of the spear, the ones responsible for actually doing it. They had the knowledge, the means, the motivation, and the access to poison the kids against the UNSC.
None of their 'sessions' were truly private. While everything in the Spartan-II compound was monitored, it was only the Psych sessions that got shipped back to ONI's ominous tower at FLEETCOM HQ every single day, to be reviewed by their clandestine overseers and inspected for any hint of sedition.
Frankly, the pressure was worse than any position that David could ever think of. The only reason the Psych Team hadn't started taking stress casualties was because David had been working himself to the bone to ensure they had ample recovery time in the outdoors. There were some silver linings to being on a secret military base where the expenditures were classified, after all.
Every single member of the Psych Team was, by this point, a devout worshipper at nature's cathedrals – hiking the gorgeous mountains, driving ATV's down hundreds of miles of off-road trails. They'd started picking up military weapons training out of sheer lack of any other options, firing off hundreds if not thousands of rounds in the firing ranges. They were taking out their frustrations with physical actions.
Fittingly, they were all constructive habits, the same kind of thing that they coached the kids through. Beyond helping with the temporary relief of stress, those hobbies were helping train their self-discipline in the dozens of ways. The unfit had become fit, the lazy had become workaholics, and some of them were even bonding with the trainers on hunting trips during their rare 'days off'.
David himself had started the young 'tradition', but he hadn't done it for stress relief. He'd done it because he saw far too many of his colleagues nearing the breaking point, becoming more and more uncivil as they stewed in their hatred of Catherine Halsey and the program.
It helped keep the Psych Team sane, but they were only addressing the symptoms, and never the root cause.
They all hated this program. Every single person on the Psych Team wanted nothing more than to stop it… and they couldn't, not without getting a life imprisonment or a firing squad.
And worse, even if they were willing to die on that hill as a moral stand, it would mean that someone else would show up to take their place. Someone who wasn't willing to bend the rules, who wasn't genuinely trying to keep the children in the best psychological state, who wasn't actively trying to teach them the necessary life skills to be functional adults, rather than human weapons.
It was bad logic. There were entire textbooks on why that logic didn't work. The slippery slope, the sunk cost, the moral self-licensing. Case studies ranged from the atrocities of the 20th century genocides by dictatorships, to the Interplanetary Wars of the 22nd century, to even the current logic behind the Insurrection and the more 'moral' cells that still rubbed shoulders with the nihilistic anarchists and supplied them with dangerous weaponry.
None of it changed the fact that it was the best possible thing David could do in a horrific situation. With the increasing militarization of the government as the Insurrection continued to gain power, the UNSC could make him disappear permanently without anyone ever knowing. They were already doing it temporarily, hiding him away for a decade while he worked on the project.
It would have been easier if he'd known that this was a Milgram experiment, and it was just to see how far he and other 'experts' in the field could be deceived into blindly doing evil things as a test of their obedience to blind authority. Perhaps a re-do of the Stanford prison experiment, testing how a person could 'adopt' a role
But it wasn't. He'd written the damn paper himself. He'd been the monster who had suggested using children. This was no lie, no long-running fake out, no reality TV show. This was real, and he was trapped in it.
"Well, maybe that's something to focus on, for the future," David suggested, bringing his focus back to the session he was currently conducting.
Adrianna was one of the most resistant cadets in the group. It made her a paradoxical source of both irritation and pride for David, who'd taken on responsibility for the sessions with her and her two compatriots in crime, Jai and Michael.
On the one hand, he was so very proud of them for refusing to bend under the pressure of ONI, and to seek out the healthy life that they'd been ripped from. It was stubborn, but stubbornness was a complicated thing. Unhealthy clinging to bad behaviors was detestable, while refusal to bend your own principles for something monstrous was near universally praise as a sign of strong morals.
On the other hand, every time David had to talk to them after their misbehavior, he was forced to confront exactly how outrageous this program was, rather than the comfortable delusion that he could have with less rebellious cadets.
It was an unwanted reminder that his own preference for the other cadets was, itself, an avoidance of a difficult topic. He should be wishing that more cadets were clinging to their families, remembering their normal lives, as opposed to fewer.
"Yeah?" Adrianna asked, turning her head to look back at him. "You think I should stick with the program, so I can learn to fly a Pelican, and escape properly?"
"No," David lied with a gentle smile, for the benefit of the ONI watchdogs. "I simply think it might be a good idea to learn useful skills for many reasons. Either to serve, or for your own benefit in the future. It's entirely possible that the augmentations would not be fully successful. In that situation, you could still find a purpose in life through piloting, or any one of the military skills that your trainers are teaching."
He was toeing the line a little, but it was defensible. He could easily argue that he was manipulating Adrianna into engaging with the lessons in the short term, while gradually wearing her down on the idea of loyal service to the UNSC, one step at a time.
The cadet looked uncertain. It was a positive change. Better uncertain that hostile.
"You know, if the program succeeds, then you might not be in UNSC service for your entire life," David continued, stretching out ONI's leash just a little bit further, pushing the boundaries of what he could and couldn't say. "The fastest way out might be to commit to the program, and do the best job you can. After that… well, piloting is a lucrative career on the civilian side of life."
Adrianna bit her lip. A decent sign that she was considering it, though hardly conclusive.
"What do civilian pilots… do?" she asked, hesitantly. "I mean, how do they live?"
"You know, that's a very interesting question," David said, nodding. "Let me tell you how civilian jobs work, and why it's so important we keep society safe, so that those civilians can live happy lives."
It wasn't much. It was so little that it was barely any better than holding her hand and singing kumbaya, and ignoring the very real issues that were at the root of Adrianna's problems.
Yet it was all that David Meyer could do. Damn him for being too cowardly, damn him for falling prey to the same horrible logic that he was trained against, and damn him for ever coming up with the Spartan-II program at all – damn him for all of it.
But damned or not, he was going to keep trying to help with this avalanche of evil, even if all he could do was move one pebble at a time.
After his session with Adrianna finished up, David locked his office door, changed into outdoor clothes, and prepared to head out.
The weather today was nice. This far from the equator, the sunny day mixed with a surprisingly dry summer climate, and temperatures were soaring. Some wind would be a pleasant balm for the heat.
But David wasn't going hiking because he wanted to sweat his balls off today. He'd much rather stay in the air conditioned office and not go stomping around in the dust with all the bugs.
Today's walk was for a more important purpose.
"Jason," he called out, as he caught sight of the man. "Come on, let's go!"
The man standing outside the formerly-spare office building jerked abruptly at the call, and turned towards him. The building had long since been converted to house the dozen-plus members of the Psych team and their offices. Almost all the psychologists had been there for all three years of the Spartan-II program.
Almost all, save for Jason Thompson, a specialist in the psychology of high performing teenagers and pre-teens.
Unlike David's team of generalists and theoretical experts, Jason was a highly experienced practicing psychologist. He'd worked for five years in Kensington, London, and then five years in Sydney, Australia, handling the children of Earth's elite. A mixture of the highly intelligent and motivated, and the spoiled rotten and troublesome.
He had been hired by ONI six months before, and for those months, Jason had been working from Menachite Mountain, remotely contributing on a series of hypothetical scenarios. How one should handle a highly intelligent, physically capable, incredibly motivated child that was being tutored to the utmost degree. How to handle their tantrums, their clever tricks. Jason had been an enormous help in dealing with seventy five such 'hypothetical' cases as they evolved and grew.
Today, he met the Spartan-II cadets for the first time. Today, he learned that they were not hypothetical.
"Doctor Meyer," Jason said, his voice hoarse.
"Call me David, please," David said, slapping him on the shoulder gently, and leading him out of the compound. "We'll be working together for some years yet, and there's no reason to stand on ceremony."
"You're my boss, and this is a more… formal environment," Jason said back, pausing mid-sentence as they walked past the Spartan-II's barracks.
As it was Sunday, and around noon, it was one of the rare periods of free time that any of the cadets had. A few of them were hanging around the entrance, chatting lightly.
Jason's head turned as they walked, his eyes lingering on the nine-year-olds in their summer-issue shorts and long-sleeve shirts. One of them – Linda, David recognized – was wearing a large sunhat to keep the rays from hitting her pale skin. She burned easily, as they'd discovered during that first summer.
It wasn't the same communal barracks that the cadets had been forced into years ago, but Jason didn't know that. David and Catherine had moved them over to the new one a year ago, when they had turned eight. They were no longer living in one large communal room, but in four-man and two-man rooms that allowed them slightly more privacy. They had desks, and bunk-beds, and shoe-racks, and tall, thin wardrobes for their uniforms.
Their living arrangements were more like a boarding school these days. They had inspections twice daily, with a full Number One inspection on every Friday night. Each night, while they were working on their schoolwork, a small number of trainers and psychologists would be assigned to walk the halls, checking on the open doors. It was an unnecessary assurance that they would punish any cadet that wasn't working, with the unstated true reason of providing a chance for the cadets to ask for help.
Some of the cadets even made a game of re-arranging their furniture every week, trying out increasing bizarre room arrangements. Mendez had taken one look at the first room to do so, a quad that contained Kirk, Fhajad, Frederic, and Victor, and hadn't said a single word. An hour later, after all the inspections were done, Mendez had reminded the cadets that their rooms needed to remain accessible to both cadets and trainers, and that they'd better be able to get outside in time for a fire drill or reveille call – and there was no further mention of the changed room layouts. So long as those two conditions were met, the cadets could do what they wanted.
The northern path out of the compound was guarded by a single trainer standing in a watchtower. There wasn't much that could get up this far into the Highland Mountains, but you never knew when a wild animal could go crazy and try to take a human for dinner. That's why the guard had both a DMR for smaller game, and a mounted heavy machine gun, in case a Gúta somehow made it all the way up from the lowlands.
"Two heading up for a hike," David called up to the trainer, Sergeant Flores. "David Meyer and Jason Thompson."
"Alright, you're marked down," Flores replied, leaning his arms on the watchtower's railing and looking down at them. "Where you headed?"
"Howling Gulch," David told him, before adding, in a deliberately casual voice, "I thought we'd get some fresh air, and Jason here's new, so I thought I'd show him around the place, get him situated."
"Understood, Doctor Meyer," Flores said, nodding slowly. "You packing?"
"Yeah, just in case," David said, patting his hip-pack, where the pistol was securely stowed across from his water bottle. "Anybody seen any signs of bear?"
"Looks pretty clear," Flores said, his eyes flicking briefly to the left and right, before re-focusing on David. "But you never know, so keep your eyes peeled for poop. You have a good hike."
"You never know," David agreed.
Flores waved them off, and the pair of psychologists headed north. They stayed silent as they walked; David because he knew that they were still in sight of the compound, and Jason for his own reasons.
It took twenty minutes to reach the trailhead. They turned west as the closest mountain slid away into a gulch, and as soon as they started on the turn, the compound was completely out of sight.
"So, how was your first day?" David asked, walking ahead as Jason followed behind.
It was odd how different experiences could age a person, David thought to himself as his colleague looked over at him with a bitter, angry look. Jason Thompson was a couple years older than David, but right now, his unguarded emotions made him look a decade younger.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Jason countered, meeting David's question with his own. "Why didn't you warn me?"
"Oh yes, that would have gone well," David drawled, deciding to meet anger with nonchalance and sarcasm. It would either defuse the situation, or it would tell him that Jason was far, far angrier than he'd been acting. "I should have sent a message over the ONI network, explaining that we'd kidnapped seventy five children. I'm sure the internal censors wouldn't have noticed or cared."
He waited for a response, but after ten seconds, none came.
The sun on his face, David turned back and looked to his new co-worker. Jason had stopped a half dozen meters away and was glaring at him. His fists were tight, and he looked like he was only a few seconds away from trying to tackle David and beat him to death with his bare hands. Of course, given that David had a foot of height and probably a hundred pounds of muscle over the older man, it probably wouldn't have unfolded in the way that Jason wanted.
David sighed.
"I couldn't have told you," he said slowly, dropping the sardonic tone as he locked eyes with Jason. "If I had even tried, I would have been either thrown in prison or shot."
"Self-justification," Jason said, with a scowl. "It's always easier when you're already in a bad situation."
"Jason, I didn't bring you out here so we could scream at each other," David told him, hardening his tone. "You aren't saying anything new to me. I've been thinking those same things. And so has every other psychologist on this team."
"Then why did you bring me out here?" Jason demanded.
"So we could have a hike," he said, gesturing at the gulch ahead of them – the exposed craggy rock faces protruding from the hills, worn down by years of snow and rain, the gently waving tall grass along the higher edges, the splashes of color from brightly colored wildflowers.
"No!" Jason snapped. "Why'd you bring me onto this damn program?"
"Because you could do some real good here," David said, staring the man in the eyes. "We're all generalists, and these kids are incredibly intelligent. If they start acting out, we might not be able to notice it, until it's too late, and they piss off ONI enough to do something… drastic. Preventing that is very important to me. Both for our sake, and the sake of the kids."
"Nothing good could ever come from this," Jason retorted. "This is all fruit of the poisoned tree. Even if those kids do wind up saving some lives, it doesn't make up for what you're doing to them!"
"I know," David replied simply, nodding in agreement. "Now come on, let's go."
"Why?" Jason asked, before David could turn back to the trail. "What's the point? Why bother with going on this… charade? Why shouldn't we talk this out, right here?"
"Because the hike is a lesson," David told him. "It's more than a good excuse for getting out of the compound."
"A sermon on the mount, is that it?" Jason asked, a tinge of disappointment mixed with his scorn. "I'm not interested."
"Okay, then I guess I can shoot you, right here and now," David snapped, his irritation getting the better of him.
He made no move to draw the pistol at his back, but Jason recoiled anyway, and his eyes flicked down to where it sat.
"You're in a shitty situation," David continued, glaring right back at the now hesitant psychologist. "You've signed up for a morally bankrupt military project that is so black, if you ever try to say a word about it publicly, nobody will ever know you died. You'd just vanish. So why don't I just shoot you now, and get it over with? Save you all those years of pain? Is that what you want? Take the moral stance, and refuse to go on with it?"
Jason bit his lip, and slowly, carefully, took a single step forward. Perhaps he was thinking about taking the gun from David to save his own life, but David wasn't going to shoot him. He wouldn't shoot the man in a thousand years.
That didn't excuse the vitriol that Jason had thrown at David, nor the way that he'd made the two worsts mistakes that any psychologist could make – he assumed that he knew everything, and he wasn't willing to listen.
Well, so be it. David would have to make him listen. He didn't have the time to do this gradually, over sessions that would help the man realize his own mistake. The children didn't have the time for that.
"You've been under this pressure for all of one day," David reminded the man. "Can you imagine what it feels like to the rest of us? We're not monsters. We don't agree with the program any more than you do. Now, if you're willing to put aside your own perfectly sensible emotional reaction to what is honestly a very disturbing situation, maybe I can tell you something that you don't already know."
David turned back around and started walking up the trail. At this point, he had given Jason a choice. The newcomer could continue to enjoy his sense of moral superiority and abandon David as just another monster, or he could take a chance and listen to a potential enemy, and perhaps learn something.
He didn't have to wait long – within a few seconds, he heard Jason's hiking poles hitting the ground. The man wasn't a quitter, and while it wasn't much, it was at least a start. David had no use for quitters. Not these days, not with these stakes.
They walked in silence for a few minutes. The start of the trail was filled with older trees, tall enough that they'd blocked enough sunlight, and the undergrowth had died away underneath them, leaving a clear trail with a scenic view.
Further along, David knew, the trees would get shorter, and the bushes would start creeping across the trail, with beautiful wildflowers and thorny berry bushes and weeds, all trying to sting them. It was why they were both wearing pants instead of shorts, despite the heat.
"Alright," Jason said, after he'd had some time to think. "What don't I know about this program?"
"Quite a lot," David said, sadly. "We should start with the most important item. This program was a joke. Literally, a drunken joke of a research paper. It was never supposed to be real. It was never supposed to actually happen. And yet…"
"And how would you know that?" the new hire asked, wary.
"Because I helped write it," David told Jason, glancing over his shoulder and giving him a good look at his own bitter, weary expression. "I was one of four co-authors, back in 2510. We'd all just gotten our doctorates, and we were celebrating."
"What kind of celebration would come up with something like… this?" Jason muttered, flapping a hand aimlessly in the air.
"Oh, we started simply enough," David reminisced, smiling sadly at the memories. "We were talking about how we'd all be famous and successful researchers, and what we'd do with an unlimited budget. The wild and wacky ways that we could waste it all. Human augmentation, power armor exoskeletons, perfectly trained human beings, and potential integrations of A.I. into a person. After a few more drinks, Catherine – that's Doctor Halsey – came up with the idea of combining our scientific fields, to spend even more. Making them soldiers was just a… natural evolution to Catherine's idea."
He paused near a bend in the trail, as the stream trickled past.
"In fact, that reminds of a small story," David said, chuckling. "Let me tell you about the first time I met Catherine Halsey…"
"…we got away with it, but, well, Catherine and I were politely told that we shouldn't attend any more protests," he continued, as the sun bore down on them from above. "Something about instigating a riot, I think. Catherine told them that was stupid, of course. We had no involvement, and even if we had, it was technically riot control. Very different, she told 'em."
"Can't blame them," Jason commented, grunting as he clambered over the rocky outcropping and sat down alongside David. "Should've gotten you two kicked out of the university. Still, can't say I've ever heard about defusing a riot with an improvised foam party."
The small spur of rock was a few feet from the trail, and it projected outwards over the gulch with a commanding presence, like a bird's beak, or a man's face. They'd come quite a ways, even in a mere forty-five minutes and David could tell that Jason was a little impressed at how the gulch fell away – and by extension, how far they'd hiked.
There was something interesting about the psychology of it. Because you were constantly moving uphill, you knew that the trail wasn't level, but your frame of reference was still skewed. It was all too easy to think you were ascending at a much lesser rate… right until you turned around and looked back, and saw the truth of it.
"It probably would have gotten us kicked out, if they could prove it was us," David said, laughing. "Which it wasn't, of course. We had nothing to do with the foam. We were just standing there. Birdwatching, that's what Catherine called it. Now, Paul and Steve, they were the ones who actually started the whole chemical chain reaction, but they were further away, so they didn't get spotted."
"What happened next?" Jason asked, a hesitant note in his voice.
It wasn't hard to understand that hesitation. Jason had only ever met Doctor Halsey, ONI spook. He'd never met the woman that David known – the one who'd screamed down a dozen football jocks at a party, after they'd started hitting a little too forcefully on a couple women that were way too drunk to consent to anything.
"It was a little tense," David said, with no small amount of understatement. "They didn't get it at first. They thought she was just some kid that had snuck in. One of them decided it would a good idea to push her off the table she was standing on. Big guy, you know. Used to solving things with force."
He paused, and both of the psychologists looked out of the descending floor beneath them. The way it zigged and zagged. The stream was gentle, with curves, but the walls of the miniature valley were stone and soil, and they didn't shift as easily as the dirt in the center. Only enormous pressure could move them, and the landslides had resulted in sharp, jagged angles to the gulch itself.
"The jerk reached out, and she broke his thumb," David said softly. "Yanked it backwards, shattered the metacarpal. Just like that."
Fingers snapped, the sharp crack bouncing off the hills, and echoing.
"I've never seen anybody move that fast," he recounted.
He could see it, even all these years later. The way that Catherine had seemed to blur, her arm whipping out like a snake. The instant reaction from the towering man, the scream he let out.
"Then they all saw me," David continued, with a sad smile. "Big guy, just like them, with a couple of my weightlifting buddies. Think we… maybe seven of us, to the five of them? They didn't like the odds, so they left."
Jason turned his head, and looked him with a confused, thoughtful expression.
"But Catherine didn't see us," David said, looking right back at him. "She didn't know that I was standing behind her. This little, five-foot six girl standing on a coffee table. Maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, soaking wet. And she was ready to keep going. She would've attacked every single one, if they hadn't backed off."
"Catherine really hates forced labor," David said, as Jason gulped down a swig from his water bottle. "She hates it because it's immoral, sure, but she ranted about it once, a couple months before we wrote that paper. It's… oh, what did she say?"
He trailed off, trying to remember Catherine's exact wording.
"It's inefficient," he recalled, speaking slowly. "It's lower quality, it requires constant inspections to check for sabotage, you spend more labor on the guards, and all sorts of stuff like that. The economics of it, the sheer incompetence of it, that pissed her off almost as much as the principle itself."
"I don't buy it," Jason told him, shaking his head. "Halsey's crazy, boss. Even just a single meeting with her, that was enough. She's a sociopath. She doesn't get human emotions. She switched between anger and happiness too fast for a normal person."
"No," David disagreed. "She cares more about these kids than any of us. She's not a sociopath, Jason. She's just very good at pretending to be one."
Jason made a non-verbal noise of disagreement, a descending 'nnnn' sound.
They were three hours into the hike, and by now, they'd risen up, above the gulch's small ridgeline.
David could see, in the distance, the Spartan-II compound gleaming in the sunlight. This far away, the details were hard to make out, but he could see the fluttering motion of the UNSC's flag, as well as the UNSC Navy flag just beneath it. He could see the firing range, the children's playground, and even the admin block.
"She's had a lot of experience with pretending to be a sociopath," David continued, ignoring Jason's disagreement. "She can't let up on her acting job even for a moment. There's far less scrutiny on the regular scientists. Even us team leaders aren't watched as carefully as Catherine is. She's the head of the entire program, and she's the one that ONI keeps the closest eye on."
"But how do you actually know?" Jason insisted half an hour later, huffing a little as they started up the final approach to the top. "About Halsey pretending, that is. Have you talked to her about it?"
"Haven't, can't, and don't need to," David said with a shrug, still breathing easily despite the increased incline. "All four of us – Catherine, me, Steve Sullivan, and Paul Wu – we lived together in a shared house for years. We'd talk politics and philosophy every night, Catherine and I. I know that woman better than anyone alive, Jason. That's how I know she's absolutely furious about this."
Jason didn't respond immediately. He was sucking down a breath as the trail leveled out, near the final ascent. The mountain itself was directly in front of them, but that didn't make it any easier – the peak was another four hundred meters higher up, and the final climb had no trail, just a quickly rising ascent.
David wasn't breathing quite as hard, which probably meant he'd been pushing a little too hard for Jason, likely because of his own irritation with Jason. Of course, David had always been in excellent shape, but before the Spartan-II program, he had been more of a gym rat than a cardio hound.
Over the last three years though, he'd done so many of these little walk and talks with the Psych Team that he'd grown fond of the different kind of exertion. It was simpler, purer, in some ways. And it helped with the mental struggles.
Even with the doctors who knew that Catherine wasn't the devil she appeared to be, the stress could still build up. The classic dilemma, true for both medicine and psychology – doctors made the worst patients. They could be just as blind to the problems in their own lives as their patients, but they didn't like admitting it.
As a result, David had been the therapist for every other therapist in the program. He was their safety net, their pressure release valve. It offloaded a lot of the stress onto him, but unlike the others, he had absolute faith that Catherine would make everything work out.
He didn't know exactly how she'd do it, but at the moment, it looked like she was preparing from every situation. The options ranged from a peaceful and quiet shutdown of the program without having to put the children through experimental surgery, to calling in every possible favor or loan to ensure that all the children at least survived the surgeries.
"Besides," David continued, moving more slowly as Jason caught his breath. "Catherine's part of the paper wasn't that bad. She wrote all the stuff about how to train soldiers, and how to deploy them. The Artificial Intelligence stuff too, but, honestly, that stuff is such a low priority that its practically dormant."
"Then…" Jason said, before trailing off.
David's shoulders sank, involuntarily. He already knew what the other man was thinking. There were four research teams in the program, and he had been telling stories about all four of the Party House for the entire climb up the mountain.
If Catherine Halsey had not come up with the child element, then who had?
"Doctor Wu?" Jason asked, in a guessing tone.
"No," David shook his head. "Paul came up with the augmentations, sure, but he didn't specify an age. Remember, we wanted to waste money. Efficiency like doing it at puberty? We could do it to adults, it would only take a few trillion extra dollars of research."
He sighed.
"No, I did that," David said. "I'm the one who said we had to use children. It would be optimal for… psychological inculcation."
There was a hiss behind him, a dark, seething sound. Jason didn't say anything audible, but he didn't need to. His… disgust… had been made clear.
David kept his eyes forward, on the path ahead of him. There was no condemnation that the other man could express that would outweigh what David had told himself over the years.
"You wanted to know why we needed to go on this hike," he said, changing the topic.
"It's a lesson," Jason said, repeating David's earlier words. "About what, sunk cost fallacy? We're already out here on the trail, so we might as well continue until the top?"
"No, but close," David said. "It shouldn't surprise you to learn that I've studied ONI's file on you quite extensively before we made the decision to bring you on. You've only ever really lived in London or Sydney, right? Never been out in the wilds like this?"
"Hampstead Heath is wild," the man argued. "We're quite proud of that, you know. It's not park. Not some manicured garden. Real wilderness."
"Sure, but it's not a mountain," David replied, rolling his eyes at the meaningless point. "See that, up there? That's our destination. Doesn't really have a name, but some of the trainers are thinking of calling it Halsey's Peak."
"Yeah, what's a little casual arrogance among friends?" Jason muttered.
"Total length of this hike is about nine kilometers to the summit," David continued, ignoring the other man. "About one-point-six kilometers of vertical gain. Since we left at around noon, we've done about… four-fifths of the first half. Four hours, in case you haven't been checking your watch."
"Wait, first half?" Jason asked, abruptly stiffening.
David kept his face still.
The newcomer had just come out of a very traumatizing day at the Spartan-II compound. He had been so distracted by the revelations that he hadn't asked for specifics when David had told him that they were going for a hike, nor when they'd started.
It was a bit cruel of him, to not tell Jason in advance… but that was part of the lesson. To realize, too late, what you had already agreed to do. To learn how trapped you really were. Jason's busy mind had been too distracted to ask the details at the start, and to realize what it had meant.
The parallels were obvious.
"We've got to come back down," he said, patiently. "Five hours to the top. It's normally a little faster going down than going up, but let's say that'll be another four hours, so we'd be back in the compound by nine o'clock. Of course, sunset around here is about eight o'clock, but since the gulch goes east-to-west, it'll be in partial darkness probably starting around six-thirty, maybe seven o'clock."
He paused, and looked back to the other psychologist, who had stopped, and was staring at David in shock.
"Of course, going downhill in the dark is very, very dangerous," he continued. "Especially across that scree, and especially without a flashlight, and… I seem to have forgotten mine. So our only option is to beat the time. To keep going."
"Doctor Meyer, this is stupid," Jason said, staring at David in dismay. "We'll never make it back in time. We don't have the gear to spend the night. We've got two water bottles and… what, some crackers? There's no point. Let's head back, and we'll do it tomorrow, with an earlier start time and more preparation."
"Nope," David denied, cracking a smile as he looked back at the newcomer, amused. "We're gonna do it today. I'm going to get a picture of the two of us on top of the mountain."
"And then a dropship will pick us up," Jason guessed. "This is a team-building exercise. Your twisted idea of a psych evaluation. You're gonna make me stress and sweat, and gut it out, so that you can see if I had the stomach to go through with it. If I've got the determination. Because you think this will tell you if I can handle being in this position, in this program."
"There won't be any dropship coming," David told him. "This isn't about your determination to do the impossible, Jason. This is about talking to God."
"I'm an atheist," Jason said, flatly.
"I'm agnostic, myself. Religion doesn't come into this," David chuckled darkly, though he didn't feel any humor at the moment. "This isn't a religious thing. It's a phrase."
"Then what the hell does the phrase mean?" Jason demanded.
"Ask me again at the end of this," David told him. "If you need to. I think you'll understand by then."
Jason visibly bit back a comment. It was likely something spiteful, something about how if Jason didn't understand, it was because David was horrible at explaining.
Childish, yes, but everyone had thoughts like those, even the most well-trained and capable people at avoiding those mistakes. They were innate things, unconscious whispers. Nothing wrong with that, so long as you had the self-control to keep them unconscious. It was only when you lacked self-control, and you spat venom and vitriol freely, without thinking, that you could really put yourself into truly horrible situation.
For all his anger at the Spartan-II program, and his slowly growing dislike of David, Jason Thompson was still a highly trained professional. He had already figured out that the hike was a lesson in the first half hour. He would listen to David, think about his words, and try to determine the best path forward, like any good psychologist would.
Like every psychologist that David had brought onto this mountain.
It was a quarter past five when they reached the peak. The sun was still high, but not too high.
Jason set down his pack and carefully lowered himself to the rocky ground, leaning against it.
David, for his part, looked out over the valley that the compound lay inside, and then he turned, looking out over the next, and the next valley beyond it.
In the clear, cloudless day, he could see for dozens of kilometers, and everywhere he looked, there was nothing but more mountains and more valleys. It reminded him of looking at an ancient rug in a museum, underneath a magnification lens – seeing the threads up close, with the gaps between them.
"What's the point?" he heard Jason mutter under his breath, just loud enough to make out.
David suppressed a sigh. He'd hoped for a chance to catch his breath before he got to this part of the trip, but Jason's blood was boiling, and his temper wouldn't hold long enough.
And to be honest, David's own temper was about to snap.
"Have you talked to God yet?" David asked.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Jason snapped, glaring at David from where he was sitting.
"Are you desperate enough yet?" David demanded, sending his own fierce look back. "Are you still thinking about complicated stuff, or are you thinking about survival?"
The other man stared at him, and his mouth worked for a moment, but no words came out. His face was bright red, but he was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't get the words out. David knew the feeling well.
"That's what talking to God is about," David snapped at him. "It's about when you're pushed to your limit, and you're afraid you're gonna die, and you start talking to God, asking for just one more step, just one more day to live. When you are so desperate that you realize how simple everything really is."
"Simple," Jason repeated, the word twisting out of his mouth like it was a living, wriggling thing of chitin and hate. The man stood up, his legs shaking, but still bearing his weight. "You think this is simple? What, the mountain or the goddamn child soldiers you're training here?"
"Do you think this is hard?" David shot back, turning the man's question around as he gestured at the mountain. "Do you think this little mountain walk was difficult? Do you think this is suffering? That desperation, that fear? That's what every single one of us have lived with for the last three fucking years!"
His roar echoed down the mountain valley, like the trumpets at Jericho, as the sound spread to the valley below. But it was not yet the seventh day, and there was no glorious conclusion awaiting them. Luckily, Halsey's Peak did not directly border the Spartan-II compound. His words would trickle down the mountain into a dusty, dry place where nothing but the bushes would hear them.
Jason fell silent, staring up at David. He was still angry, but he had at least stopped for a moment.
"Three years of watching these children suffer," David snarled. "Three years of Paul and me doing our best to make sure that they survive the augmentations. Three years of Steve trying to make their armor, so they don't eat a bullet and die! Three years of Catherine lying to ONI with every single report, telling them that the kids are loyal, that the kids are obedient! Three years, we've been climbing this mountain, Jason!
"Do you know who is out doing PT with those kids every single day? Catherine Halsey!" he continued, sweeping a hand down towards the distant compound, towards the training fields. "Who's traveling two thousand kilometers a day, just to check in on everyone's progress in person, to make sure nothing goes wrong? Catherine Halsey! Do you know who's chosen to take the child with the highest probability of dying, and made her into her personal protégé, reminding her every single day what the cost of our failure would be? Catherine fucking Halsey!"
David's breath was catching in his throat. He hadn't had enough time to rest. It would have been better if he truly had been a sociopath, like the new guy thought Catherine was. Jason had been pushing his buttons too fast, the entire final stretch of the hike and now David was screaming out his lungs before he could truly fill them.
But he couldn't stop now. Just like Jason couldn't stop climbing the mountain. Just like none of the scientists could stop the program.
Because there was no other option. There was no safety net, no stress release valve, no bridge back across the Rubicon. They could only go forward.
"And do you know who picks through the resumes of potential people to be brought on, to make sure we get people like you, who will be sick over what the program does?" David demanded, pointing an accusing finger at Jason. "Me!"
A small bit of spittle sprayed from his mouth as he turned that accusing finger back on himself. The wet droplets were dark against the rocky ground at the peak.
"I pick who else has to suffer in this living hell!" David screamed. "If any one of you cracks and decides to chew on lead, I'm going to have to pick the next man to suffer because you chickened out! And then, I have to go back to work the next day with another death on my soul. Seventy-five deaths, and counting. How many more do we need?!"
David grit his teeth and pulled off his hip-pack, flinging it to the ground. The bag of trailmix, tightly wrapped in rubber-bands, burst as he did, scattered peanuts and pretzels and brightly-colored M&M's all over the peak.
He stomped over Jason, who stumbled back, eyes wide, perhaps realizing for the first time that they were four kilometers away from the nearest other person, and that David was tall, broad, well-muscled man who could easily kill him, right then, right there.
"That's why you're on this damn mountain," David told the man, jabbing him with a finger, physically pressing it against his chest. "Because that feeling, right there in your heart? That anger at the mountain, at me, at Halsey? That fear? I want you to remember that. I want you to remember that exact feeling, and I want you to never, ever let it go.
"That's what ONI has done to those kids, and to us scientists, and even the damn trainers!" he spat, stepping back from Jason and gesturing out, over the summit, towards the distant Spartan-II compound. "None of us can give up! None of us can ever turn back! The only thing we can do is keep going, and pray that we make it out the other side!"
Jason slowly turned his head, looking out over compound that David was pointing to. He was no longer wearing an angry glare, and it had been replaced by something more terrified, more haunted.
"And you're just a small cog," David hissed, forced to lower his volume by the hoarseness of his throat. "No matter how horrible this feels to you, it isn't a fraction of the anger that Catherine Halsey feels for this entire God-damned program."
David inhaled sharply, trying to fill his aching lungs. Jason didn't speak, didn't take advantage of the pause.
No humans spoke on that peak for a minute. There was only the wind, and the rustling of the spilled food, and the burst wrapper from the trailmix being carried away into the wilderness, flying free forevermore.
"Now," David said, as soon as he felt like he could talk without throwing up. "Are you going to help us? Or are you going to give up, because this climb is too much for you?"
The other man's throat clenched, and he swallowed hard. There was a tremble in his hands. A shakiness to his shoulders. His eyes were red, either from anger or fear.
Slowly, Jason Thompson nodded.