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-I have only a hazy recollection of the events of the next few months. The rain fell incessantly and the trenches, and our boots, filled with water. I spent many hours with fingers frozen as I took readings of wind direction and force, and experimented with nozzle designs for our gas weapon. I was haunted by the memory of the dawn firing squad and by the suffering of our troops following the German attack and I was seized by an urgency that blocked all feeling of common humanity with the enemy. The Fabulists had done their job well.
-It quickly became apparent to me that forecasting atmospheric conditions would be of crucial importance in determining how and when to use the weapon without unduly jeopardizing our own troops. After several months in the trenches taking measurements I returned to VERONA HQ and began work on a new statistical model of wind movements based on the work of Bayes. You had joined up and been sent to the front by this time, and as I laboured I began to hear tales of your heroism in battle. I was ashamed to be enjoying the comforts of the Chateau, but by then I was obsessed with the belief that my work could end the war quickly and that I might save you and hundreds of thousands of young men like you.
-Finally beginning to make progress on the difficult task of analyzing wind patterns I showed my work to Valentine and Proteus and to my surprise they immediately reassigned me to another division.
-I can see now that the safe deployment of the weapon was a secondary concern for them and they were preoccupied with the lethal power it would convey. I think they were disappointed that I had failed to engage in the design of new poisons, but I could never do that. I still recalled my horror as I listened to Hahn in Berlin describing the effects of mustard gas. There was something chilling in the contrast between the cold dispassion of a scientific lecture and the vileness of the results he reported, and I could not bring myself to work in the laboratories.
-Looking back I can see that the Fabulists needed me out of the way in order to carry out the next step of their plan, however, in reassigning me, the two gentlemen from VERONA had made a very bad mistake.
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projects / cipher-training.git / blobdiff