“Keep your voice down!” Connor looks around—they’ve chosen a corner booth that’s relatively secluded, but it’s not that big of a diner, and voices carry.
“Maybe we oughta check out that ‘You-Tub’ place, get a Jacuzzi, and turn into a couple of spa potatoes. We deserve some downtime.”
He knows Lev is kidding, but there’s something about what he said that triggers a thought. It’s a small thought at first, but it grows quickly. An inkling becomes a hunch, becomes an idea, becomes a revelation, and Connor flips open the laptop again, clicking and typing furiously.
“What is it?” Lev asks.
“Janson Rheinschild!”
“But you already told me he was wiped out of digital existence, so what’s the point in looking?”
Connor continues to ply the search engines, getting the keyboard slick with french fry grease. “You gave me an idea.”
“Me?”
“The hot tub website. The typo.”
“Are you gonna make fun of my keyboarding skills again?”
“No. You gotta have skills to make fun of them,” Connor tells him. “Anyway, Hayden figured there’s a code-eating worm on the net that chewed up every reference to Janson Rheinschild, but it’s only looking for his name spelled correctly. . . . So I’m inputting every possible misspelling of his name.”
Lev smiles. “Leave it to you to turn someone else’s screwup into gold.”
Connor orders a second burger and spends twenty minutes misspelling the name. By the last bite of the burger, he’s ready to give up hope . . . then suddenly there’s a glint of that gold Lev was talking about, and it turns out to be the mother lode.
“Lev—take a look at this!”
Lev comes around to his side of the booth, and they look at a news article dated more than thirty years ago. The article is from a small local paper somewhere in Montana where Rheinschild once lived. Apparently they kept tabs on one of their favorite sons, but consistently misspelled his name as “Reignchild.”
Connor and Lev read the article in stunned disbelief. Rheinschild, a research scientist and inventor, was important enough to make quite a name for himself, until that name got erased like a shunned pharaoh from an Egyptian obelisk.
“My God!” Connor says, “This guy pioneered neural bonding and regeneration—the very technology that made unwinding possible! Without Rheinschild, transplants and grafting would be back in the Stone Age!”
“So he was the monster who started this!”
“No, this was right at the beginning of the war—before anyone even thought of unwinding.”
Connor plays a video embedded in the article, and they watch an interview with Rheinschild, a middle-aged man with glasses and thinning hair—two clear signs that it was before unwinding.
“We can’t even begin to know the uses of this technology,” Rheinschild says with an excitement much more youthful than he looks. “Imagine a world where loved ones who die young don’t really die—because every part of them can be donated to ease someone else’s suffering. It’s one thing to be an organ donor, and another to know that every single part of you will save someone else’s life. That’s a world I want to live in.”
Connor shivers, for the first time noticing the air-conditioned chill of the diner. The world Rheinschild described is a world Connor would want to live in too . . . but that’s not the world they ended up with.
“Of course there are going to be ethical questions,” Rheinschild goes on to say, “which is why I’ve started an organization to study the ethical issues inherent in this sort of medical advancement. Proactive Citizenry, as I’m calling it, will be a watchdog to make sure there are no abuses of this technology. A conscience to make sure nothing goes wrong.”
Connor stops the video, trying to process it all. “Holy crap! So he founded Proactive Citizenry to protect the world from what he created!”
“And it became the very monster he was afraid of.”
Connor thinks back to something he learned in school. Oppenheimer—the man who created the first nuclear bomb—turned against it in the end and became the bomb’s greatest opponent. What if Rheinschild was the same, speaking out against unwinding, then was silenced—or worse—was silenced before he even had the chance to speak out. Not even the Admiral remembered the man, which means Rheinschild was either already gone or was prevented from speaking out against the Unwind Accord.
Lev reaches over and starts the video again—just a few more seconds of Rheinschild joyfully, naively waxing on about the glorious future he envisioned. “This is just the beginning. If we’re able to regenerate nerve tissue, we can regenerate anything—it’s just a matter of time.”
The interview freezes on his smiling face, and Connor can’t help but feel tremendous sorrow for this man; the secret father of unwinding, who paved a road to a place beyond hell with his good intentions.
“That’s pretty wild,” says Lev, “but how can knowing all this stop unwinding? Isn’t that what you said, that finding out about this guy can change life as we know it, or something like that? Even if everyone knew about him, it wouldn’t change a thing.”
Connor shakes his head in frustration. “There’s got to be something we’re missing.”