He was called "Adam" in North America, and "Friday" on Mars He was called "Adam" in North America, and "Friday" on Mars. He has not decided what name to keep in Europe, though his papers claim that he is Jean Paul Camus. The man who sold him the documents is now on his short list of people who will die this year.
He has decided that he likes living in Europe. Europeans come pre-disillusioned -- the humans do -- but they maintain an attitude toward pleasure and the quality of their lives that Americans find decadent and cynical. In place of the perfunctory smiles and "friendliness" of the Americans who created him, Europeans have formality and manners, and a respect for privacy that Americans read as haughtiness. Americans express their disapproval in the form of summer tourism to all the major European cities and seaside towns. During the American tourist season, the man retreats to the countryside, where his chances of accidental contact with his compatriots are significantly reduced.
In America, one's beliefs are treated as a sacred right, no matter how irresponsible or poorly informed. The Americans brag to the world and to each other about their democratic freedoms, though the diversity of views is confined to disagreements on whether Communism is a greater threat to the economy or to morality. The Europeans are ideological, some of them, but their belief systems are secondary to more personal concerns. What is of issue is the quality of bread, the percentage of cocoa in chocolate, the amount of time taken for lunch in the middle of the week, the number of annual holiday's guaranteed by the central government in Belgium.
His former field partner and only friend had been European. A replicant, created in Bavaria, Gregor was made with an ideological devotion that did not fit the temperament of his human masters. He had been an undercover operative and Nazi hunter for the German National Police, before he became a NATO soldier on Mars, fighting the Soviets alongside "Friday", who enjoyed the art of war, but did not share Gregor's need to justify the killing. (When Friday shot the Russian cyborg in the face, he was avenging his partner, not fighting Communism.)
In Europe, he has taken coffee with Communists, by the Duomo, in Florence, has beaten them at the old man's game of Pétanque in the shadows of Notre Dame. He even ran into a Nazi, in a bar in Berlin called The Wall. The Aryan called him a darky (roughly translated) and told him The Party would rise again and drive him and his people from the fatherland. He didn't take it personally. He was amused at the idea of having a people. But as a gesture to his deceased field partner, he followed the old fascist out of the bar and dispatched him in an alley. He chastised himself afterward for being incautious and sentimental.
Despite the Nazi's observations, he has very little Arab or Indian blood. His unique genetic mix gives him dark skin, angular features and straight hair. What would further frustrate the Aryan philosophy is how hard it is to make a superman out of "racially pure" material. When you take the best that each genetic pool has to offer, you end up with soldiers who look like ... well, like darkies.
Biologically, he is a young adult. Without affectation, he appears to be in his mid-thirties. With old-fashioned, steel-rimmed glasses and gray in his beard, he can pass for a fit and healthy fifty. Chronologically, he is not yet a teenager. He has existed for just over ten years.
He was "born" as specimen EHG/P-20100318.usna.1a, in North Memorial Hospital, Alexandria, Virginia. He and his crèche mates were the product of early military cloning projects, conducted in secrecy, at the beginning of the century. As the first iteration of his genotype, he was called Adam. His fellow iterations were called Brad, Charles, David, Evan, Frank, George, etc. Their names were pure white American, but these products of test tube engineering were dark-skinned and multi-racial. Their names were in-house conveniences, and on assignment "Adam" would use whatever name his passport and papers indicated.
His covers for NATO intelligence included Native Americans, South Americans and Pakistanis. He was responsible for dozens of political assassinations in Northern India that lead to a reshuffling of U.N. representatives before the Greening of Mars vote in 2015. Five years later, as a soldier in the Green Wars, he had killed hundreds of humans, mostly Africans, and destroyed more Soviet androids than he could count.
Kill a dozen politicians and you are a diplomatic tool. Kill a hundred soldiers and you are a hero. Kill one Russian cyborg -- for personal reasons -- and you are a murderer, hiding on a foreign continent, trying to choose a new name for yourself.
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