The funny part is, she's not pronouncing her name right anyway, if she's supposed to be German (or Austrian, or Swiss, or what have you). "V" in German is pronounced like "F", so it'd be "fahlen"; for it to be pronounced "vahlen" it'd have to be spelled Wahlen. Her VA's German accent is about as consistent as my Russian one, anyway. :)

>"Evil" implies intentional malice, except Halsey never seemed to care
>enough about other people to ever rise to that level.

She does routinely seem to be the sort of cautionary tale you get when you give a sociopath a blank check, but there are points at which her lack of routine human empathy is arresting even by those standards. The flash-clone thing, for instance. "Well, it might create an investigable pattern if all these children just disappear, but no one will notice a couple hundred extra cases of various tragic childhood wasting diseases. Or if they do, they'll look at the local chemical factory or something. Anywhere but at us." It's perfectly logical, and so utterly heartless it would make a Surakite raise an eyebrow and mutter, "Fuck me, that's cold, yo."

That's the part of the plan that ultimately got her sent to Takron-Galtos in UF, as it happens. SPECWARDEVGRU was authorized to develop Unconventional Force Multipliers, as "super-soldiers" are technically known in the jargon of the Royal Salusian Armed Forces. It was not authorized to abduct, experiment on, physically and psychologically brutalize, and in many cases cavalierly waste the lives of juvenile subjects of the Crown, or emotionally torture their parents, or develop an entire series of fully sapient artificial persons whose only function was to die horribly in short order.

In the dock on these charges, Dr. Halsey calmly maintained that, at the very worst, she was guilty of exceeding her instructions in an effort to do a better job, which led to the following deadpan exchange with the Crown Prosecutor, still taught in Salusian law schools:

The Rt. Hon. the Baron Vlatimyr, Crown Prosecutor
I put it to you, Doctor, that you have an interesting way of summarizing wholesale kidnapping and murder. "Exceeding one's instructions" strikes the Crown as a phrase better applied to, for instance, falsifying financial records so as to conceal a massive budget overage from Parliament.

Dr. Halsey
I work in weapons development. Surely that was already assumed as a matter of course.

Oh yes, she was a real piece of work.

--G.
"We don't torture people to create human superweapons. That's villain crap."
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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