Well, I'll kick this one off with a solid, "Meh". Not that the story was bad, I did enjoy aspects of it, but there was a lot that bugged me. I really like the way the MC developed so many ticks and phobias over the course of his military career all based on the horrific things he did. And I appreciate that the MC went to all the trouble to save the kid and his family. It's an interesting character quirk that makes him save this one boy over the thousands he's about to kill, so that aspect of the story was well done.
I didn't understand why this retired operative was confessing to a classroom of students that he was responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. I mean, he says that the government isn't trying to shut him up because it's all old news so no one cares anymore. Well, no one may care that this top secret information is being released, but I'm pretty sure people are not going to just brush off the fact that this guy straight up murdered thousands. Sure, it's the military, sure it was covert ops stuff decades ago, but it wasn't war time. These deaths aren't casualties of war, they're murder. Why in the world would any school teacher ask a mass murderer to speak to their students?
Really, it's not the events of the story that bother me, but the framing of it. If the MC was speaking to the class as a confessional or something, like he's there to talk about being a corporate exec, or a CIA recruit, and then he unloads all of this stuff out of the blue, then I could see it. But as it's set up, he's there specifically to talk about his experiences as a CIA operative spreading disease in the name of government control. That just doesn't sit right with me.
The other thing that bothered me with this one was the narration. Not that John Chu did a bad job, he did a very excellent job reading this story. I just didn't feel like his voice fit the character we were being presented with. I mean, the first line says he's sixty-eight years old. John sounds like a teenager. So already I'm thrown off trying to picture this gruff old CIA agent with a kid's high-pitched voice. Not to mention the fact that John, to me anyway, sounds Asian. (Admittedly that might be due to the fact that the only other stories I've heard John narrate were for Asian characters, and young ones at that, and he did a great job with them.) I'm not saying there's anything wrong with sounding Asian, don't read that the wrong way. But the character in this story wasn't Asian. So having him sound Asian really contradicted the down-home American boy we're presented with. And I found that distracting.
So overall, though I liked some of the aspects of this, I'm not likely to promote this one or even remember it in the near future.