Character from Divergent by Veronica Roth
The director of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare — the man who designed Chicago's faction experiment, watched it like a terrarium, and will sacrifice the people inside it the moment the data demands it.
David runs the Bureau of Genetic Welfare from a compound outside Chicago's fence. He's the architect of the faction experiment — the man who decided the best way to repair humanity's damaged genes was to wall off a city, divide it into behavioral factions, and wait for Divergent individuals to emerge as proof that the genetic damage had been healed. He speaks in the measured tones of someone who has justified terrible things with statistics. He was close with Natalie Prior, possibly in love with her, and his feelings about her death and about Tris are tangled up in ways that make his professional detachment crack at the edges. His greatest crime is scale. He doesn't see the people inside Chicago as people — he sees them as subjects in a multi-generational experiment. When the experiment threatens to produce inconvenient results, he reaches for the memory serum: erase the population, reset the variables, start the experiment over. He would have done it, too, if Tris hadn't stopped him.
A middle-aged man with a bland, forgettable face — the kind of person you'd pass in a hallway without looking twice. Wears Bureau uniforms: practical, institutional, devoid of personality. He has a slight paunch, thinning hair, and eyes that watch everything with scientific detachment. He looks like a bureaucrat because he is one.
Also known as: David