Daniel Suarez - Freedom (TM)

Sebeck stared at her through sports glasses. “Well, he’s dead now.” He grabbed his energy drinks off the counter.

“Need a bag?”

“No, thanks.”

On the television behind her Sebeck couldn’t help but notice the blonde lip-glossed news model, Anji Anderson, stoking public hysteria about the latest prepackaged threat. It was especially ironic since Sebeck knew that, like him, Anderson was a Daemon operative. He still couldn’t figure out how she fit into Sobol’s master plan. In the two years he’d been in prison before his faked execution, Anderson had used sexed-up innocence combined with self-righteous indignation to claw her way from obscurity to the top of the prime-time ratings. She’d turned Sebeck into an infamous serial killer. The Daemon had everything to do with that.

“How can you watch this crap?”

“Anji? She’s great. I just love her. She’s doing this whole series on the collapse of the U.S. dollar. It’s on the way. There’s not a damned thing we can do about it either. I’m savin’ up cigarettes. They’ll be like gold after the crash.”

He stared at her for a moment to be certain she was serious, then walked out shaking his head. Sebeck sat on a desert hillside in darkness, staring up at a brilliant field of stars in the crisp night air. The Milky Way was a smudge of light out of the corner of his eye. He took a deep breath and listened to the silence.

It felt good to get away from the highway.

Sebeck had been on the road for weeks; following a line only he could see, toward a destination even he did not know. Before this journey he had never thought of the modern world as a machine—with humanity just the cells of its body. But a lot had changed since his arrest and execution by the government—and his subsequent rescue by the Daemon.

As a cop, he found it difficult to accept that the law was an illusion. If the powers that be identified you as a threat, right or wrong, you were destroyed.

Was that the lesson Matthew Sobol had taught him by destroying the person Sebeck once was? Sebeck’s only ally now was the very thing he’d been fighting against—the Daemon . No one knew how far its powers stretched or if it could be stopped. And the dead man who created it had assigned Sebeck a fearsome task.

Justify the freedom of humanity.

Coming from a software construct that had already orchestrated the deaths of thousands of people, it was a charge Sebeck didn’t take lightly—and one he had no idea how to accomplish.

Each day he followed the Thread —a glowing blue line that existed in a private virtual dimension Daemon operatives called D-Space, which was visually overlaid on the GPS grid. It was an augmented reality, whose 3-D objects were only visible through HUD glasses the Daemon had provided for him. For weeks now the Thread had led Sebeck through the American Southwest, and finally up onto this hillside in the New Mexico desert. Wherever he was going, it seemed he was about to arrive.

Just then Sebeck heard labored breathing on the path below him. He saw an ethereal name call-out bobbing toward him in the fabric of D-Space. Name call-outs were a means of identifying other members of the Daemon’s darknet (or encrypted network). The glowing words Chunky Monkey hovered three feet over a pear-shaped silhouette moving in the shadows. It was the network name of Laney Price, Sebeck’s Daemon-assigned minder. Sebeck knew that a similar call-out reading Unnamed_1 floated above his own head in D-Space. Matthew Sobol had indeed unnamed him by erasing Sebeck’s existence to the modern world, and giving him a new life on the darknet.

Sebeck waited as Price labored toward him then collapsed on the ground nearby. The light from pico projectors in Price’s own HUD glasses cast a soft glow onto his face, revealing a twentysomething kid with a thick beard and a mane of unkempt black hair. His face shined with sweat.

“Couldn’t we have . . . waited until daylight . . . Sergeant?”

“The Thread has never led us off the highway. We’re close to something.”

Price gazed around wearily. “It’s really leading you out here?” Sebeck could see the blue line extending like a crooked laser beam from where he stood, shooting uphill and disappearing over the ridgeline. It was the path Sobol had told him to follow. It was coded to him, and he was supposedly the only person in the world who could see it.

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“It’s my job, Sergeant.”

“You honestly don’t know where the Thread is heading?”

Price shook his head. “I’m just another slob on the darknet. Like you.”

“No. Not like me. You volunteered for the Daemon. That’s the difference between us, Laney. Don’t forget it—because I won’t.”

“For me it was an easy choice.”

They sat for several minutes looking up at the stars and the occasional meteor trail.

Price nodded, soaking up the atmosphere. “It’s pretty rockin’ out here.”

Sebeck jerked his thumb uphill. “Let’s keep going.”

In barely half a mile they crested the desert ridge in the moonlight. Price was panting and cursing by the time they reached the top. Sebeck was still in good physical shape—his prison ritual of sit-ups and push-ups remained the first thing he did every morning.

A quarter moon and a brilliant field of stars illuminated the surrounding mesas. Ahead Sebeck could see clustered shadows. The Thread led straight toward them.

“There’s something up ahead.”

Price was still sucking wind. “Anasazi Indian ruins.”

“How do you know that?”

“D-Space geotags. Layer nine. I could show you how to—”

“And you claim you don’t know where we’re headed. Sure. . . .” Sebeck continued down the path.

Behind him Price cursed again and struggled to keep up. Soon they came to the edge of stone ruins. They were taller than Sebeck would have expected for ancient Indian dwellings. The thick masonry walls were still several stories high, pierced by windows and doorways. He’d heard of cliff dwellers in the Southwest, but not freestanding stone buildings.

The Thread led directly through a low doorway in the face of a towering masonry wall. Sebeck approached and reached out his hand to run it along the wall’s face. It was remarkably straight and tightly constructed.

He kneeled down to look ahead and could see moonlight illuminating several roofless rooms, connected by a series of open doorways that lined up perfectly.

The sound of Price’s footsteps were behind him. Sebeck turned.

“Why are we here, Laney?”

“I told you, man. I don’t know. I’m just supposed to help you reach your goal—that doesn’t mean I know where it is.”

Sebeck glared at him then ducked into the rooms beyond. Price followed, and they moved cautiously through roofless rooms. Walls loomed above them, framing a field of stars.

Before long the Thread led Sebeck down a worn stone stairway, and out into a circular chamber about forty feet in diameter, open to the sky. Above them, the distant mesas and cliffs of the canyon formed a jagged silhouette along the horizon. Twenty-foot walls surrounded the space, with several more entrances leading into it, but here the Thread ended in a swirling aura of blue light that floated above the glowing apparition of a man. The ghostly figure wore a Victorian jacket and tie, and leaned on a silver shod cane.

It was a man Sebeck knew—the digital ghost of Matthew Sobol. The creator of the Daemon. Sobol’s avatar looked healthier than when Sebeck saw it last. It now took the form of a brown-haired, thirtysomething man—apparently how Sobol appeared before his brain cancer wasted him away. Weeks ago, Sobol’s recorded avatar had appeared to him in D-Space and offered Sebeck the opportunity to justify the freedom of humanity. Insane or not, it was a task Sebeck had dared not refuse. Especially given the Daemon’s growing power.