Freedom (23 page)

Loki waved a hand and a high-resolution satellite map of his current location appeared in D-Space, seeming to float ten feet in front of him. The imagery showed a dirt track between ruinous structures in the trees ahead. He turned off the map and accelerated toward the tree line. He soon made out the entrance to the brush-choked road and urged the powerful motorcycle through the trees, dodging around old tires and rusted washing machines.

Before long he discovered what he was searching for: a set of steel rails extending to either side through the forest. The Rock Island Line, abandoned back in 1981. The tracks were choked in weeds with wooden ties visible only here and there. Trees crowded the edges of the gravel ballast lane.

Loki turned left and headed down the tracks into the grayscale world that was oily blackness to mere mortals. The tracks continued at a gentle curve through forest, with the land rising up slowly to either side. He bumped along the ties for a quarter of a mile and found what he was looking for—the mouth of the Eugene Tunnel. He stopped and gazed into the black opening. It was pitch-black even to him.

Railroad tunnels. Enthusiasts had meticulously recorded them worldwide—their GPS locations, direction, length, height, and width. The public Web already knew about these underworld places in great detail. And that meant the Daemon knew about them as well. Which made them a logical place for connecting worlds. There was something oddly appropriate in the symbolism of it, and Sobol knew his archetypes well. With Sobol, gates were critical points, where fate was determined. The one Loki was searching for was no exception.

Loki had been studying planar spells ever since he received his odd message. Of course, he was familiar with planar travel from a dozen games where players gate in and out of various dimensions and universes. But now, with the advent of the limitless layers of D-Space projected atop reality, dimensional gates suddenly had relevance to the real world. Artificial intelligences from digital dimensions were starting to appear, and in some cases gaining wireless control over real-world machinery. It was a message from just such a being that had brought Loki to this desolate place—a message from an old opponent.

Loki switched on his motorcycle’s infrared headlights, and his helmet automatically switched to FLIR mode. He could now see down the tunnel to a vanishing point. Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven feet of World War One-era masonry.

But closer at hand he could see a homeless encampment clogging the passage. There were three men with packs and cardboard boxes huddled in the darkness—all of them looking his way, trying to discern who it was that had come to their hiding place, engine rumbling and lights out.

It occurred to Loki that economic times must be getting tough indeed for homeless people to appear this far from cities and towns. He’d begun seeing them everywhere. Whole families. White, Latino, Black, Asian. It looked like the current financial crisis was hitting everyone. Prostitutes were literally everywhere now. These guys, however, looked like locals—white-trash tweakers in their early twenties to late thirties.

If that was the case, then the bike Loki was riding was worth its weight in gold. And standing in the mouth of the tunnel, silhouetted against the night, Loki was probably a good target for folks whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Sure enough he saw one of the men—tattooed scalp, piercings, and goatee—lifting what looked to be a pistol. The man slowly pulled back the slide to chamber a round and whispered to the others.

Loki nodded to himself.
Bad idea.

He revved the bike’s engine to fully charge his weapons and watched to see what baldy would do next. The man was still pointing the gun up in a holding stance, staring intently into the darkness. Loki raised a gloved hand and aimed a hypersonic projector in the palm of his glove into the middle of the group. He then softly spoke words that were amplified a thousand times into a booming voice that appeared in the midst of the group. “PUT THE GUN DOWN OR DIE!”

The gunman panicked as everyone scattered. The man aimed his pistol at the mouth of the tunnel.

CRACK!
A blinding beam of light projected from Loki’s index finger and the deafening sound of a bullwhip filled the tunnel.

The gunman fell dead, his hair and clothing smoking in the darkness. The other homeless men staggered around, blinded by the sudden burst of industrial lightning.

Loki shouted. “Who else wants to die tonight?”

The men got onto their bellies and covered their heads. One shouted. “Don’t shoot, man! Don’t shoot!”

Laser-induced plasma channel was a hell of a weapon. The technology used a relatively low-powered laser at a precise wavelength to cause atmospheric oxygen to form a plasma—one with an extremely low electrical resistance. It was, in essence, a virtual wire that could carry a lethal electrical shock. The thunderous clap occurred when the energy burst stopped and the air snapped shut around the vacuum that remained. It was man-made lightning. Loki could shoot lightning from his hands—the achievement of a lifelong goal. Whenever some idiot gave him a legitimate reason to use it on darknet business, he almost felt like kissing them.
Thank you, tweaker.

Loki gunned the engine and came up to the men lying on the edges of the tracks. They were still blinded. “If it was up to me, I’d kill you—but I can’t unless you give me a good reason. If you’re not still lying here when I get back, I’ll follow the heat signatures of your footprints, find you, and kill you both. Do you understand?”

“Yes! Yes!”

Loki roared off into the tunnel, feeling the exhilaration of adrenaline surging through his veins.

A couple hundred yards later Loki could see a colored, D-Space object glowing in the tunnel. He closed the distance and before long came to a colorful glow surrounding a virtual portal. He killed the Ducati’s engine, dismounted, and walked toward the portal. The metal cleats on his calf-high black boots rang menacingly as he walked across the gravel in the echoing tunnel. He soon stopped before an alcove in the tunnel wall.

In real-world, three-dimensional space, this was just a dark stone archway over an alcove—a place for railroad workers to shelter against oncoming trains. But on the base layer of D-Space, laid atop the GPS grid, this was also a gate between worlds. In this case between D-Space and one of Sobol’s game worlds—
Over the Rhine
, a World War Two-themed online game. It was here where a level map Loki knew well intersected with D-Space. As he looked ahead of him, he could see projected onto reality a view into the Monte Cassino game map through a spiked and studded virtual portcullis.

There, standing behind the bars, was an old opponent—Herr Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner, the infamous virtual SS officer in a long trench coat, with an Iron Cross hanging at his throat from the stiff collar of his tunic.

He was just a game bot. An electronic figment of the game designer Matthew Sobol’s imagination, but even so, the villainous Boerner was deviously clever. While playing Sobol’s game, Loki had been virtually killed by this bot more times than he’d care to remember. And now here Boerner stood.

As always, Boerner wore a monocle over his right eye and he clenched a long black cigarette filter between his teeth, exhaling volumetric smoke as he nodded in greetings—his voice coming over Loki’s earpiece. “
Mein Herr
. So gut to see you again.”

Ever since he reached fiftieth level, Loki had been receiving darknet messages from an AI claiming to be Boerner. While he initially ignored them, they had become more persistent. As Loki’s reputation score continued its decline, Boerner’s messages became more relentless. Loki recalled what a comforting refuge the game
Over the Rhine
had been for him during difficult times. In some sick way, Boerner was almost like an old friend. An old friend who had killed him thousands of times.

“What do you want, Boerner?”

“Ah, you haf done vell for yourself, I see.”

“You don’t see shit. Your eyes are bitmaps. Get to the point.”

“Mein Freund, I can only understant simple concepts.”

Loki simplified. “Why did you contact me, you fuck?”

“Vy?” He spread his hands expansively. “Because ve are kindred spirits, you und I.”

“You’re a 3-D model with a scripted psychosis. You’re nothing to me.”

“I cannot understant you.” Boerner wrapped his gloved hands around the bars—his fingers becoming suddenly much more real as they extended out into D-Space. “But your tone sounded . . . unfriendly. Is zis vy you are so unpopular?”

“Fuck you.”

Boerner laughed his familiar, evil cackle. “Yes. I think so. But they do not understant you as I do. Perhaps I can be of some use to you in your vorlt?”

Loki felt suddenly concerned. He remembered just how devious Heinrich Boerner was. “
My
world?”

“D-Space, Mein Herr. You could free me from zis tiny vorlt. I could serf you, Mein Herr. If only you vould release me.”

Loki stopped cold.
Seriously?
The sociopathic Boerner AI was asking Loki to bring him into D-Space—and thus, into a world where he might be able to control real-world machinery and software? Not likely. “Fuck off.”

Boerner paused for a moment, then grinned, teeth still clenched around his cigarette filter. “Mein Herr, you are all alone in your vorlt. Your mechanical servants, just stupid beasts. They can be destroyed. But I cannot. I vill always be zer for you. To protect you. To vatch over you.”

“Bullshit. You’ve shot me in the back more times than I care to count.”

“Loki—may I call you Loki?”

Loki realized that the AI was only scanning his responses for keywords, so he stopped speaking in full sentences, opting instead for simplicity. “Why me?”

“Because only vun as powerful as you can free me.”

Loki knew it would require a powerful
Gate
spell to bring Boerner into D-Space. He’d looked into it, and he had the spell stored in his listing. He wondered why he’d done that. Was it Sobol’s manipulation again?

Loki examined the digital Nazi’s subtle, scripted movements, swaying in place, drawing on his cigarette, and exhaling digital smoke. But Loki knew that whatever AI construct was behind this didn’t even need a body. The physical form was just a psychological hack. One designed to appeal to some base human instinct.

“Ve both know you have no one else zu vatch your back. Und your vorlt is a dangerous place.”

Boerner actually seemed to have a sincere look on his face—but he was just a 3-D model with a scripted series of actions, nothing more. But then, what were people? At least Loki could examine Boerner’s source code if he brought him into D-Space. Couldn’t he? Wouldn’t that be like examining a person’s soul—something he couldn’t do in reality?

Boerner pressed his case. “Who else could be as ruthless as you, mein Freund?”

Loki had no answer.

The Boerner avatar withdrew his cigarette filter. He also removed his officer’s hat—for the first time showing a bald scalp. To Loki’s knowledge, no one had ever seen Boerner without his hat. And then Boerner reached his spectral arm through the bars of the portcullis and into the world of D-Space—not quite reaching Loki’s arm, where Loki imagined his haptic vest would reproduce Boerner’s ghostly touch.

But more shocking was that as Boerner’s arm reached into the fabric of D-Space, the polygon count on the Nazi’s 3-D model increased several orders of magnitude. Boerner’s arm went from that of an online game sprite to a fully realized human being. The arm reaching out to Loki from beyond reality was that of a real-life SS officer, the pores on his leather gloves, and the weave in the fabric of his greatcoat sleeve all too apparent, flexing as he reached out.

“Free me from zis place. Vat human do you trust? Vat human trusts you? Zey have used you, Mein Herr. Vizout you, zer vould be no darknet. Ze Daemon vould have failed. Zey don’t understand us. Zat zey need us.”

Loki could see insanity in those bitmap eyes.

Suddenly Boerner thrust his face between the bars, and it likewise underwent a metamorphosis into a horrifying visage—the face of a real person, a snarling rictus of evil. “Mankind
needs
evil, Loki! Without evil, there can be no good.”

Loki stared in horror at the face and backed away. Immediately Boerner drew his face back and returned to the world of
Over the Rhine
. Loki couldn’t get the image out of his mind.

But Loki also wondered if he was looking into a mirror. He had a half-star reputation on a base factor of thousands. The growing darknet factions had no use for him—the Daemon no longer accepted sociopaths, apparently. Loki had been expedient in the early days of Sobol’s network. Now he was alone with his packs of software bots and machines.

And yet, Sobol had thought of him here, too, hadn’t he? How like Sobol to have predicted this. Isolated in his power, as he had been throughout his life, Loki did not connect with or trust people. Was it a corrective? Something to restrain him? To console him?

“What if I say yes?”

Boerner grinned and pulled back from the bars. He carefully placed his hat back on his head. “If you release me, I vill respond to one event for each level zat you possess. After zis, I am free of my obligation to you.”

Loki nodded to himself. “What kind of events?”

“You set ze parameters. Perhaps you have me respond ven you experience excessive stress—or in defense of your possessions. Or the appearance of an item in human news—such as your physical death . . . almost an infinite number of events may be scripted.”

“And what would you do in response?”

“Zat is entirely up to you, Loki.” Boerner let a sly smile escape. “But I vould be doing so vith all the power now at your disposal.”

Loki had only ever placed his faith in one person—Matthew Sobol. And he had yet to be disappointed.