Freedom (32 page)

Now he was looking at his official state identification photo, his employment history, and his military history. It showed that he was currently employed by Alexandru International Solutions. His most recent tax copayments were from his employer, and this system seemed to have access to all of it.

“Were you sent here by your current employer . . . Alexandru International Solutions?”
There was a pause.
“Yes, you were.”
Another pause.
“Did your job responsibilities include perpetrating acts of violence against unarmed civilians?”
Another pause. “
Yes. It did.
” Yet another pause. “
The financial resources of . . . Alexandru International Solutions . . . have just been deleted.”

He tried to shake his head in disbelief, but couldn’t even manage that in the viselike grip of the head restraints.

“Now let’s determine your social network. What is the primary means you use to contact your handler? Is it e-mail?”
A pause.
“No. Is it phone?”
A pause.
“Yes. By phone. What is the first digit of your contact’s phone number? Is it 1... 2... ?”

Ibanescu sighed deeply. His career, if not his life, was over. He stared intently ahead.

“I would like application. Yes? Is this the word?
Application?”

P
ete Sebeck and Jon Ross sat in an outdoor cafe on Greeley, Iowa’s Main Street. Around their table sat another half-dozen people, various locals who had been following Sebeck’s quest on the darknet feeds, as well as his recent exploits against paramilitaries. Introductions were long over, as was the meal, and the group was now talking animatedly. On the far side of the table, Laney Price was debating with an online gaming economist named
Modius,
while their hosts laughed uproariously. Today, Price’s T-shirt read: “What would Roy Merritt do?”

Sebeck sipped his espresso and chuckled. He turned to Ross. “Laney’s kept me sane. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

“I guess it was luck of the draw that the Daemon selected him to revive you.”

Sebeck grew somber. “My past life seems like a thousand years ago, Jon.”

“I know the feeling.”

“I think about my wife and my son every day, but contacting them would only put them in danger. And what would I say?” Sebeck raised his hands dramatically. “ ‘I’m not a mass murderer and by the way, the Daemon is real’ ?”

Ross had no response.

Sebeck leaned back in his seat. “So there I was in federal prison and imagine how I felt when they told me you were an imposter all that time we were working together on the Sobol murder case.”

Ross grimaced. “Yes, you probably wanted to strangle me.”

“I thought you’d
framed
me, Jon.” He took another sip of his espresso. “So what do I call you now?” He pointed up at Ross’s call-out. “It’s not really ‘Rakh,’ is it?”

“No.”

“What the hell does ‘Rakh’ mean, anyway?”

“It’s Russian. Look, one advantage of the darknet is that no one needs to know who you
were
. Because they know who you
are
.”

Sebeck gestured up to Ross’s darknet reputation score. “Meaning you’re someone people can rely on.”

Ross nodded. “That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Sebeck pondered the question. “Well, you sure were right about Sobol in those early days. We should have listened to you.”

“Should you have?” Ross gestured to the bustling small town around them.

Unlike many Midwestern towns, Greeley appeared to be undergoing a renaissance. Main Street was lined with recently renovated brick storefronts and micro-manufacturing shops with their roll-top doors opened to reveal machinists and customers poking at D-Space objects, negotiating and ordering 3-D plans off the darknet. CNC milling machines hummed in the workshops beyond.

In the street dozens of young adults, young families, and even middle-aged folks with call-outs over their heads walked, clicking on one another’s data, interacting in multiple dimensions as though it were a natural extension of reality. Already second nature.

It reminded Sebeck of something Riley said to him months ago in New Mexico about social interactions where race and gender didn’t matter. They were all members of the network here, and Sebeck had found himself increasingly looking at people’s call-outs to really know who they were. Reputation mattered more than physical appearance, and he was shocked at how quickly his brain had made that transition. Everyone had the same color call-out in the darknet.

Sebeck dialed down the number of layers he was looking at and reduced the range of his D-Space vision to prevent call-out overload. He wondered how long it had been going on like this. Judging by the scaffolding and ongoing construction, it hadn’t been long. Most of these folks were probably new arrivals from suburbs and cities. Or perhaps
returning
from suburbs and cities.

Ross was watching the people of the small town, too. “Given what we both now know—it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it was for better or for worse. If society continues to come apart, who’s to say this won’t wind up saving lives
and
civil society?”

“So, what made you finally decide to join the darknet?”

“Have you ever heard of a sorcerer named Loki?”

Sebeck shook his head.

“He’s possibly the most powerful Daemon operative alive. He nearly killed me. He killed just about everyone I worked with.”

“And that convinced you to
join
the darknet? I’d expect the opposite reaction.”

“If this new network is going to have a future, it can’t be ruled by bloodthirsty sociopaths like Loki. And there was another person on that task force—a man they call The Major—who made me realize the existing order is even worse.”

Sebeck nodded. “I’ve heard of The Major. Hell, people are looking all over for that guy. He’s the one who shot Roy Merritt—the Burning Man.”

“I
knew
Roy. I worked with him. He’s the one who got me onto the government team. We were both betrayed by The Major.”

Sebeck raised his eyebrows. “So you’ve got some powerful enemies.”

“Here’s what I’m worried about, Pete: the darknet is an encrypted wireless mesh network—constantly changing—but it’s got to have some elements that tie it together, and I’m worried that some very advanced minds are working on a means to hack into the Daemon and take control of it.”

“You think that’s possible?”

He nodded. “This new spring of freedom might be short-lived if that’s the case. And I’ve lived through false springs before.”

“So this Major guy is . . .”

“Part of a financial system that rules behind the scenes. They seem to know the global economy is faltering, and they view the Daemon as a way to retain control. Darknet news feeds are recording a rise in violent repression around the world—focused on resilient darknet communities. They don’t want people to be like this. . . .” He gestured to the town.

“You mean self-reliant.”

“Exactly. Democracy is a rare thing, Pete. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but it isn’t really true. They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s theater. What
your
Founding Fathers did was the real thing. But the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain. Especially in the face of high technology. How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.”

“Laney calls it ‘neofeudalism.’ ”

Price’s voice rose across the table. “And it’s happening already, Sergeant. Mark my words.”

Ross turned to Price. “What do you mean, Laney?”

“See, in medieval Europe a mounted knight in armor could defeat almost any number of peasants.” He jabbed a fork in Ross’s direction. “The modern elite warrior is much the same—they can mow down mass conscripted armies with superior technology. So what happens when small elite forces can overwhelm citizen forces of almost any size? We return to feudalism—landless serfs and a permanent ruling class. Just look at the fortified upscale neighborhoods now being built with their own private security forces. It’s neofeudalism, man.”

Ross turned back to Sebeck.

Sebeck shook his head. “I’ll never understand how we let this happen.”

“Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.”

Sebeck finished the last of his espresso. “Look, I can see distributed democracy working in holons like this, but can we really run an entire civilization off something that was essentially a gaming engine?”

“Can you name anything else that’s as battle tested? It’s been attacked nine ways to Sunday by every leet hacker on the planet. Sobol basically used an army of teen gamers to beta test the operating system for a new civilization. I guess all those hours gaming weren’t a waste of time, after all.”

Price laughed. “Right on, man.”

Sebeck glanced at the Scale of Themis at the center of his HUD display. Locally, power was leaning a bit to the left—widely distributed. “Jon, humor me: look at the Scale of Themis.”

“Okay.” Ross started clicking on D-Space objects. “What about it?”

“I’ve been noticing this. Dial it back to look at the global distribution of darknet power.”

Ross did so, and Sebeck already knew what he was seeing; the Scale of Themis had moved dramatically to the right—nearly three-quarters of the way. It meant that darknet power in much of the world was concentrated in relatively few hands.

“Is this really an improvement over what we have now? You’ll find the reputation ranking per level is below average also—two stars out of five. So there’s a concentration of power among people of questionable character.”

Ross confirmed this with a few clicks and stared at the objects in D-Space. “The darknet is still new in many places—and being taken up first by misfits and outsiders—like most new frontiers. That was the case here in the beginning as well—just look at Loki’s reputation score.”

“But let’s not just drink the Kool-Aid here. We should always be asking ourselves if—”

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to bother you. . . .”

Sebeck looked up to see a man in his early thirties, with his wife and their infant in a stroller. The man’s call-out identified him as
Prescott3,
his wife as
Linah
. “Sorry to interrupt you, but I couldn’t help notice your quest icon. Are you Pete Sebeck?”

Sebeck nodded.

“I’ve been following your quest for months. It’s an honor to have you here in Greeley. I wonder if we could get a picture with you?”

Sebeck could see the man was a sixth-level Architect with a three-star reputation score. He looked back down at the man himself, and suddenly realized how the world had changed. “Sure. Happy to.”

“Oh, that’s so nice of you. Here. . . .” He picked up his infant and extended him for Sebeck to hold in his lap. Sebeck accepted the child uncertainly—it had been a long time since he’d held an infant. As he looked down at the child, he couldn’t help but think of his own son, Chris. Sebeck had barely been seventeen when he became a father.

The parents moved in on either side of Sebeck’s chair. “I want to have this picture to show Aaron when he grows up.”

Ross was standing now looking at the four of them, aiming his HUD glasses. Sebeck remembered that most HUD glasses had built-in cameras. It was the source of all the many millions of photos and videos people were uploading to the darknet—the eyes of this distributed society.

“Smile. . . .”

Everyone smiled.

Ross then slid the virtual photo across D-Space over to the parents, and then he slid a copy over to Sebeck as well.

The parents were cooing as they collected their son. “That looks great. Thank you so much, Rakh. Detective Sebeck. The very best of luck on your quest—for all our sakes.”

The parents started moving off, the father holding his son in his arms.

Ross watched them go. “Let’s talk about this quest of yours.”

“What about it? The Thread has been leading me in a circle around the town of Greeley for a week now. There’s something here I’m supposed to be doing or getting or understanding—and I’m not.”

“Do you think the Cloud Gate is here in Greeley?”

Sebeck shook his head. “The gate is supposed to appear after humanity justifies its freedom to the Daemon—not before.”

“And Sobol gave you no indication how we were supposed to justify our freedom?”

“No. He was annoyingly vague.”

Ross pondered the question. “This Thread has been leading you to
events
—not places? Correct?”

“Yeah. For the last seven months Price and I have found ourselves at the center of just about every major change now under way. I’ve seen the rise of the new power infrastructure, the new economy, the new fMRI legal system—you name it. That’s how my reputation grew so fast. We just always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.”