Freedom (9 page)

Sebeck decided to change the subject. “Is this your tribe’s land?”

“No. Right now we’re passing through the Acoma reservation. I’m a Laguna Indian. We’ll reach Laguna land in about fifteen minutes. The Navajo nation is north of us—much larger—and the Zunis are to the west.”

Sebeck gazed out the window at the mesas and light green grass bowing in a breeze. “This is beautiful country. I always thought of New Mexico as just sand and rocks.”

“The Spanish word for lake is
laguna
. That’s how our tribe got its name. Access to water is what attracted Europeans.” She pointed into the distance and a line of tan rock on the horizon. “The Acoma pueblo up on that mesa was first settled in eleven hundred A.D. It’s the oldest continuously occupied community in North America.”

Sebeck was genuinely surprised. “So they didn’t fall along with the Anasazi civilization?”

“You have an interest in Anasazi history?”

“It came up recently in conversation.”

“Well, Acoma rose partly from the collapse of Chacoan society. Some of the survivors resettled here.

“Acoma was attacked in the late fifteen-hundreds by the Spanish. They used cannons and attack dogs to force their way up the stone stairway onto the mesa. They killed all but two hundred and fifty of the twenty-five hundred inhabitants and cut one foot off every male survivor. The children were given to Catholic missionaries, but most of them wound up being sold into slavery. The Spanish then used the pueblo as a base to conquer the rest of the region.”

Sebeck didn’t know what to say.

“That was two centuries before the British colonies in the East declared their independence. We’ve been here a long time.”

“And now you’re a darknet faction leader. Are you some sort of militant?”

She laughed. “You mean, a violent fringe group? No, Sergeant. We’re builders.” A look came over her, and she tapped again at invisible objects on a hidden layer of D-Space. “In fact, you’ll see some of our work on the way.” She was about to say something, but then apparently thought better of it.

“What?”

“If you’re wondering whether I bear a grudge against the Spanish—or the U.S. government for that matter—I don’t. Nursing anger against people long dead is a waste of one’s life. Today if someone wrongs us, we do what anyone else does: we send our lawyers after them.” Riley fixed her gaze on Sebeck. “The Laguna value education highly. It is our rod and staff, as my father used to say.”

“How did a woman your age get involved in the darknet?”

“A woman
my age
?” She laughed. “Don’t sugarcoat it, Sergeant.”

“I’m just wondering how you—”

“Sobol’s online fantasy game—
The Gate
.”

He just looked at her.

“Okay, what’s a fifty-two-year-old woman doing playing online games? I found them interesting. The idea of putting on a body like clothing—there was something about it that seemed intriguing. That we might surpass our physical differences and deal with one another as human beings. With no preconceived notions about gender or race.”

“And that’s where the Daemon found you.”

“I did the finding, but it wasn’t the Daemon I found. It was the darknet. The encrypted wireless network Sobol created. Only later did I discover how much blood Sobol shed establishing this network. And yet, I can’t help but wonder, just as evil sometimes arises from good intentions, if good can’t sometimes grow from evil. It’s a distasteful notion, but human history makes me wonder.”

Sebeck gritted his teeth. “I may be on this quest, but that doesn’t mean I agree with Sobol. I accepted it because I had no choice, and I was concerned that unless I did so, he would enslave humanity. Matthew Sobol killed
friends of mine
. Police and federal officers—people with families.”

She held up a hand. “I’m not defending Sobol, Sergeant. I’m saying that Sobol was
willing
to be our villain to force necessary change. So that we didn’t have to.”

“Megalomaniacs always justify their actions by saying how
necessary
it is.”

She gave him a sideways look. After a moment she said, “Do you feel any guilt for what your ancestors did to the Indians?”

Sebeck was taken aback.

“You know, for the genocide that was perpetrated against Native American people by the U.S. government and the settlers?”

“That’s not the same as what Sobol did.”

“Why?”

“Because the theft of tribal lands occurred a hundred and fifty years ago. Things were different then.”

“Statute of limitations, then?” She concentrated on the road then turned an eye back on him. “I’m just making a point. You probably don’t feel guilt because you’re not the one who did it. You bear native people no ill will, and aren’t prejudiced against them.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“But then, we’re not getting the land back either, are we?” A slight smile creased her face.

Sebeck folded his arms. “It could never be sorted out even if we tried. That was a different time, Riley.”

“We’re not all that different from our ancestors, Sergeant. And even though the land Matthew Sobol grabbed was virtual real estate—computer networks—I don’t think anyone’s going to get that back either.”

Sebeck sat in silence for a few moments, watching the road. “He can force me to go on this quest, but I’ll never accept what he’s done.”

“Don’t waste time being angry with the dead. They’ll never give you satisfaction. Whatever punishment Sobol deserved he has either received—or not—already, and nothing you can do will change that. Now, there is only the system he left behind, and he’s given control of that to all of us.”

“I just spoke with Sobol yesterday. He is very much still here.”

She looked him in the eye. “Sobol is dead and gone, Sergeant. His consciousness no longer exists. What you’re dealing with is a recording—a scripted entity that responds to real events. It can’t feel. It can’t think. Sobol is gone.”

Sebeck just turned back to the window, lost in his reflections for several minutes. He thought about how much death the Daemon had caused and how much of his own life irrevocably changed.

Soon they approached a junction with an unpaved road. Riley slowed the van and turned left onto a road marked INDIAN SERVICE ROUTE 49. NO TRESPASSING signs flanked it. Moments later they were roaring down the dirt road, leaving a plume of dust in their wake.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes as the road curved between distant, rocky cliffs with batters of scree at their base. The grasslands and an occasional pond or stream gave the landscape a serene feel.

About fifteen miles later the road gradually curved around a tall promontory of stone—a mesa jutting out like the peninsula of a higher plateau. As they came around it, Sebeck could see the road for miles ahead, running straight toward a towering monolith, a mountain of rock perhaps a thousand feet tall. On the lowlands before it, glittering reflections spread across the landscape. Sebeck could also see signs of human civilization ahead—outbuildings and what looked to be a tall water tower under construction in the distance. Dozens of diminutive D-Space call-outs hovered over the land, their owners invisible at this distance. The valley floor was a vast darknet construction project.

Riley noticed Sebeck’s gaze. “The mirrors are heliostats. Trough mirrors that focus the sun’s energy onto a central tower to generate heat—and thus steam to run a turbine and generate electricity.”

“That whole valley floor?”

“No, no. The heliostats are an intermediary station. They provide on-site power for the
real
project. Otherwise the spike in energy usage would attract attention.”

They were coming up on a steel gate with a short stretch of fencing on either side to prevent casual drive-arounds. The gate was closed, but Riley wasn’t slowing down. As they got within a hundred yards, it opened automatically, revealing a new stretch of paved roadway beyond. A white SUV labeled SECURITY stood near the gate with two uniformed Indians inside—both had call-outs over their heads.

Riley exchanged waves with them, and there was a slight bump as they passed through the gate and onto pavement. Then the road was smooth—and suddenly quiet.

“The Daemon financed this.” Sebeck turned to her. “Didn’t it?”

“The Daemon’s economy is powered by darknet credits, Sergeant. Imaginary credits are all that money is.”

“But there’s a theft at the heart of it.”

She thought about it and nodded slightly. “Yes, the darknet economy was seeded by real world wealth. Wealth that was questionable in origin to begin with. Here, it’s being invested in people and projects that have begun to return value—not in dollars, but in things of intrinsic human worth. Energy, information, food, shelter.”

“But originally from theft.”

“That could be said of a lot of things that are now admired.”

The van followed a ruler-straight line through a series of ongoing construction projects—stark, windowless buildings, pipes, electrical lines, all of them leading toward the large tank being constructed in the distance, a couple of miles away still. It was enormous. They passed pickup trucks and minibuses moving workers—more than a few with D-Space call-outs above them bearing the mark of the Two-Rivers faction.

“So what’s this ‘real project’ you mentioned—that water tank?”

“It’s not a water tank. It’s a fifty-megawatt power station that will generate enough electricity to supply a hundred thousand homes. What you’re looking at is just the first three hundred feet. When it’s done, it will stand sixteen hundred feet tall and two hundred sixty feet in diameter.”

Sebeck whistled and peered through the windshield.

Riley gestured with one hand, and suddenly a completed, life-sized three-dimensional wire model of the proposed tower sprang into being in D-Space miles from them—rising sixteen hundred feet into the air in glowing spectral lines.

In spite of himself Sebeck smiled and turned toward Riley. “That’s incredible.” He looked back at the tower as parts of it began to animate, showing red arrows representing wind currents flowing in at the base and up through the tower’s shaft and out the top.

Riley aimed her finger, and a glowing pointer that must have been thirty feet across appeared miles away in the fabric of D-Space. She pointed at the heliostat array closer to them. “The problem with parabolic mirror stations is that they don’t produce much energy on cloudy days, and none at night.”

Her massive pointer moved to the base of the 3-D tower model, only a fifth of which was completed in reality. A sloping base surrounded the wire model as though it were a trumpet placed horn-down in the soil. “This design uses a transparent canopy to superheat air with solar radiation—energy that gets through cloud cover. The canopy is eight feet off the ground at the perimeter and slopes up to sixty feet above ground where it connects to the tower base. As the air heats, it rises, creating a wind that proceeds up the tower—which is lined with wind turbines.”

“So it creates its own wind.”

She nodded. “Even at night.” She pointed at what looked to be rectangular cisterns arrayed at intervals around the perimeter of the canopy. “Covered saltwater ponds gather heat energy during the day and release it at night—continuing the wind cycle.”

Sebeck didn’t know what to think. There was no dismissing the scale and ambition of this—but what was it for? “Why do you need so much electrical power?”

“To transform our environment. To power equipment, micro-manufacturing plants, chemical and material reactions. This tower—and other solar installations—will provide clean, sustainable energy and freshwater from the elemental building blocks of matter.”

Sebeck gave her a doubtful look.

She laughed. “It’s not my design, Sergeant. I’m not an engineer. What I do here is work with people—helping to define goals and needs of the community.”

“Seriously. How do you know this is not complete bullshit?”

“The design has existed for decades. The technology has been proven. My technical familiarity comes from dealing with the darknet engineers and architects handling the construction. I make it a point to understand, so I can convey the information to our people. This is a big deal for us.”

“No doubt. But, Riley, if this was economically feasible, don’t you think everyone would be doing it? Besides, I thought the Laguna nation already had water.”

“At present, yes, but darknet communities are founded on long-term thinking. In coming decades we anticipate water stress due to climate change and depleted aquifers. Sustainable water independence increases our darknet resilience score.”

He gazed upon all the construction. “But doing all this to irrigate fields can’t be anything close to cost-effective.”

“Water isn’t the
product
, Sergeant. Water is the
waste
.” In D-Space she pointed to highlight a line of small buildings being constructed down a road leading off to their right. “Those will be reverse-hydrolysis fuel cell stations. They’ll consume hydrogen to produce heat and electricity—leaving behind freshwater as the only waste product. We can produce a third of a liter of freshwater with every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced from hydrogen.”

“But where in the hell do you get
hydrogen
?”

She aimed her pointer at the surrounding valley walls. “From the crystalline structures of igneous rock. This whole region has vast quantities of it. Millions of years ago this volcanic rock picked up water vapor when it crystallized from magma. That means it contains molecular hydrogen. When crushed into a powder, it seeps hydrogen at room temperature through its fracture surfaces for hundreds of hours—no liquid water required. We use some of the electrical energy from the power tower to crush this rock”—her pointer moved onto the lofty power tower—“and the rock removal helps to create energy-efficient shelter in the cliff-faces—much like our ancestors had. But that’s just one aspect of the project. We’ll also use solar energy to reverse combustion.”