Freedom (49 page)

It had been ten days since Sobol’s Daemon had bankrupted the merchant princes of the world. Ten days since thousands of darknet operatives had scoured the five-star luxury survivalist lodge that was Sky Ranch. They’d cleaned out the warehouses and store-rooms, dismantled the weapon systems, and raided the vaults. They’d gone through the floor plans and databases to find everything there was to find.

But they didn’t see The Major’s Cold War hiding spot on the blueprints. Rumor had it that the room was a tryst location for a philandering banker—built to Cold War bomb shelter standards to mask its true purpose in the books and to muffle loud music. The entrance was concealed to keep out the uninvited.

True story or not, the place looked a lot like the swinging pad of a midcentury banker—long sofas, bar, pool table, and card tables. It was also musty, covered in dust, and unaccountably cold. But it had kept him alive. Living on canned goods gleaned from the storage room outside before he closed himself in, The Major once more checked the periscope. All was quiet.

He’d grown a slight beard over the past few days and wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans pilfered from the nearby laundry. He opened the heavy door and listened. He heard nothing.

He turned up the hood and poked his head out, looking both ways. There was daylight coming through an open fire-exit door at the corner of the room, wagging in the wind. Trash skittered around the floor with each breeze.

He shouldered his scoped Masada rifle, then grabbed his day-pack of canned provisions and water in liquor bottles, and took one more precautionary glance before exiting the bomb shelter. He got to the open fire door and peeked through the gap between the hinge and the door.

It was a cloudy day, but he cursed under his breath as he saw what obviously were darknet sentries still moving about on the walkways near the main house. One of them wore the telltale armor of a Daemon champion. They were all carrying darknet weaponry. There was no way he could exit unseen. And night would be no better, since he knew they’d have night vision. In fact, he’d be at a disadvantage.

The Major remained calm. He reached into his pack and produced a pair of quality HUD glasses along with spooled wire that led to an electronic enclosure.

In the closing days of Operation Exorcist, the Weyburn Labs team had made significant progress cracking into the encrypted Daemon darknet. Partial credit was due, of course, to Dr. Natalie Philips for her work at Building Twenty-Nine—where she proved the concept of darknet identity theft. But in order to use this network, they needed to own it. They had been well on their way to doing that—and The Major might soon be again.

His researchers had advanced past the need to keep a darknet operative medically alive in order to spoof them—they’d done better. They digitized the biometric data and created a unit that injected it into the standard darknet HUD glass sensors, replete with pulse sensor. All that was needed to steal a darknet operative’s identity with this system was their biometric data—fingerprints, iris scan, voice.

And The Major had given just that to the lab team.

As he powered up the unit and slipped the glasses on, he became Loki Stormbringer. He suddenly saw the HUD display first-person, instead of on a projection screen, and he saw darknet objects moving in a plane of augmented reality. They were all over the place. This was going to be a very interesting new world.

He walked with purpose out the storeroom door, ignoring the guards, and then kept walking briskly toward the distant guest bungalows. He gauged the houses were two miles away across slightly unkempt gardens and uncut lawns.

He kept his back turned to the guards and just kept walking. As the minutes ticked away and he estimated he was hundreds of yards from the main house, he felt the tension draining from him. He looked up at the sky with his new glasses.

He saw the call-outs of surveillance drones up there, thousands of feet in the sky. But he was one of them now. A member of the darknet. He also had four hundred thousand euros in his bag. It would be much needed since his accounts had all been emptied by Sobol’s Daemon. If only he hadn’t been greedy. But he still had some safe-deposit boxes in Zurich and Dubai.

And he could now steal all the darknet identities he needed. He suddenly frowned at Loki’s reputation score. It looked surprisingly like a half-star out of five. And what was this? It now looked like Loki was only a tenth-level Sorcerer.

No matter. This was only a temporary identity. The sky was the limit now. He was almost to the bungalows, and he could either head out on foot for the power station or try to obtain a vehicle legitimately from the darknet.

He risked a glance behind him, but there was no one in sight any longer. He was more than a mile from the main house.

He kept walking and chuckled to himself. Once he was clear of this place, he knew some hackers who could make very good use of this darknet identity theft technology. Very good use.

The Major stopped cold. The voice came from
right behind him
.

The Major clicked the safety on his Masada rifle and spun around even as he crouched. Then, in utter astonishment, he slowly came to his feet again.

Only a few feet away, impossibly, stood a spectral image of a Nazi officer in a full black trench coat, monocle, and filter cigarette. He looked real, except for the fact he was a ghost. The Major was so stunned he kept the gun aimed at the ghost’s head.

It knew who he was.

“I zought I recognized you.”
The apparition tapped his cheek just under the eye.
“From your eyes. I can tell zees zings.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“My name is Heinrich Boerner.”
He started taking off his leather gloves as he spoke.

Meanwhile, around him, The Major heard a rising whine, like electric motors. He turned to see a line of razorbacks coming over the grass toward him. Why hadn’t he heard them?

“Fuck!” He turned to run and saw another row of razorbacks moving toward him from the bungalows—like lions approaching in deep grass. There were at least a dozen closing in from all directions. He opened fire with the Masada. The bullets whined off the in front cowlings harmlessly, and the machines all unfolded their swords as they advanced across the grass on electrical power.

Soon The Major’s gun was empty. And there right next to him was Boerner, smoking calmly.

Boerner began to remove his heavy leather coat. “Your guns are qvite useless, Major. Zis is an unstoppable event. Struggle vill only prolong ze inefitable.”

Now the razorbacks were all around The Major—trapping him in a circle of swords.

The razorback nearest Boerner raised one sword, and Boerner hung his leather jacket upon it. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and grinned at The Major.

You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in
Freedom™
through the following books:

 

Omnivore’s Dilemma
by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press

The Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books

When the Rivers Run Dry
by Fred Pearce, Beacon Press

The Shadow Factory
by James Bamford, Doubleday

When Corporations Rule the World
by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press & Berrett-Koehler Publishers

The Transparent Society
by David Brin, Basic Books

Wired for War
by P. W. Singer, Penguin Press

The Populist Moment
by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press

Wikinomics
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio
Brave New War
by John Robb, John Wiley & Sons

This book was quite a journey. Dramatizing the sweeping socio-economic and technological transformation of civilization required a little research. I’d like to extend my profound gratitude to: James Bamford, David Brin, Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis, Deborah Koons Garcia, Lawrence Goodwyn, Naomi Klein, David C. Korten, Fred Pearce, Michael Pollan, John Robb, and P. W. Singer whose published works informed this story in ways both great and small.

The research and innovations of the following groups and institutions also aided greatly in the creation of this book: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, California Institute of Technology, the people and State of Iowa, and the Ames Research Center.

Thanks also to Stewart Brand and the entire Long Now Foundation for promoting long-term thinking in our institutions and culture.

Thanks to Dan G. and Don T. for giving me an interesting forum for my crazy ideas.

Thanks as well to Adam Winston for his much-appreciated insights on early drafts of this book.

Also, sincere thanks to my wonderful literary agent, Bridget Wagner, at Sagalyn Literary Agency, and also to my editor at Dutton, the saintly and talented Ben Sevier.

And finally, heartfelt thanks to my patient and loving wife, Michelle.

Daniel Suarez is an independent systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies. He has designed and developed enterprise software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries. An avid gamer and technologist, he lives in Los Angeles, California.
Freedom™
is his second novel.