Freedom TM

they executed him, I can’t very well
be
him, can I?”
    She laughed. “I’m not saying you
are
him. Just that you look like him.”
    Sebeck handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
    She took the money. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
    He shook his head.
    “No offense. He was good-looking.” She paused, tapping her stick-on nails on the counter.
Click-click-click
. “What was his name? The Daemon hoax guy. Killed a whole bunch of people. Almost got away with like a hundred million dollars.”
    “I don’t recall.”
    She rang up the sale. “Man, that’s gonna drive me crazy.” She circled her face while clutching his change. “It’s in your face. He was on television every day for like a year. His head wasn’t shaved, though. And he didn’t have the Van Dyke.”
    “The what?”
    “The beard.”
    “Is that what this is called?”
    “You trim it like that, and you don’t even know what it’s called?” She laughed and handed over his change. “It’s called a Van Dyke. My ex-husband had one. Used it to cover a port-wine stain on his chin. Some people get the Van Dyke confused with the Winnfield or the Anchor, but they’re not the same thing.”
    Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Sebeck! That was his name, Pete Sebeck. He was a
detective
, too. Did you know that? Killed his best friend, a woman, and like a dozen FBI agents before they caught him.”
    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 ontothis 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