Freedom TM

thinking for you? Do you really want that?”
    A balding assistant manager with a muscular frame emerged from the kitchen door. His name tag read “Howard.” “Is there a problem here?”
    “Yeah, Howard, the kid has the price wrong, and I’m trying to get him to do the math.”
    “And what did you order?”
    “I ordered a number two and a number nine.”
    The manager looked at the screen. “Okay, that’s fourteen thirty-nine.”
    Howard was lucky Sebeck no longer carried a Taser.
    ______________
    Sebeck returned to the car with a carryout bag and two drinks. Laney Price was still refueling at the sprawling interstate travel center. There were at least twenty pump islands around them, brightly lit. Traffic hissed by on the nearby highway.
    Price was using a squeegee to clean bugs off the windshield of the Chrysler 300 the Daemon had assigned them the day before. He seemed to notice the look on Sebeck’s face. “What’s wrong?”
    “Humanity is doomed, that’s what’s wrong.”
    “Oh.” Price kept cleaning the windshield.
    Sebeck tossed the food in the car and took over the refueling. “That was something Sobol knew, wasn’t it?”
    “What’s that?”
    “That people will do whatever a computer screen tells them. I swear to god, you could run the next Holocaust from a fucking fast-food register.” He pantomimed aiming a pistol. “It says I should kill you now.”
    “I see we’ve had another unsatisfactory consumer experience.”
    “There are times when I miss the badge, Laney. I swear I miss it.”
    “Why, so you can intimidate the shit out of teen slackers? Besides, what you’ve got now is something better—a quest icon. You’re like a knight of the realm now.”
    “Just get in the car.”
    ______________
    Sebeck almost missed the turnoff. They were heading west on Interstate 40 about an hour outside of Albuquerque when his new Thread abruptly veered onto an exit ramp marked INDIAN SERVICE ROUTE 22. Sebeck was in the middle of taking a sip of bottled water when the turn came up on him, and he had to swerve one-handed from the fast lane onto the exit ramp, cutting across solid white lines just before an abutment.
    He glanced over at the sleeping form of Laney Price, who stirred a bit but then settled back to sleep. Sebeck followed the glowing blue line superimposed on reality over a bridge that crossed the highway to arrive at a travel center where trucks and cars were clustered around gas stations, convenience stores, and ever-present fast-food outlets.
    There in the middle of a parking lot his new Thread ended in a swirling aura of blue light, above a live human being this time—a woman standing next to a white passenger van. The van was parked in front of a Conoco convenience store.
    It was not exactly the destination he’d envisioned—not that he had any clear idea what to expect. Sebeck parked the Chrysler facing forward in a row of cars across from the woman and peered through the freshly bug-spattered windshield at her.
    She was a trim American Indian woman in her fifties with long gray hair braided into a plait. She wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a tan button-down shirt with some sort of logo on the breastpocket. She also wore slim, stylish HUD glasses, through which she was gazing directly at Sebeck. She looked like a Santa Fe art gallery owner. Her D-Space call-out marked her as
Riley
—a fourteenth-level Shaman. Riley’s reputation score was five stars out of five on a base factor of nine hundred three—which, if Sebeck had understood Price’s ramblings over the weeks, meant that she had an average review by nine hundred–plus darknet operatives who’d interacted with her of five stars out of five. She was apparently highly regarded—about
what
Sebeck didn’t know.
    He turned off the engine and glanced over at the sleeping form of Price in the passenger seat. Sebeck pulled the keys from the ignition and stealthily opened the driver’s door. He didn’t feel like having his Daemon-assigned minder along for this conversation, so he placed the keys on the seat and quietly closed the car door behind him, checking that Price was asleep.
    Sebeck then walked across the parking lot toward Riley, who regarded him with some curiosity, since he was leaving his companion behind. It was fairly cloudy and rather cool. Sebeck closed his jacket as he approached Riley. Fellow travelers came and went around them.
    He took note of the passenger van she stood alongside. It was new and