Freedom TM

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 nearthe 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