Freedom TM

around him, in a complete sphere. Next to his skin he wore a haptic shirt that pulsed electronic signals like pixels on a screen, to give him a sensory impression of the area all around him. He could “feel” the walls and shapes of obstacles ahead of him in darkness or smoke.
    Loki linked more than nearby geometry to his vest. He also reserved several areas of his skin for more powerful electricalpulses—alerts from his pack of razorbacks, darknet news, or news about The Major, or mentions of Loki’s real-life name anywhere on the Web. Loki was intimately connected to the world around him— both the real one and the numberless dimensions of D-Space.
    He surveyed the blood-spattered furniture and scattered body parts of dead military contractors. His air filtration system kept most of the intestinal stench out of his nostrils. Blood was still dripping down the walls and off the ceiling. There was a shattered razorback giving off smoke in the corner, but the piercing shriek of the smoke detector made no impression on Loki in his insulated motorcycle helmet.
    A glance around the room confirmed what he already knew. The Major wasn’t among the dead. Loki had remotely piloted the lead razorback and slaved the others to it. Perhaps the frontal assault had been a mistake. The Major was a veteran operator, after all.
    But there might still be useful intelligence here. The “Cult of Efficiency” was meeting here for a reason. With several other razorbacks patrolling the perimeter, Loki figured he had a while before local police had the courage to move past the carnage at the front gate.
    He kicked over the butchered corpse of a husky Latin American man in an expensive suit. The man had been slashed open neck to groin, spine deep—then hip to shoulder. Beneath him on the floor was a blood-soaked map. Loki kicked the carcass aside and overturned a dining room table to reveal a topographical map. He started to notice a collection of large-format survey maps of the Midwestern United States spread about the room. They were torn and stained with blood.
    What are you planning, Major?
    He snapped several high-definition photos with his HUD display. Loki then reached a black-gloved hand out to turn on a layer of D-Space—one that revealed all wireless consumer electronicsdata emitted in his vicinity. With it, he immediately saw the mobile equipment identifiers (MEIDs) of several phones floating above the dead men in D-Space, as well as Bluetooth IDs to various headsets and wireless devices around the bungalow. He could also see SSIDs for nearby Wi-Fi access points—floating in three-dimensional space as call-outs.
    Loki activated a darknet telecommunications search portal, which appeared as a single orange ring of light floating in space a foot or so in front of him. It was a digital receptacle into which he swept each of the MEIDs of the dead men’s phones with a wave of his gloved hand. The orange circle flashed and in a moment shrank, transforming into a series of six names associated with those handsets. Aliases, of course, but Loki wasn’t looking for their names. He wanted their social network.
    Loki turned to look at the shattered French doors, the curtains swaying in a tropical breeze. The Major had been here, and he couldn’t have gotten far.
    Loki pushed aside his D-Space portal app and brought up an overhead satellite photo of his current GPS position. The image of the bungalow’s roof floated as a D-Space object, in a private translucent dimension a foot and a half in front of him, where he could work with it. With a couple of clicks he overlaid mobile phone tracking data from four major telecom carriers onto the image of the bungalow roof. He adjusted a slider to move back in time from the present, showing various dots—each representing a phone handset—moving around the bungalow. There were six individuals. Then he spotted a seventh handset coming in from the patio right about the time his lead razorback hit the door.
    Loki zoomed out and let the clock run forward—watching the dot representing that same phone handset move through the French doors, and then across the grounds toward the parking lot. At that point the phone disappeared from the map.
    Loki rewound the timeline and clicked on the dot—retrieving its MEID, which he then swept into his search portal list.
    He now had seven identities. He examined the last name—The Major’s current alias:
Anson Gregory Davis.
    Loki immediately sent the