Freedom TM

identity out to the darknet feed dedicated to finding The Major. He knew hundreds of thousands of people were monitoring it. Perhaps The Major would make the mistake of using a credit card from this identity within the next few hours. Likewise, he knew they’d analyze the purchase patterns of this identity, as well. Did The Major buy a coffee at the same time each day? Did he drink a rare type of scotch? Smoke a rare cigar—or have any other unique tastes that couldn’t be masked by a false identity? One they could use to detect him wherever he reappeared? If so, the crowd would find it.
    In the meantime, Loki wanted to see what sort of friends “Mr. Davis” had been speaking with. Loki clicked on the name and it quickly expanded into a map of variously sized dots radiating out from a central hub—like the map of a star system. Loki knew each dot represented a unique phone number that The Major had called with this specific handset. The size of the dot represented how often he had called it. With another click, Loki examined the calls made by The Major’s most talked-to colleagues. Intelligence experts called this sort of map a “community of interest,” and each level of detail was called a “generation.” He was now looking at a “two-generation community of interest” for The Major. Loki laid the calling data over a map of the world and noticed a very even geographic spread within the U.S.—plus a few dozen calls overseas to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
    Loki added the second-generation data for the most talked-to colleagues, and suddenly a pattern began to form. Indeed, it was focused throughout the Midwestern states—Kansas, Iowa, Missouri. Bringing up the third generation made the pattern even more clear.
    There were operations under way in the Midwest. He stared hungrily at the tiny dots. Each one represented a person—a person who was now known to him and who could be tracked down. At this level of abstraction they looked looked like ants.
    Ants that were about to get squashed …

Chapter 12: // Masterwork
    Darknet Top-rated Posts +295,383↑
    The GamerZ faction has launched the open-source Burning Man Project with the express aim of “resurrecting” Roy Merritt as a system-level D-Space avatar. The planned avatar would obey the eleven principles of the Order of Merritt and be imbued with powers as participants donate levels. The project was made feasible through the recent discovery of comprehensive biometric data for the late Roy Merritt in the Building Twenty-Nine security database. The data includes body and facial geometry, textures, voice, gait, and other info. Contributors need a five-star reputation score and at least fifteen levels of proficiency in their primary class.
    XiLAN_oO*****/ 2,930 23rd-level Programmer
    Situated just across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, Shenzhen was a city of migrants. Declared a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government in 1980, it was an experiment in limited capitalism—and had grown with astonishing speed. Fueled by cheap labor, Shenzhen’s population exploded from three hundred thousand to over twelve million people in less than three decades. State-of-the-art factory complexes producing goods for Western companies covered mile after mile in the northern reachesof the city, away from the tourism- and trade-centered southern districts.
    Jon Ross had been here for only a few weeks, and already he liked it better than Beijing. The air was better, for one thing, and it had milder, subtropical weather. It was a city made for the type of person he was pretending to be—a thirty-year-old, successful entrepreneur looking for manufacturing capacity. To such a person, Shenzhen held many charms, not the least of which was cheap, skilled labor.
    China was no longer punching out plastic trinkets. They made iPods, computers, and medical devices here now. High-quality merchandise. If you were making shirts or plastic patio chairs, you brought your business to Vietnam or Pakistan. At least for now.
    Ross gazed out the window. Thousands of blue-uniformed, female factory workers with multicolored ID tags clipped to their pockets surged around Ross’s chauffeured Buick Regal. As they pressed past in the narrow lane between production buildings and dormitories, the car’s blacked-out windows hid Ross from their view. His driver honked the horn repeatedly and cursed in Mandarin as they inched along. Ross studied the tableau of humanity as it