Freedom TM

control of thousands of corporate networks, it would cause a stock market panic.”
    CSC: “Mr. Director, we can assure you that none of these razor-back videos will ever gain credibility by appearing in mainstream news.”
    NSA: “But they’re being shared over the Internet. Millions of people have already seen them.”
    EndoCorp: “That’s a manageable problem.”
    NSA: “What do you mean it’s
manageable
?”
    EndoCorp: “We’ve copyrighted the razorback.”
    NSA: “How does
copyrighting
them solve anything?”
    EndoCorp: “Owning the IP gives us legal control of their image. We’re spinning these viral videos as stealth advertising for an upcoming video game.”
    CSC: “Which means the general public won’t take them seriously.”
    NSA: “Whose idea was this?”
    CSC: “We don’t get down in the weeds. It was done by our psyops division. As far as the Millennials are concerned, these razor-backs are just guerrilla marketing.”
    CIA: “But people have
witnessed
these things. People have
died
. How do we explain that?”
    BCM: “Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”
    CSC: “Persistence and presence create truth online.”
    EndoCorp: “We’ve neutralized eyewitnesses in Web forums by flaming them as shills for the game’s whisper campaign. We’ve created 3-D models, and fictitious how-it-was-done videos to ‘prove’ surveillance clips and cell phone videos are fakes.”
    BCM: “So the public knows about razorbacks, but they don’t really know what they know.”
    FBI: “Then we’re using some of Sobol’s jujitsu, then?”
    BCM: “We might even see net revenue on the resulting video game.”
    CIA (shaking his head): “When I hear this crap, I start to understand why Sobol is attacking us.”
    FBI: “Don’t even joke about that.”
    CIA: “Seriously, you’re going to sit there and tell us your idea for combating the Daemon is to develop a video game around it? If Sobol were alive, he would be laughing at us.”
    CSC: “You said yourself that in the short term we can’t remove the Daemon from infected networks without triggering catastrophic data loss. Until a reliable countermeasure is available the only thing we can do to avoid panicking the populace and further disturbing capital markets is to make sure everyone thinks the Daemon is just a fiction.”
    NSA: “And what happens when the Daemon’s army of followers takes more aggressive action?”
    CSC: “Then we call them terrorists—anything but ‘Daemon followers.’ But we cannot risk direct action against the Daemon itself until we find a way to disrupt its grip on corporate networks.”
    NSA: “We agree on that much at least.”
    DIA: “The U.S. dollar is already sliding. How do we know word hasn’t gotten out among key investors?”
    DARPA: “Sooner or later word
will
get out that the Daemon exists—or foreign powers will decrypt the Daemon’s
Ragnorok
module and use the Daemon as an economic weapon against us. What do we do then?”
    EndoCorp: “You’ve already got your answer: the
Ragnorok
module contains the key to destroying the Daemon. To crippling its command and control.”
    EndoCorp: “There are flaws in Sobol’s code. Flaws we can exploit. We should have a Daemon countermeasure in a matter of months. But it’s vital we not provoke the Daemon before we’re ready.”
    NSA: “And you really suggest we do
nothing
to counteract these razorbacks or the Daemon’s human operatives in the meantime?”
    BCM: “Gentleman, let’s not forget what’s at stake here. Yes, it’s regrettable that people have died—and will die—but we must defend the core of our civilization: which is
commerce
. And commerce requires
capital
. That no longer means gold bars in a vault; it means ones and zeros in a database. Purely financial transactions moving through global markets on any given day outweigh transactions for
real world
goods and services by twenty-to-one, and that money moves automatically and instantaneously across borders. By disrupting the world financial system, the Daemon could destroy fiduciary trust. It could create global economic chaos in minutes. From that point of view the real-world manifestations of the Daemon—like these razorbacks and its human followers—are minor; dangerous only insofar as they threaten the public’s belief system. But if we kill the
digital
core of the Daemon, then its physical