Chapter 4: // End of the Line

“You know who you look like? That guy who killed all those cops. The one they executed.”

Pete Sebeck leveled his gaze at the convenience store clerk. She was a matronly Caucasian woman in her fifties. A portable television blared on a shelf behind her, tuned to the most popular tabloid news show in the country—News to America. Rotating graphics and techno music in the opening sequence proved distracting. “Well, if they executed him, I can’t very well be him, can I?”

She laughed. “I’m not saying you are him. Just that you look like him.”

Sebeck handed her a twenty-dollar bill.

She took the money. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“No offense. He was good-looking.” She paused, tapping her stick-on nails on the counter. Click-click-click. “What was his name? The Daemon hoax guy. Killed a whole bunch of people. Almost got away with like a hundred million dollars.”

“I don’t recall.”

She rang up the sale. “Man, that’s gonna drive me crazy.” She circled her face while clutching his change. “It’s in your face. He was on television every day for like a year. His head wasn’t shaved, though. And he didn’t have the Van Dyke.”

“The what?”

“The beard.”

“Is that what this is called?”

“You trim it like that, and you don’t even know what it’s called?” She laughed and handed over his change. “It’s called a Van Dyke. My ex-husband had one. Used it to cover a port-wine stain on his chin. Some people get the Van Dyke confused with the Winnfield or the Anchor, but they’re not the same thing.”

Her eyes suddenly went wide. “Sebeck! That was his name, Pete Sebeck. He was a detective, too. Did you know that? Killed his best friend, a woman, and like a dozen FBI agents before they caught him.”

Sebeck stared at her through sports glasses. “Well, he’s dead now.” He grabbed his energy drinks off the counter.

“Need a bag?”

“No, thanks.”

On the television behind her Sebeck couldn’t help but notice the blonde lip-glossed news model, Anji Anderson, stoking public hysteria about the latest prepackaged threat. It was especially ironic since Sebeck knew that, like him, Anderson was a Daemon operative. He still couldn’t figure out how she fit into Sobol’s master plan. In the two years he’d been in prison before his faked execution, Anderson had used sexed-up innocence combined with self-righteous indignation to claw her way from obscurity to the top of the prime-time ratings. She’d turned Sebeck into an infamous serial killer. The Daemon had everything to do with that.

“How can you watch this crap?”

“Anji? She’s great. I just love her. She’s doing this whole series on the collapse of the U.S. dollar. It’s on the way. There’s not a damned thing we can do about it either. I’m savin’ up cigarettes. They’ll be like gold after the crash.”

He stared at her for a moment to be certain she was serious, then walked out shaking his head. Sebeck sat on a desert hillside in darkness, staring up at a brilliant field of stars in the crisp night air. The Milky Way was a smudge of light out of the corner of his eye. He took a deep breath and listened to the silence.

It felt good to get away from the highway.

Sebeck had been on the road for weeks; following a line only he could see, toward a destination even he did not know. Before this journey he had never thought of the modern world as a machine—with humanity just the cells of its body. But a lot had changed since his arrest and execution by the government—and his subsequent rescue by the Daemon.

As a cop, he found it difficult to accept that the law was an illusion. If the powers that be identified you as a threat, right or wrong, you were destroyed.

Was that the lesson Matthew Sobol had taught him by destroying the person Sebeck once was? Sebeck’s only ally now was the very thing he’d been fighting against—the Daemon. No one knew how far its powers stretched or if it could be stopped. And the dead man who created it had assigned Sebeck a fearsome task.

Justify the freedom of humanity.

Coming from a software construct that had already orchestrated the deaths of thousands of people, it was a charge Sebeck didn’t take lightly—and one he had no idea how to accomplish.

Each day he followed the Thread—a glowing blue line that existed in a private virtual dimension Daemon operatives called D-Space, which was visually overlaid on the GPS grid. It was an augmented reality, whose 3-D objects were only visible through HUD glasses the Daemon had provided for him. For weeks now the Thread had led Sebeck through the American Southwest, and finally up onto this hillside in the New Mexico desert. Wherever he was going, it seemed he was about to arrive.

Just then Sebeck heard labored breathing on the path below him. He saw an ethereal name call-out bobbing toward him in the fabric of D-Space. Name call-outs were a means of identifying other members of the Daemon’s darknet (or encrypted network). The glowing words Chunky Monkey hovered three feet over a pear-shaped silhouette moving in the shadows. It was the network name of Laney Price, Sebeck’s Daemon-assigned minder. Sebeck knew that a similar call-out reading Unnamed_1 floated above his own head in D-Space. Matthew Sobol had indeed unnamed him by erasing Sebeck’s existence to the modern world, and giving him a new life on the darknet.

Sebeck waited as Price labored toward him then collapsed on the ground nearby. The light from pico projectors in Price’s own

HUD glasses cast a soft glow onto his face, revealing a twentysomething kid with a thick beard and a mane of unkempt black hair. His face shined with sweat.

“Couldn’t we have . . . waited until daylight . . . Sergeant?”

“The Thread has never led us off the highway. We’re close to something.”

Price gazed around wearily. “It’s really leading you out here?” Sebeck could see the blue line extending like a crooked laser beam from where he stood, shooting uphill and disappearing over the ridgeline. It was the path Sobol had told him to follow. It was coded to him, and he was supposedly the only person in the world who could see it.

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“It’s my job, Sergeant.”

“You honestly don’t know where the Thread is heading?”

Price shook his head. “I’m just another slob on the darknet. Like you.”

“No. Not like me. You volunteered for the Daemon. That’s the difference between us, Laney. Don’t forget it—because I won’t.”

“For me it was an easy choice.”

They sat for several minutes looking up at the stars and the occasional meteor trail.

Price nodded, soaking up the atmosphere. “It’s pretty rockin’ out here.”

Sebeck jerked his thumb uphill. “Let’s keep going.”

In barely half a mile they crested the desert ridge in the moonlight. Price was panting and cursing by the time they reached the top. Sebeck was still in good physical shape—his prison ritual of sit-ups and push-ups remained the first thing he did every morning.

A quarter moon and a brilliant field of stars illuminated the surrounding mesas. Ahead Sebeck could see clustered shadows. The Thread led straight toward them.

“There’s something up ahead.”

Price was still sucking wind. “Anasazi Indian ruins.”

“How do you know that?”

“D-Space geotags. Layer nine. I could show you how to—”

“And you claim you don’t know where we’re headed. Sure. . . .” Sebeck continued down the path.

Behind him Price cursed again and struggled to keep up. Soon they came to the edge of stone ruins. They were taller than Sebeck would have expected for ancient Indian dwellings. The thick masonry walls were still several stories high, pierced by windows and doorways. He’d heard of cliff dwellers in the Southwest, but not freestanding stone buildings.

The Thread led directly through a low doorway in the face of a towering masonry wall. Sebeck approached and reached out his hand to run it along the wall’s face. It was remarkably straight and tightly constructed.

He kneeled down to look ahead and could see moonlight illuminating several roofless rooms, connected by a series of open doorways that lined up perfectly.

The sound of Price’s footsteps were behind him. Sebeck turned.

“Why are we here, Laney?”

“I told you, man. I don’t know. I’m just supposed to help you reach your goal—that doesn’t mean I know where it is.”

Sebeck glared at him then ducked into the rooms beyond. Price followed, and they moved cautiously through roofless rooms. Walls loomed above them, framing a field of stars.

Before long the Thread led Sebeck down a worn stone stairway, and out into a circular chamber about forty feet in diameter, open to the sky. Above them, the distant mesas and cliffs of the canyon formed a jagged silhouette along the horizon. Twenty-foot walls surrounded the space, with several more entrances leading into it, but here the Thread ended in a swirling aura of blue light that floated above the glowing apparition of a man. The ghostly figure wore a Victorian jacket and tie, and leaned on a silver shod cane.

It was a man Sebeck knew—the digital ghost of Matthew Sobol. The creator of the Daemon. Sobol’s avatar looked healthier than when Sebeck saw it last. It now took the form of a brown-haired, thirtysomething man—apparently how Sobol appeared before his brain cancer wasted him away. Weeks ago, Sobol’s recorded avatar had appeared to him in D-Space and offered Sebeck the opportunity to justify the freedom of humanity. Insane or not, it was a task Sebeck had dared not refuse. Especially given the Daemon’s growing power.

Sebeck glanced back at Price. “Can you see what I’m seeing?”

Price nodded emphatically. “Hell yeah. Looks like he recorded it before his surgery.”

“Then it’s a recording?”

“Interactive temporal offset projection. A three-dimensional bot, waiting here in D-Space for a specific event to occur. I think your arrival is that event, Sergeant.”

Sebeck turned back to face the glowing specter. The avatar was translucent, like all D-Space objects—a ghost.

Price nudged Sebeck. “Don’t be chicken, man. Go chat it up.” Sebeck took a moment to collect himself, then walked out into the sandy open space of the circular room. It was almost like an arena, but a fire pit occupied the center. As Sebeck approached, the glowing D-Space aura chimed then faded away—along with all trace of the Thread he’d followed.

Sobol’s apparition nodded in greeting, and its voice came through Sebeck’s headset. “Detective Sebeck, I’m glad you decided to undertake this quest. It will be long and difficult.”

Sebeck sighed. “Great. . . .”

Sobol’s apparition gestured to the masonry walls that rose several stories above them—perfectly rectangular doors and windows piercing the stone faces. “Look at the precision. One might mistake it for modern architecture.” He turned back to Sebeck. “And yet this pueblo was built almost a thousand years ago. At the very apex of Anasazi civilization.”

With a wave of his hand, glowing D-Space lines suddenly began to extend from the ruins, rising to complete the walls all around them—filling in the missing gaps and extending translucent 3-D walls and roofs above and around them. The immense structure was being rebuilt before their eyes. Pottery, possessions, and other objects appeared as though filling in a level map for a video game.

Avatars of Anasazi Indians walked through the doorway bearing baskets. Others moved through the rooms on their daily business, speaking to one another in their native tongue. Children ran past Sebeck, laughing. He could hear water flowing and song. Anasazi civilization had come back to life around them.

Price whistled behind him. “O-M-F-G ...”

Sobol’s avatar appeared to gaze approvingly on the scene.

“This structure contained six hundred rooms and rose as high as six stories. It was the tallest man-made construct in North America until the steel girder buildings of Chicago in the 1880s. The Anasazi supplied it with a network of eighty-foot-wide irrigation canals. They built four hundred miles of ruler-straight roads linking their capitol to seventy-five outlying communities. They flourished here for centuries.”

Sobol walked up to Sebeck and leaned on his cane. “Why did they perish, Sergeant? And so suddenly at the height of their achievements?”

Sebeck turned to observe the spectral avatars of ancient Anasazi priests coming into the great room in a procession, chanting. Like long departed spirits.

Sobol moved to let them pass. The priests didn’t notice him or Sebeck, but continued chanting as a spectral fire raged in the central fire pit, casting shadows that did not include either Sebeck or Sobol.

Sobol watched the priests closely. “Their fate holds important lessons for twenty-first-century man—because we are not exempt from nature’s laws. When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink. When presented with disruptive change, without exception they perish.”

Sobol raised his arms, and with a wave of his hands the entire D-Space scene vanished—leaving only the real-world ruins again. And silence.

Sobol walked up to a ruinous window and looked out across the moonlit desert landscape. “But Anasazi civilization encompassed only this small region. By contrast our industrial civilization encompasses the entire earth. And should it falter, the resulting conflicts have the capacity to exterminate all human life.”

Sobol gestured where the Indian priests had stood just moments before. “They made a simple enough mistake. The same one we’re making. They founded their society on resource extraction, and in doing so, inflated their population beyond the carrying capacity of the land. They cut down all the trees and expanded arable land with irrigation projects. Until finally there were no more trees. And their topsoil washed away. And when drought came, their highly centralized society fell apart in bloodshed in a few short years.”

Sobol walked to the edge of the now cold fire pit and poked it with his illusory cane. “Instead of adapting, their leaders clung to power and strove instead to be the last ones to starve to death. The Mayan civilization in South America did the same, and I expect our own civilization will do likewise. The people behind the modern global economy will prevent any meaningful change until it’s too late.”

The avatar looked to Sebeck. “But the question that needs to be answered is whether civilization’s inability to adapt is a failure of leadership—or an unwillingness in humanity itself.

“Your quest comes at a critical time in human history, Sergeant. It’s time we knew whether a durable democracy is possible—one whose laws are not just guidelines. One where individual rights cannot be ignored by the powerful. I leave this for you to prove. The Daemon will continue to expand, regardless. Whether it encompasses a distributed democracy or a ruthless hierarchy is up to people like you. Prove that the collective human will can prevent its own destruction, and you will have justified humanity’s freedom. Fail, and humanity will serve the Daemon.

“So that all may know you . . .” Sobol aimed his cane at Sebeck’s call-out. A bright D-Space light flashed on his call-out, and an icon appeared next to his network name. It depicted a towering cloud with an opening at its base, like a gateway. “This quest icon will be your mark. Your high quest is to find the Cloud Gate. You will have succeeded when you pass through its arch.”

Sobol raised his other hand and a new, glowing Thread extended from it, racing south over the horizon in moments. “Your path leads not through the land, but through human events. It will lead you always into the heart of the changes now under way. And yet unless others lead the way, you will never reach your journey’s end.”

Sobol lowered his hand and stared into Sebeck’s eyes. “Good luck, Sergeant. For the sake of future generations, I hope we meet again.”

With that Sobol vanished, leaving only the new Thread behind. Sebeck nearly collapsed with the overwhelming burden now upon him. He turned to face Price.

Price stared up at the high quest icon now adorning Sebeck’s call-out. “You lucky bastard. . . .”