Chapter 17: // Immortality

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The Burning Man Project has finished prototyping a fully functional Roy Merritt avatar linked to darknet and public Internet news feeds. Presidio and Enoble_6 have begun development of a “just-in-time” hero module. Individuals wishing to donate levels, credits, or powers to the avatar can contact any Order of Merritt signatory.

Quillor*****/ 3,147 21st-level Programmer

Loki’s traveling rig was a tribute to American automotive excess. He drove a customized Ford F-650 4x4 with a Caterpillar diesel engine. It had nine hundred foot-pounds of torque and could pull twenty-six thousand pounds up an unpaved 7 percent grade. With a series of three chromed fuel tanks tucked beneath each running board, that incline didn’t need to be anywhere near a gas station either. Composite-laminate windows and ceramic composite plating meant the driver and three passengers could recline in comfort while enduring a barrage of small arms fire. It was, in short, the ultimate vehicle for commuting through the Apocalypse.

It could have accommodated five passengers if Loki hadn’t extended the storage area to provide room for various pieces of high-tech wireless communications equipment and supplies. This was, after all, his mobile base of operations for running the one-man Stormbringer faction.

Toward that end, Loki towed an enclosed forty-four-foot Gooseneck racing trailer, whose exterior surface was emblazoned with the image of a black-helmeted motorcycle racer viewed from the shoulders up and done in the style of a Japanese anime character. The entire branding effort was completed with the logo for Stormbringer Motorcycle Racing, jagged with lightning bolts.

To all outward appearances, Loki was a professional motorcycle racer following his circuit through the Midwest. The fact that his real business was hunting down and destroying at any cost a shadowy mercenary army hired to kill Daemon operatives was well concealed behind the patina of professional racing. With his big corporate sponsors (unwilling though they might be) listed on the trailer’s wall, he looked more than legit. He looked downright establishment.

However, in this fight, as in all things, Loki remained a loner. He had no crew of mechanics. He preferred instead to communicate his needs through the darknet—pressing into service local maintenance factions to repair his fleet of razorbacks and microjets. That was, after all, what the trailer was for—a storage facility for a score of Type 2-E razorback interceptors and half a dozen microjet aircraft—as well as his personal black Ducati S-version Streetfighter motorcycle, which he rode into battle against The Major’s people. So far he’d slain or captured at least a hundred of the bastards, and he was on his way to tracking down more—dragging them screaming from their motel rooms or safe houses like pigs to slaughter. Their blind trust in the anonymity of their communications would be their undoing.

But each battle brought damage, and for this Loki had to seek out darknet communities where he could get replacement bikes and turn in his damaged units. This had brought him here to Garnia, Missouri—a small, economically depressed town out in the plains that was transforming itself into a bustling new darknet community. Founded by a logistics faction—an Order of Merritt signatory, no less—they’d be able to service his razorbacks, provide fuel cell batteries, replace wireless receivers, and so on. Loki would also be secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be hassled by the police—because, as in all darknet communities, the police here would be fellow darknet members.

Regardless of Loki’s half-star reputation score, he knew that no one would question him. He was the leader of an infrastructure defense faction—an unpleasant job that frequently caused him to commandeer local darknet resources in defense of the network as a whole. Everyone knew he had to pass frequent fMRI scans to prove to the Daemon his actions were legitimate—aimed at defense of the Daemon’s constituent parts. So the opinions of fellow darknet operatives mattered little to Loki. The Daemon was all that mattered.

Another fact that swayed other operatives to comply was the network level shown on his call-out. Loki was a fifty-sixth-level Sorcerer, and the most powerful operative in North America—possibly the world. It was hard to know, really, since operatives above fiftieth level could employ power masking. But Loki wanted everyone to see his power.

As Loki brought his huge pickup and trailer rig through the sleepy town’s main street—if such a loose collection of a dozen houses could be called a town—he marveled at what some people accepted as living. The downtown consisted of a single convenience store, a weather-beaten gas station, and a down-in-the-mouth auto-parts store. Loki knew the big-box stores thirty miles off near the interstate had killed most of the local businesses. He imagined the auto-parts store survived primarily because you couldn’t get to the big-box stores if your car was broken down. With gas rising past six dollars a gallon, that dynamic would likely change soon—as would the shipment of cheap, plentiful parts from China.

Beyond the old commercial center of Garnia, there were new businesses sprouting, and ironically much of that life seemed to be sprouting out of the same shipping containers that had helped to destroy the local economy in the first place. The multicolored corrugated-metal boxes littered the landscape, and as Loki drove through the edge of town, he could see darknet operatives pulling lumber, aluminum beams, and construction equipment from them. He also saw the flash of welding coming from within several—mobile fabrication workshops. Loki had seen it before. Local faction leadership had no doubt pooled their resources to call down a construction kit from the network. They’d have to return it to the network pool when they were done, but there were a hundred operatives out there in the fields building homes, businesses, and setting up farms to serve as the center of a new holon. Trying to recolonize America with something that didn’t have a 30 percent interest rate and a forty-five-minute commute attached to it.

Loki just observed them as he came in. Living in such a place was Loki’s idea of Hell. He hoped that there would always be enemies like The Major to stalk, for he dreaded the day he would need to stop hunting and settle down to actually become part of the Daemon’s infrastructure. Defending it was much more to his liking.

As he expected, the several low- to mid-level operatives he passed on the way in didn’t wave to the most powerful sorcerer they’d ever laid eyes on. Loki’s darknet reputation preceded him. The sorcerer with a half-star reputation ranking—meaning that anyone who had ever dealt with him had found him lacking in almost all socially redeeming qualities. A sorcerer who traveled with a personal retinue of twenty razorbacks and no humans—when summoning a single razorback for a limited period of time was a major undertaking for a typical midlevel operative. Neither did they seem to appreciate Loki’s over-the-top rig. Still, they could go fuck themselves with their four- and five-star reputation rankings. Loki was doing the dirty work of the network, and they should be grateful that people like him existed. Loki was happy to live among his machines and his network bots. He didn’t need the company of his fellow man. Mankind had always been a disappointment.

But he did need their labor. And that’s what he’d come to Garnia to claim. He gestured with his gloved hand and pulled some of the local fabricators and mechanics off their priority-two and -three jobs to place them onto his priority-one job: repairing the blade assemblies of three razorbacks and replacing missing blades that he’d left in the back of a mercenary colonel in Oklahoma—a Ghanaian. The guy had been staying in a Holiday Inn, obviously waiting for something. There were forces afoot in the land, and that meant the network was under threat. Loki didn’t care that these locals were building the twenty-first-century equivalent of a homestead. He was claiming the right of an infrastructure defense faction—the right of a lord to commandeer for the common good. He didn’t need to be nice about it.

Loki pulled his rig into a gravel lot behind the gas station, and there near the entrance to an unmarked assembly of container fabrication shops, Loki could see several darknet operatives staring in wide-eyed amazement at what someone could manage to wring from the darknet. Loki’s setup was so over-the-top it was as though a rockstar’s tour bus had pulled in. He opened the door to his cab and dropped three feet to the ground—his steel hobnailed boots clanging into the stones. He wore black jeans and a numbered racing shirt, beneath which he wore—as always—the haptic vest that kept him in continual contact with the networked world, as well as his shimmering electronic contact lenses, which allowed him to see into D-Space without the need to wear glasses—ten thousand darknet credits. It had been worth it. He was looking forward to the day when they’d be able to surgically implant sensors. The newly available tattooed circuitry had looked interesting, but it didn’t provide the full-skin coverage that a haptic vest could.

Loki pulled a racing cap onto his head and walked along the length of his trailer. He could feel the messages reaching him from his stable of razorbacks. They were like restless war stallions, and he maintained a constant link to them. They were his familiars. The only friends he wanted near him. He felt affection for his loyal mechanical beasts.

He could have summoned more razorbacks and sent these back into the public pool, but he’d grown fond of these specific machines. It was a form of animism that he couldn’t readily reconcile with the logical side of himself. He’d examined the source code of these machines and knew they were just automatons. But the human in him wanted them to be more and had him reading between the lines of their source code.

Loki “felt” an eighteenth-level Fabricator named Sledge, leader of the Advitam faction, approaching from some ways away. And he’d also observed a great deal of message traffic about his truck’s arrival. They were talking about him here.

“Afternoon, Loki. This is a hell of a battle wagon you’ve got here.”

Loki barely looked up. “I’ve got damaged razorbacks.”

“Yeah, we got the message. It’s good to see you’re in the area. There are gangs operating around here—burning homesteads and beating up darknet folks.”

Loki just stared at the guy. He was young—perhaps in his mid-twenties. “Why on earth would you want to start a darknet community in this place?”

Sledge shrugged. “Grew up around here. It’ll be good to live near my folks again. I was working in Indianapolis before this. Same for a lot of these other guys.”

Loki said nothing but kept looking around at all the work going on in the town.

“You’re on the trail of The Major, aren’t you?”

Loki turned to Sledge and narrowed his mother-of-pearl eyes. “Has he been through here?”

Sledge just laughed and shook his head. “No. Hell, if we saw that bastard, we’d have called a flash mob to tear him to pieces. I was just wondering because I know you were there when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“When The Major killed Roy Merritt.” Sledge pointed across the street. “If you get a chance before you leave, check out our monument in Redstone Park.”

Loki kept his gaze on Sledge. “Something else happened that day.”

“What?”

“I destroyed the Daemon task force.”

Sledge looked uneasy. “I’m not sure that accomplished what you thought it would.”

Loki turned away and motioned with a gloved hand. The rear door to the trailer opened, slamming down a ramp onto the gravel drive. There was a dull roar within the trailer and in a few moments, several razorbacks smeared with brownish bloodstains, dented and bullet-pocked, drove off the rear ramp.

Sledge got the hint and yelled over the roar. “We don’t have any spares, so we’ll have to fabricate parts. We’ll let you know when it’s done.”

“I don’t see anywhere to eat on your grid.”

“We’re not a full-service community yet, but there are places out by the highway.”

“Not really a holon, then, is it?”

“We’re working on it.”

Loki looked Sledge up and down then clomped up the trailer ramp. He mounted his Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle and roared out of there.

Asshole.

He accelerated down the county road, south toward its junction with the interstate. Loki noticed the park that Sledge must have been referring to. Even though it was a small thing—a village green with a circular flagstone path, a flagpole, and a statue—it still stopped Loki in his tracks. The statue was that of a man—but it was engulfed in writhing flames. Not chiseled flames, either, but rippling orange flames that guttered and surged twenty feet into the air.

It took several moments for Loki to realize they had to be D-Space flames. He made a gesture and turned off his HUD contact lenses, and sure enough, the flames disappeared, leaving the ten-foot-tall stone statue cold and inert. Loki turned his HUD display back on and the flames returned. He drove off the county road, onto the grass, and pulled his bike up to the base of the statue.

The words “Roy Merritt” were carved into its pedestal base. He looked up to see Merritt posed on one knee, one arm across his leg, the other bracing himself on the ground, as though he were readying himself to get back up from a severe blow.

Loki leaned under the shadow of the statue to look into the eyes of that massive head. The brow was determined. The jaw firmly set—showing his resolve to endure. It was a fair likeness of the man he remembered—but who had grown larger than life since his death. Now it literally was a chiseled jaw, but there was also Roy’s Roman nose, his short hair, and, of course, his burns. They appeared as a texture pattern running down his muscular neck and down the sinewy forearms. He was depicted in tactical gear—ready for action.

Solid granite. Loki marveled that this was one of the first public monuments for this new darknet community. He’d seen the cult of Merritt growing steadily with each passing month. He thought the funeral might have been the high-water mark of the hero worship, but he was seeing real-life graffiti, and more Order of Merritt factions being founded.

Roy Merritt had been Loki’s enemy, but unlike The Major, Merritt was a worthy opponent—resourceful, personally courageous, and honest. Loki felt a twinge of anguish at the memory of Merritt dying before his eyes. They called him the Burning Man because he’d survived the death trap Sobol’s house had become—and he did it all on video. Video that had since been seen by just about everyone on the darknet. Merritt had seemed invincible.

But he was a man too idealistic for this world. No wonder his own side shot him in the back.

Loki wondered what it must be like to be so universally loved and admired. He circled around again and looked up into that great, stone face, wrapped in D-Space flames, burning him for all eternity, as though he were damned. It was an odd conceit for the angelic hero to appear tortured by eternal flames. Perhaps he was all the more powerful a symbol because of it.

Loki noticed that there was also a D-Space video display just beneath the carved name on the pedestal. People in the real world wouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but darknet operatives could. It showed only a still photograph of Merritt from what looked to be his FBI Quantico graduation photo. Loki clicked on the image and a procession of photographs and videos began to play to a mournful tune. Loki clicked a MUTE button, preferring instead to view the images without overt psychological manipulation.

What followed was a several-minute presentation that had apparently been gleaned from commercial online photo and video sites. Loki could imagine hundreds of thousands of people scouring the public Web for any information on their fallen hero. It was possible someone even cracked into the Merritt family computer. Whatever the source, a very personal and moving series of images appeared.

Loki turned the sound back on.

There was Merritt whispering kind encouragement to his daughter at the edge of a basketball court, pride still evident in his eyes. Her jersey and the scoreboard behind them showed they were getting creamed. Photos of him with his family. A newspaper photo of Merritt—although injured himself—carrying a wounded woman from a bank surrounded by police.

Loki began to realize the power of myth. It was the power of common belief. Sobol understood it, and yet he chose to become a devil, and here as if part of the natural order, a mythic hero arose in the network—dead but more alive than ever.

While Loki, possibly the most powerful Daemon operative in the world, with each passing day felt smaller and more isolated as the darknet population grew around him.

He suddenly felt truly alone.