Freedom by Daniel Suárez Read Free Book Online

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