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    “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 ontothis 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 twenty-something 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