Freedom (TM) d-2

  Freedom (TM)

  ( Daemon - 2 )

  Daniel Suarez

  Picking up a few months after the end of Daemon (2009), Suarez continues his popular technothriller and SF saga. The computer program Daemon has taken over the Internet, and millions have joined its virtual world. Now the effect is spilling into the real world as Daemon assumes control of financial institutions, and the program’s real-life converts flock to small towns to re-create a sustainable lifestyle amid the agribusiness monoculture of the Midwest. Despite a slow start, Freedom picks up speed by the second half with Daemon’s supporters and detractors facing off for the control of civilization. Only readers who have also read Daemon will be fully able to enjoy and understand Freedom, as most of the characters and plot elements are drawn directly from the previous story, and only so much backstory is possible, given the elaborate premise. On the other hand, Daemon fans will be well be pleased with the exciting conclusion, as will anyone who enjoys lots of gaming elements and virtual worlds in their science fiction. —Jessica Moyer

  Daniel Suarez

  Freedom™

  Dedication

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Generation Y

  Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible

  government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility

  to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to

  befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt

  politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

  —Theodore Roosevelt in 1906

  Part One

  December

  Gold:$1.057USD/oz.

  Unleanded Gasoline:$3.58USD/gallon

  Unemployment:16.3%

  USD/Darknet Credit:3.9

  Chapter 1: // Dark Pool

  InvestorNet.com

  Profits in Milliseconds—“Algorithmic stock trading is the future of finance,” according to Wall Street titan Anthony Hollis , whose Tartarus Group employs sophisticated software that responds to market conditions, trading equities with sub-millisecond speed. Due to its extraordinary profitability, Hollis’s form of programmatic trading grew from 14 percent of all equity volume in 2003, to 73 percent of all volume in 2009.

  However, critics contend that high-frequency trades—where a single stock may be bought and sold multiple times an hour—only increases market volatility while producing nothing of value.

  An elderly man emerged from the crowd and aimed a revolver straight at Anthony Hollis’s face. As the old worker’s thick index finger squeezed the trigger, Hollis sat up in darkness—breathing hard.

  He glanced at the clock on the nightstand: 3:13 A.M. Motionless, he listened to his own rapid breathing.

  He started to calm down as he looked around his bedroom. It was illuminated only by the soft glow of large flat-screen monitors mounted on the far wall, scrolling stock prices for the Nikkei, Shanghai, and Seoul exchanges. The monitors weren’t necessary anymore. They were merely a comfort to him.

  Hollis took one more deep breath and tried to shake off the nightmare. He was just about to lie back down when the unmistakable crackling of gunfire somewhere in the night came to his ears.

  He sat up again.

  The phone beside his bed warbled. He grabbed the handset. “Metzer, what’s going on?”

  The calm voice of Rudy Metzer, his security director, came over the line. “We have a situation by the service gate. It’s being contained.”

  “What kind of goddamned situation? Who the hell is shooting?”

  In the bed next to him, Hollis’s latest girlfriend looked up at him sleepily. She was a third his age. “What is it?”

  He ignored her and tried to listen to Metzer.

  “Mr. Hollis, as a precaution, I want you to move into your secure room as soon as possible.”

  “Are the police on the way?”

  “Sir, the estate’s outside lines have been cut. Cell phones and radios jammed. We’re isolated for the moment. I need you to move quickly and calmly to your safe room. I’ll phone you on the landline. Do you understand?”

  Hollis absorbed Metzer’s words and felt actual fear. “Yes. Yes, I understand.” He returned the phone to the cradle and stared at nothing for a moment. The screens on the far wall now showed only video snow.

  “What’s happening, Tony?”

  Kidnappers? Assassins? Two months ago a retired autoworker had tried to kill him in Chicago. Metzer’s men saw the guy make his move, and they tackled him before he could pull the trigger. Some pension fund loser bent on revenge. Tonight’s intruders sounded more serious.

  “Tony!”

  He turned to her. “Relax. Somebody tried to break in.” Hollis got out of bed and put on his slippers and a robe.

  “Where are you going? I don’t want to be left alone!”

  “Don’t be a pain in the ass. They caught the guy. I just need to take a piss.” He ignored her frightened look and headed to the master bathroom.

  He nudged the door closed behind him, turned on the lights, and padded across the Italian marble floor, headed toward the walk-in wardrobe. He opened twin doors to enter a sizeable room lined with H. Huntsman and Leonard Logsdail suits and rows of Edward Green and Berluti shoes.

  Hollis avoided his reflection in the wraparound mirrors as he closed the doors behind him. Yes, he felt a twinge of conscience, but then, he didn’t really know this girl. He hadn’t done a backgrounder on her yet, and he wasn’t about to bring her into his secure room. She could be a plant. People were capable of anything for money.

  Hollis walked quickly to the far wall and opened the faceplate of a wall-mounted digital thermostat. It revealed an alphanumeric keypad where he tapped in his security code—the exact amount of his first investment. A section of the wooden wall rolled aside, revealing a hidden room whose lights flickered on automatically. The door was solid steel, nearly six inches thick—the reinforced concrete walls of his secure room were even thicker. A sign of the times.

  He moved inside and tapped a red pressure switch near the door. The opening slid closed and locked with a dull boom. A large bank of monitors glowed to life on the far side of the room above a security console. From here he could watch the action through dozens of surveillance cameras. There was also a dedicated emergency phone line, a radio base station, and a house phone. The room also had a sofa, a wet bar, and flat-screen television—not to mention shelves of emergency provisions and a narrow door leading to a Spartan restroom.

  Hollis had everything he needed to await rescue.

  The house phone rang, and he tapped the speakerphone button as he clicked through monitors, trying to find the service gate cameras. “Talk to me.”

  Metzer’s voice came ove
r the speaker. “Can you get a dial tone on your emergency line?”

  Hollis grabbed the emergency phone and held it to his ear. Nothing. Some cultural instinct compelled him to stab repeatedly at the hook switch. “It’s dead. This was supposed to be a buried cable. How did they know where it was, Metzer?”

  Hollis heard talking in the background. Then Metzer came back on. “We’ll talk about that later. Right now I’ve got men missing, and motion detectors in alarm all over the estate. I’m pulling everyone back into a perimeter around the master suite.”

  “How did these people get through the gates?” One of the security monitors showed the estate’s front entrance, which stood wide open.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s your job to know! I wasn’t supposed to ever need this room, damnit.” He fumed for a moment then added, “Send someone up to get Mary.”

  “She’s not with you?”

  “I can’t have her in here. Just put her in a closet or something. And figure out a way to contact the police. I don’t care if you have to use fucking smoke signals!” He hung up and kept flipping through security monitors. He’d spent a fortune on security, and he wasn’t getting much of a return on his investment. He was going to sack the entire security team after this was over—starting with Metzer.

  As Hollis cycled through cameras, the monitors showed various rooms on a dozen screens—multicar garage, pool patio, pub room, dining room, driveway …

  He stopped cold. In the middle of the driveway, one of Metzer’s suited security men lay in a pool of blood, still clutching a submachine gun. His head was missing.

  “Jesus Christ!” Hollis picked up the house phone and dialed Metzer’s extension. It rang several times and went to voice mail. Hollis pressed the call button on the radio base station but heard nothing but static. “Fuck!”

  Then the power went out.

  Here in the safe room backup batteries instantly engaged, but on the security monitors he saw most of the lights kick off around the estate. Now only interior emergency lighting remained. Outside was blackness.

  Hollis clicked through the interior surveillance cameras. There—he saw two security people in the grand foyer with Metzer locking the ornate front doors of Hollis’s twenty-three-thousand-square-foot mansion. Metzer was racing upstairs, pointing and shouting to position men at the top of the staircase. They all carried MP-5 submachine guns. The second floor was apparently going to be their Alamo.

  Just then the front doors blasted open, sending door hardware, wood, and glass fragments silently spraying across the polished stone floor. Something the size of a man had burst through the doors at high speed, taking out the large antique table just inside the door and crashing into the far wall. The room started to fill with smoke.

  The surveillance camera showed security men opening fire from the second-floor railing. More shadows were already racing through the front door. Hollis couldn’t get a good look at them in the dim light and smoke. They moved fast—through the doorway and up the wide staircase. In mere moments they exited the frame. Hollis clicked around in frustration to find a suitable camera to see what was going on.

  He soon saw his own bedroom on one monitor—he’d had this security camera installed as a precaution against sexual assault charges (one never knew what visions of rape young women might dream up after the fact). It wasn’t on the rotation available to the security team, but here he could see Metzer grabbing Mary by the wrist and pulling her from the bed. She was nude and screaming, but the muscular German was having none of it. On camera Metzer noiselessly shouted at her and pointed under the bed, letting go of her hand as he reacted to something in the hallway.

  Metzer trained his weapon on the door as Mary crawled under the bed behind him and moments later Metzer opened fire on the doorway in short bursts. Through the thick concrete walls of the safe room Hollis could hear the dull thud of the shots less than thirty feet away in his bedroom. A blade of fire stabbed forth from Metzer’s weapon, illuminating the intense expression on his face—but only for a few moments before a dark form raced into frame and lashed out with twin blades in a lightning fast one-two strike that cut Metzer into three sections: head, torso, and legs. The blades crisscrossed again, inhumanly fast, chopping the pieces into pieces. Metzer’s body fell apart like quarters of beef, spraying the room with gore.

  Hollis stared in shock at the screen.

  The dark silhouette of the attacker moved farther into the room, twirling the twin blades to shed excess blood—spattering the walls into a macabre modern art display.

  What the camera revealed beneath the emergency lights was a machine—both familiar and alien. It was a powerful racing motorcycle, but it had no rider, just a series of whip antennas and sensors. The entire bike was covered in blades, which bristled like cooling fins along both sides. Where handlebars would normally be, it wielded twin swords at the end of mechanized gambols. The entire length of the machine was drenched in blood, as though it had hacked its way in here through every security man Hollis had. And every inch of the metal appeared to be engraved with symbols and glyphs—like some sort of high-tech religious relic.

  The machine stood with the aid of hydraulic kickstands it had extended. After spinning its blades clean, it folded the blades back behind its bullet-pocked cowling. Two more identical machines rolled into Hollis’s bedroom behind it.

  Hollis collapsed into his console chair and stared in incomprehension at the monitor. What he was looking at made no sense.

  Swirling green laser light issued from the headlight assemblies of the bikes. The scene took on the appearance of a laser light show as the beams spread through Metzer’s lingering gun smoke and traced brilliant lines along the walls and furniture in the shadows—scanning for something.

  Without warning, one of the bikes roared through the bathroom doorway. Hollis could see in the mirror where it crashed through the thin wardrobe room doors. They caved in like paper, and now Hollis could actually hear the muted throbbing of a powerful motorcycle engine just beyond his panic room door.

  It knew where he was.

  He swiveled his chair to face the solid steel door ten feet away. That door was the only thing that stood between him and a gruesome death. His heart was hammering so hard it felt like it had moved up into his throat. Hollis dug through the desk drawer and produced a Sig Sauer P220 Super Match pistol. He chambered a round and took another glance at the bedroom monitor.

  The other two bikes had flipped the bed over with their sword arms, revealing the naked and helpless Mary beneath. She lay curled up, silently screaming beneath the blinding laser lights.

  Oh god. No …

  But perhaps this would appease them?

  The bikes just stood observing Mary as she shrieked in terror at the sight of Metzer’s butchered remains on the floor around her. Hollis decided he would do something for Mary’s family after this. He would find out more about her. He’d help her family.

  But the machines didn’t attack. Instead, they just stood watching as she got to her feet and fled the room.

  Maybe she was part of this after all …

  Hollis tapped buttons on the console, bringing up the image outside his safe room door. There he could see the third machine waiting. It seemed to know exactly where the concealed door was. From blueprints? There was no doubt that whoever was behind this had serious power. Access to his communications and electrical layout would have been no problem for someone who could do this. It was his secure room that had saved him, and there was no home automation link to its steel door. Once locked, it could only be opened manually from the inside.

  Suddenly the house phone rang on the console next to him. Hollis recoiled from it. He glanced up at the screen again. The bloodstained machine stood impassively outside, still aimed at the secret door.

  The phone rang again, and Hollis just stared at it. Perhaps it was someone on the security team? Hollis pressed the speakerphone button. “Hello?”

  The
line was silent for a moment—but then his own voice came back to him, talking fast, as Hollis always did on business calls… .

  “Even if the U.S. markets crash, we’ll make money. Movement is all we need—positive or negative makes no difference… .”

  It was definitely Hollis’s voice. Someone had tapped his phone calls. Another clip immediately followed… .

  “What a company does is irrelevant. What a company makes is irrelevant. The market is a math problem we solve through value extraction.”

  Someone somewhere had intercepted his words. But why?

  Looking at the remorseless killing machine outside, he somehow couldn’t picture it being spawned by human rights activists. Whoever was behind it was decidedly more dangerous.

  His laughing voice came to him again over the speaker. “We made it legal. Our people wrote the congressional bill.”

  On the security monitor a different type of bike entered the wardrobe room. This machine wasn’t covered in blades, but in piping and pressure tanks. As it came in, the other bike moved aside. The new arrival slammed down hydraulic jacks to plant it firmly just outside the panic room door. Then, instead of twin blade arms, it extended a single robotic nozzle arm, with hoses trailing back along its length to half a dozen pressure tanks. A spark flashed, and then a white-hot flame suddenly stabbed out from the nozzle—instantly turning the wood paneling in front of the panic room door into a solid wall of flame.

  Hollis stared at the machine on-screen, paralyzed in fear. He knew what it was. He’d owned stock in steel mills in the nineties. It was a plasma torch. Someone had mounted it on this terror machine, and it now stood before his safe room door, blasting aside the wooden millwork surrounding his bunker as though it were nothing more than ash. Already the scores of fine suits and leather shoes and carpeting in the wardrobe room were engulfed in flames as the twenty-five-thousand-degree cutting head on the machine penetrated the steel door like a knife through modeling clay.

  The sprinkler system leapt into action, spraying water over the outside room, but the fire’s intensity vaporized it. The surveillance camera showed the remorseless machines standing their ground, one cutting, the other waiting, but soon, even the camera started to fail—and melt. The screen turned grainy and then went black.