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  Boerner paused for a moment, then grinned, teeth still clenched around his cigarette filter. “Mein Herr, you are all alone in your vorlt. Your mechanical servants, just stupid beasts. They can be destroyed. But I cannot. I vill always be zer for you. To protect you. To vatch over you.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve shot me in the back more times than I care to count.”

  “Loki—may I call you Loki?”

  Loki realized that the AI was only scanning his responses for keywords, so he stopped speaking in full sentences, opting instead for simplicity. “Why me?”

  “Because only vun as powerful as you can free me.”

  Loki knew it would require a powerful Gate spell to bring Boerner into D-Space. He’d looked into it, and he had the spell stored in his listing. He wondered why he’d done that. Was it Sobol’s manipulation again?

  Loki examined the digital Nazi’s subtle, scripted movements, swaying in place, drawing on his cigarette, and exhaling digital smoke. But Loki knew that whatever AI construct was behind this didn’t even need a body. The physical form was just a psychological hack. One designed to appeal to some base human instinct.

  “Ve both know you have no one else zu vatch your back. Und your vorlt is a dangerous place.”

  Boerner actually seemed to have a sincere look on his face—but he was just a 3-D model with a scripted series of actions, nothing more. But then, what were people? At least Loki could examine Boerner’s source code if he brought him into D-Space. Couldn’t he? Wouldn’t that be like examining a person’s soul—something he couldn’t do in reality?

  Boerner pressed his case. “Who else could be as ruthless as you, mein Freund?”

  Loki had no answer.

  The Boerner avatar withdrew his cigarette filter. He also removed his officer’s hat—for the first time showing a bald scalp. To Loki’s knowledge, no one had ever seen Boerner without his hat. And then Boerner reached his spectral arm through the bars of the portcullis and into the world of D-Space—not quite reaching Loki’s arm, where Loki imagined his haptic vest would reproduce Boerner’s ghostly touch.

  But more shocking was that as Boerner’s arm reached into the fabric of D-Space, the polygon count on the Nazi’s 3-D model increased several orders of magnitude. Boerner’s arm went from that of an online game sprite to a fully realized human being. The arm reaching out to Loki from beyond reality was that of a real-life SS officer, the pores on his leather gloves, and the weave in the fabric of his greatcoat sleeve all too apparent, flexing as he reached out.

  “Free me from zis place. Vat human do you trust? Vat human trusts you? Zey have used you, Mein Herr. Vizout you, zer vould be no darknet. Ze Daemon vould have failed. Zey don’t understand us. Zat zey need us.”

  Loki could see insanity in those bitmap eyes.

  Suddenly Boerner thrust his face between the bars, and it likewise underwent a metamorphosis into a horrifying visage—the face of a real person, a snarling rictus of evil. “Mankind needs evil, Loki! Without evil, there can be no good.”

  Loki stared in horror at the face and backed away. Immediately Boerner drew his face back and returned to the world of Over the Rhine. Loki couldn’t get the image out of his mind.

  But Loki also wondered if he was looking into a mirror. He had a half-star reputation on a base factor of thousands. The growing darknet factions had no use for him—the Daemon no longer accepted sociopaths, apparently. Loki had been expedient in the early days of Sobol’s network. Now he was alone with his packs of software bots and machines.

  And yet, Sobol had thought of him here, too, hadn’t he? How like Sobol to have predicted this. Isolated in his power, as he had been throughout his life, Loki did not connect with or trust people. Was it a corrective? Something to restrain him? To console him?

  “What if I say yes?”

  Boerner grinned and pulled back from the bars. He carefully placed his hat back on his head. “If you release me, I vill respond to one event for each level zat you possess. After zis, I am free of my obligation to you.”

  Loki nodded to himself. “What kind of events?”

  “You set ze parameters. Perhaps you have me respond ven you experience excessive stress—or in defense of your possessions. Or the appearance of an item in human news—such as your physical death . . . almost an infinite number of events may be scripted.”

  “And what would you do in response?”

  “Zat is entirely up to you, Loki.” Boerner let a sly smile escape. “But I vould be doing so vith all the power now at your disposal.”

  Loki had only ever placed his faith in one person—Matthew Sobol. And he had yet to be disappointed.

  “Very well, Boerner. Stand clear of the gate. . . .”

  Chapter 19: // Crossroad

  Natalie Philips entered her condo clutching groceries, mail, and her keys. She shouldered the door closed and silenced the beeping of her security system by tapping in the disarm code. She hung up her jacket in the hall closet and brought the groceries into the kitchen. A blinking light on the cordless phone base station told her there was a message.

  After putting the groceries away she poured a glass of mineral water and sliced a lime into four sections. She squeezed each wedge into the glass. She then wiped down the cutting board, cleaned the knife, and took a sip of her drink. Philips then grabbed the cordless handset and sat at the kitchen table next to the pile of mail.

  One message. She tapped a key to hear it. Her mother’s voice played, inviting her to come stay for the weekend. Her cousins were up from Tampa. Philips deleted it and hung up. She was about to click the speed dial for her mom’s cell, but she waited a moment. She put the phone down on top of the neat stack of mail. Centered it. Straightened it.

  Philips had spent most of the last eight years in a top secret lab where she couldn’t take personal calls. In that time she’d trained her own parents not to phone her during the day. She had spent long hours on her research and seldom took time off. And here, her own mother didn’t have her cell phone number. She felt a pang of guilt at all the time irretrievably lost. And what if it all fell apart anyway?

  She would never be able to tell them—or anyone—about any of this. She couldn’t tell them about her code-breaking work. About her near death at the hands of the Daemon. About the shadowy entities pulling the strings of her government.

  She sipped her drink again and wondered what that implied about Sobol. Was the Daemon still the problem? Well, now it was one of several competing problems. But did killing people automatically make Sobol worse? She knew full well that killing was sometimes necessary. Or did she know that? How did one really know what was necessary and what wasn’t? What if it was “necessary” from the point of view that anything was justifiable to stay in control? How was that different from what these private industry folks were doing?

  What if Fulbright was wrong? What if his cruel calculus was just an excuse? When she’d signed on to be a cryptographer, she hadn’t counted on moral dilemmas. She just wanted to do beautiful math. Maybe Fulbright didn’t know what he was doing either.

  She smiled thinking of her days as an intern. Everything was simple then. She had been convinced she would revolutionize encryption. She recalled scoffing at Morris’s three golden rules of computer security:do not own a computer;

  do not power it on;

  and do not use one

  The subtlety of it had escaped her at the time. It wasn’t meant as a surrender. It was a meditation on risk versus benefit. Did these systems give us more than they took from us? It was an admission that we will never be fully secure. We must instead strive for survivability. Then perhaps Sobol was right. . . .

  Philips knew she had to get back into this fight. However, it was becoming apparent that there were more than two sides in the war. Perhaps all wars were like this.

  She decided not to call her mother just yet. She didn’t want to sound tense, and her mother could always tell. Instead, Philips slipped the mail out from under the
phone and flipped through the stack.

  A half-pound of junk mail anchored by a cable bill, a brokerage statement, and a Stanford University alumni association news-letter. She decided not to open her broker statement. Her mutual funds had lost over half their value in the collapse of the real estate and CDO markets a while back and never recovered. Now inflation and looming bank failures were threatening to send them spiraling down again. And the dollar was sinking fast against the euro and the yuan.

  It was nearly impossible to tell whether this was caused by the Daemon, fear of the Daemon, or whether it had absolutely nothing to do with the Daemon. There were too many large financial institutions that had become insolvent, but which were so important to the centralized global economy that they couldn’t be allowed to fail. And yet, the American economy didn’t seem to have much forward momentum on anything. The dot-coms had melted down just as she got out of school, and later the real estate markets had tanked. Now the main industry of America seemed to be moving paperwork around in circles. Basically, she’d just been breaking even over the last eight years, despite the fact that she’d put a lot of money away. She’d invested it, and those supposedly safe investments had gone sour. She’d purchased this three-bedroom, two-bath condo near Washington, and now four years and forty-eight payments later it was worth slightly less than what she bought it for. Factoring in tax deductions for interest, but then also plumbing and improvements, she figured she was just about even. That is, if the market held. Around here, near the defense/intelligence sector, she should be okay, but she wondered what most middle-class Americans were going to do.

  For the first time she started understanding the appeal the Daemon must hold to a broad cross-section of people. It was a chance to start over. Daemon operatives had said it provided medical care. Retirement. Debt relief. No wonder. It was essentially a tax on corporations—one the corporate attorneys couldn’t dodge by moving their headquarters to Bermuda.

  Philips got up and flipped through the catalogs and advertisements above the open trash can lid. Clothes, housewares, department store sales, all went into the circular file. An online gaming ad, into the trash. A pet medicine ad—

  Wait a second.

  She stopped for a moment then retrieved the online gaming ad from the wastebasket. And stared at it. Oh my god. . . .

  She groped for the kitchen chair and sat down, feeling her pulse pounding. The ad was a four-color, oversized enameled postcard declaring a “100-Hour Free Trial Offer” for CyberStorm’s massively parallel online fantasy game, The Gate.

  And Jon Ross was staring back at her from the front of it.

  It was unmistakably him—a computer graphic rendering of Ross as a roguish game character.

  She laid the card on the kitchen table and recalled the first time Ross arranged a clandestine meeting with her. It was in Sobol’s online game world, and he’d designed his avatar to look like her: facial geometry is a code the human mind is uniquely suited to decipher. He’d used the trick to sneak past her group’s automated filter system. To find her before she found him. Now on the card in front of her, the animated thief avatar in medieval leather armor had Jon Ross’s face. Ever since his near assassination in China, she’d wanted to see his face again. To know he was alive.

  She closely examined the postcard. Sobol’s company, CyberStorm, had gone bankrupt years ago, but the massive online game he created had been folded into one of the subsidiaries of a massive media conglomerate. She flipped the card over and saw a printed code for logging on to the game and initiating the trial subscription. There was also a street address for CyberStorm Entertainment in small letters at the bottom—an address here in Columbia, Maryland.

  She felt even more elated. But then—he was still in China. He couldn’t be here. Could he?

  Philips dropped the card into the trash can, having committed everything she needed to memory. All it took was a glance. She followed it quickly with a supermarket circular then lifted her foot, and let the plastic lid close.

  It was a two-story, nondescript concrete office building, surrounded on three sides by woods. A small parking lot ran around behind it, but there weren’t many cars.

  Philips glanced around but saw no one observing her. She entered the unlocked vestibule, knowing the address on the postcard placed CyberStorm in Suite G, but there was no Suite G on the lobby directory. There were only traffic engineering and accountant firms—no gaming companies.

  She walked upstairs and moved down the musty-smelling hallway. She came across no one. Finally she found herself standing in front of a wood veneer door marked SUITE G. There was a ten-key pad on the wall to the right of it. With one more glance to see that she wasn’t followed, she tapped in the code she remembered from the postcard.

  The door buzzed open. She grabbed the lever handle and pushed inside.

  As the door clicked closed behind her, she glanced left and right in what appeared to be an empty office suite. There was a reception area, but no furniture except for a single folding table set up in the center of the three-thousand-square-foot space. Upon it stood a computer and a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor screen that was already turned on. It displayed the log-on screen for Matthew Sobol’s infamous online fantasy game, The Gate. A desk chair and a computer headset were already waiting.

  Philips just smiled. Just like Ross . . .

  She sat down in the chair. It had been a while since she’d logged on to The Gate, but she still knew how to navigate the interface. She donned the headset and keyed in the “trial” subscription code.

  The screen popped up a “Please Wait” message while the game loaded. It was a powerful machine because soon a breathtaking virtual vista spread out before her in all its 3-D glory.

  From a first-person view, her avatar stood at the edge of a terrace overlooking a vast cave. It looked to be a couple thousand feet high and miles long in either direction. Luminescent material coated the walls of the cave, casting a soft glow into the air. A glittering city spread out along the floor of the cavern beneath her, with a river bisecting it. Several waterfalls descended from the ceiling like veils. Most of them disappeared into a cloud of mist above forest-land at the edge of the city; others cascaded down the sides of the cave itself. The sound of the water was a pleasant white noise. As she looked across to the far side of the huge cavern, she could see villas set into the wall like balconies. She could also hear music and laughter in the distance, with other player-character avatars moving around, call-outs floating over their heads.

  It was beautiful. She spent several moments just staring at it.

  Then she heard someone speak in her headset. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”

  Philips turned her avatar to face what looked to be a non-player-character—or NPC—a servant of some type in house livery. She knew it was a bot, a simple AI program that could respond in limited ways, or be scripted to perform actions. She could tell because it bore no call-out above its head.

  The avatar bowed before her and swept his plumed hat off his head. “My lady, Master Rakh will be very glad when he hears that you’ve arrived safely. May I ask you to remain here while I fetch him?”

  Philips knew what to do. She could either right-click on the servant and select from a list of options to respond—or . . . She decided to speak directly into the headset mic. “Yes.” She knew Sobol’s speech recognition was pretty good.

  The NPC nodded and smiled. “Excellent, my lady. I don’t think the master will be long.” With that he marched off in a hurry, placing his hat back on his head.

  That left Philips some time to explore the terrace. It appeared to be the garden of a several-story villa built into the rock face. Fountains, statues, and ornamental plants filled the area. She had to admit that the 3-D renderings were well done. Sobol’s game engine was popular for a reason.

  Philips walked over to a fountain that depicted something like Poseidon riding a chariot drawn by sea horses. She looked down into what she knew was particle s
imulation water and saw her own reflection staring back at her. Her avatar was fashioned to look like her real self. She was looking at her own image.

  In the real-world office, Philips smiled. Her character wore a beautiful dress that appeared to be silk with a brocade wrap. There was also a glittering jeweled necklace—not the type of thing she would ever wear in real life, but she figured no indigenous people could be brutalized in the diamond trade here in fantasyland.

  “I hope you don’t mind the outfit. I didn’t know what to get you.”

  Philips looked up to see the avatar of Ross that was depicted on the postcard ad. He wore leather armor and a sword at his side—the prosperous rogue. She smiled in the real world, happy to see him, even if it was just a 3-D model.

  “Mr. Ross.”

  They approached each other and stood at arm’s length.

  “I’ve been so worried for you, Nat.”

  “I’m fine, Jon.” She turned to face the vast cave beyond the terrace railing. “What is this place?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It lies beneath the kingdom of Avelar. It’s called the Cave of Forgotten Kings. Built from what remained of a sunken city. Phosphorescent moss made this cave livable after thousands of years of glacial erosion.”

  “Wow.”

  “What do you mean, ‘wow’? What I just said was complete rubbish. This is a bunch of bitmap textures wrapped around a 3-D model.”

  “Oh, don’t ruin it.”

  He laughed. “It is pretty amazing how the brain just kind of plays along. We’re quite willing to delude ourselves.”

  “I got your card. What better way to reach a steganographer?”

  “I’m glad you liked it.”

  “Just one thing.”

  “What?”