Behind him, Hollis was suddenly deafened by a burst of pressure and a cracking sound as a white-hot jet of plasma burst through the steel doorway and began tracing a molten line along the length of the door. The sofa and wet bar beyond it burst into flames, and the glass cover of the flat-screen television shattered—the whole thing folding over itself like a big wax candle. Blue-hot sparks of molten steel scattered like marbles across the concrete floor. The safe room sprinklers popped and started raining over everything to no effect.
Hollis’s recorded voice still spoke to him over the speakerphone as he sat in a catatonic state, while the sprinklers soaked him with freezing water.
“Pure math frees us to create unlimited profit.”
Already the torch had finished cutting through the vault-like door. In a moment a huge section of steel fell forward with a crash that shook the concrete floor. The door’s edges still glowed red. Hollis turned to watch with the detachment of someone on morphine.
As he began to feel the heat of the flames outside and inside, even through all the water raining down on him, the killing machine entered his safe room and unfolded both sword blades with swift precision. The bike was stained with cooked blood and charred flesh. Steam rose from its metal frame.
Hollis put the pistol against his head as the killing machine moved toward him. It raised its blades in the same way he’d seen it do with Metzer.
There was no escape. Hollis pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The safety was on.
Hollis’s own words were the last thing he heard as he fumbled for the gun’s safety switch… .
“The beauty of it is: they can’t afford to let us fail… .”
Chapter 2: // Operation Exorcist
Reuters.com
High-profile Assassinations Stun Financial Community—Attacks that left scores of financial executives dead worldwide have rattled the reclusive billionaires’ club. Security services in the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, and China have withheld details of sixty-one nearly simultaneous killings that appear to be part of a coordinated campaign reminiscent of last year’s spammer massacre.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, the murders highlight growing resentment over outsized executive compensation in the midst of skyrocketing unemployment.
The surveillance video showed a man screaming as a robotic motorcycle wielding twin swords chopped him to pieces.
A voice spoke in the darkness. “Who was he?”
“Anthony Hollis—ran a highly successful hedge fund.”
“Has his name been in the news?”
“Yes. Lots of detractors in the business press. Four hundred and six negative mentions in the past year alone.” A pause. “You think the Daemon botnet is behind this?”
“Play it back. Slowly.”
The video replayed in slow motion, frame by frame. A blade-covered motorcycle advanced on the cornered man. The image stopped then zoomed in. Though motion blurred, the screen was frozen in midstroke, a sword leveled at the man’s neck while spiraling lasers in the bike’s headlight assembly illuminated his terrified face.
“Unmanned vehicle. Like some sort of ground level Predator drone. Daemon operatives call them ‘razorbacks.’ The same type Dr. Philips described in her report on the attack at Building Twenty-Nine.”
“So the Daemon is conducting class warfare now?”
“I don’t think so. These people were all engaged in a specific type of financial activity.”
“Sobol did say his Daemon would ‘eliminate parasites in the system.’ Could it have viewed Hollis and the others as parasites?”
A third voice joined the discussion. “With all due respect, these killings are just a distraction from the real problem.”
“Perhaps, but they reveal something important about the Daemon’s purpose. Bring up the lights, please.”
Suddenly the room illuminated, revealing the heads of America’s intelligence services sitting around a circular boardroom table in Building OPS-2B of National Security Agency headquarters. Plaques stood in front of everyone present—NSA, CIA, FBI,
DARPA, DIA—as well as several visitors from the private intelligence and security sectors; suited executives from Computer Systems Corporation (CSC), its subsidiaries—EndoCorp and Korr Military Solutions—and a principal from the lobbying firm Byers, Carroll, and Marquist (BCM).
Their host scanned the room.
NSA: “The late Matthew Sobol created his Daemon as a news-reading computer virus. It activated two years ago at the appearance of Sobol’s obituary in online news, and has since spread throughout the world, siphoning capital from corporate hosts to sustain a network of human operatives who distribute and protect it. It has already used these operatives to destroy the data and backup tapes of companies that try to remove it. The question is: how do we kill the Daemon without precipitating a ‘digital doomsday’?”
DIA: “That’s the dilemma. If we act, the Daemon will react and destroy the corporate networks it’s infected.”
DARPA: “But we can’t just do nothing. It continues to launch attacks—like it did against the Daemon Task Force at Building Twenty-Nine and these recent assassinations.”
NSA: “Thousands of people are already dead worldwide—dozens of federal officers are dead. And I have to ask myself how a software construct with the intelligence of a tapeworm managed to do this to us. The free market quest for efficiency has made our infrastructure vulnerable.”
BCM: “You can’t expect the market to operate inefficiently. Efficiency is what makes modern life possible.”
NSA: “Yes, but we might need to place a greater emphasis on resiliency.”
CSC (gesturing to the screen): “Why? Because a few people are dead? These machines are not militarily significant. They’re glorified toys.”
NSA: “I was speaking more in terms of network security—but these razorbacks are becoming a serious public relations problem as well. Witnesses have seen these machines navigating at night on highways. People are uploading videos to Web sites.”
BCM: “We’re already aware of these videos, and are taking steps to minimize their public impact.”
NSA: “My point is that we may soon have no choice but to reveal the existence of the Daemon to the general public.”
BCM: “That will be difficult, Mr. Director—especially after going through so much effort to convince the public the Daemon was a hoax. How would you explain executing Peter Sebeck for a crime that never occurred?”
FBI: “That wasn’t our doing.”
BCM: “Nonetheless. If word got out that the Daemon had taken control of thousands of corporate networks, it would cause a stock market panic.”
CSC: “Mr. Director, we can assure you that none of these razorback videos will ever gain credibility by appearing in mainstream news.”
NSA: “But they’re being shared over the Internet. Millions of people have already seen them.”
EndoCorp: “That’s a manageable problem.”
NSA: “What do you mean it’s manageable?”
EndoCorp: “We’ve copyrighted the razorback.”
NSA: “How does copyrighting them solve anything?” EndoCorp: “Owning the IP gives us legal control of their image. We’re spinning these viral videos as stealth advertising for an upcoming video game.”
CSC: “Which means the general public won’t take them seriously.”
NSA: “Whose idea was this?”
CSC: “We don’t get down in the weeds. It was done by our psyops division. As far as the Millennials are concerned, these razorbacks are just guerrilla marketing.”
CIA: “But people have witnessed these things. People have died. How do we explain that?”
BCM: “Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”
CSC: “Persistence and presence create truth online.” EndoCorp: “We’ve neutralized eyewitnesses in Web forums by flaming th
em as shills for the game’s whisper campaign. We’ve created 3-D models, and fictitious how-it-was-done videos to ‘prove’ surveillance clips and cell phone videos are fakes.”
BCM: “So the public knows about razorbacks, but they don’t really know what they know.”
FBI: “Then we’re using some of Sobol’s jujitsu, then?”
BCM: “We might even see net revenue on the resulting video game.”
CIA (shaking his head): “When I hear this crap, I start to understand why Sobol is attacking us.”
FBI: “Don’t even joke about that.”
CIA: “Seriously, you’re going to sit there and tell us your idea for combating the Daemon is to develop a video game around it? If Sobol were alive, he would be laughing at us.”
CSC: “You said yourself that in the short term we can’t remove the Daemon from infected networks without triggering catastrophic data loss. Until a reliable countermeasure is available the only thing we can do to avoid panicking the populace and further disturbing capital markets is to make sure everyone thinks the Daemon is just a fiction.”
NSA: “And what happens when the Daemon’s army of followers takes more aggressive action?”
CSC: “Then we call them terrorists—anything but ‘Daemon followers. ’ But we cannot risk direct action against the Daemon itself until we find a way to disrupt its grip on corporate networks.”
NSA: “We agree on that much at least.”
DIA: “The U.S. dollar is already sliding. How do we know word hasn’t gotten out among key investors?”
DARPA: “Sooner or later word will get out that the Daemon exists—or foreign powers will decrypt the Daemon’s Ragnorok module and use the Daemon as an economic weapon against us. What do we do then?”
EndoCorp: “You’ve already got your answer: the Ragnorok module contains the key to destroying the Daemon. To crippling its command and control.”
EndoCorp: “There are flaws in Sobol’s code. Flaws we can exploit. We should have a Daemon countermeasure in a matter of months. But it’s vital we not provoke the Daemon before we’re ready.”
NSA: “And you really suggest we do nothing to counteract these razorbacks or the Daemon’s human operatives in the meantime?”
BCM: “Gentleman, let’s not forget what’s at stake here. Yes, it’s regrettable that people have died—and will die—but we must defend the core of our civilization: which is commerce. And commerce requires capital. That no longer means gold bars in a vault; it means ones and zeros in a database. Purely financial transactions moving through global markets on any given day outweigh transactions for real world goods and services by twenty-to-one, and that money moves automatically and instantaneously across borders. By disrupting the world financial system, the Daemon could destroy fiduciary trust. It could create global economic chaos in minutes. From that point of view the real-world manifestations of the Daemon—like these razorbacks and its human followers—are minor; dangerous only insofar as they threaten the public’s belief system. But if we kill the digital core of the Daemon, then its physical manifestations disappear along with it. This is what Operation Exorcist is designed to accomplish, and why it will succeed where the government effort failed.”
DARPA: “No one has ever successfully exterminated a botnet.”
EndoCorp: “Technically that’s true, but what we’re contemplating is disrupting its key communications to render it defenseless. In particular the Destroy function of the Ragnorok module. The logic that initiates a corporate data destruction sequence on demand.”
NSA: “Which would take away the Daemon’s claws… .”
BCM: “Precisely.”
DIA: “It’s interesting that Sobol designed online game worlds. Worlds with millions of players buying and selling virtual objects.
I just never realized how similar his game economy was to our own.”
BCM: “The chief difference is that our world is real—with real consequences. And unless we preserve faith in capital markets, all economic activity ceases. Society disintegrates into anarchy. And millions perish.”
Silence prevailed as the others digested this. Finally their host spoke.
NSA: “There’s one more item we need to discuss. A new development.”
He picked up a remote and turned off the video screen.
NSA: “Not all corporations are fighting the Daemon.”
BCM: “What do you mean?”
NSA: “Sixteen lawsuits were filed by Daemon-infected multinationals yesterday in federal district courts.”
Now the corporate side of the table fell into stunned silence for a moment.
BCM: “Which companies?”
NSA (handing over a list): “They’re filing suit against the U.S. government. Its lawyers claim that the Daemon has a constitutional right to exist under the precedent of corporate personhood.”
CSC: “Holy hell …”
BCM: “The Daemon has lawyers?”
NSA: “And it’s retained lobbyists. We’re negotiating with the courts to keep these cases classified; however, we can’t be certain what the judicial branch is going to do about them.”
BCM: “This is insane. The Daemon is a computer virus, not a corporation.”
NSA: “But it’s not the Daemon that’s filing suit. These are multinational corporations that host the Daemon. Their management feels that the Daemon gives them an advantage.”
BCM: “What advantage?”
NSA: “Survival, for one. They feel that the Daemon has a better handle on cyber security and might help them weather an anticipated period of coming chaos.”
BCM: “This is extortion. The Daemon will destroy their data if they don’t comply. RICO statutes cover this. And I see several firms on this list that some of our clients hold significant stock positions in.”
NSA: “But not a controlling interest?”
BCM: “It doesn’t matter. The management of these firms has no right to defend the Daemon.”
NSA: “They cite their right as ‘artificial persons’ granted in an 1886 Supreme Court ruling on the fourteenth amendment …” (he flipped through documents) ”… Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. You’re a lawyer. You tell me if the courts will throw it out.”
EndoCorp: “These attorneys are agents of the Daemon—a known terrorist organization.”
NSA: “Maybe. Or maybe the attorneys are just following instructions from the corner office. We don’t know yet. Either way, we should be able to get the courts to close a nineteenth-century loop-hole that has unanticipated twenty-first-century consequences.”
BCM: “Wait. Let’s just wait a second. There are complex considerations relating to an entire body of legal precedents on corporate personhood, and the rights of free speech to corporate interests have a necessary and guiding effect on policy. Let’s not do anything rash. We should let these cases run their course. We’ll have neutralized the Daemon before they get their day in court, and then these companies will be back in the fold.”
CIA: “Is there something about that 1886 ruling we should know?”
BCM: “We don’t want to rehash established precedents. This is part of the Daemon’s effort to sow chaos.”
CIA (writing notes): “What was the name of that case again?”
BCM: “This is a perfect example of why government isn’t nimble enough to deal with the Daemon. It’s using our own laws and government institutions against us. To divide us. We should be helping one another.”
NSA: “Wait a minute. Nobody’s dividing anyone. Does corporate personhood expose us to danger?”
BCM: “That’s not the point. What I’m saying is that we can’t follow legal niceties in dealing with this thing. We cannot demonstrate weakness. Ever.”
FBI: “Our laws demonstrate weakness?”
The corporate side of the table conferred for a moment, and then the lobbyist turned to face the intelligence directors again. He took a calmer tone.
BCM: “Look, the current economic cri
sis has crippled state governments. States have begun to sell off assets to balance their budgets. They’re outsourcing services and selling their highways, bridges, prisons.”
NSA: “And?”
BCM: “We are buying them. We’re investing in America. We—and the chairmen of intelligence funding committees in the House and Senate—hope you will defend our legitimate interests while we help America through this difficult period.”
NSA: “Of course, you know that we will.”
BCM: “We need wide latitude to deal with these dangers. I think you’ll agree that it’s in the best interests of the nation to make all tools available to us.”
The two sides viewed each other across the table.
BCM: “I hope we can count on your support, Mr. Director… .”
Chapter 3: // Going Viral
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What makes Roy Merritt’s legend so powerful is that it was unintentional. He was a mere artifact on the surveillance tapes at the Sobol mansion siege, but his successful struggle against the impossible is what immortalized him as the Burning Man.
PanGeo**** / 2,194 12th-level Journalist
“Roy Merritt represented all that was best in us. That’s what makes the loss of him so hard to bear.” Standing before a flag-draped casket, the minister raised his voice to carry above a cold, Kansas wind. “I knew Roy from the time he was a child. I knew his father and his mother. I saw him grow to become a loving husband, a caring father, and a respected citizen. He dedicated his life to public service and never gave up hope for anyone. In fact, Roy mentored some of the same troubled youth he faced in his law enforcement work. Blessed with a calm, physical courage Roy was often sent in harm’s way to protect us, and it was on such a mission that he gave his life. Although we may find it hard to carry on without him, I think it is precisely because of Roy that we will be able to carry on.”
A frigid wind whipped Natalie Philips’s coat as she contemplated the minister’s words. She stared at the coffin in front of her. Lost in thought, she didn’t feel the cold.
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