It took several moments for Loki to realize they had to be D-Space flames. He made a gesture and turned off his HUD contact lenses, and sure enough, the flames disappeared, leaving the ten-foot-tall stone statue cold and inert. Loki turned his HUD display back on and the flames returned. He drove off the county road, onto the grass, and pulled his bike up to the base of the statue.
The words “Roy Merritt” were carved into its pedestal base. He looked up to see Merritt posed on one knee, one arm across his leg, the other bracing himself on the ground, as though he were readying himself to get back up from a severe blow.
Loki leaned under the shadow of the statue to look into the eyes of that massive head. The brow was determined. The jaw firmly set—showing his resolve to endure. It was a fair likeness of the man he remembered—but who had grown larger than life since his death. Now it literally was a chiseled jaw, but there was also Roy’s Roman nose, his short hair, and, of course, his burns. They appeared as a texture pattern running down his muscular neck and down the sinewy forearms. He was depicted in tactical gear—ready for action.
Solid granite. Loki marveled that this was one of the first public monuments for this new darknet community. He’d seen the cult of Merritt growing steadily with each passing month. He thought the funeral might have been the high-water mark of the hero worship, but he was seeing real-life graffiti, and more Order of Merritt factions being founded.
Roy Merritt had been Loki’s enemy, but unlike The Major, Merritt was a worthy opponent—resourceful, personally courageous, and honest. Loki felt a twinge of anguish at the memory of Merritt dying before his eyes. They called him the Burning Man because he’d survived the death trap Sobol’s house had become—and he did it all on video. Video that had since been seen by just about everyone on the darknet. Merritt had seemed invincible.
But he was a man too idealistic for this world. No wonder his own side shot him in the back.
Loki wondered what it must be like to be so universally loved and admired. He circled around again and looked up into that great, stone face, wrapped in D-Space flames, burning him for all eternity, as though he were damned. It was an odd conceit for the angelic hero to appear tortured by eternal flames. Perhaps he was all the more powerful a symbol because of it.
Loki noticed that there was also a D-Space video display just beneath the carved name on the pedestal. People in the real world wouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but darknet operatives could. It showed only a still photograph of Merritt from what looked to be his FBI Quantico graduation photo. Loki clicked on the image and a procession of photographs and videos began to play to a mournful tune. Loki clicked a MUTE button, preferring instead to view the images without overt psychological manipulation.
What followed was a several-minute presentation that had apparently been gleaned from commercial online photo and video sites. Loki could imagine hundreds of thousands of people scouring the public Web for any information on their fallen hero. It was possible someone even cracked into the Merritt family computer. Whatever the source, a very personal and moving series of images appeared.
Loki turned the sound back on.
There was Merritt whispering kind encouragement to his daughter at the edge of a basketball court, pride still evident in his eyes. Her jersey and the scoreboard behind them showed they were getting creamed. Photos of him with his family. A newspaper photo of Merritt—although injured himself—carrying a wounded woman from a bank surrounded by police.
Loki began to realize the power of myth. It was the power of common belief. Sobol understood it, and yet he chose to become a devil, and here as if part of the natural order, a mythic hero arose in the network—dead but more alive than ever.
While Loki, possibly the most powerful Daemon operative in the world, with each passing day felt smaller and more isolated as the darknet population grew around him.
He suddenly felt truly alone.
Chapter 18: // Underworld
Loki sat astride an idling black Ducati Streetfighter motorcycle. He studied the darkness around him. Stars provided the only light, but the fourth-generation white-phosphor night vision integrated into his helmet gave him a high-contrast black-and-white view of his surroundings. He preferred to remain enveloped in darkness like this when traveling at night. No lights. He had added a control to kill his motorcycle’s brake and dashboard lights, too. As he glanced around, he confirmed what he already knew: he was in the middle of fucking nowhere.
To his left lay the crumbling ruins of a small clapboard house, windows like empty eye sockets. He idled at a T intersection with a road extending left and right along the edge of some woods. The wreckage of several cars had been left there in the tall grass. Oddly, one of them was a Porsche 944, which had died a long way from Germany. This was a desolate place.
Just like him to bring me out here …
Eugene, Missouri, couldn’t be considered a town. It was even smaller than Garnia—with no shops or Main Street. The hour was late, and he knew the residents of this tiny hamlet would have heard him roaring in, but he was just an invisible, rumbling presence in the darkness. He wouldn’t have come this far from the interstate if this wasn’t the closest gate to the underworld. And the underworld, he knew, could only be reached in places that had long endured and which would long remain. Finding them in the flatness of this prairie was difficult.
Loki waved a hand and a high-resolution satellite map of his current location appeared in D-Space, seeming to float ten feet in front of him. The imagery showed a dirt track between ruinous structures in the trees ahead. He turned off the map and accelerated toward the tree line. He soon made out the entrance to the brush-choked road and urged the powerful motorcycle through the trees, dodging around old tires and rusted washing machines.
Before long he discovered what he was searching for: a set of steel rails extending to either side through the forest. The Rock Island Line, abandoned back in 1981. The tracks were choked in weeds with wooden ties visible only here and there. Trees crowded the edges of the gravel ballast lane.
Loki turned left and headed down the tracks into the grayscale world that was oily blackness to mere mortals. The tracks continued at a gentle curve through forest, with the land rising up slowly to either side. He bumped along the ties for a quarter of a mile and found what he was looking for—the mouth of the Eugene Tunnel. He stopped and gazed into the black opening. It was pitch-black even to him.
Railroad tunnels. Enthusiasts had meticulously recorded them worldwide—their GPS locations, direction, length, height, and width. The public Web already knew about these underworld places in great detail. And that meant the Daemon knew about them as well. Which made them a logical place for connecting worlds. There was something oddly appropriate in the symbolism of it, and Sobol knew his archetypes well. With Sobol, gates were critical points, where fate was determined. The one Loki was searching for was no exception.
Loki had been studying planar spells ever since he received his odd message. Of course, he was familiar with planar travel from a dozen games where players gate in and out of various dimensions and universes. But now, with the advent of the limitless layers of D-Space projected atop reality, dimensional gates suddenly had relevance to the real world. Artificial intelligences from digital dimensions were starting to appear, and in some cases gaining wireless control over real-world machinery. It was a message from just such a being that had brought Loki to this desolate place—a message from an old opponent.
Loki switched on his motorcycle’s infrared headlights, and his helmet automatically switched to FLIR mode. He could now see down the tunnel to a vanishing point. Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven feet of World War One-era masonry.
But closer at hand he could see a homeless encampment clogging the passage. There were three men with packs and cardboard boxes huddled in the darkness—all of them looking his way, trying to discern who it was that had come to their hiding place, engine rumbling and lights out.
&nbs
p; It occurred to Loki that economic times must be getting tough indeed for homeless people to appear this far from cities and towns. He’d begun seeing them everywhere. Whole families. White, Latino, Black, Asian. It looked like the current financial crisis was hitting everyone. Prostitutes were literally everywhere now. These guys, however, looked like locals—white-trash tweakers in their early twenties to late thirties.
If that was the case, then the bike Loki was riding was worth its weight in gold. And standing in the mouth of the tunnel, silhouetted against the night, Loki was probably a good target for folks whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Sure enough he saw one of the men—tattooed scalp, piercings, and goatee—lifting what looked to be a pistol. The man slowly pulled back the slide to chamber a round and whispered to the others.
Loki nodded to himself. Bad idea.
He revved the bike’s engine to fully charge his weapons and watched to see what baldy would do next. The man was still pointing the gun up in a holding stance, staring intently into the darkness. Loki raised a gloved hand and aimed a hypersonic projector in the palm of his glove into the middle of the group. He then softly spoke words that were amplified a thousand times into a booming voice that appeared in the midst of the group. “PUT THE GUN DOWN OR DIE!”
The gunman panicked as everyone scattered. The man aimed his pistol at the mouth of the tunnel.
CRACK! A blinding beam of light projected from Loki’s index finger and the deafening sound of a bullwhip filled the tunnel.
The gunman fell dead, his hair and clothing smoking in the darkness. The other homeless men staggered around, blinded by the sudden burst of industrial lightning.
Loki shouted. “Who else wants to die tonight?”
The men got onto their bellies and covered their heads. One shouted. “Don’t shoot, man! Don’t shoot!”
Laser-induced plasma channel was a hell of a weapon. The technology used a relatively low-powered laser at a precise wavelength to cause atmospheric oxygen to form a plasma—one with an extremely low electrical resistance. It was, in essence, a virtual wire that could carry a lethal electrical shock. The thunderous clap occurred when the energy burst stopped and the air snapped shut around the vacuum that remained. It was man-made lightning. Loki could shoot lightning from his hands—the achievement of a lifelong goal. Whenever some idiot gave him a legitimate reason to use it on darknet business, he almost felt like kissing them. Thank you, tweaker.
Loki gunned the engine and came up to the men lying on the edges of the tracks. They were still blinded. “If it was up to me, I’d kill you—but I can’t unless you give me a good reason. If you’re not still lying here when I get back, I’ll follow the heat signatures of your footprints, find you, and kill you both. Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes!”
Loki roared off into the tunnel, feeling the exhilaration of adrenaline surging through his veins.
A couple hundred yards later Loki could see a colored, D-Space object glowing in the tunnel. He closed the distance and before long came to a colorful glow surrounding a virtual portal. He killed the Ducati’s engine, dismounted, and walked toward the portal. The metal cleats on his calf-high black boots rang menacingly as he walked across the gravel in the echoing tunnel. He soon stopped before an alcove in the tunnel wall.
In real-world, three-dimensional space, this was just a dark stone archway over an alcove—a place for railroad workers to shelter against oncoming trains. But on the base layer of D-Space, laid atop the GPS grid, this was also a gate between worlds. In this case between D-Space and one of Sobol’s game worlds—Over the Rhine, a World War Two-themed online game. It was here where a level map Loki knew well intersected with D-Space. As he looked ahead of him, he could see projected onto reality a view into the Monte Cassino game map through a spiked and studded virtual portcullis.
There, standing behind the bars, was an old opponent—Herr Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner, the infamous virtual SS officer in a long trench coat, with an Iron Cross hanging at his throat from the stiff collar of his tunic.
He was just a game bot. An electronic figment of the game designer Matthew Sobol’s imagination, but even so, the villainous Boerner was deviously clever. While playing Sobol’s game, Loki had been virtually killed by this bot more times than he’d care to remember. And now here Boerner stood.
As always, Boerner wore a monocle over his right eye and he clenched a long black cigarette filter between his teeth, exhaling volumetric smoke as he nodded in greetings—his voice coming over Loki’s earpiece. “Mein Herr. So gut to see you again.”
Ever since he reached fiftieth level, Loki had been receiving darknet messages from an AI claiming to be Boerner. While he initially ignored them, they had become more persistent. As Loki’s reputation score continued its decline, Boerner’s messages became more relentless. Loki recalled what a comforting refuge the game Over the Rhine had been for him during difficult times. In some sick way, Boerner was almost like an old friend. An old friend who had killed him thousands of times.
“What do you want, Boerner?”
“Ah, you haf done vell for yourself, I see.”
“You don’t see shit. Your eyes are bitmaps. Get to the point.”
“Mein Freund, I can only understant simple concepts.”
Loki simplified. “Why did you contact me, you fuck?”
“Vy?” He spread his hands expansively. “Because ve are kindred spirits, you und I.”
“You’re a 3-D model with a scripted psychosis. You’re nothing to me.”
“I cannot understant you.” Boerner wrapped his gloved hands around the bars—his fingers becoming suddenly much more real as they extended out into D-Space. “But your tone sounded … unfriendly. Is zis vy you are so unpopular?”
“Fuck you.”
Boerner laughed his familiar, evil cackle. “Yes. I think so. But they do not understant you as I do. Perhaps I can be of some use to you in your vorlt?”
Loki felt suddenly concerned. He remembered just how devious Heinrich Boerner was. “My world?”
“D-Space, Mein Herr. You could free me from zis tiny vorlt. I could serf you, Mein Herr. If only you vould release me.”
Loki stopped cold. Seriously? The sociopathic Boerner AI was asking Loki to bring him into D-Space—and thus, into a world where he might be able to control real-world machinery and software? Not likely. “Fuck off.”
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?
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