Sobol had waited patiently, but when Sebeck met his gaze again, the avatar repeated the question. “Should I destroy the Daemon, Sergeant?”
Sebeck took a deep breath. Then shook his head. “No.”
“Let me confirm your answer. Should I destroy the Daemon? Yes or no?”
“No.”
There was a flicker in the image, and Sobol looked grimly relieved. He gazed directly at Sebeck again. “You don’t know how much I dream for this to be the ending. There are so many ways for it to end. If you’re really there, Sergeant, good luck to you. Good luck to you all. And don’t be afraid of change. It’s the only thing that can save us.”
Sobol stood, nodded farewell, and walked toward the nearby gardens. In a few moments he vanished into thin air.
Sebeck sat in the garden for an unknowable time by himself, contemplating what had just occurred. Until finally he received an alert in his HUD display. It was from a network handle he was too afraid to recognize. He read it over and over: Chris_Sebeck
After bracing himself, he opened the message and read it slowly . . .
Dad, I sent you this message triggered to open when you’re ready for it. I know the truth, and can’t wait to see you. Your son, Chris.
Sebeck felt the tears come forth from him—coming from some place he thought hadn’t existed in his heart. He had a family. He was a father.
He was going home. . . .
Chapter 40: // Exit Strategy
It had taken over a century for Sky Ranch to evolve from the ancestral home of a wealthy family into the heavily fortified executive retreat and End-Times bunker complex it ultimately became. However, The Major knew these things didn’t happen overnight. They accrued in layers over decades—and so they had secrets.
It was knowing those secrets that set The Major apart from his colleagues. He planned for the worst, and was seldom disappointed. His brand of “black sky thinking” had kept him alive on more than one occasion when all around him had perished. Even now as he looked through a 1960s-era periscope at the cleaned-out storage rooms beyond his secret hiding place, he realized that, once again, paranoia had prevailed.
It had been ten days since Sobol’s Daemon had bankrupted the merchant princes of the world. Ten days since thousands of darknet operatives had scoured the five-star luxury survivalist lodge that was Sky Ranch. They’d cleaned out the warehouses and store-rooms, dismantled the weapon systems, and raided the vaults. They’d gone through the floor plans and databases to find everything there was to find.
But they didn’t see The Major’s Cold War hiding spot on the blueprints. Rumor had it that the room was a tryst location for a philandering banker—built to Cold War bomb shelter standards to mask its true purpose in the books and to muffle loud music. The entrance was concealed to keep out the uninvited.
True story or not, the place looked a lot like the swinging pad of a midcentury banker—long sofas, bar, pool table, and card tables. It was also musty, covered in dust, and unaccountably cold. But it had kept him alive. Living on canned goods gleaned from the storage room outside before he closed himself in, The Major once more checked the periscope. All was quiet.
He’d grown a slight beard over the past few days and wore a hooded sweatshirt and jeans pilfered from the nearby laundry. He opened the heavy door and listened. He heard nothing.
He turned up the hood and poked his head out, looking both ways. There was daylight coming through an open fire-exit door at the corner of the room, wagging in the wind. Trash skittered around the floor with each breeze.
Disarray. A good sign.
He shouldered his scoped Masada rifle, then grabbed his day-pack of canned provisions and water in liquor bottles, and took one more precautionary glance before exiting the bomb shelter. He got to the open fire door and peeked through the gap between the hinge and the door.
It was a cloudy day, but he cursed under his breath as he saw what obviously were darknet sentries still moving about on the walkways near the main house. One of them wore the telltale armor of a Daemon champion. They were all carrying darknet weaponry. There was no way he could exit unseen. And night would be no better, since he knew they’d have night vision. In fact, he’d be at a disadvantage.
The Major remained calm. He reached into his pack and produced a pair of quality HUD glasses along with spooled wire that led to an electronic enclosure.
In the closing days of Operation Exorcist, the Weyburn Labs team had made significant progress cracking into the encrypted Daemon darknet. Partial credit was due, of course, to Dr. Natalie Philips for her work at Building Twenty-Nine—where she proved the concept of darknet identity theft. But in order to use this network, they needed to own it. They had been well on their way to doing that—and The Major might soon be again.
His researchers had advanced past the need to keep a darknet operative medically alive in order to spoof them—they’d done better. They digitized the biometric data and created a unit that injected it into the standard darknet HUD glass sensors, replete with pulse sensor. All that was needed to steal a darknet operative’s identity with this system was their biometric data—fingerprints, iris scan, voice.
And The Major had given just that to the lab team.
As he powered up the unit and slipped the glasses on, he became Loki Stormbringer. He suddenly saw the HUD display first-person, instead of on a projection screen, and he saw darknet objects moving in a plane of augmented reality. They were all over the place. This was going to be a very interesting new world.
He walked with purpose out the storeroom door, ignoring the guards, and then kept walking briskly toward the distant guest bungalows. He gauged the houses were two miles away across slightly unkempt gardens and uncut lawns.
He kept his back turned to the guards and just kept walking. As the minutes ticked away and he estimated he was hundreds of yards from the main house, he felt the tension draining from him. He looked up at the sky with his new glasses.
He saw the call-outs of surveillance drones up there, thousands of feet in the sky. But he was one of them now. A member of the darknet. He also had four hundred thousand euros in his bag. It would be much needed since his accounts had all been emptied by Sobol’s Daemon. If only he hadn’t been greedy. But he still had some safe-deposit boxes in Zurich and Dubai.
And he could now steal all the darknet identities he needed. He suddenly frowned at Loki’s reputation score. It looked surprisingly like a half-star out of five. And what was this? It now looked like Loki was only a tenth-level Sorcerer.
What the hell?
No matter. This was only a temporary identity. The sky was the limit now. He was almost to the bungalows, and he could either head out on foot for the power station or try to obtain a vehicle legitimately from the darknet.
He risked a glance behind him, but there was no one in sight any longer. He was more than a mile from the main house.
He kept walking and chuckled to himself. Once he was clear of this place, he knew some hackers who could make very good use of this darknet identity theft technology. Very good use.
“Excuse me, Major.”