Freedom™ (Daemon #2)

by Daniel Suarez

“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”

These junior executives were always so earnest in their Savile Row suits. One was a pasty-white Brit, the other a Pakistani, also with an English accent. Probably graduates of the best schools. A wife and two young children at home—and no idea that there was video on file somewhere of them having sex with young women (or men) while they were on business in Panama, or Mali, or Brazil, or anywhere really. Get the footage while they’re up-and-coming—before they suspect anyone would care. Before they become powerful. These rich dynasties had been using offshore photo mills for decades to enforce loyalty with one another, their business partners, and their kids. Get them married, set them up as respectable people in the community. Pay them tons of money—but always get photos of them with underage hookers. The more perverse the better. It could pay huge dividends when they chaired a government committee or tried to go public with damaging information. Political ideology didn’t matter. They hosted junkets for left-wingers, right-wingers. The Major had cut his teeth on a Panama operation like that back in the late eighties, using cocaine and sex workers to generate potentially career-ending imagery that made the business world go round. Photoshop had pretty much ended the still picture side of the business by making photographs meaningless. High-def video was the only way to go now, and sooner or later computer graphics would do that in, too. Someone really had to come up with a s...

It was an unmarked Jeep Cherokee knockoff—what some of the expat Americans had taken to calling “Cheeps.”

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.

“Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.”

She took the envelope from him and felt the weight of it. There was a thick report inside. In her experience a document this heavy meant somebody had just spent several hundred million dollars.

Listen, you Ivy League prick, you don’t determine what is and isn’t authorized. Halperin isn’t your company, it’s the investors’ company. The last time I checked you didn’t found it. You’re not even a scientist. You’re just a trained business monkey that someone hired to crank an organ handle. So get back on our company jet like a good little monkey before someone sells you off for medical experiments.”

It changed the game for everyone, didn’t it? Not just me. I realized I couldn’t have long supply chains. It would punish me—and my competitors—for doing that. That’s a level playing field. The Destroy function it installed in our network is like a hand grenade pin that anyone can pull—a ticking clock forcing us to migrate to a more sustainable, less complex system. And besides . . .” He gestured to the machines around them. “This is the future. It makes no bloody sense to transport parts thousands of miles. Creating them to-order like this from raw materials—metal powders or Arboform granules—that’s the market, mate. There are other machines that can produce circuitry from printed, flexible material. It’s a bloody third Industrial Revolution, isn’t it?”

The sirens were winding down now, and he could see hundreds of darknet call-outs beyond the walls and hear the voice of Floyd_2, an ex-army officer that the darknet had automatically selected as civil defense commander, based on his reputation score and skill set.

“What are the rules of engagement, General?” “Fire on anything that approaches our lines by land or air.” “Anything?” “Let me make this clear: if a horse and buggy filled with orphans and nuns approaches a gate waving a white flag—open fire at four hundred yards and keep firing until those bitches are down.

Further Reading You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in Freedom™ through the following books: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, Beacon Press The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, Doubleday When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press & Berrett-Koehler Publishers The Transparent Society by David Brin, Basic Books Wired for War by P. W. Singer, Penguin Press The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio Brave New War by John Robb, John Wiley & Sons