Regardless of Loki’s half-star reputation score, he knew that no one would question him. He was the leader of an infrastructure defense faction—an unpleasant job that frequently caused him to commandeer local darknet resources in defense of the network as a whole. Everyone knew he had to pass frequent fMRI scans to prove to the Daemon his actions were legitimate—aimed at defense of the Daemon’s constituent parts. So the opinions of fellow darknet operatives mattered little to Loki. The Daemon was all that mattered.
Another fact that swayed other operatives to comply was the network level shown on his call-out. Loki was a fifty-sixth-level Sorcerer, and the most powerful operative in North America—possibly the world. It was hard to know, really, since operatives above fiftieth level could employ power masking. But Loki wanted everyone to see his power.
As Loki brought his huge pickup and trailer rig through the sleepy town’s main street—if such a loose collection of a dozen houses could be called a town—he marveled at what some people accepted as living. The downtown consisted of a single convenience store, a weather-beaten gas station, and a down-in-the-mouth auto-parts store. Loki knew the big-box stores thirty miles off near the interstate had killed most of the local businesses. He imagined the auto-parts store survived primarily because you couldn’t get to the big-box stores if your car was broken down. With gas rising past six dollars a gallon, that dynamic would likely change soon—as would the shipment of cheap, plentiful parts from China.
Beyond the old commercial center of Garnia, there were new businesses sprouting, and ironically much of that life seemed to be sprouting out of the same shipping containers that had helped to destroy the local economy in the first place. The multicolored corrugated-metal boxes littered the landscape, and as Loki drove through the edge of town, he could see darknet operatives pulling lumber, aluminum beams, and construction equipment from them. He also saw the flash of welding coming from within several—mobile fabrication workshops. Loki had seen it before. Local faction leadership had no doubt pooled their resources to call down a construction kit from the network. They’d have to return it to the network pool when they were done, but there were a hundred operatives out there in the fields building homes, businesses, and setting up farms to serve as the center of a new holon. Trying to recolonize America with something that didn’t have a 30 percent interest rate and a forty-five-minute commute attached to it.
Loki just observed them as he came in. Living in such a place was Loki’s idea of Hell. He hoped that there would always be enemies like The Major to stalk, for he dreaded the day he would need to stop hunting and settle down to actually become part of the Daemon’s infrastructure. Defending it was much more to his liking.
As he expected, the several low- to mid-level operatives he passed on the way in didn’t wave to the most powerful sorcerer they’d ever laid eyes on. Loki’s darknet reputation preceded him. The sorcerer with a half-star reputation ranking—meaning that anyone who had ever dealt with him had found him lacking in almost all socially redeeming qualities. A sorcerer who traveled with a personal retinue of twenty razorbacks and no humans—when summoning a single razorback for a limited period of time was a major undertaking for a typical midlevel operative. Neither did they seem to appreciate Loki’s over-the-top rig. Still, they could go fuck themselves with their four- and five-star reputation rankings. Loki was doing the dirty work of the network, and they should be grateful that people like him existed. Loki was happy to live among his machines and his network bots. He didn’t need the company of his fellow man. Mankind had always been a disappointment.
But he did need their labor. And that’s what he’d come to Garnia to claim. He gestured with his gloved hand and pulled some of the local fabricators and mechanics off their priority-two and -three jobs to place them onto his priority-one job: repairing the blade assemblies of three razorbacks and replacing missing blades that he’d left in the back of a mercenary colonel in Oklahoma—a Ghanaian. The guy had been staying in a Holiday Inn, obviously waiting for something. There were forces afoot in the land, and that meant the network was under threat. Loki didn’t care that these locals were building the twenty-first-century equivalent of a homestead. He was claiming the right of an infrastructure defense faction—the right of a lord to commandeer for the common good. He didn’t need to be nice about it.
Loki pulled his rig into a gravel lot behind the gas station, and there near the entrance to an unmarked assembly of container fabrication shops, Loki could see several darknet operatives staring in wide-eyed amazement at what someone could manage to wring from the darknet. Loki’s setup was so over-the-top it was as though a rockstar’s tour bus had pulled in. He opened the door to his cab and dropped three feet to the ground—his steel hobnailed boots clanging into the stones. He wore black jeans and a numbered racing shirt, beneath which he wore—as always—the haptic vest that kept him in continual contact with the networked world, as well as his shimmering electronic contact lenses, which allowed him to see into D-Space without the need to wear glasses—ten thousand darknet credits. It had been worth it. He was looking forward to the day when they’d be able to surgically implant sensors. The newly available tattooed circuitry had looked interesting, but it didn’t provide the full-skin coverage that a haptic vest could.
Loki pulled a racing cap onto his head and walked along the length of his trailer. He could feel the messages reaching him from his stable of razorbacks. They were like restless war stallions, and he maintained a constant link to them. They were his familiars. The only friends he wanted near him. He felt affection for his loyal mechanical beasts.
He could have summoned more razorbacks and sent these back into the public pool, but he’d grown fond of these specific machines. It was a form of animism that he couldn’t readily reconcile with the logical side of himself. He’d examined the source code of these machines and knew they were just automatons. But the human in him wanted them to be more and had him reading between the lines of their source code.
Loki “felt” an eighteenth-level Fabricator named Sledge, leader of the Advitam faction, approaching from some ways away. And he’d also observed a great deal of message traffic about his truck’s arrival. They were talking about him here.
“Afternoon, Loki. This is a hell of a battle wagon you’ve got here.”
Loki barely looked up. “I’ve got damaged razorbacks.”
“Yeah, we got the message. It’s good to see you’re in the area. There are gangs operating around here—burning homesteads and beating up darknet folks.”
Loki just stared at the guy. He was young—perhaps in his mid-twenties. “Why on earth would you want to start a darknet community in this place?”
Sledge shrugged. “Grew up around here. It’ll be good to live near my folks again. I was working in Indianapolis before this. Same for a lot of these other guys.”
Loki said nothing but kept looking around at all the work going on in the town.
“You’re on the trail of The Major, aren’t you?”
Loki turned to Sledge and narrowed his mother-of-pearl eyes. “Has he been through here?”