Sebeck looked back up at the profusion of data above them. Beyond that loomed the Thread, still beckoning. For the first time he thought it might actually lead someplace he’d want to go.
A tanned couple walked up to Sebeck and Price. The man nodded in greeting. “Excuse me, guys.”
They turned to face him. The man was well-dressed with an oversized watch strapped to his wrist and a yin-yang tattoo on his forearm. He had his arm around a younger, attractive woman.
“Where did you guys get those sunglasses? I’ve been seeing them around, and I was wondering where I can pick up a pair.”
Sebeck just stared at him through the yellow-tinted HUD glasses. Floating above the guy’s head was a call-out indicating a net worth of -$103,039.
The man smiled. “They look kick-ass.”
Sebeck glanced at Price, who just shrugged. Sebeck turned back to the guy. “Trust me, you don’t want them.” With that he headed off in the direction of the Thread.
Price followed, but then glanced back at the man, gesturing at the guy’s invisible data. “Go easy with that Viagra prescription, Joe. It’s potent stuff.”
The man stopped cold as his girlfriend cast a puzzled look toward him. “Joe, do you know those guys?”
Chapter 6: // Waymeet
Darknet Top-rated Posts +95,383↑
At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition. Can we use the darknet to preserve representative democracy, or will we seek protection from brutal strong-men as the old order begins to fail?
Catherine_7***** / 3,393 17th-level Journalist
“That’ll be fourteen thirty-nine.” Pete Sebeck frowned. “That’s not right.”
He faced a lanky teenager in an ill-fitting franchise smock—one of the innumerable conscripts of the retail world. The kid glanced down at his computer screen and shrugged. “That’s what it is, sir. Fourteen thirty-nine.”
Sebeck leaned in against the counter. “Kid, I got a number two combo, and a number nine combo. What does that add up to?”
The cashier looked down at his computer screen. “Fourteen thirty-nine.”
“Stop looking at the screen and just think for a second.” He pointed at the wall-mounted menu. “How could a number two combo, at three ninety-nine, and a number nine combo, at five ninety-nine, add up to fourteen thirty-nine?”
“Sir, I’m just telling you what it is. If you don’t want them both—”
“Of course I want them both, but you’re not getting rid of me until you do the math.”
“I’m not trying to get rid of you, I’m just telling you that it’s fourteen thirty-nine.” He swiveled the screen so Sebeck could see it.
“It doesn’t matter what—Look, you’ve hit the wrong key or something.”
“You’re forgetting sales tax, sir.”
“No, I’m not forgetting sales tax. It shows sales tax there.” He pointed. “Listen, I want you to use your own mind for a second and think about this. Forget the machine.”
“But—”
“Three ninety-nine plus five ninety-nine is what?”
The kid started looking at the screen again.
“Listen to me! Don’t look at the screen. This is easy. Just round it up to four bucks plus six bucks—that’s ten bucks—then take away two pennies—that’s nine ninety-eight. Right?”
“You’re forgetting sales tax.”
“Kid, what’s five percent sales tax on ten bucks?”
“Sir—”
“Do it for me.”
“I don’t—”
“Do it! Just do it, goddamnit!” His shout echoed in the tiled restaurant.
People in the restaurant suddenly stopped talking and started watching what seemed to be an altercation.
“What is five percent sales tax on ten bucks?”
The kid started tapping at the machine. “I’ll need a manager to clear this.”
“Kid, do you really want machines doing all your thinking for you? Do you really want that?”
A balding assistant manager with a muscular frame emerged from the kitchen door. His name tag read “Howard.” “Is there a problem here?”
“Yeah, Howard, the kid has the price wrong, and I’m trying to get him to do the math.”
“And what did you order?”
“I ordered a number two and a number nine.”
The manager looked at the screen. “Okay, that’s fourteen thirty-nine.”
Howard was lucky Sebeck no longer carried a Taser.
Sebeck returned to the car with a carryout bag and two drinks. Laney Price was still refueling at the sprawling interstate travel center. There were at least twenty pump islands around them, brightly lit. Traffic hissed by on the nearby highway.
Price was using a squeegee to clean bugs off the windshield of the Chrysler 300 the Daemon had assigned them the day before. He seemed to notice the look on Sebeck’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Humanity is doomed, that’s what’s wrong.”
“Oh.” Price kept cleaning the windshield.
Sebeck tossed the food in the car and took over the refueling. “That was something Sobol knew, wasn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“That people will do whatever a computer screen tells them. I swear to god, you could run the next Holocaust from a fucking fast-food register.” He pantomimed aiming a pistol. “It says I should kill you now.”
“I see we’ve had another unsatisfactory consumer experience.”
“There are times when I miss the badge, Laney. I swear I miss it.”
“Why, so you can intimidate the shit out of teen slackers? Besides, what you’ve got now is something better—a quest icon. You’re like a knight of the realm now.”
“Just get in the car.”
Sebeck almost missed the turnoff. They were heading west on Interstate 40 about an hour outside of Albuquerque when his new Thread abruptly veered onto an exit ramp marked INDIAN SERVICE ROUTE 22. Sebeck was in the middle of taking a sip of bottled water when the turn came up on him, and he had to swerve one-handed from the fast lane onto the exit ramp, cutting across solid white lines just before an abutment.
He glanced over at the sleeping form of Laney Price, who stirred a bit but then settled back to sleep. Sebeck followed the glowing blue line superimposed on reality over a bridge that crossed the highway to arrive at a travel center where trucks and cars were clustered around gas stations, convenience stores, and ever-present fast-food outlets.
There in the middle of a parking lot his new Thread ended in a swirling aura of blue light, above a live human being this time—a woman standing next to a white passenger van. The van was parked in front of a Conoco convenience store.
It was not exactly the destination he’d envisioned—not that he had any clear idea what to expect. Sebeck parked the Chrysler facing forward in a row of cars across from the woman and peered through the freshly bug-spattered windshield at her.
She was a trim American Indian woman in her fifties with long gray hair braided into a plait. She wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a tan button-down shirt with some sort of logo on the breast pocket. She also wore slim, stylish HUD glasses, through which she was gazing directly at Sebeck. She looked like a Santa Fe art gallery owner. Her D-Space call-out marked her as Riley—a fourteenth-level Shaman. Riley’s reputation score was five stars out of five on a base factor of nine hundred three—which, if Sebeck had understood Price’s ramblings over the weeks, meant that she had an average review by nine hundred-plus darknet operatives who’d interacted with her of five stars out of five. She was apparently highly regarded—about what Sebeck didn’t know.
He turned off the engine and glanced over at the sleeping form of Price in the passenger seat. Sebeck pulled the keys from the ignition and stealthily opened the driver’s door. He didn’t feel like having his Daemon-assigned minder along for this conversation, so he placed the keys on the seat and quietly closed the car door behind him, checking that Price was asleep.