It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter
Chapter 10

The road was dead straight. They could see for miles, and an eerie breeze was starting to whip the dust across the asphalt.

David was asleep across the back seats, Jeopardy was dozing with her head lolling against the headrest in the passenger seat. Thorner was tired and his back ached. They had stopped intermittently by the side of the road for various people to piss and stretch out, but the long drive was taking its toll. The old Volvo's seats were sagging and threadbare, any semblance of lumbar support long since decayed.

Conversation had been as sparse as the landscape. It had given Thorner more time to think, something he didn't really need. The others had been stuck to their arm pieces, their pupils reflecting back scrolling news feeds and status updates. David spent hours playing some kind of game, which involved firing bubbles at jewels - it was asinine. When challenged on it, he reported that his profile stated he was a big fan, and had a high score. He pointed out that if he stopped playing all of a sudden, it would be incongruent, so Thorner had to put up with the bleeps and squeaks of David's score increasing, a database table somewhere thousands of miles away being incremented, benefitting nobody, creating nothing.

They had been tracking the news constantly for updates on Griffen's activity, as well as homing in on his avatar and tracking its progress across the map. They were closing on each other, like a matador and his bull. As the two icons crept imperceptibly towards each other, so the tension in the Volvo increased.

So far there were still no reported visuals, even though the Tanner Griffen manhunt seemed to be big news - today at least. No doubt tomorrow there would be another killing, kidnapping, torturing - something horrific to keep people in a permanent state of fear. Corporate greed, espionage, sabotage, tax evasion, dirty dealings and fat bonuses were relegated to one-line items on the more obscure news reels. They just didn't sell, so nobody was really interested. A stream of numbers just wasn't as sexy as a photograph of a fresh cadaver.

Griffen had continued to travel east, at roughly the same speed. They were travelling west, much slower, but had managed to get onto the same road. They estimated they would come face to face with him in about three hours.

Jeopardy roused from her sleep, her head rolled round to face Thorner and her eyes were wide, taking her bearings. "Where are we?"

"We're on Route 40 right now," replied Thorner.

"Is he still on this road?"

"You tell me."

Jeopardy checked her arm piece. "Yep, we're heading straight for him."

"What exactly is our plan, by the way - when we catch up to him?" asked Thorner.

"Stop him, first of all. Find out some answers. Why he killed the senator, who was paying him, where he's going now."

"And after this little chat - what?"

Jeopardy sighed. "You're quite melodramatic, aren't you Thorner?"

"I'm old fashioned. I think murder is pretty melodramatic."

"Whatever."

"Do you think you'll be able to kill him? By all reports he made short work of Big Joe and his man Friday."

"Don't worry about me, Thorner. I can handle myself."

"I don't doubt it."

"What the... what is that?" It was David, who had awakened unbeknownst to either of them, and who now stuck his head between the front seats. He was pointing out of the windshield.

They followed his finger. In the distance, on the road, was what looked like a huge pile of twisted metal, glinting in the afternoon sun.

"Shit," intoned Jeopardy.

Thorner looked at her. "Trouble?"

"Yup. Roadblock. Out here, most likely Freemen."

"Who or what are Freemen?"

Jeopardy was already pulling weapons from her belt and loading them. "The Freemen, half biker gang, half crazed cult. Lead by Dankar Freeman, total fucking lunatic."

"Shit. I mean... shit," panicked David from the back seat. "Give me a weapon."

Jeopardy ignored him.

"What shall I do?" asked Thorner.

"They've seen us now, probably been tracking us all night. Just keep driving, we'll try and wing it."

Thorner tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The sun was now smouldering at the bottom of the light cloud cover. The roadblock was getting nearer much faster than he had time to think about a plan of action.

"How many of them? Armed?"

"No idea," responded Jeopardy curtly. "They're off-Gridders, fervently so. They won't show up on anything, pointless even looking. You'll like these guys, Thorner - they're just like you." There was little humour in her voice. She sounded scared, which just made Thorner all the more terrified. He felt old, unarmed and unprepared.

As they got closer to the roadblock it became clear that what had from a distance looked like a pile of twisted metal was actually a collection of vehicles, adorned with scrap metal spikes and poles, like giant barbed wire on wheels. Every vehicle was unrecognisable, such was the level of customisation and vandalism effected on each. Covered in rust and in very poor repair, they were still ruggedly effective for these kinds of ambushes.

As they neared, a man jumped down from the flatbed of one of the trucks and started walking towards them, his hand raised in a 'halt' signal. He was tall, skinny, and heavily tattooed. Long blonde hair sprouted from his head seemingly at random and he was clad in chunks of dark brown leather, which was itself daubed with spray paint splashes and the logos of automotive parts manufacturers. His weaselly face sported an amused sneer and his left forearm had a sawn-off shotgun strapped to it where an arm piece would normally be.

Thorner slowed to a stop in front of the man, who walked casually to the driver's side door and bent over to knock on the window with his weapon. The electric window button did nothing when Thorner pressed it, so he wound it down manually. A stubbly, sun-browned face filled the window.

"'Ello. May I ask what you are doin'?" his tone was one of mock friendliness, which didn't fool any of them. Thorner was about to speak when Jeopardy saved him.

"We want to get past. We're on our way to Oklahoma City."

"Oh yeah?" the man grunted and spat on the road. He turned back to the car. His breath stank of chemicals. "Well, see - I don't think that's gonna happen today. You lot, as they say, are now royally fucked. You, this car, and everything in it now belong to the Freemen. Think of it as a toll for using our road for the last 300 miles."

"Your road?" asked Thorner, and instantly regretted it. He could feel Jeopardy tense as soon as he'd finished the sentence.

The gang member looked frustrated, then nodded and in one swift movement wrenched the car door open, pulled Thorner out of his seat and threw him onto the road. Thorner landed painfully on his shoulder and right side. Before he could get back to his feet, the Freeman had swung and landed a solid right hook to his temple. Thorner crumpled and covered up.

Jeopardy had jumped out of the passenger side and had her hands in the air. "Okay! Okay! Calm down, we get it. Car is yours, we don't have anything with us - check if you want."

"I fuckin' do want, missy! Get the gimp out of the back seat and shut the fuck up."

Jeopardy pulled David out of the far door. He was mute and wide-eyed but beyond that, his mood was unreadable.

The gang member marched to the back of the Volvo and threw open the trunk. He pulled out the three rucksacks and threw them back towards the roadblock, where another gang member scurried to collect them. Jeopardy and David darted out of his way as he stomped around the car to the passenger side door, reached in and ransacked the glove compartment, which was full of trash and nothing else.

Looking back towards the barricade, Jeopardy now saw that the vehicles were festooned with Freemen. All dressed similarly to the man currently dissecting the borrowed Volvo. Some had face paint, all were heavily armed. They looked like an African tribe who had discovered huffing paint thinners was fun. Scrawny, wiry bodies missing ears and fingers, bristling with knives and guns. They were watching silently, as if waiting for something.

Their assailant had finished roughly ransacking the Volvo, and finding nothing he could drink or sniff was duly upset.

"You fuckin' skeezes. Why you going to Okie? Answer me!"

Thorner was still down, groaning quietly. Jeopardy looked the Freeman in the eye. "Visiting friends."

"Visiting friends," parroted the Freeman, in a mocking tone. "Fuckin' bullshit. Get in that truck over there." He motioned to the nearest truck, a modified camper van with no roof. He whistled and another member of the group jogged over and jumped behind the wheel of the Volvo.

Jeopardy picked up Thorner and helped him across to the camper and they climbed inside. Another Freeman, this one short and stubby but just as aggressive, demanded their arm pieces. David and Jeopardy gave theirs up grudgingly. The Freeman threw the devices into a nearby flatbed truck, giving them the deference of roadkill. He then searched both of Thorner's arms and came up with nothing, which gave him pause like a gorilla seeing a television for the first time. A walkie-talkie on his belt chirped and fuzzed.

Up close, the Freemen smelled worse as a group - a mixture of household cleaning products, sweat, gasoline and excrement. A giant of a man sat on the remnants of the roof at the front of the camper and casually span the barrel of his revolver as he looked them over.

Someone in the group whistled and the roadblock lurched into life, splitting up slowly like a melting iceberg to become a dozen chugging, vibrating trucks and cars.

They travelled in a convoy off the road and over the cracked, dusty earth. At the head of the collection of random, barely-functional utility vehicles, Dankar Freeman sat in the passenger seat of a decaying flatbed truck. A huge man, large of bones but powerfully muscled under a thick layer of fat, his dark skin glistened like a ripe olive. His head was shaved to the skin and shone in the midday sun. White face paint and black tattoos gave him a mottled, almost camouflaged appearance. He was dressed in the same patchwork of black and brown leather as the other gang members, his heavy spiked biker boots propped on the dashboard.

Dankar used to be an engineer, and a very good one back when he was Dankar Odebe. He had lived a contented and uneventful thirty-nine years working hard and bringing home a pay check until one day six years ago he saw a speech by Senator Joe Rigsby on a video stream. It provoked some kind of an awakening in him. The child of deeply religious parents, now both dead, he harboured some long-standing guilt about abandoning their faith but saw nowhere in the modern world where he could make amends for this. Senator Rigsby's words targeted that part of his brain responsible for sublimation to a higher power and the rest of his journey seemed automatic.

He moved out of his family home, after putting his arm piece in the microwave and setting it to 'high' for ten minutes. He left behind a wife and a young son in order to follow Senator Joe around the Midwest and east coast, always in the front row of his speaking engagements, staring intently at him and nodding at every point he made. Dankar got so well versed in Big Joe's rhetoric that he could mouth many of his speeches along with him as he gave them.

But being off-Grid himself didn't seem like enough and before long Dankar was organising off-Grid sit-ins in squats and abandoned buildings. Attendances were not large at first, until he had a revelation and took his crusade out of the densely packed cities and out into the suburbs, and then the countryside. When people weren't quite so tightly packed together, it was easier to be truly off the OraCorp radar and people felt more at ease speaking their minds, knowing that their geo-location data didn't track them directly into and out of a building as part of a regular pattern.

The quality of attendees, however, disappointed Dankar. Whackjobs, conspiracy theorists, runaways, junkies and criminals - it was all far from the religious utopia he had originally envisioned. Rigsby's message was fine up to a point, but in Dankar's opinion he didn't go far enough, he didn't deliver these new free souls back to God. So, Dankar took it upon himself to convert these off-Grid co-conspirators to the word of God, using a mishmash of ancient Catholic dogma and vague spiritualism, and he filled in the gaps with good old-fashioned fire and brimstone preaching.

It was much more difficult that he expected. The problem with being off-Grid for a long period of time, and outside of civilisation to the extent that was necessary to evade investigation from government or company forces, was that humans tended to revert to base, primal archetypes. These were exacerbated by the poor backgrounds most of them had endured. Thus, violence, murder, rape and crime followed his God-fearing troupe wherever they went. At first, Dankar was appalled and petitioned for calm and righteousness, but within a few months decided to take the line of least resistance. He started instead to justify any action his disciples made as being the hand of God, smiting those worshipping the false idol of the Grid. Retribution, then, for turning their back on the God he had rediscovered.

So this was the life he now led - committing highway robbery out in the dusty plains, relieving the unsuspecting of their high-end consumer goods and bartering or selling them for supplies and energy cells. Dressing like savages, living in filth and decay, nomadic - all these sacrifices were worth it for Dankar Freeman.

Thorner, Jeopardy and David didn't speak, but instead exchanged worried glances. While they weren't tied up or restrained in any way, they each knew that flight would be futile from such heavily armed captors. They watched the beige landscape crackle past until a farmhouse and outbuildings loomed on the horizon, surrounded by yet more vehicles.

The camper rustled to a stop in a plume of dust and grit. The fat Freeman jumped down and roughly manhandled them out of the camper, pointing his revolver at them with a splintered grin on his face. He spat some coarse slang into his radio. They were ushered towards the farmhouse, then around it to the rear, where a garden once was - now neglected, overgrown and desperate-looking. It looked like a family photograph left out in the sun to fade. At the far side of the garden was a child's swing set, built from tubular steel and heavily augmented with vehicle parts, a sports car's bucket seat and with various blades and tools welded around it to create a kind of rude metal throne.

Already sat on this throne, perhaps three feet above the ground, was Dankar Freeman. As they were prodded towards him, he stepped down from the swing set and folded his arms. A large machete swung at his waist.

"Welcome!" he bellowed.

"That's Freeman," Jeopardy whispered to Thorner.

"So, what do we have here? Jenkins, you found them?" he didn't look at the scrawny gang member who originally stopped their car, but Jenkins answered anyway, from behind them.

"Yeah I sure did boss. We'd tailed 'em for a few hundred miles down the road, figured they were in need of conversion."

Freeman nodded and started to pace in front of them. "You know who I am?"

Jeopardy once again took the role of unofficial spokesperson. "You're Dankar Freeman, leader of the Freemen."

"That's right, girlie. Do you know why I had you brought here?"

The group stood silent, assuming it was a rhetorical question. It wasn't.

"Well? Answer me when I ask you a question." His manner was schoolmasterly, but severely threatening. His thick patois accent seemed fake, but gave him the air of a third world dictator.

Jeopardy eyeballed him, showing no fear. "You're going to rob us of the few possessions we have, then kill us, I expect."

Dankar laughed uproariously. "Girlie! You must have heard some bad stories about Mr Freeman and his friends, yes?"

Jeopardy said nothing. Dankar shook his head in amusement.

"I might kill you. I might." He paced some more, looked up underneath his brow at them. "But I really want you here to save you, we'll see how that goes eh?"

"Save us? From what?" The fog had lifted from Thorner's head and he was starting to feel annoyed. Nothing annoyed him more than people not killing him when he was expecting them to.

"Old man! You can talk! Ha ha ha... tell me your name."

His temple throbbed to a beat that was slowly increasing in tempo. "Henry Thorner."

"Nice to meet you Henry Thorner, can you please introduce me to your friends?"

Thorner saw no reason to be secretive at this point. "This is David Wilkinson, and this is uh... Jeopardy."

Freeman made an uninterested face, and carried on. "The world today, Thorner - the world is fucked. When we found you out there on the road, you were lost."

David looked like he was going to deny this, but thought better of it.

"You were lost! Just like everyone else out there. We've already helped you take the first step towards being found by removing those evil windows to oblivion from your bodies!" Thorner took a moment to realise Freeman meant the arm pieces.

"Everybody is glued to those things, they only experience life through the updates, through the data. They don't feel life anymore. We are the Freemen! We are free from the shackles of OraCorp and their repugnant death grip on our identities and our souls, and our relationships and our love! You see?"

Thorner didn't really see. He didn't see how being off-Grid naturally equated to not washing and kidnap and robbery and murder.

"Look around you, Henry Thorner. No connections, no wireless, no satellites - we are truly free! Where we go is our choice, and the only people who know about it are the people we meet. We make our own choices and nobody tells us what to do! Those devices on your wrists are the devil's grip, leading you to sin and damnation!"

Jeopardy kicked her toe in the dirt, starting to look dangerously bored. Their weapons had not been taken from them, which struck Thorner as strange. Perhaps the fact that it was only Jeopardy, a young girl, who was bearing weapons left the gang feeling reasonably secure - plus, the Freemen were armed to the teeth and vastly outnumbered them. Thorner was wondering if Jeopardy was about to do something drastic and took the opportunity to turn Freeman's diatribe into a conversation and get back to somewhere near his comfort zone.

"Mr Freeman," he began, "your men may not have told you this, but I also have no profile, never had one. I wasn't wearing an arm piece when your colleague picked us up. I'm curious as to how you got to be so... uh... marginalised? I mean, nobody is forcing you to have an Ora profile, and while it's inconvenient, you can live a normal life in society without one, I'm living proof of that."

A darkness descended over Freeman's mood. "You think we want to live like this? Like animals, out in the desert, scrounging for food and hiding in old buildings? Shitting on the ground?" he took a few steps towards Thorner and stood towering over him. Thorner could smell gasoline, sweat and hashish. "You might think you're free, Henry Thorner, but all the time you're in the city, surrounded by the infected, you're just as monitored as if you had your own ident. Don't kid yourself! You can't walk down the street without people checking you in, putting a visual on you, tagging you in the background of a photograph. You think the system doesn't know you? Don't be a fucking child, Henry Thorner. You think the heart doesn't know about the liver? If you're in the belly of the system you are part of the system. You might be the space between the data, but the space is what gives the data its form, do you understand?"

Thorner looked down. He did understand, and in a way Freeman had a point. He was always just one phone call to Linda away from being able to use the massive power of the information Grid. Even though it was by proxy, his connection to that vast treasure trove was complicit and absolute. He wouldn't even have found Kruke and Griffen without a simple Ora lookup.

"Maybe you're right, Mr Freeman. Maybe I'm taking the easy way out of being outside of the system, but I don't hurt people in the process. You and your... people, you steal and you kidnap and I don't even know what else. How are you making society a better place by scavenging from it?"

Freeman looked amused, entertained. Thorner got the impression he was enjoying the cat and mouse game that their conversation had become. "Okay Henry Thorner, let me tell you something right now. We do what we have to do to survive. We didn't make the rules of this so-called society. The people we steal from are already lost, they're pawns of OraCorp, so when we steal from them we steal from the corporation. Every one of them sold their rights as people away when they accepted the Ora terms and conditions. We give them the opportunity to join us and live as free men, but if they are happy to be meek little sheep, then the wolves will keep on snatching them in the night until they decide to evolve. We are the evolution, Henry Thorner! We will chew on the system from around the edges until infection takes hold, mark my words!"

Thorner looked around the garden at the thirty or so filthy, scrawny specimens dressed in trash. "This is the hope for mankind's future? This is what everyone has to look forward to? Becoming a desert thug, on the run from Sec for some petty theft or other?"

"Henry Thorner, you do not understand! Sec don't know we exist. They can't track us, we talk to each other on these," he brandished the old radio walkie-talkie tied to his belt with a length of bungee cord, "nobody uses radio waves anymore, they belong to us! We are like ghosts, when we are gone we leave no trace."

Thorner was almost starting to feel sorry for Freeman and his faithful flock. "But, if we're being tracked, those arm pieces you stole from us will lead Sec right to your door."

Freeman was unfazed. "Sec aren't tracking you. If they were, you wouldn't have been so easy for us to watch you and catch you. Besides, your geo-data just shows you paying a visit to an empty deserted farmhouse, that's all."

"What if you're wrong? What if the absence of biometric life signs triggers a warning?"

"Then Sec show up, two men at the most. We kill them, strip their vehicle of useful parts and bury their bodies in the desert. Sec are like wasps, you kill one and then more flock to the dying creature's last calls. As soon as we're over the horizon, we no longer exist."

"So you're always on the run."

"Hmmm, no. We like to think of it as always on the move. What's the point of being tied down to one place anyway? Sooner or later civilisation will come to you, swallow you up and take away your privacy and your rights as a human being. Better to go where you will, live free and smell the air like God intended."

"So you really think God has a part in this?"

"Of course Henry Thorner! Everything is for God's glory! You think God wanted us to live your way, worshipping those false idols strapped to your arms? No!" Freeman was becoming more and more demonstrative. The beat in Thorner's temple got stronger and faster - he could see it now at the edges of his vision. Sweat ran down his back underneath his overcoat.

"How do you know God doesn't want us to be this tightly connected? How can you be sure the Grid isn't part of his master plan to bring humanity closer together?"

Freeman smiled, giving Thorner the impression he'd answered this question many times. "God does not live in the Grid, he cannot live there in the digital jungle, there is no soul there, no humanity. It's a gathering of zeroes and ones and nothing else. The people connect using Ora but it's not a real connection, it's flimsy... superficial. They no longer go to church, apart from to log on to the Grid and ignore each other."

Thorner thought back to the Reverend and his conversation with him. The Reverend was resigned to the new world order, he knew God had left the building, replaced with the multiple glowing eyes of the Grid. He'd accepted it, made the most of it, welcomed the same people in to his house as before, but now the landlord was absent. Freeman on the other hand seemed to think he was living under God's gaze, sleeping under the stars, fully exposed to His love once again.

"So," asked Thorner, "the way you see it, God never went away, humanity did?"

"Yes, that's right. God still loves every one of his children, even those who have turned their back on him. They sit in God's house and immerse themselves in this abomination, we couldn't expect Him to stay in those old crumbling buildings - they were just meeting places anyway. Now, God doesn't look in the city, in the churches. He sees only those of us who are looking up at the heavens, and forsakes those who look down at their wrist screens."

David and Jeopardy were getting restless. They weren't enjoying listening to Thorner and Freeman's theological discussion. It was hot under the thick afternoon sun and they still had guns pointed at them.

"Okay, so what's your plan Freeman? What if we don't want to be converted?"

"Huh. That would be a shame, but your car is a good runner, we'd take that. If you really have denied God and His love, then he has no use for you and neither do we and we will kill you and bury your bodies in the desert along with all the rest."

Thorner looked at Jeopardy. She looked intensely annoyed. "That's not much of a choice, we'll choose conversion."

"Excellent!" boomed Freeman. "Men! Ready the ceremony!"

There was a flurry of activity. The Freemen scuttled around like insects, busying themselves. Jeopardy's belt was taken from her, along with the weapons fixed to it. Thorner was frisked and his overcoat removed, which he was grateful for in the short term. David was frisked also, but in a more perfunctory manner due to his unassuming appearance. The Freemen laughed at his clothes and mocked his silence.

Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were led inside the mercifully cool house. It was dilapidated. Portions of the first floor had fallen through and lay either in the middle of rooms, or swept roughly to the side. The whole place felt structurally unsound and smelled of urine and rot. Judging by the state of the place, the Freemen had been based here for some time - trash and discarded food wrappers covered every available surface.

The three of them were taken to what used to be the dining room. It was the least untidy room they'd seen and was devoid of furniture. In the centre of the room was a threadbare rug, like a magic carpet with the magic long beaten out of it. In front of it was a makeshift altar, created from furniture that had been smashed and then nailed roughly together again.

They were each thrown to their knees in a line facing the altar and told to wait. A skeleton-like member of the congregation stood in the corner of the room, by the door, with a badly maintained looking revolver gripped in each hand. He was young, perhaps still a teenager. There was a dense, pregnant silence.

"Hey," Jeopardy suddenly said over her shoulder, "what's this ceremony all about?"

The guard seemed unwilling to speak.

"Come on, I think we deserve a little prep time, you know what I mean?"

The guard cleared his throat and spoke quietly, nervously. "The ceremony is a great honour. To be converted by Dankar Freeman himself - you should be humbled."

"Did he convert you?" said Jeopardy, still not looking at their captor.

"Yes!" the young man became animated, "I was fortunate enough to be saved by Mr Freeman just two years ago, he made me see the error of my ways, how shallow my life had been!"

"What was your life like before you joined the Freemen?"

"Oh, terrible. Horrible. I was living in the sour bosom of so-called civilisation, going to school, following the commands of my arm piece unquestioningly. I was so concerned about getting good grades so I could become a programmer for OraCorp, I lost my soul! I was an empty shell, my relationships with others were digital, disconnected. I was lost."

Jeopardy continued her line of questioning. "So, you were getting good grades, on target for a cushy job for the biggest employer in the world, and this guy comes up and convinces you to go with him to live in the wilderness eating rats?"

"Show more respect!" spat the Freeman. "Dankar spotted me on the street, I was walking without looking where I was going, absorbed in my arm piece like a slave, and he stopped me from walking into traffic. I would be dead today if it wasn't for him! Straight away he started to tell me about his mission, about his vision for the new world free of the shackles of corporate control, free from their scrutiny and their judgment! I left the very next day and went on the road with him. It was the best decision of my entire life."

The boy's tone was reverent, sincere. He had the fervour of a true religious fanatic. Jeopardy thought that whatever Dankar was, he was definitely very good at it.

"So this ceremony, can you tell me about it?"

The boy paused, obviously this was against his orders. "All I can say is, you will be cleansed. Dankar will demand that you throw away all trappings of your previous life, all technology must be surrendered to him. Then he will speak words of wisdom to you, and if you are truly saved, you may get the chance to join us."

Jeopardy tried to suppress her sarcasm. "Well, that would be... great," she said.

The door of the room opened, and a muttered conversation took place that none of them could make out. When the door closed again, the young guard was silent, obviously chastised for conversing with the prisoners. The ceremony was about to begin.

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