Chapter 33:// Response

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Sebeck’s Macabre Message—In a live interview with Anji Anderson Friday at Lompoc Federal Prison, Peter Sebeck, the ex–Ventura County Sheriff’s detective convicted in last year’s Daemon Hoax, directed a bizarre message to the late Matthew Sobol: “My message is this: I, Peter Sebeck, accept the Daemon.” Legal experts doubt a belated insanity defense will have any effect on Sebeck’s pending federal appeal.

In a dark storage room in a nondescript export company in the Huang Cun Industrial Zone of Dongguan City, China, a low-end server stood wedged between stacks of toner cartridges and counterfeit software packages. A long-forgotten CAT-5 cable ran from the back of the machine, snaking behind towering boxes containing yet more boxes, and terminated in a Fast-Ethernet jack just to the left of an overloaded electrical outlet—both lost to sight behind cases of Communist Party propaganda pamphlets, printed specifically for use as props in Western theme restaurants. The Ethernet jack ran in turn to the company network, which in turn led to the corporate Web server, which in turn led to the world.

The computer fan hummed as the machine used RSS to scan the contents of the same four hundred Web sites every minute. And at exactly seventeen minutes past midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, the machine stopped scanning.

The computer’s hard drive whined to life and started clicking feverishly—sending out packets to hundreds of IP addresses before committing digital suicide by erasing itself.

Another Daemon event had been triggered.