Page 135 - Hunter the Vigil - Mortal Remains

CHAPTER FIVE: TO HELL AND BACK

The problem isn’t the vampires pulling the strings of legis- house from the city’s old money residents. He’s often courted
lators or the werewolves preying on our youth in the streets. The by charities. But William Horn doesn’t believe in charity. He be-
problem is the system that allows those things to happen. The lieves in earning your place, and the place he’s planning to earn
hierarchy we’ve been born into, that we’re expected to perpetu- will blow everybody’s minds.
ate. In order to reform society, we need to disrupt it, the way a The first step in Horn’s master plan is to build a floating
startup with moxie topples a tech giant. Most of the monsters town off the coast of northern California — essentially, a network
are symptoms of the real problem. They need to be treated, but of boats that will form a neighborhood, then the beginnings of a
the disease is civilization-wide. It’s time for a new order. city. His utopia will be founded on principles of self-governance
It’s time for Utopia Now. and self-sufficiency. The individual modules of his floating
Government as we know it — the military environment will be able to produce goods for
complex, the nanny state, the intelligence themselves with 3-D printing and other cut-
agencies — it’s all outdated. New tech- ting-edge advances. The technology’s
nology has the potential to free us there to create things like complex
from those restraints, to build aquatecture, wireless network-
communities independent ing, and so on. The problem,
of traditional nation-states. however, is that there’s no
Truth is, though, the tech way for an upstart commu-
isn’t all there yet. That’s nity like this to be truly
why Utopia Now needs self-sufficient. The pow-
to develop it. And the er would have to come
best part is: they can from somewhere, and
salvage it from the building adequate
existing nation state’s medical infrastructure
festering wounds. in limited space is a
Utopia Now was problem.
founded by William That’s why
Horn, a Witness who Horn’s grand design
saw the demonic forces revolves around finding
behind the ailing tech be- institutional demons,
hemoth he worked for. He exorcising them, and then
uncovered the existence of scavenging their infrastruc-
institutional demons, and de- ture, the secret processors,
termined that the only way to get reactors, and so on that provide
away from them would be to build a the demonic soul with its power.
world free of those diseased institutions. Who knows? He might even discover
He went back to school. He got a PhD and re- that some of the demons’ conceptual powers
cruited his fellow students to form a mobile app start- can be dismantled and used. It’d be awfully handy to
up. He found venture capitalists. And Horn succeeded the way draw prosperity by using a piece of a demon of greed, or recover
everyone else dreams of. Now, he’s a respected entrepreneur who faster from a gunshot wound by visiting a demonic hospital.
lives in Pacific Heights, the once-exclusive San Francisco neigh- Horn’s goal is a perfect example of the startup thinking he
borhood where new tech billionaires are taking over house by admires and is well on his way to mastering: taking bits of the

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