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22 Sysadmins Ruled the Earth</I></FONT></FONT></P>
25 Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection “Overclocked: Stories
26 of the Future Present,” published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division
27 of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons
28 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you’ll
29 find more at the end of this file.</P>
31 other stories in the volume are available at:</P>
34 at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:</P>
35 <P CLASS="western" STYLE="margin-bottom: 0in">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20</P>
37 Guthrie:</P>
39 Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of
40 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will
41 be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish
42 it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s
43 all we wanted to do.”</P>
45 dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.</P>
48 Sysadmins Ruled the Earth</I></P>
50 every two or three years ever since I dropped out of university in
51 1990, and one of the best gigs I ever had was working as a freelance
52 systems administrator, working in the steam tunnels of the
53 information age, pulling cables, configuring machines, keeping the
54 backups running, kicking the network in its soft and vulnerable
55 places. Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if
56 they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs, or engaging in
57 unprofessional email conduct it’s purely out of their own goodwill.</P>
59 myth that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war; while
60 that Strangelove wet-dream was undoubtedly present in the hindbrains
61 of the generals who greenlighted the network’s R&D at companies
62 like Rand and BBN, it wasn’t really a big piece of the actual
63 engineering and design.</P>
65 make for a compelling scenario, this vision of the sysadmins in their
66 cages around the world, watching with held breath as the generator
67 failed and the servers went dark, waiting out the long hours until
68 the power and the air run out.
69 </P>
71 appeared in Baen’s Universe Magazine, an admirable, high-quality
72 online magazine edited by Eric Flint, himself a talented writer and a
73 passionate advocate for open and free culture.</P>
75 heard this story as it was written, read aloud in serial chinks after
76 each composing session. The pressure of listeners writing in,
77 demanding to know what happened next, kept me honest and writing.</P>
80 the Earth</I></P>
84 phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him
85 in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking
86 thing off before bed?”</P>
88 call,” he said.</P>
90 fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s
91 edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning
94 said.</P>
96 government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s
97 sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle
98 of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t
99 answer that phone.”</P>
101 He answered the phone.</P>
103 responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the
104 systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it
105 made him feel a little better.</P>
107 from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and
108 reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own
109 independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.</P>
111 bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years
112 of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from
113 here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the
114 time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she
115 didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that
116 showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving
117 out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—AKA Felix’s
118 Law.</P>
120 Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from
121 home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last
122 time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven
123 a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix
124 had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the
125 resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who
128 twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the
129 mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more
130 critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.</P>
133 can hear the cringe in your voice.”</P>
135 involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”</P>
137 she said.</P>
139 bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”</P>
141 she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and
142 when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office,
144 calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little
145 bastard was born to suck tit.”</P>
147 you,” he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2AM.
148 He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He
149 didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.</P>
151 me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have
152 three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid
153 your dues.”</P>
155 asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.</P>
157 she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you
158 most at night.”</P>
161 angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”</P>
165 that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues.
166 From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”</P>
168 don’t take holidays.”</P>
170 said. “Promise.”</P>
174 he said.</P>
176 she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center
177 lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal
178 scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.</P>
180 machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of
181 lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed
182 down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his
183 hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted
184 the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he
185 passed finally to the inner sanctum.</P>
187 cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around
188 them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to
189 humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them
190 were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular
191 convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies
192 overlapping belts with phones and multitools.</P>
194 practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were
195 overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and
196 grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded
197 his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in
198 the back of the room.</P>
200 Van, who wasn’t on call that night.</P>
202 here?” he asked. “No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow.”</P>
205 up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was
206 coming down—spared you the trip.”</P>
208 box he shared with five other friends—was in a rack one floor down.
209 He wondered if it was offline too.</P>
212 attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows
213 box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block,
214 including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over
215 v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous
216 probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down.
217 DNS is screwy, too—like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer
218 last night. Oh, and there’s an email and IM component that sends
219 pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up
220 Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get
221 you to open a Trojan.”</P>
224 type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long pony-tail, bobbing Adam’s
225 apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and
226 featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.</P>
228 admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle,
229 and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee
230 said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style
231 Cthulhu. They’d known each other for fifteen years, having met on
232 Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek
233 convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under
234 him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an
235 electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled
236 with the details of every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.</P>
238 time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email
239 trojans fell into that category—if people were smart enough not to
240 open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past.
241 But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with the
242 lusers—they were the fault of incompetent engineers.</P>
244 Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2AM,
245 it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”</P>
248 unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of
249 course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after
250 shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple
251 bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at
252 once to get access to their cage—like guards in a Minuteman silo.
253 95 percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this
256 Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by
257 worm-probes—putting the routers back online just exposed the
258 downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was
259 drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed
260 to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts,
261 and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the
262 worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10AM, and he was hungry
263 enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his
264 kernels and brought the machines back online. Van’s long fingers
265 flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he
266 ran load-stats on each one.</P>
268 days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server
269 in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star
270 Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were
271 running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters,
272 starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.</P>
274 again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five
275 years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”</P>
279 shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like
280 euthanizing your grandmother.”</P>
282 said.</P>
284 Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll take
285 you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the
286 rest of the day off.”</P>
288 said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a
289 pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”</P>
292 Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the 486, which had
293 refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from
294 some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it fitted.
295 He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while he
296 was twisting to get at the back of the machine.</P>
298 said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background. Static,
301 tried to call back, but didn’t get anything—no ring nor
302 voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.</P>
304 mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted to know when
305 he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up for the
306 family. She’d leave voicemail.</P>
308 power-supply when his phone rang again. He snatched it up and
309 answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked to keep
310 anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty:
311 technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent
312 Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past
313 three hours had been purely personal—even if he planned on billing
314 them to the company.</P>
316 the line.</P>
318 the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.</P>
320 barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s dead, oh Jesus,
321 he’s dead.”</P>
323 Kelly?”</P>
327 was the name they’d written on the birth certificate, though they’d
328 called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick
329 bark.</P>
331 said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I love you so
332 much.”</P>
334 going on?”</P>
336 she said. “Only two channels left on the tube. Christ, Felix, it
337 looks like dawn of the dead out the window—” He heard her retch.
338 The phone started to break up, washing her puke-noises back like an
339 echoplex.</P>
341 he shouted as the line died. He punched 911, but the phone went
342 NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.</P>
344 McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s network cable and
345 launched Firefox off the command line and googled for the Metro
346 Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an online
347 contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He solved problems
348 and freaking out didn’t solve problems.</P>
350 form and wrote out the details of his conversation with Kelly like he
351 was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description complete,
352 and then he hit SUBMIT.</P>
354 shoulder. “Felix—” he began.</P>
356 He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly pulled himself
357 upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but they were
358 all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something
359 terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the
360 superworm.</P>
362 Felix said.</P>
364 Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”</P>
366 the elevators. One of the building’s few windows was there, a
367 thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited for
368 the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Were there more
369 police cars than usual?</P>
371 Van pointed.</P>
373 white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It
374 was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It
375 was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast toward
376 the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point
377 and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole
378 building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the
379 wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest
380 freestanding structure crashed through building after building.</P>
382 Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was—the CBC’s towering
383 building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way, were
384 crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the port-hole, it was like
385 watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.</P>
387 clustering around them now, jostling to see the destruction.</P>
389 one of them asked.</P>
391 down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.</P>
394 Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin with just a little
395 type-two flab around the middle.</P>
397 guy said. “I got an email that the whole city’s quarantined
398 because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix his
399 Blackberry.</P>
401 in the report—purportedly forwarded from Health Canada—that he
402 didn’t even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did,
403 and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand, and let
404 out one small sob.</P>
407 in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed
408 Van by the arm, pulled him back.</P>
410 this out in the cage,” he said.</P>
412 Van said.</P>
414 going to throw up. “We should get into the cage, now.” The cage
415 had microparticulate air-filters.</P>
417 the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it hiss shut behind
418 him.</P>
420 get home—”</P>
422 Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be OK in here, I think, so long as
423 the filters hold out.”</P>
426 said.</P>
428 McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They skipped around the chat
429 channels until they found one with some familiar handles.</P>
431 pentagons gone/white house too</FONT></P>
433 MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO</FONT></P>
435 Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like
436 rats.</FONT></P>
438 I heard that the Ginza’s on fire</FONT></P>
440 typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve heard
441 reports of bioweapons, something very fast.</FONT></P>
443 read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe
444 we were all exposed three days ago.”</FONT></P>
446 closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some symptoms,
447 I think.”</FONT></P>
449 Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris—realtime sat
450 footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren’t
451 routing</FONT></P>
453 You’re in Toronto?</FONT></P>
455 was an unfamiliar handle.</FONT></P>
457 Yes—on Front Street</FONT></P>
459 my sisters at UofT and i cnt reach her—can you call her?</FONT></P>
461 No phone service</FONT></P>
463 NETWORK PROBLEMS.</P>
465 on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his voice-over-IP app. “I
466 just remembered.”</P>
468 from him and punched in his home number. It rang once, then there was
469 a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian movie.</P>
471 No phone service</FONT></P>
474 and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van said, “Holy
475 motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”</P>
478 of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was
479 hot—radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over
480 Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca
481 was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had been hanged before their
482 palaces.</P>
484 and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of the cage. He tried
485 calling home again, and then the police. It didn’t work any better
488 downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam. More spam.
489 Automated messages. There—an urgent message from the intrusion
490 detection system in the Ardent cage.</P>
492 quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly probing his routers. It
493 didn’t match a worm’s signature, either. He followed the
494 traceroute and discovered that the attack had originated in the same
495 building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.</P>
497 this. He portscanned his attacker and found that port 1337 was
498 open—1337 was “leet” or “elite” in hacker number/letter
499 substitution code. That was the kind of port that a worm left open to
500 slither in and out of. He googled known sploits that left a listener
501 on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the fingerprinted operating
502 system of the compromised server, and then he had it.</P>
504 one that every box should have been patched against years before. No
505 mind. He had the client for it, and he used it to create a root
506 account for himself on the box, which he then logged into, and took a
507 look around.</P>
509 user logged in, “scaredy,” and he checked the proccess monitor
510 and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds of processes that
511 were probing him and plenty of other boxen.</P>
514 Stop probing my server</FONT></P>
516 guilt, denial. He was surprised.</P>
518 Are you in the Front Street data-center?</FONT></P>
520 Yes</FONT></P>
522 Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I’m on the fourth floor.
523 I think there’s a bioweapon attack outside. I don’t want to leave
524 the clean room.</FONT></P>
526 whooshed out a breath.</FONT></P>
528 You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?</FONT></P>
530 Yeah</FONT></P>
532 That was smart</FONT></P>
535 I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more with me.</FONT></P>
537 What do you know?</FONT></P>
539 log and waited while the other guy digested it. Van stood up and
540 paced. His eyes were glazed over.</P>
543 said.</P>
545 door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty Mountain Dew bottle in the
546 trash there.”</P>
548 He walked like a zombie to the trash can and pulled out the empty
549 magnum. He turned his back.</P>
551 I’m Felix</FONT></P>
553 Will</FONT></P>
557 need to go outside,” Van said. He was moving toward the airlock
558 door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran
559 headlong to Van, tackling him before he reached the door.</P>
561 looking into his friend’s glazed, unfocused eyes. “Look at me,
562 Van.”</P>
564 said. “I need to get home and feed the cats.”</P>
566 out there, something fast-acting and lethal. Maybe it will blow away
567 with the wind. Maybe it’s already gone. But we’re going to sit
568 here until we know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down,
569 Van. Sit.”</P>
572 Felix’s arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his feet felt like
573 blocks of ice.</P>
575 servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust heat.” He found a rack and
576 nestled up against it.”</P>
578 Are you there?</FONT></P>
580 Still here—sorting out some logistics</FONT></P>
582 How long until we can go out?</FONT></P>
584 I have no idea</FONT></P>
586 for quite some time then.</P>
589 Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it again. Felix tried
590 calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was down.</P>
592 against the servers and wrapped his arms around his knees and wept
593 like a baby.</P>
595 came over and sat beside him, with his arm around Felix’s shoulder.</P>
597 Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s—son. My family is gone.”</P>
599 sure,” Van said.</P>
601 Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t it?”</P>
603 few more hours and then head out. Things should be getting back to
604 normal soon. The fire department will fix it. They’ll mobilize the
605 Army. It’ll be OK.”</P>
607 hadn’t cried since—Since 2.0 was born. He hugged his knees
608 harder.</P>
611 entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and
612 the other one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt.</P>
614 NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top floor. Take
615 the stairs.”</P>
617 holding his breath.</P>
619 bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK NERDY said.
620 “Just go, we’ll meet you there.”</P>
622 sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his feet.</P>
624 him. He’s up there.”</P>
626 the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d unplugged the big routers.
627 Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the
628 deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt
629 like a sauna.</P>
631 on the top floor, with working toilets, water and coffee and vending
632 machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No
633 one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he
634 joined the vending machine queue.</P>
636 energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee before running out
637 of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the
638 stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save some
639 for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.</P>
641 all settled in, thoroughly evacuated, and eating, TALK NERDY and his
642 friend had returned again. They cleared off the cash-register at the
643 end of the food-prep area and TALK NERDY got up on it. Slowly the
644 conversation died down.</P>
646 this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank you all for coming up here. Here’s
647 what we know for sure: the building’s been on generators for three
648 hours now. Visual observation indicates that we’re the only
649 building in central Toronto with working power—which should hold
650 out for three more days. There is a bioagent of unknown origin loose
651 beyond our doors. It kills quickly, within hours, and it is
652 aerosolized. You get it from breathing bad air. No one has opened any
653 of the exterior doors to this building since five this morning. No
654 one will open the doors until I give the go-ahead.</P>
656 cities all over the world have left emergency responders in chaos.
657 The attacks are electronic, biological, nuclear and conventional
658 explosives, and they are very widespread. I’m a security engineer,
659 and where I come from, attacks in this kind of cluster are usually
660 viewed as opportunistic: group B blows up a bridge because everyone
661 is off taking care of group A’s dirty nuke event. It’s smart. An
662 Aum Shin Rikyo cell in Seoul gassed the subways there about 2AM
663 Eastern—that’s the earliest event we can locate, so it may have
664 been the Archduke that broke the camel’s back. We’re pretty sure
665 that Aum Shin Rikyo couldn’t be behind this kind of mayhem: they
666 have no history of infowar and have never shown the kind of
667 organizational acumen necessary to take out so many targets at once.
668 Basically, they’re not smart enough.</P>
670 here for the foreseeable future, at least until the bioweapon has
671 been identified and dispersed. We’re going to staff the racks and
672 keep the networks up. This is critical infrastructure, and it’s our
673 job to make sure it’s got five nines of uptime. In times of
674 national emergency, our responsibility to do that doubles.”</P>
676 hand. He was very daring in a green Incredible Hulk ring-tee, and he
677 was at the young end of the scale.</P>
679 you king?”</P>
681 the main security system, keys to every cage, and passcodes for the
682 exterior doors—they’re all locked now, by the way. I’m the one
683 who got everyone up here first and called the meeting. I don’t care
684 if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty one. But someone
685 needs to have this job.”</P>
687 the kid said. “And I can do it every bit as well as you. My name’s
688 Will Sario.”</P>
690 his nose at the kid. “Well, if you’ll let me finish talking,
691 maybe I’ll hand things over to you when I’m done.”</P>
693 means.” Sario turned his back on him and walked to the window. He
694 stared out of it intensely. Felix’s gaze was drawn to it, and he
695 saw that there were several oily smoke plumes rising up from the
696 city.</P>
698 was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.</P>
700 after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is it my turn now?”</P>
702 good-natured chuckling.</P>
704 think: the world is going to shit. There are coordinated attacks on
705 every critical piece of infrastructure. There’s only one way that
706 those attacks could be so well coordinated: via the Internet. Even if
707 you buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, we need to
708 ask how an opportunistic attack could be organized in minutes: the
709 Internet.”</P>
711 should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a little, but
712 stopped when Sario said nothing.</P>
714 last night that nearly killed the Internet. A little DoS on the
715 critical routers, a little DNS-foo, and down it goes like a
716 preacher’s daughter. Cops and the military are a bunch of
717 technophobic lusers, they hardly rely on the net at all. If we take
718 the Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage the
719 attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders. When the time
720 comes, we can rebuild it.”</P>
722 me,” Popovich said. His jaw literally hung open.</P>
724 Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with logic when it
725 dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with people, not logic.”</P>
727 conversation that quickly turned into a roar.</P>
729 hollered. The conversation dimmed by one Watt. Popovich yelled again,
730 stamping his foot on the countertop. Finally there was a semblance of
731 order. “One at a time,” he said. He was flushed red, his hands in
732 his pockets.</P>
734 staying. Another for going. They should hide in the cages. They
735 should inventory their supplies and appoint a quartermaster. They
736 should go outside and find the police, or volunteer at hospitals.
737 They should appoint defenders to keep the front door secure.</P>
739 surprise that he had his hand in the air. Popovich called on him.</P>
741 Tremont,” he said, getting up on one of the tables, drawing out his
742 PDA. “I want to read you something.</P>
744 the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come
745 from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask
746 you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
747 have no sovereignty where we gather.</P>
749 elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you
750 with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
751 speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be
752 naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You
753 have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of
754 enforcement we have true reason to fear.</P>
756 derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have
757 neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do
758 not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie
759 within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it
760 were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of
761 nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.’</P>
763 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It was written 12 years
764 ago. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever
765 read. I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace was
766 free—and where that freedom infected the real world, so meatspace
767 got freer too.</P>
769 scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. Van awkwardly patted
770 him on the shoe.</P>
772 my beautiful wife died today. Millions more, too. The city is
773 literally in flames. Whole cities have disappeared from the map.”</P>
775 swallowed it again.</P>
777 world, people like us are gathered in buildings like this. They were
778 trying to recover from last night’s worm when disaster struck. We
779 have independent power. Food. Water.</P>
781 that the bad guys use so well and that the good guys have never
782 figured out.</P>
784 love of liberty that comes from caring about and caring for the
785 network. We are in charge of the most important organizational and
786 governmental tool the world has ever seen. We are the closest thing
787 to a government the world has right now. Geneva is a crater. The East
788 River is on fire and the UN is evacuated.</P>
790 Republic of Cyberspace weathered this storm basically unscathed. We
791 are the custodians of a deathless, monstrous, wonderful machine, one
792 with the potential to rebuild a better world.</P>
794 live for but that.”</P>
796 Van’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one. They didn’t applaud him,
797 but they did one better. They maintained respectful, total silence
798 for seconds that stretched to a minute.</P>
800 Popovich said, without a trace of sarcasm.</P>
803 filling up fast. They’d announced them in
804 news.admin.net-abuse.email, where all the spamfighters hung out, and
805 where there was a tight culture of camaraderie in the face of
806 full-out attack.</P>
808 alt.november5-disaster.recovery, with .recovery.governance,
809 .recovery.finance, .recovery.logistics and .recovery.defense hanging
810 off of it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in
811 her.</P>
813 of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online, with the stalwart Queen
814 Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who wheeled through the
815 gigantic data-center swapping out dead boxen and hitting reboot
816 switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the Presidio, but the
817 mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d redirected the DNS so that
818 you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. Paypal was up.
819 Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up, and filling with
820 millions of posts from scared survivors huddling together for
821 electronic warmth.</P>
823 were horrific. Felix had to unsubscribe from them after he caught a
824 photo of a woman and a baby, dead in a kitchen, twisted into an
825 agonized heiroglyph by the bioagent. They didn’t look like Kelly
826 and 2.0, but they didn’t have to. He started shaking and couldn’t
827 stop.</P>
829 limping under load. The spam poured in as though nothing had changed.
830 Worms roamed the network.</P>
832 where most of the action was.</P>
834 We can use the newsgroup voting mechanism to hold regional </FONT>
835 </P>
837 elections</FONT></P>
839 would work. Usenet newsgroup votes had been running for more than
840 twenty years without a substantial hitch.</P>
842 We’ll elect regional representatives and they’ll pick a Prime
843 Minister.</FONT></P>
845 on President, which Felix didn’t like. Seemed too partisan. His
846 future wouldn’t be the American future. The American future had
847 gone up with the White House. He was building a bigger tent than
848 that.</P>
850 sysadmins online from France Telecom. The EBU’s data-center had
851 been spared in the attacks that hammered Geneva, and it was filled
852 with wry Germans whose English was better than Felix’s. They got on
853 well with the remains of the BBC team in Canary Wharf.</P>
855 English in .recovery.logistics, and Felix had momentum on his side.
856 Some of the admins were cooling out the inevitable stupid flamewars
857 with the practice of long years. Some were chipping in useful
858 suggestions.</P>
860 thought that Felix was off his rocker.</P>
862 I think we should hold elections as soon as possible. Tomorrow at the
863 latest. We can’t rule justly without the consent of the governed.</FONT></P>
865 reply landed in his inbox.</P>
867 You can’t be serious. Consent of the governed? Unless I miss my
868 guess, most of the people you’re proposing to govern are puking
869 their guts out, hiding under their desks, or wandering shell-shocked
870 through the city streets. When do THEY get a vote?</FONT></P>
872 had a point. Queen Kong was sharp. Not many woman sysadmins, and that
873 was a genuine tragedy. Women like Queen Kong were too good to exclude
874 from the field. He’d have to hack a solution to get women balanced
875 out in his new government. Require each region to elect one woman and
876 one man?</P>
878 into argument with her. The elections would be the next day; he’d
879 see to it.</P>
882 Cyberspace? Why not call yourself the Grand Poobah of the Global Data
883 Network? It’s more dignified, sounds cooler and it’ll get you
884 just as far.” Will had the sleeping spot next to him, up in the
885 cafeteria, with Van on the other side. The room smelled like a
886 dingleberry: twenty-five sysadmins who hadn’t washed in at least a
887 day all crammed into the same room. For some of them, it had been
888 much, much longer than a day.</P>
890 Van said. “You wanted to try to knock the Internet offline.”</P>
892 to knock the Internet offline. Present-tense”</P>
894 He was so tired, it was like lifting weights.</P>
896 don’t like my platform, put one of your own forward. There are
897 plenty of people who think I’m full of shit and I respect them for
898 that, since they’re all running opposite me or backing someone who
899 is. That’s your choice. What’s not on the menu is nagging and
900 complaining. Bedtime now, or get up and post your platform.”</P>
902 unrolling the jacket he had been using for a pillow and putting it
903 on. “Screw you guys, I’m out of here.”</P>
905 never leave,” Felix said and turned over, lying awake a long time,
906 thinking about the election.</P>
908 in the running. Some of them weren’t even sysadmins. A US Senator
909 on retreat at his summer place in Wyoming had generator power and a
910 satellite phone. Somehow he’d found the right newsgroup and thrown
911 his hat into the ring. Some anarchist hackers in Italy strafed the
912 group all night long, posting broken-English screeds about the
913 political bankruptcy of “governance” in the new world. Felix
914 looked at their netblock and determined that they were probably holed
915 up in a small Interaction Design institute near Turin. Italy had been
916 hit very bad, but out in the small town, this cell of anarchists had
917 taken up residence.</P>
919 were running on a platform of shutting down the Internet. Felix had
920 his doubts about whether this was even possible, but he thought he
921 understood the impulse to finish the work and the world. Why not?</P>
923 about the logistics of shutting down the Internet, and dreamed bad
924 dreams in which he was the network’s sole defender.</P>
926 itchy sound. He rolled over and saw that Van was sitting up, his
927 jacket balled up in his lap, vigorously scratching his skinny arms.
928 They’d gone the color of corned beef, and had a scaly look. In the
929 light streaming through the cafeteria windows, skin motes floated and
930 danced in great clouds.</P>
932 Felix sat up. Watching Van’s fingernails rip into his skin made him
933 itch in sympathy. It had been three days since he’d last washed his
934 hair and his scalp sometimes felt like there were little egg-laying
935 insects picking their way through it. He’d adjusted his glasses the
936 night before and had touched the back of his ears; his finger came
937 away shining with thick sebum. He got blackheads in the backs of his
938 ears when he didn’t shower for a couple days, and sometimes
939 gigantic, deep boils that Kelly finally popped with sick relish.</P>
941 said. He went to work on his head, sending a cloud of dandruff-crud
942 into the sky, there to join the scurf that he’d already eliminated
943 from his extremeties. “Christ, I itch all over.”</P>
945 McCheese from Van’s backpack and plugged it into one of the
946 Ethernet cables that snaked all over the floor. He googled everything
947 he could think of that could be related to this. “Itchy” yielded
949 discriminating links.</P>
951 stress-related excema,” Felix said, finally.</P>
953 excema,” Van said.</P>
955 lurid photos of red, angry skin flaked with white. “Stress-related
956 excema,” he said, reading the caption.</P>
958 “I have excema,” he said.</P>
960 moisturized and to try cortisone cream. You might try the first aid
961 kit in the second-floor toilets. I think I saw some there.” Like
962 all of the sysadmins, Felix had had a bit of a rummage around the
963 offices, bathrooms, kitchen and store-rooms, squirreling away a roll
964 of toilet-paper in his shoulder-bag along with three or four
965 power-bars. They were sharing out the food in the caf by unspoken
966 agreement, every sysadmin watching every other for signs of gluttony
967 and hoarding. All were convinced that there was hoarding and gluttony
968 going on out of eyeshot, because all were guilty of it themselves
969 when no one else was watching.</P>
971 face hove into the light, Felix saw how puffed his eyes were. “I’ll
972 post to the mailing-list for some antihistamine,” Felix said. There
973 had been four mailing lists and three wikis for the survivors in the
974 building within hours of the first meeting’s close, and in the
975 intervening days they’d settled on just one. Felix was still on a
976 little mailing list with five of his most trusted friends, two of
977 whom were trapped in cages in other countries. He suspected that the
978 rest of the sysadmins were doing the same.</P>
980 luck on the elections,” he said, patting Felix on the shoulder.</P>
982 stopping to stare out the grubby windows. The fires still burned in
983 Toronto, more than before. He’d tried to find mailing lists or
984 blogs that Torontonians were posting to, but the only ones he’d
985 found were being run by other geeks in other data-centers. It was
986 possible—likely, even—that there were survivors out there who had
987 more pressing priorities than posting to the Internet. His home phone
988 still worked about half the time but he’d stopped calling it after
989 the second day, when hearing Kelly’s voice on the voicemail for the
990 fiftieth time had made him cry in the middle of a planning meeting.
991 He wasn’t the only one.</P>
993 face the music.</P>
995 Are you nervous?</FONT></P>
997 Nope,</FONT></P>
1000 I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I”m just glad we’re
1001 doing this. The alternative was sitting around with our thumbs up our
1002 ass, waiting for someone to crack up and open the door.</FONT></P>
1004 Kong was very high latency as she bossed her gang of Googloids around
1005 the Googleplex, doing everything she could to keep her data center
1006 online. Three of the offshore cages had gone offline and two of their
1007 six redundant network links were smoked. Lucky for her,
1008 queries-per-second were way down.</P>
1010 There’s still China</FONT></P>
1012 had a big board with a map of the world colored in
1013 Google-queries-per-second, and could do magic with it, showing the
1014 drop-off over time in colorful charts. She’d uploaded lots of video
1015 clips showing how the plague and the bombs had swept the world: the
1016 initial upswell of queries from people wanting to find out what was
1017 going on, then the grim, precipitous shelving off as the plagues took
1018 hold.</P>
1020 China’s still running about ninety percent nominal.</FONT></P>
1023 You can’t think that they’re responsible</FONT></P>
1025 No</FONT></P>
1027 started to key something and then stopped.</P>
1029 No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis. This is a bunch
1030 of assholes all using the rest for cover. But China put them down
1031 harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve finally found a use
1032 for totalitarian states.</FONT></P>
1034 couldn’t resist. He typed:</FONT></P>
1036 You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You guys were
1037 pretty enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of China.</FONT></P>
1039 Wasn’t my idea</FONT></P>
1045 USGS’s automated data-stream from the 6.9 that trashed northern Cal
1046 from Gilroy to Sebastopol. Soma webcams revealed the scope of the
1047 damage—gas main explosions, seismically retrofitted buildings
1048 crumpling like piles of children’s blocks after a good kicking. The
1049 Googleplex, floating on a series of gigantic steel springs, had shook
1050 like a plateful of jello, but the racks had stayed in place and the
1051 worst injury they’d had was a badly bruised eye on a sysadmin who’d
1052 caught a flying cable-crimper in the face.</P>
1054 Sorry. I forgot.</FONT></P>
1056 It’s OK. We all lost people, right?</FONT></P>
1058 Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the election. Whoever
1059 wins, at least we’re doing SOMETHING</FONT></P>
1061 Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags</FONT></P>
1063 that some of the sysadmins were using to describe the contingent that
1064 wanted to shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it—apparently
1065 it had started life as a catch-all term to describe the clueless IT
1066 managers that she’d chewed up through her career.</P>
1068 They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is all. Your endorsement
1069 will carry the day</FONT></P>
1071 of the largest and most powerful blocs left behind, along with the
1072 satellite uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. Queen
1073 Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and he’d sent her an
1074 email that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t have the fuckrags
1075 in charge.”</P>
1077 gtg</FONT></P>
1079 connection dropped. He fired up a browser and called up google.com.
1080 The browser timed out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the
1081 Google front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen Kong’s
1082 workplace—power failure, worms, another quake—she had fixed it.
1083 He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced the O’s in the Google
1084 logo with little planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them.</P>
1087 eat?” Van said to him. It was mid-afternoon, not that time
1088 particularly passed in the data-center. Felix patted his pockets.
1089 They’d put a quartermaster in charge, but not before everyone had
1090 snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a dozen power-bars
1091 and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches but had wisely
1092 eaten them first before they got stale.</P>
1094 he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in his waistline that
1095 morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s
1096 teasing about his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two
1097 power bars, leaving him with just one left.</P>
1099 face was hollower than ever, his shoulders sloping in on his
1100 toast-rack chest.</P>
1102 “Vote Felix.”</P>
1104 from him and then put it down on the table. “OK, I want to give
1105 this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking
1108 me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”</P>
1110 elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the wrapper clean.</P>
1112 said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been winning by a
1113 slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop was a major
1114 handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there were
1115 a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the house on Der
1116 Tag without thinking to snag something WiFi-enabled.</P>
1118 get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them. He’d become
1119 famous in the center for never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for
1120 picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet
1121 flamewar. “The winner will be someone who understands a couple of
1122 fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then ticked off his bullet
1123 points by raising a finger at a time. “Point: The terrorists are
1124 using the Internet to destroy the world, and we need to destroy the
1125 Internet first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a
1126 joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough. Point: Or if we
1127 don’t, it will be because the old world will be back and running,
1128 and it won’t give a crap about your new world. Point: We’re gonna
1129 run out of food before we run out of shit to argue about or reasons
1130 not to go outside. We have the chance to do something to help the
1131 world recover: we can kill the net and cut it off as a tool for bad
1132 guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck chairs on the bridge of your
1133 personal Titanic in the service of some sweet dream about an
1134 ‘independent cyberspace.’”</P>
1136 Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in two days—intermittent
1137 power from the grid had stretched their generator lifespan. And if
1138 you bought his hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used
1139 as a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down would be the
1140 right thing to do.</P>
1142 and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to rebuild the old world. He
1143 wanted a new one. The old world was one that didn’t have any place
1144 for him. Not anymore.</P>
1146 flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scruff swirled in the musty, greasy
1147 air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That is disgusting. We’re
1148 breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you,
1149 aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty anti-social.”</P>
1151 leading authority on anti-social, Sario,” Van said. "Go away
1152 or I’ll multi-tool you to death.” He stopped scratching and
1153 patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.</P>
1155 anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any meds
1156 in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”</P>
1158 more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”</P>
1160 you are priceless. I’d bet that three quarters of this bunch is
1161 borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an asshole. But I’m one who
1162 isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you,
1163 dickweed.”</P>
1165 said, “fuck off.”</P>
1168 day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first ever Prime
1169 Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that
1170 spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they
1171 added up the votes a second time.</P>
1173 seeming like more of a joke. Half the data-centers had gone dark.
1174 Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and
1175 grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a
1176 leader-board of new and rising queries—largely related to health,
1177 shelter, sanitation and self-defense.</P>
1179 was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their
1180 compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and
1181 blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more
1182 and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had
1183 anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.</P>
1185 short, too.</P>
1187 came and got him before he could do more than answer a few
1188 congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to
1189 newsgroups.</P>
1191 open the doors,” Popovich said. Like all of them, he’d lost
1192 weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off
1193 a trash-bag behind a fish-market on a sunny day. Felix was quite sure
1194 he smelled no better.</P>
1196 for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group for
1197 it—great idea.”</P>
1199 head sadly. “We’re going to go find our families. Whatever is out
1200 there has burned itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no
1201 future in here.”</P>
1203 maintenance?” Felix said, though he knew the answers. “Who’ll
1204 keep the routers up?”</P>
1206 root passwords to everything,” Popovich said. His hands were
1207 shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in
1208 the data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d run out
1209 of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.</P>
1211 here and keep everything online?”</P>
1213 who cares anymore.”</P>
1215 squandered his opportunity. The election had seemed noble and brave,
1216 but in hindsight all it had been was an excuse for infighting when
1217 they should have been figuring out what to do next. The problem was
1218 that there was nothing to do next.</P>
1220 stay,” he said.</P>
1222 Popovich turned on his heel and walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go,
1223 then he gripped Felix’s shoulder and squeezed it.</P>
1225 was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe we’ll find something to
1226 eat and some fuel and come back.”</P>
1228 whom he’d been in contact with over IM for the first days after the
1229 crisis broke. Then she’d stopped answering. The sysadmins were
1230 split among those who’d had a chance to say goodbye and those who
1231 hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it better.</P>
1233 the internal newsgroup—they were still geeks, after all, and there
1234 was a little honor guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them
1235 pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the keypads and the
1236 steel shutters lifted, then the first set of doors opened. They
1237 stepped into the vestibule and pulled the doors shut behind them. The
1238 front doors opened. It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart
1239 from how empty it was, it looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.</P>
1241 tentative step out into the world. Then another. They turned to wave
1242 at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed their throats and
1243 began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.</P>
1245 Felix managed to choke out before they both dusted themselves off and
1246 stood up, laughing so hard they were clutching their sides. They
1247 waved once more and turned on their heels.</P>
1249 sick,” Van said. He scratched his arms, which had long, bloody
1250 scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in scurf they looked
1251 like they’d been dusted with icing sugar.</P>
1253 pretty funny,” Felix said.
1254 </P>
1256 hungry,” Van said, conversationally.
1257 </P>
1259 got all the packets we can eat,” Felix said.</P>
1261 us grunts, Mr President,” Van said.
1262 </P>
1264 he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re the Deputy Prime
1265 Minister. You’re my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out of
1266 oversized novelty checks.”</P>
1268 spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix
1269 knew then that they’d all be going soon.</P>
1271 pre-ordained by the fuel-supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel
1272 to run out, anyway?</P>
1275 half my crew split this morning</FONT></P>
1277 Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the
1278 servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google
1279 fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford.
1280 </P>
1282 we’re down to a quarter</FONT></P>
1284 was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on
1285 the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had
1286 much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too busy
1287 learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big,
1288 big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all
1289 the network backbones in Canada.
1290 </P>
1292 to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The
1293 old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down
1294 the network, or who took too much food—it was all gone.
1295 </P>
1297 newsgroup. There was a typical message.</P>
1299 Runaway processes on Solaris </FONT>
1300 </P>
1302 </FONT>
1303 </P>
1305 Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MSCE but I’m the only one awake
1306 here and four of the DSLAMs just went down. Looks like there’s some
1307 custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how much to bill
1308 our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand threads and
1309 its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to
1310 do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do to get this
1311 goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it’s not as if any
1312 of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d ask the guy
1313 who wrote this code, but he’s pretty much dead as far as anyone can
1314 work out.</FONT></P>
1316 a response. It was short, authoritative, and helpful—just the sort
1317 of thing you almost never saw in a high-caliber newsgroup when a noob
1318 posted a dumb question. The apocalypse had awoken the spirit of
1319 patient helpfulness in the world’s sysop community.
1320 </P>
1322 him. “Holy shit, who knew he had it in him?”</P>
1324 message again. It was from Will Sario.
1325 </P>
1327 chat window.
1328 </P>
1330 sario i thought you wanted the network dead why are you helping msces
1331 fix their boxen?</FONT></P>
1334 computer suffer at the hands of an amateur. </FONT>
1335 </P>
1337 flipped to the channel with Queen Kong in it.</FONT></P>
1339 How long?</FONT></P>
1341 Since I slept? Two days. Until we run out of fuel? Three days. Since
1342 we ran out of food? Two days.</FONT></P>
1344 Jeez. I didn’t sleep last night either. We’re a little short
1345 handed around here.</FONT></P>
1347 asl? Im monica and I live in pasadena and Im bored with my homework.
1348 WOuld you like to download my pic???</FONT></P>
1350 all over IRC these days, jumping to every channel that had any
1351 traffic on it. Sometimes you caught five or six flirting with each
1352 other. It was pretty weird to watch a piece of malware try to con
1353 another instance of itself into downloading a trojan.
1354 </P>
1356 bot off the channel simultaneously. He had a script for it now. The
1357 spam hadn’t even tailed off a little.
1358 </P>
1360 How come the spam isn’t reducing? Half the goddamned data-centers
1361 have gone dark</FONT></P>
1363 Kong paused a long time before typing. As had become automatic when
1364 she went high-latency, he reloaded the Google homepage. Sure enough,
1365 it was down. </FONT>
1366 </P>
1368 Sario, you got any food?</FONT></P>
1370 You won’t miss a couple more meals, Your Excellency</FONT></P>
1372 Mayor McCheese but he was in the same channel.</P>
1374 looking pretty buff, though, dude.”</P>
1376 good. He looked like you could knock him over with a stiff breeze and
1377 he had a phlegmy, weak quality to his speech.
1378 </P>
1380 hey kong everything ok?</FONT></P>
1382 everything’s fine just had to go kick some ass</FONT></P>
1384 Van?”</P>
1386 this morning,” he said. There were a bunch of nodes whose
1387 connections routed through them. Presumably most of these were home
1388 or commercial customers is places where the power was still on and
1389 the phone company’s COs were still alive.
1390 </P>
1392 Felix would wiretap the connections to see if he could find a person
1393 who had news of the wide world. Almost all of it was automated
1394 traffic, though: network backups, status updates. Spam. Lots of spam.</P>
1396 Spam’s still up because the services that stop spam are failing
1397 faster than the services that create it. All the anti-worm stuff is
1398 centralized in a couple places. The bad stuff is on a million zombie
1399 computers. If only the lusers had had the good sense to turn off
1400 their home PCs before keeling over or taking off</FONT></P>
1402 at the rate were going well be routing nothing but spam by dinnertime</FONT></P>
1404 a painful sound. “About that,” he said. “I think it’s going
1405 to hit sooner than that. Felix, I don’t think anyone would notice
1406 if we just walked away from here.”</P>
1408 his skin the color of corned-beef and streaked with long, angry
1409 scabs. His fingers trembled.</P>
1411 water?”</P>
1413 frigging day, every ten seconds. Anything to keep my belly full.”
1414 He pointed to a refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of water by his side.</P>
1416 meeting,” he said.</P>
1419 forty-three of them on D-Day. Now there were fifteen. Six had
1420 responded to the call for a meeting by simply leaving. Everyone knew
1421 without having to be told what the meeting was about.</P>
1423 you’re going to let it all fall apart?” Sario was the only one
1424 with the energy left to get properly angry. He’d go angry to his
1425 grave. The veins on his throat and forehead stood out angrily. His
1426 fists shook angrily. All the other geeks went lids-down at the site
1427 of him, looking up in unison for once at the discussion, not keeping
1428 one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service log.
1429 </P>
1431 to be shitting me,” Felix said. “You wanted to pull the goddamned
1432 plug!”</P>
1435 keel over in little gasps and pukes forever. I wanted it to be an act
1436 of will by the global community of its caretakers. I wanted it to be
1437 an affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy and bad code and worms
1438 winning out. Fuck that, that’s just what’s happened out there.”</P>
1440 cafeteria, there were windows all around, hardened and light-bending,
1441 and by custom, they were all blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the
1442 room, yanking down the blinds. <I>How the hell can he get the energy
1443 to run?</I> Felix wondered. He could barely walk up the stairs to the
1444 meeting room.</P>
1446 in. It was a fine sunny day out there, but everywhere you looked
1447 across that commanding view of Toronto’s skyline, there were rising
1448 plumes of smoke. The TD tower, a gigantic black modernist glass
1449 brick, was gouting flame to the sky. “It’s all falling apart, the
1450 way everything does.</P>
1452 we leave the network to fall over slowly, parts of it will stay
1453 online for months. Maybe years. And what will run on it? Malware.
1454 Worms. Spam. System-processes. Zone transfers. The things we use fall
1455 apart and require constant maintenance. The things we abandon don’t
1456 get used and they last forever. We’re going to leave the network
1457 behind like a lime-pit filled with industrial waste. That will be our
1458 fucking legacy—the legacy of every keystroke you and I and anyone,
1459 anywhere ever typed. You understand? We’re going to leave it to die
1460 slow like a wounded dog, instead of giving it one clean shot through
1461 the head.”</P>
1463 cheeks, then Felix saw that he was wiping away tears.</P>
1465 wrong, but you’re not right either,” he said. “Leaving it up to
1466 limp along is right. We’re going to all be limping for a long time,
1467 and maybe it will be some use to someone. If there’s one packet
1468 being routed from any user to any other user, anywhere in the world,
1469 it’s doing it’s job.”</P>
1471 kill, you can do that,” Felix said. “I’m the PM and I say so.
1472 I’m giving you root. All of you.” He turned to the white-board
1473 where the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day’s specials. Now
1474 it was covered with the remnants of heated technical debates that the
1475 sysadmins had engaged in over the days since the day.
1476 </P>
1478 clean spot with his sleeve and began to write out long, complicated
1479 alphanumeric passwords salted with punctuation. Felix had a gift for
1480 remembering that kind of password. He doubted it would do him much
1481 good, ever again.</P>
1484 Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway</FONT></P>
1486 yeah well thats right then. it was an honor, mr prime minister</FONT></P>
1488 you going to be ok?</FONT></P>
1490 ive commandeered a young sysadmin to see to my feminine needs and
1491 weve found another cache of food thatll last us a coupel weeks now
1492 that were down to fifteen admins—im in hog heaven pal</FONT></P>
1494 youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. Dont be a hero though. When you
1495 need to go go. Theres got to be something out there</FONT></P>
1497 be safe felix, seriously—btw did i tell you queries are up in
1498 Romania? maybe theyre getting back on their feet</FONT></P>
1500 really?</FONT></P>
1502 yeah, really. we’re hard to kill—like fucking roaches</FONT></P>
1504 dropped to Firefox and reloaded Google and it was down. He hit reload
1505 and hit reload and hit reload, but it didn’t come up. He closed his
1506 eyes and listened to Van scratch his legs and then heard Van type a
1507 little.</P>
1509 he said.</P>
1511 breath. He sent the message to the newsgroup, one that he’d run
1512 through five drafts before settling on, “Take care of the place,
1513 OK? We’ll be back, someday.”</P>
1515 except Sario. Sario wouldn’t leave. He came down to see them off,
1516 though.</P>
1518 in the lobby and Felix made the safety door go up, and the light
1519 rushed in.
1520 </P>
1522 out.</P>
1524 said.</P>
1526 said. He had a firm grip, Sario, stronger than he had any right to
1527 be. “Maybe you were right,” he said.
1528 </P>
1531 the plug?”</P>
1533 drop-ceiling, seeming to peer through the reinforced floors at the
1534 humming racks above. “Who knows?” he said at last.</P>
1536 flurry of white motes danced in the sunlight.</P>
1538 a pharmacy,” Felix said. He walked to the door and the other
1539 sysadmins followed.
1540 </P>
1542 interior doors to close behind them and then Felix opened the
1543 exterior doors. The air smelled and tasted like a mown grass, like
1544 the first drops of rain, like the lake and the sky, like the outdoors
1545 and the world, an old friend not heard from in an eternity.</P>
1547 other sysadmins said. They were drifting away while he stood
1548 transfixed at the top of the short concrete staircase. The light hurt
1549 his eyes and made them water.</P>
1551 Shopper’s Drug Mart on King Street,” he said to Van. “We’ll
1552 thrown a brick through the window and get you some cortisone, OK?”</P>
1554 Minister,” Van said. “Lead on.”</P>
1557 single soul on the fifteen minute walk. There wasn’t a single sound
1558 except for some bird noises and some distant groans, and the wind in
1559 the electric cables overhead. It was like walking on the surface of
1560 the moon.</P>
1562 chocolate bars at the Shopper’s,” Van said.</P>
1564 lurched. Food. “Wow,” he said, around a mouthful of saliva.</P>
1566 little hatchback and in the front seat was the dried body of a woman
1567 holding the dried body of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour
1568 bile, even though the smell was faint through the rolled-up windows.</P>
1570 Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped to his knees and retched again. Out
1571 here in the real world, his family was dead. Everyone he knew was
1572 dead. He just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and wait to die,
1573 too.</P>
1575 slipped under his armpits and hauled weakly at him. “Not now,” he
1576 said. “Once we’re safe inside somewhere and we’ve eaten
1577 something, then and then you can do this, but not now. Understand me,
1578 Felix? Not fucking now.”</P>
1580 through to him. He got to his feet. His knees were trembling.
1581 </P>
1583 Van said, and slipped Felix’s arm around his shoulders and led him
1584 along.</P>
1586 sorry.”</P>
1588 said. “You need a shower, bad. No offense.”</P>
1591 metal security gate, but it had been torn away from the front
1592 windows, which had been rudely smashed. Felix and Van squeezed
1593 through the gap and stepped into the dim drug-store. A few of the
1594 displays were knocked over, but other than that, it looked OK. By the
1595 cash-registers, Felix spotted the racks of candy bars at the same
1596 instant that Van saw them, and they hurried over and grabbed a
1597 handful each, stuffing their faces.</P>
1599 pigs.”</P>
1601 the sound of the woman’s voice. She was holding a fire-axe that was
1602 nearly as big as she was. She wore a lab-coat and comfortable shoes.</P>
1604 need and go, OK? No sense in there being any trouble.” Her chin was
1605 pointy and her eyes were sharp. She looked to be in her forties. She
1606 looked nothing like Kelly, which was good, because Felix felt like
1607 running and giving her a hug as it was. Another person alive!</P>
1609 Felix said. She was wearing scrubs under the coat, he saw.</P>
1611 She brandished the axe.</P>
1613 up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A pharmacist?”</P>
1615 ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web-designer.”</P>
1617 me,” Felix said.</P>
1619 met a girl who knew about computers?”</P>
1621 of mine who runs Google’s data-center is a girl. A woman, I mean.”</P>
1623 me,” she said. “A woman ran Google’s data-center?”</P>
1625 “It’s still online.”</P>
1627 She let the axe lower.</P>
1629 any cortisone cream? I can tell you the story. My name’s Felix and
1630 this is Van, who needs any anti-histamines you can spare.”</P>
1632 old pal, I have enough dope here to last a hundred years. This
1633 stuff’s going to expire long before it runs out. But are you
1634 telling me that the net’s still up?”</P>
1636 he said. “Kind of. That’s what we’ve been doing all week.
1637 Keeping it online. It might not last much longer, though.”</P>
1639 don’t suppose it would.” She set the axe down. “Have you got
1640 anything to trade? I don’t need much, but I’ve been trying to
1641 keep my spirits up by trading with the neighbors. It’s like playing
1642 civilization.”</P>
1645 said. “The people in the restaurant across the way make a pretty
1646 good soup, even if most of the veg is canned. They cleaned me out of
1647 Sterno, though.”</P>
1649 neighbors and you trade with them?”</P>
1651 It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken care of whatever
1652 sniffles I could. Set a bone—broken wrist. Listen, do you want some
1653 Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks
1654 like he could use a meal.”</P>
1656 said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re both
1657 committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use some
1658 assistants?”</P>
1660 spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind some company.”</P>
1662 and then some soup. The restaurant people brought it over and made
1663 their manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle up and
1664 ascertained that there was working plumbing in the back room. Van
1665 went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.
1666 </P>
1668 to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and she had found them a
1669 bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from the housewares
1670 aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or tanks or even looters,
1671 but it’s just quiet.”</P>
1673 kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.</P>
1675 attract the wrong kind of attention.”</P>
1677 maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing the same thing? Maybe
1678 if we all get together we’ll come up with something to do.”</P>
1680 cut our throats,” she said.</P>
1682 got a point.”</P>
1684 “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady, we’re at a critical
1685 juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away in
1686 our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better.”</P>
1688 a rude noise.</P>
1690 Something though. Building something new is better than letting it
1691 dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you’ve read all
1692 the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?”</P>
1694 “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell are we going to do,
1695 anyway?”</P>
1697 said. “We’re going to do something. Something is better than
1698 nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world where people
1699 are talking to each other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re
1700 going to find everyone we can and we’re going to take care of them
1701 and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably fuck it up.
1702 We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give up, though.”</P>
1704 you are crazier than Sario, you know it?”</P>
1706 and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He’s going to be a part of
1707 this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of the world. The world
1708 doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have endings.”</P>
1710 again, but she was smiling a little now. “And you’ll be what, the
1711 Pope-Emperor of the World?”</P>
1713 Minister,” Van said in a stagey whisper. The anti-histamines had
1714 worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a
1715 fine pink.</P>
1717 Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.
1718 </P>
1720 “Playing games. How about this. I’ll help out however I can,
1721 provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never
1722 call me the Minister of Health?”</P>
1724 said.
1725 </P>
1727 glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.
1728 </P>
1730 glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To humanity.” He
1731 thought hard. “To rebuilding.”</P>
1733 said.</P>
1735 Felix said. “To everything.”</P>
1737 Rosa said.
1738 </P>
1740 day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over
1741 again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they’d
1742 pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And
1743 five years later, they started again.
1744 </P>
1746 salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed
1747 some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a
1748 data-center for a little government—little governments came and
1749 went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and
1750 needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.</P>
1752 time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from
1753 the strange time they’d spent running the Distributed Republic of
1754 Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in
1755 the real world ever called him that anymore.</P>
1757 life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never healed, and neither
1758 did most other people’s. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden
1759 ones. Tragedy on tragedy.
1760 </P>
1762 data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it
1763 was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was
1764 the last days of one, either.
1765 </P>
1767 go to bed, felix</FONT></P>
1769 soon, kong, soon—almost got this backup running</FONT></P>
1771 youre a junkie, dude. </FONT>
1772 </P>
1774 look whos talking</FONT></P>
1776 homepage. Queen Kong had had it online for a couple years now. The Os
1777 in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they
1778 were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.</P>
1780 long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It
1781 was running clean, for a change. The little government’s records
1782 were safe.
1783 </P>
1785 ok night night</FONT></P>
1787 take care</FONT></P>
1789 creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of
1790 pops.
1791 </P>
1793 he said.</P>
1795 here all night again,” Felix said. “You need your sleep, too.”</P>
1797 us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.</P>
1799 and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator
1800 hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he
1801 loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight
1802 off entropy again. And why not?
1803 </P>
1805 was a sysadmin.</P>
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