War of the Worlds: Fixes after reading

[ccbib.git] / content / Cory_Doctorow / When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.tex

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\begin{center}
\textbf{\huge\textsf{{When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth}}}
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\section{Forematter:}

This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection
“Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by
Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license,
about which you’ll find more at the end of this file.

This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:

\texttt{http://craphound.com/overclocked}

You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including
\href{http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20}{Amazon.}

In the words of Woody Guthrie:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright
\#154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it
without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause
we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it.
Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.

\section{Introduction to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth}

I’ve changed careers every two or three years ever since I dropped
out of university in 1990, and one of the best gigs I ever had was
working as a freelance systems administrator, working in the steam
tunnels of the information age, pulling cables, configuring
machines, keeping the backups running, kicking the network in its
soft and vulnerable places. Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the
century, and if they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs, or
engaging in unprofessional email conduct it’s purely out of their
own goodwill.

There’s a pernicious myth that the Internet was designed to
withstand a nuclear war; while that Strangelove wet-dream was
undoubtedly present in the hindbrains of the generals who
greenlighted the network’s R\&D at companies like Rand and BBN, it
wasn’t really a big piece of the actual engineering and design.

Nevertheless, it does make for a compelling scenario, this vision
of the sysadmins in their cages around the world, watching with
held breath as the generator failed and the servers went dark,
waiting out the long hours until the power and the air run out.

This story originally appeared in Baen’s Universe Magazine, an
admirable, high-quality online magazine edited by Eric Flint,
himself a talented writer and a passionate advocate for open and
free culture.

Listeners to my podcast heard this story as it was written, read
aloud in serial chinks after each composing session. The pressure
of listeners writing in, demanding to know what happened next, kept
me honest and writing.

\section{When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth}

\textsf{(Originally published in Baen’s Universe, 2006)}

When Felix’s special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled
over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you
turn that fucking thing off before bed?”

“Because I’m on call,” he said.

“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on
the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before
turning in. “You’re a goddamned \emph{systems administrator}.”

“It’s my job,” he said.

“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m
right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running
off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply
goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”

He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical
voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he
did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS
for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different
netblock, with its own independent routers on their own
uninterruptible power-supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the
headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been
able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong\dash{}he fixed
stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t
make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too\dash{}he
had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed
without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal
Perversity\dash{}AKA Felix’s Law.

Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able
to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline,
too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction
worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the
data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins
who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at
the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires
back together.

His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the
stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big,
bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline.
Then Kelly called.

“Hi,” he said.

“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”

“I love you, Felix,” she said.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”

“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in
her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out
of the office, shouting, \emph{The Gold Master just shipped!}
They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry.
“This little bastard was born to suck tit.”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data center.
No traffic at 2AM. He slowed down and pulled over before the
entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call
underground.

“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years.
You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone.
You’ve paid your dues.”

“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he
said.

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the
night. I miss you most at night.”

“Kelly\dash{}”

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet
dreams.”

“OK,” he said.

“Simple as that?”

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and
I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to
cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all
over my bathrobe.”

“That’s my boy,” he said.

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into
the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to
let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped
eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil
power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof
clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee,
then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for
a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of
positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the
inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three
sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic
space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and
drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other
sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with
inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and
multitools.

Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those
bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six
looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by
name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward
the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

“Felix.” It was Van, who wasn’t on call that night.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “No need for both of us to be
wrecked tomorrow.”

“What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30
and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you
and told you I was coming down\dash{}spared you the trip.”

Felix’s own server\dash{}a box he shared with five other friends\dash{}was in a
rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

“What’s the story?”

“Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has
got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on
every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run
administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they
get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about
every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too\dash{}like maybe
someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an
email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to
everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys
off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a
Trojan.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long
pony-tail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee
said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds
all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over
his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute,
mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for
fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet
beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix
had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and
methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession
of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever
taken, with time and date.

“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between
Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category\dash{}if people
were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans
would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers
weren’t a problem with the lusers\dash{}they were the fault of
incompetent engineers.

“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at
2AM, it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”

\tb

They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the
Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and
get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was
done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to
turn two keys at once to get access to their cage\dash{}like guards in a
Minuteman silo. 95 percent of the long distance traffic in Canada
went through this building. It had \emph{better} security than most
Minuteman silos.

Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They
were being pounded by worm-probes\dash{}putting the routers back online
just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the
Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both.
Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a
hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should
reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was
10AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear,
but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online.
Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his
tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.

“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was
the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the
boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after
Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on
McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor
McCheese.

“Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs
with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to
reboot it.”

“What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime?
That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

“I wanna eat,” Van said.

“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine,
then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and
you can have the rest of the day off.”

“You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You
should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s
all we deserve.”

\tb

“It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts
of the 486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a
spare power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was
trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had
fallen off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the
machine.

“Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the
background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? “Kelly?”

The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get
anything\dash{}no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and
said NETWORK ERROR.

“Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly
wanted to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick
something up for the family. She’d leave voicemail.

He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang again. He
snatched it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked
to keep anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty:
technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent
Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past
three hours had been purely personal\dash{}even if he planned on billing
them to the company.

There was sobbing on the line.

“Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were
numb.

“Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s
dead, oh Jesus, he’s dead.”

“Who? \emph{Who}, Kelly?”

“Will,” she said.

\emph{Will?} he thought. \emph{Who the fuck is\dash{}}He dropped to his
knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth
certificate, though they’d called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an
anguished sound, like a sick bark.

“I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I
love you so much.”

“Kelly? What’s going on?”

“Everyone, everyone\dash{}” she said. “Only two channels left on the
tube. Christ, Felix, it looks like dawn of the dead out the
window\dash{}” He heard her retch. The phone started to break up, washing
her puke-noises back like an echoplex.

“Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He punched 911,
but the phone went NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.

He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s
network cable and launched Firefox off the command line and googled
for the Metro Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he
searched for an online contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head,
ever. He solved problems and freaking out didn’t solve problems.

He located an online form and wrote out the details of his
conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his
fingers fast, his description complete, and then he hit SUBMIT.

Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix\dash{}” he began.

“God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he
slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some
news sites, but they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it
was because something terrible was happening or because the network
was limping under the superworm.

“I need to get home,” Felix said.

“I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”

They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few
windows was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through
it as they waited for the elevator. Not much traffic for a
Wednesday. Were there more police cars than usual?

“\emph{Oh my God}\dash{}” Van pointed.

The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to
the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand.
Was it moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining
speed, falling northeast toward the financial district. In a
second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt
the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the
impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more
thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure crashed
through building after building.

“The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was\dash{}the CBC’s
towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every
way, were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the port-hole,
it was like watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a
file-sharing site.

Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the
destruction.

“What happened?” one of them asked.

“The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his
own ears.

“Was it the virus?”

“The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin
with just a little type-two flab around the middle.

“Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an email that the whole city’s
quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed
Felix his Blackberry.

Felix was so engrossed in the report\dash{}purportedly forwarded from
Health Canada\dash{}that he didn’t even notice that all the lights had
gone out. Then he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its
owner’s hand, and let out one small sob.

\tb

The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for
the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.

“Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.

“What about Kelly?” Van said.

Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get into the
cage, now.” The cage had microparticulate air-filters.

They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then
let it hiss shut behind him.

“Felix, you need to get home\dash{}”

“It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be OK in here, I
think, so long as the filters hold out.”

“What?”

“Get on IRC,” he said.

They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They
skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some
familiar handles.

\edialog{pentagons gone/white house too}
\edialog{MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN
DIEGO}
\edialog{Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are
fleeing the City like rats.}
\edialog{I heard that the Ginza’s on fire}

Felix typed: \typing{I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve
heard reports of bioweapons, something very fast.}

Van read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix.
Maybe we were all exposed three days ago.”

Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some
symptoms, I think.”

\edialog{Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe
Paris\dash{}realtime sat footage shows them completely dark, and all
netblocks there aren’t routing}
\edialog{You’re in Toronto?}

It was an unfamiliar handle.

\edialog{Yes\dash{}on Front Street}
\edialog{my sisters at UofT and i cnt reach her\dash{}can you call
her?}
\edialog{No phone service}
Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.

“I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his
voice-over-IP app. “I just remembered.”

Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It
rang once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance
siren in an Italian movie.

\edialog{No phone service}
Felix typed again.

He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were
shaking. Van said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”

\tb

Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned.
Manhattan was hot\dash{}radioactive enough to screw up the webcams
looking out over Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it
became clear that Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had
been hanged before their palaces.

His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far
corner of the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the
police. It didn’t work any better than it had the last 20 times.

He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam,
spam. More spam. Automated messages. There\dash{}an urgent message from
the intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.

He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly
probing his routers. It didn’t match a worm’s signature, either. He
followed the traceroute and discovered that the attack had
originated in the same building as him, a system in a cage one
floor below.

He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker and found
that port 1337 was open\dash{}1337 was “leet” or “elite” in hacker
number/letter substitution code. That was the kind of port that a
worm left open to slither in and out of. He googled known sploits
that left a listener on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the
fingerprinted operating system of the compromised server, and then
he had it.

It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have been patched
against years before. No mind. He had the client for it, and he
used it to create a root account for himself on the box, which he
then logged into, and took a look around.

There was one other user logged in, “scaredy,” and he checked the
proccess monitor and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds
of processes that were probing him and plenty of other boxen.

He opened a chat:

\edialog{Stop probing my server}
He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.

\edialog{Are you in the Front Street data-center?}
\edialog{Yes}
\edialog{Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I’m on
the fourth floor. I think there’s a bioweapon attack outside. I
don’t want to leave the clean room.}
\edialog{Felix whooshed out a breath.}
\edialog{You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?}
\edialog{Yeah}
\edialog{That was smart}
Clever bastard.

\edialog{I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more with me.}
\edialog{What do you know?}
Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other guy digested
it. Van stood up and paced. His eyes were glazed over.

“Van? Pal?”

“I have to pee,” he said.

“No opening the door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty Mountain Dew
bottle in the trash there.”

“Right,” Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash can and
pulled out the empty magnum. He turned his back.

\edialog{I’m Felix}
\edialog{Will}
Felix’s stomach did a slow somersault as he thought about 2.0.

“Felix, I think I need to go outside,” Van said. He was moving
toward the airlock door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled
to his feet and ran headlong to Van, tackling him before he reached
the door.

“Van,” he said, looking into his friend’s glazed, unfocused eyes.
“Look at me, Van.”

“I need to go,” Van said. “I need to get home and feed the cats.”

“There’s something out there, something fast-acting and lethal.
Maybe it will blow away with the wind. Maybe it’s already gone. But
we’re going to sit here until we know for sure or until we have no
choice. Sit down, Van. Sit.”

“I’m cold, Felix.”

It was freezing. Felix’s arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his
feet felt like blocks of ice.

“Sit against the servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust heat.” He
found a rack and nestled up against it.”

\edialog{Are you there?}
\edialog{Still here\dash{}sorting out some logistics}
\edialog{How long until we can go out?}
\edialog{I have no idea}
No one typed anything for quite some time then.

\tb

Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it
again. Felix tried calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was
down.

Finally, he slid back against the servers and wrapped his arms
around his knees and wept like a baby.

After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with his arm
around Felix’s shoulder.

“They’re dead, Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s\dash{}son. My family is
gone.”

“You don’t know for sure,” Van said.

“I’m sure enough,” Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t it?”

“We’ll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. Things should
be getting back to normal soon. The fire department will fix it.
They’ll mobilize the Army. It’ll be OK.”

Felix’s ribs hurt. He hadn’t cried since\dash{}Since 2.0 was born. He
hugged his knees harder.

Then the doors opened.

The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that
said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic
Frontiers Canada shirt.

“Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top
floor. Take the stairs.”

Felix found he was holding his breath.

“If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK
NERDY said. “Just go, we’ll meet you there.”

“There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his
feet.

“Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.”

TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d
unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly,
their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of
the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna.

There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water
and coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of
sysadmins before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered
which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue.

He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla
coffee before running out of change. Van had scored them some table
space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet
line. “Just save some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in
front of Van.

By the time they were all settled in, thoroughly evacuated, and
eating, TALK NERDY and his friend had returned again. They cleared
off the cash-register at the end of the food-prep area and TALK
NERDY got up on it. Slowly the conversation died down.

“I’m Uri Popovich, this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank you all for
coming up here. Here’s what we know for sure: the building’s been
on generators for three hours now. Visual observation indicates
that we’re the only building in central Toronto with working
power\dash{}which should hold out for three more days. There is a
bioagent of unknown origin loose beyond our doors. It kills
quickly, within hours, and it is aerosolized. You get it from
breathing bad air. No one has opened any of the exterior doors to
this building since five this morning. No one will open the doors
until I give the go-ahead.

“Attacks on major cities all over the world have left emergency
responders in chaos. The attacks are electronic, biological,
nuclear and conventional explosives, and they are very widespread.
I’m a security engineer, and where I come from, attacks in this
kind of cluster are usually viewed as opportunistic: group B blows
up a bridge because everyone is off taking care of group A’s dirty
nuke event. It’s smart. An Aum Shin Rikyo cell in Seoul gassed the
subways there about 2AM Eastern\dash{}that’s the earliest event we can
locate, so it may have been the Archduke that broke the camel’s
back. We’re pretty sure that Aum Shin Rikyo couldn’t be behind this
kind of mayhem: they have no history of infowar and have never
shown the kind of organizational acumen necessary to take out so
many targets at once. Basically, they’re not smart enough.

“We’re holing up here for the foreseeable future, at least until
the bioweapon has been identified and dispersed. We’re going to
staff the racks and keep the networks up. This is critical
infrastructure, and it’s our job to make sure it’s got five nines
of uptime. In times of national emergency, our responsibility to do
that doubles.”

One sysadmin put up his hand. He was very daring in a green
Incredible Hulk ring-tee, and he was at the young end of the
scale.

“Who died and made you king?”

“I have controls for the main security system, keys to every cage,
and passcodes for the exterior doors\dash{}they’re all locked now, by the
way. I’m the one who got everyone up here first and called the
meeting. I don’t care if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty
one. But someone needs to have this job.”

“You’re right,” the kid said. “And I can do it every bit as well as
you. My name’s Will Sario.”

Popovich looked down his nose at the kid. “Well, if you’ll let me
finish talking, maybe I’ll hand things over to you when I’m done.”

“Finish, by all means.” Sario turned his back on him and walked to
the window. He stared out of it intensely. Felix’s gaze was drawn
to it, and he saw that there were several oily smoke plumes rising
up from the city.

Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,”
he said.

The kid looked around after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is
it my turn now?”

There was a round of good-natured chuckling.

“Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There are
coordinated attacks on every critical piece of infrastructure.
There’s only one way that those attacks could be so well
coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you buy the thesis that the
attacks are all opportunistic, we need to ask how an opportunistic
attack could be organized in minutes: the Internet.”

“So you think we should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a
little, but stopped when Sario said nothing.

“We saw an attack last night that nearly killed the Internet. A
little DoS on the critical routers, a little DNS-foo, and down it
goes like a preacher’s daughter. Cops and the military are a bunch
of technophobic lusers, they hardly rely on the net at all. If we
take the Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage the
attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders. When the time
comes, we can rebuild it.”

“You’re shitting me,” Popovich said. His jaw literally hung open.

“It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with
logic when it dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with
people, not logic.”

There was a buzz of conversation that quickly turned into a roar.

“Shut UP!” Popovich hollered. The conversation dimmed by one Watt.
Popovich yelled again, stamping his foot on the countertop. Finally
there was a semblance of order. “One at a time,” he said. He was
flushed red, his hands in his pockets.

One sysadmin was for staying. Another for going. They should hide
in the cages. They should inventory their supplies and appoint a
quartermaster. They should go outside and find the police, or
volunteer at hospitals. They should appoint defenders to keep the
front door secure.

Felix found to his surprise that he had his hand in the air.
Popovich called on him.

“My name is Felix Tremont,” he said, getting up on one of the
tables, drawing out his PDA. “I want to read you something.

“‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh
and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf
of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not
welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

“‘We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so
I address you with no greater authority than that with which
liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we
are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek
to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you
possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

“‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not
invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world.
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you
can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You
cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our
collective actions.’

“That’s from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It was
written 12 years ago. I thought it was one of the most beautiful
things I’d ever read. I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where
cyberspace was free\dash{}and where that freedom infected the real world,
so meatspace got freer too.

He swallowed hard and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his
hand. Van awkwardly patted him on the shoe.

“My beautiful son and my beautiful wife died today. Millions more,
too. The city is literally in flames. Whole cities have disappeared
from the map.”

He coughed up a sob and swallowed it again.

“All around the world, people like us are gathered in buildings
like this. They were trying to recover from last night’s worm when
disaster struck. We have independent power. Food. Water.

“We have the network, that the bad guys use so well and that the
good guys have never figured out.

“We have a shared love of liberty that comes from caring about and
caring for the network. We are in charge of the most important
organizational and governmental tool the world has ever seen. We
are the closest thing to a government the world has right now.
Geneva is a crater. The East River is on fire and the UN is
evacuated.

“The Distributed Republic of Cyberspace weathered this storm
basically unscathed. We are the custodians of a deathless,
monstrous, wonderful machine, one with the potential to rebuild a
better world.

“I have nothing to live for but that.”

There were tears in Van’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one. They didn’t
applaud him, but they did one better. They maintained respectful,
total silence for seconds that stretched to a minute.

“How do we do it?” Popovich said, without a trace of sarcasm.

\tb

The newsgroups were filling up fast. They’d announced them in
news.admin.net-abuse.email, where all the spamfighters hung out,
and where there was a tight culture of camaraderie in the face of
full-out attack.

The new group was alt.november5-disaster.recovery, with
.recovery.governance, .recovery.finance, .recovery.logistics and
.recovery.defense hanging off of it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy
and all those who sail in her.

The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online,
with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts
who wheeled through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead
boxen and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline
in the Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d
redirected the DNS so that you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon
was down. Paypal was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all
up, and filling with millions of posts from scared survivors
huddling together for electronic warmth.

The Flickr photostreams were horrific. Felix had to unsubscribe
from them after he caught a photo of a woman and a baby, dead in a
kitchen, twisted into an agonized heiroglyph by the bioagent. They
didn’t look like Kelly and 2.0, but they didn’t have to. He started
shaking and couldn’t stop.

Wikipedia was up, but limping under load. The spam poured in as
though nothing had changed. Worms roamed the network.

.recovery.logistics was where most of the action was.

\edialog{We can use the newsgroup voting mechanism to hold
regional elections}
Felix knew that this would work. Usenet newsgroup votes had been
running for more than twenty years without a substantial hitch.

\edialog{We’ll elect regional representatives and they’ll
pick a Prime Minister.}
The Americans insisted on President, which Felix didn’t like.
Seemed too partisan. His future wouldn’t be the American future.
The American future had gone up with the White House. He was
building a bigger tent than that.

There were French sysadmins online from France Telecom. The EBU’s
data-center had been spared in the attacks that hammered Geneva,
and it was filled with wry Germans whose English was better than
Felix’s. They got on well with the remains of the BBC team in
Canary Wharf.

They spoke polyglot English in .recovery.logistics, and Felix had
momentum on his side. Some of the admins were cooling out the
inevitable stupid flamewars with the practice of long years. Some
were chipping in useful suggestions.

Surprisingly few thought that Felix was off his rocker.

\edialog{I think we should hold elections as soon as
possible. Tomorrow at the latest. We can’t rule justly without the
consent of the governed.}
Within seconds the reply landed in his inbox.

\edialog{You can’t be serious. Consent of the governed?
Unless I miss my guess, most of the people you’re proposing to
govern are puking their guts out, hiding under their desks, or
wandering shell-shocked through the city streets. When do THEY get
a vote?}
Felix had to admit she had a point. Queen Kong was sharp. Not many
woman sysadmins, and that was a genuine tragedy. Women like Queen
Kong were too good to exclude from the field. He’d have to hack a
solution to get women balanced out in his new government. Require
each region to elect one woman and one man?

He happily clattered into argument with her. The elections would be
the next day; he’d see to it.

\tb

“Prime Minister of Cyberspace? Why not call yourself the Grand
Poobah of the Global Data Network? It’s more dignified, sounds
cooler and it’ll get you just as far.” Will had the sleeping spot
next to him, up in the cafeteria, with Van on the other side. The
room smelled like a dingleberry: twenty-five sysadmins who hadn’t
washed in at least a day all crammed into the same room. For some
of them, it had been much, much longer than a day.

“Shut up, Will,” Van said. “You wanted to try to knock the Internet
offline.”

“Correction: I \emph{want} to knock the Internet offline.
Present-tense”

Felix cracked one eye. He was so tired, it was like lifting
weights.

“Look, Sario\dash{}if you don’t like my platform, put one of your own
forward. There are plenty of people who think I’m full of shit and
I respect them for that, since they’re all running opposite me or
backing someone who is. That’s your choice. What’s not on the menu
is nagging and complaining. Bedtime now, or get up and post your
platform.”

Sario sat up slowly, unrolling the jacket he had been using for a
pillow and putting it on. “Screw you guys, I’m out of here.”

“I thought he’d never leave,” Felix said and turned over, lying
awake a long time, thinking about the election.

There were other people in the running. Some of them weren’t even
sysadmins. A US Senator on retreat at his summer place in Wyoming
had generator power and a satellite phone. Somehow he’d found the
right newsgroup and thrown his hat into the ring. Some anarchist
hackers in Italy strafed the group all night long, posting
broken-English screeds about the political bankruptcy of
“governance” in the new world. Felix looked at their netblock and
determined that they were probably holed up in a small Interaction
Design institute near Turin. Italy had been hit very bad, but out
in the small town, this cell of anarchists had taken up residence.

A surprising number were running on a platform of shutting down the
Internet. Felix had his doubts about whether this was even
possible, but he thought he understood the impulse to finish the
work and the world. Why not?

He fell asleep thinking about the logistics of shutting down the
Internet, and dreamed bad dreams in which he was the network’s sole
defender.

He woke to a papery, itchy sound. He rolled over and saw that Van
was sitting up, his jacket balled up in his lap, vigorously
scratching his skinny arms. They’d gone the color of corned beef,
and had a scaly look. In the light streaming through the cafeteria
windows, skin motes floated and danced in great clouds.

“What are you doing?” Felix sat up. Watching Van’s fingernails rip
into his skin made him itch in sympathy. It had been three days
since he’d last washed his hair and his scalp sometimes felt like
there were little egg-laying insects picking their way through it.
He’d adjusted his glasses the night before and had touched the back
of his ears; his finger came away shining with thick sebum. He got
blackheads in the backs of his ears when he didn’t shower for a
couple days, and sometimes gigantic, deep boils that Kelly finally
popped with sick relish.

“Scratching,” Van said. He went to work on his head, sending a
cloud of dandruff-crud into the sky, there to join the scurf that
he’d already eliminated from his extremeties. “Christ, I itch all
over.”

Felix took Mayor McCheese from Van’s backpack and plugged it into
one of the Ethernet cables that snaked all over the floor. He
googled everything he could think of that could be related to this.
“Itchy” yielded 40,600,000 links. He tried compound queries and got
slightly more discriminating links.

“I think it’s stress-related excema,” Felix said, finally.

“I don’t get excema,” Van said.

Felix showed him some lurid photos of red, angry skin flaked with
white. “Stress-related excema,” he said, reading the caption.

Van examined his arms. “I have excema,” he said.

“Says here to keep it moisturized and to try cortisone cream. You
might try the first aid kit in the second-floor toilets. I think I
saw some there.” Like all of the sysadmins, Felix had had a bit of
a rummage around the offices, bathrooms, kitchen and store-rooms,
squirreling away a roll of toilet-paper in his shoulder-bag along
with three or four power-bars. They were sharing out the food in
the caf by unspoken agreement, every sysadmin watching every other
for signs of gluttony and hoarding. All were convinced that there
was hoarding and gluttony going on out of eyeshot, because all were
guilty of it themselves when no one else was watching.

Van got up and when his face hove into the light, Felix saw how
puffed his eyes were. “I’ll post to the mailing-list for some
antihistamine,” Felix said. There had been four mailing lists and
three wikis for the survivors in the building within hours of the
first meeting’s close, and in the intervening days they’d settled
on just one. Felix was still on a little mailing list with five of
his most trusted friends, two of whom were trapped in cages in
other countries. He suspected that the rest of the sysadmins were
doing the same.

Van stumbled off. “Good luck on the elections,” he said, patting
Felix on the shoulder.

Felix stood and paced, stopping to stare out the grubby windows.
The fires still burned in Toronto, more than before. He’d tried to
find mailing lists or blogs that Torontonians were posting to, but
the only ones he’d found were being run by other geeks in other
data-centers. It was possible\dash{}likely, even\dash{}that there were
survivors out there who had more pressing priorities than posting
to the Internet. His home phone still worked about half the time
but he’d stopped calling it after the second day, when hearing
Kelly’s voice on the voicemail for the fiftieth time had made him
cry in the middle of a planning meeting. He wasn’t the only one.

Election day. Time to face the music.

\edialog{Are you nervous?}
\edialog{Nope,}
Felix typed.

\edialog{I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I\erratum{”}{'}m just
glad we’re doing this. The alternative was sitting around with our
thumbs up our ass, waiting for someone to crack up and open the
door.}
The cursor hung. Queen Kong was very high latency as she bossed her
gang of Googloids around the Googleplex, doing everything she could
to keep her data center online. Three of the offshore cages had
gone offline and two of their six redundant network links were
smoked. Lucky for her, queries-per-second were way down.

\edialog{There’s still China}
she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of the world
colored in Google-queries-per-second, and could do magic with it,
showing the drop-off over time in colorful charts. She’d uploaded
lots of video clips showing how the plague and the bombs had swept
the world: the initial upswell of queries from people wanting to
find out what was going on, then the grim, precipitous shelving off
as the plagues took hold.

\edialog{China’s still running about ninety percent nominal.}
Felix shook his head.

\edialog{You can’t think that they’re responsible}
\edialog{No}
She typed, but then she started to key something and then stopped.

\edialog{No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis.
This is a bunch of assholes all using the rest for cover. But China
put them down harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve
finally found a use for totalitarian states.}
\edialog{Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:}
\edialog{You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You
guys were pretty enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of
China.}
\edialog{Wasn’t my idea}
she typed.

\edialog{And my boss is
dead. They’re probably all dead. The whole Bay Area got hit hard,
and then there was the quake.}

They’d watched the USGS’s automated data-stream from the 6.9 that
trashed northern Cal from Gilroy to Sebastopol. Soma webcams
revealed the scope of the damage\dash{}gas main explosions, seismically
retrofitted buildings crumpling like piles of children’s blocks
after a good kicking. The Googleplex, floating on a series of
gigantic steel springs, had shook like a plateful of jello, but the
racks had stayed in place and the worst injury they’d had was a
badly bruised eye on a sysadmin who’d caught a flying cable-crimper
in the face.

\edialog{Sorry. I forgot.}
\edialog{It’s OK. We all lost people, right?}
\edialog{Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the
election. Whoever wins, at least we’re doing SOMETHING}
\edialog{Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags}
Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins were using to
describe the contingent that wanted to shut down the Internet.
Queen Kong had coined it\dash{}apparently it had started life as a
catch-all term to describe the clueless IT managers that she’d
chewed up through her career.

\edialog{They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is all. Your
endorsement will carry the day}
The Googloids were one of the largest and most powerful bloc\erratum{}{k}s left
behind, along with the satellite uplink crews and the remaining
transoceanic crews. Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise
and he’d sent her an email that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t
have the fuckrags in charge.”

\edialog{gtg}
she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up a browser
and called up google.com. The browser timed out. He hit reload, and
then again, and then the Google front-page came back up. Whatever
had hit Queen Kong’s workplace\dash{}power failure, worms, another
quake\dash{}she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced
the O’s in the Google logo with little planet Earths with mushroom
clouds rising from them.

\tb

“Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was mid-afternoon, not
that time particularly passed in the data-center. Felix patted his
pockets. They’d put a quartermaster in charge, but not before
everyone had snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a
dozen power-bars and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches
but had wisely eaten them first before they got stale.

“One power-bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in
his waistline that morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d
remembered Kelly’s teasing about his weight and he’d cried some.
Then he’d eaten two power bars, leaving him with just one left.

“Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his shoulders
sloping in on his toast-rack chest.

“Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”

Van took the power-bar from him and then put it down on the table.
“OK, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but
I’m fucking \emph{hungry}, so I’m just going to take it and eat it,
OK?”

“That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”

“How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the
wrapper clean.

“Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been
winning by a slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop
was a major handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the
cages, there were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left
the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag something
WiFi-enabled.

“You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them.
He’d become famous in the center for never sleeping, for
eavesdropping, for picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered
heat of a Usenet flamewar. “The winner will be someone who
understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then
ticked off his bullet points by raising a finger at a time. “Point:
The terrorists are using the Internet to destroy the world, and we
need to destroy the Internet first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the
whole thing is a joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough.
Point: Or if we don’t, it will be because the old world will be
back and running, and it won’t give a crap about your new world.
Point: We’re gonna run out of food before we run out of shit to
argue about or reasons not to go outside. We have the chance to do
something to help the world recover: we can kill the net and cut it
off as a tool for bad guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck
chairs on the bridge of your personal Titanic in the service of
some sweet dream about an ‘independent cyberspace.’”

The thing was that Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in
two days\dash{}intermittent power from the grid had stretched their
generator lifespan. And if you bought his hypothesis that the
Internet was primarily being used as a tool to organize more
mayhem, shutting it down would be the right thing to do.

But Felix’s daughter and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to
rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one. The old world was one
that didn’t have any place for him. Not anymore.

Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scruff
swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That
is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever
leprosy is eating you, aerosolizing it into the air supply is
pretty anti-social.”

“You’re the world’s leading authority on anti-social, Sario,” Van
said. "Go away or I’ll multi-tool you to death.” He stopped
scratching and patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.

“Yeah, I’m anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any
meds in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”

Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that three
quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an
asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that
makes me better than you, dickweed.”

“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”

\tb

They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the
first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was
spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a
critical day while they added up the votes a second time.

But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the
data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries
were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline,
though she maintained a leader-board of new and rising
queries\dash{}largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and
self-defense.

Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and
staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The
backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from
those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix
hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite
Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.

Water was running short, too.

Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more
than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned
acceptance speech to newsgroups.

“We’re going to open the doors,” Popovich said. Like all of them,
he’d lost weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a
cloud coming off a trash-bag behind a fish-market on a sunny day.
Felix was quite sure he smelled no better.

“You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a
working group for it\dash{}great idea.”

Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go find our
families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it
hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future in here.”

“What about network maintenance?” Felix said, though he knew the
answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?”

“We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,” Popovich said.
His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the
smokers stuck in the data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week.
They’d run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The
smokers had it rough.

“And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”

“You and anyone else who cares anymore.”

Felix knew that he’d squandered his opportunity. The election had
seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight all it had been was an
excuse for infighting when they should have been figuring out what
to do next. The problem was that there was nothing to do next.

“I can’t make you stay,” he said.

“Yeah, you can’t.” Popovich turned on his heel and walked out.
Rosenbaum watched him go, then he gripped Felix’s shoulder and
squeezed it.

“Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe
we’ll find something to eat and some fuel and come back.”

Rosenbaum had a sister whom he’d been in contact with over IM for
the first days after the crisis broke. Then she’d stopped
answering. The sysadmins were split among those who’d had a chance
to say goodbye and those who hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it
better.

They posted about it on the internal newsgroup\dash{}they were still
geeks, after all, and there was a little honor guard on the ground
floor, geeks who watched them pass toward the double doors. They
manipulated the keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the
first set of doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and
pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors opened. It was
very bright and sunny outside, and apart from how empty it was, it
looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.

The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then another.
They turned to wave at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed
their throats and began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on
the ground.

“Shiii\dash{}!” was all Felix managed to choke out before they both
dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing so hard they were
clutching their sides. They waved once more and turned on their
heels.

“Man, those guys are sick,” Van said. He scratched his arms, which
had long, bloody scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in
scurf they looked like they’d been dusted with icing sugar.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” Felix said.

“Christ I’m hungry,” Van said, conversationally.

“Lucky for you, we’ve got all the packets we can eat,” Felix said.

“You’re too good to us grunts, Mr President,” Van said.

“Prime Minister,” he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re the Deputy
Prime Minister. You’re my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out
of oversized novelty checks.”

It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum
go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that they’d all be going
soon.

That had been pre-ordained by the fuel-supply, but who wanted to
wait for the fuel to run out, anyway?

\tb

\edialog{half my crew split this morning}
Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of
course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been
since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a
desk at Stanford.

\edialog{we’re down to a quarter}
Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum
left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near
zero. He and Van hadn’t had much time to play Republic of
Cyberspace. They’d been too busy learning the systems that Popovich
had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on
acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in
Canada.

Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again,
generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM,
or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much
food\dash{}it was all gone.

He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.

\edialog{Runaway processes on Solaris}
\edialog{\textgreater{}}
\edialog{Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MSCE but I’m the only
one awake here and four of the DSLAMs just went down. Looks like
there’s some custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how
much to bill our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand
threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I
can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do
to get this goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it’s
not as if any of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d
ask the guy who wrote this code, but he’s pretty much dead as far
as anyone can work out.}
He reloaded. There was a response. It was short, authoritative, and
helpful\dash{}just the sort of thing you almost never saw in a
high-caliber newsgroup when a noob posted a dumb question. The
apocalypse had awoken the spirit of patient helpfulness in the
world’s sysop community.

Van shoulder-surfed him. “Holy shit, who knew he had it in him?”

He looked at the message again. It was from Will Sario.

He dropped into his chat window.

\edialog{sario i thought you wanted the network dead why are
you helping msces fix their boxen?}
\edialog{\textless{}sheepish grinGee Mr PM,
maybe I just can’t bear to watch a computer suffer at the hands of
an amateur.}
\edialog{He flipped to the channel with Queen Kong in it.}
\edialog{How long?}
\edialog{Since I slept? Two days. Until we run out of fuel?
Three days. Since we ran out of food? Two days.}
\edialog{Jeez. I didn’t sleep last night either. We’re a
little short handed around here.}
\edialog{asl? Im monica and I live in pasadena and Im bored
with my homework. WOuld you like to download my pic???}
The trojan bots were all over IRC these days, jumping to every
channel that had any traffic on it. Sometimes you caught five or
six flirting with each other. It was pretty weird to watch a piece
of malware try to con another instance of itself into downloading a
trojan.

They both kicked the bot off the channel simultaneously. He had a
script for it now. The spam hadn’t even tailed off a little.

\edialog{How come the spam isn’t reducing? Half the goddamned
data-centers have gone dark}
\edialog{Queen Kong paused a long time before typing. As had become
automatic when she went high-latency, he reloaded the Google
homepage. Sure enough, it was down.}
\edialog{Sario, you got any food?}
\edialog{You won’t miss a couple more meals, Your Excellency}
Van had gone back to Mayor McCheese but he was in the same
channel.

“What a dick. You’re looking pretty buff, though, dude.”

Van didn’t look so good. He looked like you could knock him over
with a stiff breeze and he had a phlegmy, weak quality to his
speech.

\edialog{hey kong everything ok?}
\edialog{everything’s fine just had to go kick some ass}
“How’s the traffic, Van?”

“Down 25 percent from this morning,” he said. There were a bunch of
nodes whose connections routed through them. Presumably most of
these were home or commercial customers is places where the power
was still on and the phone company’s COs were still alive.

Every once in a while, Felix would wiretap the connections to see
if he could find a person who had news of the wide world. Almost
all of it was automated traffic, though: network backups, status
updates. Spam. Lots of spam.

\edialog{Spam’s still up because the services that stop spam
are failing faster than the services that create it. All the
anti-worm stuff is centralized in a couple places. The bad stuff is
on a million zombie computers. If only the lusers had had the good
sense to turn off their home PCs before keeling over or taking off}
\edialog{at the rate were going well be routing nothing but
spam by dinnertime}
Van cleared his throat, a painful sound. “About that,” he said. “I
think it’s going to hit sooner than that. Felix, I don’t think
anyone would notice if we just walked away from here.”

Felix looked at him, his skin the color of corned-beef and streaked
with long, angry scabs. His fingers trembled.

“You drinking enough water?”

Van nodded. “All frigging day, every ten seconds. Anything to keep
my belly full.” He pointed to a refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of
water by his side.

“Let’s have a meeting,” he said.

\tb

There had been forty-three of them on D-Day. Now there were
fifteen. Six had responded to the call for a meeting by simply
leaving. Everyone knew without having to be told what the meeting
was about.

“So that’s it, you’re going to let it all fall apart?” Sario was
the only one with the energy left to get properly angry. He’d go
angry to his grave. The veins on his throat and forehead stood out
angrily. His fists shook angrily. All the other geeks went
lids-down at the site of him, looking up in unison for once at the
discussion, not keeping one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service
log.

“Sario, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Felix said. “You wanted to
pull the goddamned plug!”

“I wanted it to go \emph{clean},” he shouted. “I didn’t want it to
bleed out and keel over in little gasps and pukes forever. I wanted
it to be an act of will by the global community of its caretakers.
I wanted it to be an affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy
and bad code and worms winning out. Fuck that, that’s just what’s
happened out there.”

Up in the top-floor cafeteria, there were windows all around,
hardened and light-bending, and by custom, they were all
blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the room, yanking down the
blinds. \emph{How the hell can he get the energy to run?} Felix
wondered. He could barely walk up the stairs to the meeting room.

Harsh daylight flooded in. It was a fine sunny day out there, but
everywhere you looked across that commanding view of Toronto’s
skyline, there were rising plumes of smoke. The TD tower, a
gigantic black modernist glass brick, was gouting flame to the sky.
“It’s all falling apart, the way everything does.

“Listen, listen. If we leave the network to fall over slowly, parts
of it will stay online for months. Maybe years. And what will run
on it? Malware. Worms. Spam. System-processes. Zone transfers. The
things we use fall apart and require constant maintenance. The
things we abandon don’t get used and they last forever. We’re going
to leave the network behind like a lime-pit filled with industrial
waste. That will be our fucking legacy\dash{}the legacy of every
keystroke you and I and anyone, anywhere ever typed. You
understand? We’re going to leave it to die slow like a wounded dog,
instead of giving it one clean shot through the head.”

Van scratched his cheeks, then Felix saw that he was wiping away
tears.

“Sario, you’re not wrong, but you’re not right either,” he said.
“Leaving it up to limp along is right. We’re going to all be
limping for a long time, and maybe it will be some use to someone.
If there’s one packet being routed from any user to any other user,
anywhere in the world, it’s doing it’s job.”

“If you want a clean kill, you can do that,” Felix said. “I’m the
PM and I say so. I’m giving you root. All of you.” He turned to the
white-board where the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day’s
specials. Now it was covered with the remnants of heated technical
debates that the sysadmins had engaged in over the days since the
day.

He scrubbed away a clean spot with his sleeve and began to write
out long, complicated alphanumeric passwords salted with
punctuation. Felix had a gift for remembering that kind of
password. He doubted it would do him much good, ever again.

\tb

\edialog{Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway}
\edialog{yeah well thats right then. it was an honor, mr
prime minister}
\edialog{you going to be ok?}
\edialog{ive commandeered a young sysadmin to see to my
feminine needs and weve found another cache of food thatll last us
a coupel weeks now that were down to fifteen admins\dash{}im in hog
heaven pal}
\edialog{youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. Dont be a hero
though. When you need to go go. Theres got to be something out
there}
\edialog{be safe felix, seriously\dash{}btw did i tell you queries
are up in Romania? maybe theyre getting back on their feet}
\edialog{really?}
\edialog{yeah, really. we’re hard to kill\dash{}like fucking
roaches}
Her connection died. He dropped to Firefox and reloaded Google and
it was down. He hit reload and hit reload and hit reload, but it
didn’t come up. He closed his eyes and listened to Van scratch his
legs and then heard Van type a little.

“They’re back up,” he said.

Felix whooshed out a breath. He sent the message to the newsgroup,
one that he’d run through five drafts before settling on, “Take
care of the place, OK? We’ll be back, someday.”

Everyone was going except Sario. Sario wouldn’t leave. He came down
to see them off, though.

The sysadmins gathered in the lobby and Felix made the safety door
go up, and the light rushed in.

Sario stuck his hand out.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You too,” Felix said. He had a firm grip, Sario, stronger than he
had any right to be. “Maybe you were right,” he said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You going to pull the plug?”

Sario looked up at the drop-ceiling, seeming to peer through the
reinforced floors at the humming racks above. “Who knows?” he said
at last.

Van scratched and a flurry of white motes danced in the sunlight.

“Let’s go find you a pharmacy,” Felix said. He walked to the door
and the other sysadmins followed.

They waited for the interior doors to close behind them and then
Felix opened the exterior doors. The air smelled and tasted like a
mown grass, like the first drops of rain, like the lake and the
sky, like the outdoors and the world, an old friend not heard from
in an eternity.

“Bye, Felix,” the other sysadmins said. They were drifting away
while he stood transfixed at the top of the short concrete
staircase. The light hurt his eyes and made them water.

“I think there’s a Shopper’s Drug Mart on King Street,” he said to
Van. “We’ll thrown a brick through the window and get you some
cortisone, OK?”

“You’re the Prime Minister,” Van said. “Lead on.”

\tb

They didn’t see a single soul on the fifteen minute walk. There
wasn’t a single sound except for some bird noises and some distant
groans, and the wind in the electric cables overhead. It was like
walking on the surface of the moon.

“Bet they have chocolate bars at the Shopper’s,” Van said.

Felix’s stomach lurched. Food. “Wow,” he said, around a mouthful of
saliva.

They walked past a little hatchback and in the front seat was the
dried body of a woman holding the dried body of a baby, and his
mouth filled with sour bile, even though the smell was faint
through the rolled-up windows.

He hadn’t thought of Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped to his knees
and retched again. Out here in the real world, his family was dead.
Everyone he knew was dead. He just wanted to lie down on the
sidewalk and wait to die, too.

Van’s rough hands slipped under his armpits and hauled weakly at
him. “Not now,” he said. “Once we’re safe inside somewhere and
we’ve eaten something, then and then you can do this, but not now.
Understand me, Felix? Not fucking now.”

The profanity got through to him. He got to his feet. His knees
were trembling.

“Just a block more,” Van said, and slipped Felix’s arm around his
shoulders and led him along.

“Thank you, Van. I’m sorry.”

“No sweat,” he said. “You need a shower, bad. No offense.”

“None taken.”

The Shoppers had a metal security gate, but it had been torn away
from the front windows, which had been rudely smashed. Felix and
Van squeezed through the gap and stepped into the dim drug-store. A
few of the displays were knocked over, but other than that, it
looked OK. By the cash-registers, Felix spotted the racks of candy
bars at the same instant that Van saw them, and they hurried over
and grabbed a handful each, stuffing their faces.

“You two eat like pigs.”

They both whirled at the sound of the woman’s voice. She was
holding a fire-axe that was nearly as big as she was. She wore a
lab-coat and comfortable shoes.

“You take what you need and go, OK? No sense in there being any
trouble.” Her chin was pointy and her eyes were sharp. She looked
to be in her forties. She looked nothing like Kelly, which was
good, because Felix felt like running and giving her a hug as it
was. Another person alive!

“Are you a doctor?” Felix said. She was wearing scrubs under the
coat, he saw.

“You going to go?” She brandished the axe.

Felix held his hands up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A
pharmacist?”

“I used to be a RN, ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web-designer.”

“You’re shitting me,” Felix said.

“Haven’t you ever met a girl who knew about computers?”

“Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google’s data-center is a
girl. A woman, I mean.”

“You’re shitting me,” she said. “A woman ran Google’s
data-center?”

“Runs,” Felix said. “It’s still online.”

“NFW,” she said. She let the axe lower.

“Way. Have you got any cortisone cream? I can tell you the story.
My name’s Felix and this is Van, who needs any anti-histamines you
can spare.”

“I can spare? Felix old pal, I have enough dope here to last a
hundred years. This stuff’s going to expire long before it runs
out. But are you telling me that the net’s still up?”

“It’s still up,” he said. “Kind of. That’s what we’ve been doing
all week. Keeping it online. It might not last much longer,
though.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose it would.” She set the axe down.
“Have you got anything to trade? I don’t need much, but I’ve been
trying to keep my spirits up by trading with the neighbors. It’s
like playing civilization.”

“You have neighbors?”

“At least ten,” she said. “The people in the restaurant across the
way make a pretty good soup, even if most of the veg is canned.
They cleaned me out of Sterno, though.”

“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”

“Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken
care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone\dash{}broken wrist. Listen,
do you want some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of
it. Your friend looks like he could use a meal.”

“Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re
both committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use
some assistants?”

“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind
some company.”

They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people
brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw
their noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working
plumbing in the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and
then he followed.

“None of us know what to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa,
and she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic
cups from the housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or
tanks or even looters, but it’s just quiet.”

“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.

“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing
the same thing? Maybe if we all get together we’ll come up with
something to do.”

“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.

Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”

Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady,
we’re at a critical juncture here. We can go down through
negligence, dwindling away in our hiding holes, or we can try to
build something better.”

“Better?” She made a rude noise.

“OK, not better. Something though. Building something new is better
than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when
you’ve read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips
here?”

Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell
are we going to do, anyway?”

“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. Something is
better than nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world
where people are talking to each other, and we’re going to expand
it. We’re going to find everyone we can and we’re going to take
care of them and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably
fuck it up. We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give up,
though.”

Van laughed. “Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you know it?”

“We’re going to go and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He’s
going to be a part of this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of
the world. The world doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things
that have endings.”

Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little now. “And
you’ll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the World?”

“He prefers Prime Minister,” Van said in a stagey whisper. The
anti-histamines had worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded
from angry red to a fine pink.

“You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.

“Boys,” she said. “Playing games. How about this. I’ll help out
however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister
and you never call me the Minister of Health?”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the
last few drops out.

The raised their glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To
humanity.” He thought hard. “To rebuilding.”

“To anything,” Van said.

“To anything,” Felix said. “To everything.”

“To everything,” Rosa said.

They drank. The next day, they started to rebuild. And months
later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the
fragile little group they’d pulled together. And a year after that,
they started over again. And five years later, they started again.

Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted
and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel.
Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little
government\dash{}little governments came and went, but this one was smart
enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep
everything running, and Van went with him.

They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened
upon old friends from the strange time they’d spent running the
Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling
him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that
anymore.

It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never
healed, and neither did most other people’s. There were lingering
sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks,
he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he
never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

\edialog{go to bed, felix}
\edialog{soon, kong, soon\dash{}almost got this backup running}
\edialog{youre a junkie, dude.}
\edialog{look whos talking}
He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online for a
couple years now. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever
she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one
smiling the other frowning.

He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to
check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little
government’s records were safe.

\edialog{ok night night}
\edialog{take care}
Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back
with a long series of pops.

“Sleep well, boss,” he said.

“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. “You need
your sleep, too.”

“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him,
the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The
harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix
another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

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