A little maintenance kybe, scuffed and scorched, perched on the high
trellis, valiantly but fruitlessly chipping with its multitool at a hard siliceous shell irregularly encrusting the photovoltaic surface.
Thales caught a few flakes of the unknown substance as they fell, and
inserted them into the analysis chamber of the pocket lab.
“We should have a complete readout of the composition of this stuff by
morning.”
“No sooner?”
“Well, actually, by midnight. But I don’t intend to stay up. I’ve done nothing
except sit on my ass for two days, yet I’m still exhausted. It’s this oppressive place—”
“Okay,” A.B. replied. The first stars had begun to prinkle the sky. “Let’s call it a day.”
They ate in the bug, in a silent atmosphere of forced companionability,
then retired to their separate shelters.
A.B. hoped with mild lust for another nocturnal visit from a prowling
Tigerishka, but was not greatly disappointed when she never showed to
interrupt his intermittent drowsing. Truly, the desert sands of Paris sapped all his usual joie de vivre.
Finally falling fast asleep, he dreamed of the ghostly waters of the vanished
Seine, impossibly flowing deep beneath his tent. Somehow, Zulqamain
Safranski was diverting them to flood A.B.’s apartment . . .
4. THE RED QUEEN’S TRIATHLON
In the morning, after breakfast, A.B. approached Gershon Thales, who stood
apart near the trundlebug. Already the sun thundered down its oppressive
cargo of photons, so necessary for the survival of the Reboot Cities, yet,
conversely, just one more burden for the overstressed Greenhouse ecosphere.
Feeling irritable and impatient, anxious to be back home, A.B. dispensed
with pleasantries.
“I’ve tried vibbing your pocket lab for the results, but you’ve got it offline, behind that pirate software you’re running. Open up, now.”
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LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
The keek stared at A.B. with mournful stolidity. “One minute, I need
something from my pod.”
Thales ducked into his tent. A.B. turned to Tigerishka. “What do you
make—”
Blinding light shattered A.B.’s vision for a millisecond in a painful nova,
before his MEMS contacts could react protectively by going opaque.
Tigerishka vented a stifled yelp of surprise and shock, showing she had gotten
the same actinic eyekick.
A.B. immediately thought of vib malfunction, some misdirected feed from
a solar observatory, say. But then, as his lenses de-opaqued, he realized the
stimulus had to have been external.
When he could see again, he confronted Gershon Thales holding a pain
gun whose wide bell muzzle covered both of the keek’s fellow Power Jocks. At
the feet of the keek rested an exploded spaser grenade.
A.B. tried to vib, but got nowhere.
“Yes,” Thales said, “we’re in a dead zone now. I fried all the optical circuits of the vib nodes with the grenade.”
A large enough burst of surface plasmons could do that? Who knew? “But
why?”
With his free hand, keeping the pain gun unwavering, Thales reached into
a plugsuit pocket and took out his lab. “These results. They’re only the divine sign we’ve been waiting for. Reboot civilization is on the way out now. I
couldn’t let anyone in the PAC find out. The longer they stay in the dark, the
more irreversible the changes will be.”
“You’re claiming this creeping crud is that dangerous?”
“Did you ever hear of ADRECS?”
A.B. instinctively tried to vib for the info and hit the blank, frustrating
walls of the newly created dead zone. Trapped in the twentieth century!
Recreationist passions only went so far. Where was the panopticon when you
needed it!?!
“Aerially Delivered Re-forestation and Erosion Control System,” continued
Thales. “A package of geoengineering schemes meant to stabilize the spread
of deserts. Abandoned decades ago. But apparently, one scheme’s come alive
again on its own. Mutant instruction drift is my best guess. Or Darwin’s
invisible hand.”
385
PAUL DI FILIPPO
“What’s come alive then?”
“Nanosand. Meant to catalyze the formation of macroscale walls that
would block the flow of normal sands.”
“And that’s the stuff afflicting the solarcells?”
“Absolutely. Has an affinity for bonding with the surface of the cells and
can’t be removed with destroying them. Self-replicating. Best estimates are
that the nanosand will take out thirty percent of production in just a month,
if left unchecked. Might start to affect the turbines too.”
Tigerishka asked, in an intellectually curious tone of voice that A.B. found
disconcerting, “But what good does going offline do? When PAC can’t vib us,
they’ll just send another crew.”
“I’ll wait here and put them out of commission too. I only have to hang in
for a month.”
“What about food?” said Tigerishka. “We don’t have enough provisions for
a month, even for one person.”
“I’ll raid the fish farms on the coast. Desalinate my drinking water. It’s just a short round trip by bug.”
A.B. could hardly contain his disgust. “You’re fucking crazy, Thales.
Dropping the power supply by thirty percent won’t kill the cities.”
“Oh, but we keeks think it will. You see, Reboot civilization is a wobbly
three-legged stool, hammered together in a mad rush. We’re not in the Red
Queen’s Race, but the Red Queen’s Triathlon. Power, food, and social
networks. Take out any one leg, and it all goes down. And we’re sawing at the
other two legs as well. Look at that guy who vandalized your apartment.
Behavior like that is on the rise. The urbmons are driving people crazy.
Humans weren’t meant to live in hives.”
Tigerishka stepped forward, and Thales swung the gun more toward her
unprotected face. A blast of high-intensity microwaves would leave her
screaming, writhing, and puking on the sands.
“I want in,” she said, and A.B.’s heart sank through his boots. “The only
way other species will ever get to share this planet is when most of mankind
is gone.”
Regarding the furry speculatively and clinically, Thales said, “I could use
your help. But you’ll have to prove yourself. First, tie up Bandjalang.”
Tigerishka grinned vilely at A.B. “Sorry, apeboy.”
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LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Using biopoly cords from the bug, she soon had A.B. trussed with
circulation-deadening bonds, and stashed in his homeopod.
What were they doing out there!?! A.B. squirmed futilely. He banged
around so much, he began to fear he was damaging the life-preserving tent,
and he stopped. Wiped out after hours of struggle, he fell into a stupor made
more ennervating by the suddenly less-than-ideal heat inside the homeopod,
whose compromised systems strained to deal with the desert conditions. He
began to hallucinate about the subterranean Seine again, and realized he was
very, very thirsty. His kamelbak was dry when he sipped at its straw.
At some point, Tigerishka appeared and gave him some
water. Or did she?
Maybe it was all just another dream.
Outside the smart tent, night came down. A.B. heard wolves howling, just
like they did on archived documentaries. Wolves? No wolves existed. But
someone was howling.
Tigerishka having sex. Sex with Thales. Bastard. Bad guy not only won the
battle, but got the girl as well . . .
A.B. awoke to the pins and needles of returning circulation: discomfort of a
magnitude unfelt by anyone before or after the Lilliputians tethered Gulliver.
Tigerishka was bending over him, freeing him.
“Sorry again, apeboy, that took longer than I thought. He even kept his
hand on the gun right up until he climaxed.”
Something warm was dripping on A.B.’s face. Was his rescuer crying? Her
voice belied any such emotion. A.B. raised a hand that felt like a block of
wood to his own face, and clumsily smeared the liquid around, until some
entered his mouth.
He imagined that this forbidden taste was equally as satisfying to Tigerishka
as mouse fluids.
Heading north, the trundlebug seemed much more spacious with just two
passengers. The corpse of Gershon Thales had been left behind, for eventual
recovery by experts. Desication and cooking would make it a fine mummy.
Once out of the dead zone, A.B. vibbed everything back to Jeetu Kissoon,
and got a shared commendation that made Tigerishka purr. Then he turned
his attention to his personal queue of messages.
The ASBO Squad had bagged Safranski. But they apologized for some
delay in his sentencing hearing. Their caseload was enormous these days.
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PAUL DI FILIPPO
Way down at the bottom of his queue was an agricultural newsfeed. An
unprecedented kind of black rot fungus had made inroads into the kale crop
on the farms supplying Reboot City Twelve.
Calories would be tight in New Perthpatna, but only for a while.
Or so they hoped.
388
WHEN SYSADMINS
RULED THE EARTH
By Cory Doctorow
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 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 log in 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—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—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 AM, nothing
could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal
Perversity—AKA Felix’s Law.
Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix
it from home. The independent routers’ netblock was offline, too. The last
time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a
CORY DOCTOROW
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, ‘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 2 AM. 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—”
“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”
“Okay,” 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.”
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WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH
“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
con
vention 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—spared you the trip.”
Felix’s own server—a box he shared with five other friends—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
393
CORY DOCTOROW
screwy, too—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 ponytail,
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
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