Van examined his arms. “I have eczema,” 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 storerooms, 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
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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—
likely, even—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.
> Are you nervous?
> Nope, Felix typed.
> I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I’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.
> There’s still China,
she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of the world colored in
Googlequeries-per-second, and could do magic with it, showing the drop-off
overtime 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.
> China’s still running about ninety percent nominal.
Felix shook his head.
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> You can’t think that they’re responsible
> No
she typed, but then she started to key something and then stopped.
> No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis. Every asshole in
the world is using the other assholes for cover. But China put them down
harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve finally found a use for
totalitarian states.
Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:
> You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You guys were pretty
enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of China.
> Wasn’t my idea, she typed.
> 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—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 Jell-O, 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.
> Sorry. I forgot.
> It’s okay. We all lost people, right?
> Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the election. Whoever wins,
at least we’re doing SOMETHING
> 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—apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to describe
clueless IT managers that she’d chewed up through her career.
> 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 blocs 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
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her an email that she’d replied to tersely: “Can’t have the fuckrags in
charge.”
> 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—power failure, worms, another quake—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.
“Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was midafternoon, 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,
“Okay, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m
fucking hungry, so I’m just going to take it and eat it, okay?”
“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 Wi-Fi-enabled.
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“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 one
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—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 son 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 scurf 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 antisocial.”
“You’re the world’s leading authority on antisocial, Sario,” Van said. “Go
away or I’ll multitool you to death.” He stopped scratching and patted his
sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.
“Yeah, I’m antisocial. 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
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isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you, dickweed.”
“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.” 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 leaderboard of new and rising queries—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 trash
bags 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—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?”
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“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—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—!” 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.
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“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 preordained by the fuel supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel to
run out, anyway?
> 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.
> 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 gone 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—it was all gone.
He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.
> Runaway processes on Solaris TK
>
> 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 it’s eating all the
swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic
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