Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  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