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 antihistamines
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. Howa bout 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.
They 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.
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WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH
They drank. He wanted to go see the house—see Kelly and 2.0, though
his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But 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.
It was nearly six months before he went home. Van helped him along,
riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The
further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became.
There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the
houses they’d looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires
you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks
where every house was burnt before they reached home.
But Felix’s old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily
pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners
had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to
bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.
That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the
subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the
sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was
coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.
He didn’t have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months
and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn’t turn. He applied
his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb with
a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.
The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water,
four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He
splashed carefully through it, feeling the floorboards sag spongily beneath
each step.
Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the
bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.
Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they
hadn’t gone easy—they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0.
Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell—
God, the smell.
425
CORY DOCTOROW
Felix’s head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the
dresser. An emotion he couldn’t name—rage, anger, sorrow?—made him
breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.
And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0—over. And he had
a job to do. He folded the blanket over them—Van helped, solemnly. They
went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the
garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging
graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary
dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they
were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.
When the grave was dug, they laid Felix’s wife and son to rest in it. Felix
quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He’d dug so many
graves for so many men’s wives and so many women’s husbands and so many
children—the words were long gone.
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—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.
> gotobed,felix
> soon, kong, soon—almost got this backup running
> youre a junkie, dude.
> 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
426
WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH
the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other
frowning.
He looked at it for a long time and propped back into a terminal to check
his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government’s
records were safe.
> okay night night
> 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.
427
Document Outline
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: By Victoria Blake
JOHNNY MNEMONIC: By William Gibson
MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES: By Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner
INTERVIEW WITH THE CRAB: By Jonathan Lethem
EL PEPENADOR: By Benjamin Parzybok
DOWN AND OUT IN THE YEAR 2000: By Kim Stanley Robinson
GETTING TO KNOW YOU: By David Marusek
USER-CENTRIC: By Bruce Sterling
THE BLOG AT THE END OF THE WORLD: By Paul Tremblay
MEMORIES OF MOMENTS, BRIGHT AS FALLING STARS: By Cat Rambo
ROCK ON: Pat Cadigan
BLUE CLAY BLUES: By Gwyneth Jones
THE LOST TECHNIQUE OF BLACKMAIL: By Mark Teppo
SOLDIER, SAILOR: By Lewis Shiner
THE JACK KEROUAC DISEMBODIED SCHOOL OF POETICS: By Rudy Rucker
MR. BOY: By James Patrick Kelly
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU: By John Shirley
THE NOSTALGIST: By Daniel H. Wilson
LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: By Paul Di Filippo
WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH: By Cory Doctorow
Cyberpunk Page 51