What is real? What is reality anyway?
I felt like I was hallucinating, my mind never quite able to take a firm track before skidding off.
Get a grip, Mike. Luke is counting on you. Lauren is counting on you. The baby is counting on you.
Opening my eyes, I willed myself into the here and now and tapped the phone in my pocket to bring up the augmented-reality display. A field of red dots spread out into the distance, and, taking another deep breath, I began carefully putting one foot in front of the other, continuing on my way across Twenty-Fourth, pushing myself toward a cluster of dots on Sixth Avenue.
In my initial enthusiasm at digging up the bags of food, I hadn’t thought to mark off which locations I’d already visited. We’d tagged forty-six locations in total, and so far I’d tried fourteen of them on four trips.
At four locations I hadn’t been able to find anything. It might have been that people saw me dropping the bags at those spots, or that they’d become exposed, or even that I’d already visited them. My brain wasn’t clear anymore.
In any event, I guessed that a quarter of the locations would be empty. With fourteen spots already visited, that meant about twenty locations should still yield something to eat. I was finding three or four bags per location, and with an average of about two thousand calories per bag, each location represented nearly a day’s worth of food for our group on starvation rations.
The numbers spun through my head.
Lauren needs two thousand calories, and the kids needed nearly as much.
But I need to eat more.
I’d been light-headed all day, feverish. I wasn’t going to be protecting anyone if I starved myself to death. Starvation rations weren’t going to be enough, not in this cold. I was allowing myself only a few hundred calories a day of food, but I’d read that Arctic explorers used up to six thousand calories a day in the cold.
It was cold, and I felt like the wind could blow me over like a leaf. Looking up, I squinted, trying to make out the street sign as I passed it.
Eighth Avenue.
The sign behind it mocked me—Burger King.
Imagine a nice, juicy burger, all the toppings, mayonnaise and ketchup. It was all I could do to restrain myself from going through the open door and digging through the snow drifted halfway up to the ceiling inside. Maybe somebody missed a burger in here? Maybe I could start up a propane grill?
Pulling my mind away from burgers, I continued walking. In the snowbanks on Sixth Avenue, we’d buried food at eight locations. It was a veritable gold mine, and that’s where I was heading to hunt. My mind cycled through the numbers again. If I could recover it all, from all twenty locations, we’d have twelve days until we’d be like them.
Like them.
Like the other people on our floor.
It’d been five days since the relief stations had closed, pinching off the only reliable new stream of new calories for the other groups on our floor. It was my guess that it had been nearly as many days since they’d had anything substantial to eat.
Mostly they just slept.
In the morning, I’d gone to check on the young mother and her kids, pulling away the layers of blankets from the couch in the middle of the hall. The kids had stared at me dully in the dim light, their lips horribly cracked and swollen, red and infected.
Dehydration was worse than starvation.
Vince and I had spent most of the day collecting as much snow as we could, dragging it up with the pulleys. Chuck had tried to help, but he hadn’t really recovered from the blow to his head, and his broken hand was swelling up again. Susie went around offering water to everyone, sneaking out scraps of our food, doing what she could.
The hallway smelled of human excrement.
As brutal as conditions had become, I would still see small acts of kindness. I watched Vince bring over his own blanket, that he’d spent a day cleaning, and give it to the mother and her kids. He shared some food with them as well. During the whole day, though, I hadn’t seen the door to Richard’s apartment open even once. We’d knocked to make sure they were all right, but he’d told us to go away.
Arriving at Seventh Avenue, I looked up and down the street, but visibility was limited to about twenty feet in the falling snow. When I tapped the phone’s screen, the heads-up display on my AR glasses switched to a top-down view of where I was.
I might as well head up Seventh and then circle down Sixth from Twenty-Third.
Carefully making my way to the intersection of the footpaths at the middle of the streets, my mind filled with images of the dead bodies we’d stacked in the apartment on the second floor.
During the day, ham radio stations had rebroadcast the audio portion of a CNN news report, one that had apparently been broadcast on television networks in the outside world. It described the situation in New York as difficult but stable, that supplies were being delivered, that the outbreaks of disease were being contained.
Nothing could have been further from our reality. The immense disconnect fueled speculation that the government was hiding something.
How can they not see what’s happening in here?
I didn’t care anymore.
My life had been reduced to caring for Lauren and Luke, and after that, for Susie and Ellarose and Chuck. Our situation was bringing my life into sharp relief, making me shrug off any artificialities, cleaning away all of the unimportant things I’d thought of as essential before.
A strong feeling of déjà vu gripped me when I sat in the hallway, but not from anything I’d experienced before. I felt like I was reliving the stories Irena had shared with me, of the siege of Leningrad seventy years before.
This cyberwar felt like it had nothing to do with the future, but was a part of the past, as if we were burrowing backwards, like a diseased worm, back into the essence of humankind’s unending ability to inflict suffering upon one another.
If you wanted to see into the future, you just had to look into the past.
Reaching the corner of Sixth and Twenty-Third, I came upon the strewn remains of an air-dropped container. We’d gone out to see what we could get when each airdrop was announced, but they’d turned into violent scavenging wars. Rory had been injured in return for some meager supplies, half of which, things like mosquito netting, were nearly useless.
A large, red circle glowed under one corner of the airdrop container in front of me. I clicked my phone for the image that would mark the exact location. Walking around the container, I found the best spot and then dropped to my knees and began digging. After about ten minutes of foraging I was rewarded.
Potatoes. Cashews.
Random items we’d grabbed off shelves in another world.
My mouth salivated as I imagined eating some of the cashews—just a few, nobody will notice—but I stuffed everything into my backpack and continued on to the next red circle just down Sixth Avenue.
After an hour I’d recovered all the bags from that location. I rested and treated myself to a few peanuts and the bottle of water Lauren had packed me.
I continued on.
The next red circle glowed under a scaffolding overhang at the edge of a burnt-out building. As I approached, the strong smell of scorched wood and plastic forced me to pull my bandana over my nose. Within a few minutes I found the prizes, and began pulling them out of the snow. It was bags and bags of chicken.
That’s right—this was when we raided the butcher’s shop on Twenty-Third.
My back was aching intensely from bending over. The backpack was stuffed, probably weighing fifty pounds.
Time to go home—chicken for breakfast.
“Who’s there?”
Awkwardly, with my backpack half on, I wheeled around and fumbled for my gun.
Out of the darkness, ghostly faces appeared in the greenish light of my night-vision goggles—faces and outstretched fingers. In my rush to get to this spot and start digging, I hadn’t really looked around. I was in some sort of a makeshift cam
p of people who must have lived in the burnt-out building.
“We can hear you digging. What did you find?”
Backing up, I was pinned against the plywood wall of the scaffolding.
“It’s ours, whatever it is. Give it to us!” hissed another voice.
Dozens of green faces now circled me in the dark. They couldn’t see me—it was pitch black—but they could hear me, sense me there. Their outstretched hands and fingers hunted through space, their feet shuffling forward in the snow, their eyes blind. I held the gun in my pocket.
Should I shoot one of them?
I dropped my backpack and rummaged around in it. The nearest hands were only a few feet away from me.
“Back! I have a gun!”
That stopped them, but only temporarily.
Grabbing the packet of cashews from the backpack, I threw it at one of the closest ones. His face was emaciated, with eyes shrunken into hollowed-out orbitals, and he had no gloves. His hands were black and bleeding in the phosphorescent light of the night-vision goggles.
The cashews ricocheted off him, landing somewhere behind, and he turned and dove for them, colliding with two others who did the same. I flung a few more packets randomly behind them, and they all turned away from me.
Running out of the enclosure, I dragged the backpack behind me.
In a few seconds I was back out on the open street, under cover of the falling snow. Taking a few gasping breaths to calm my thumping heart, I began the trek back toward our building. In my escape, I’d glanced once over my shoulder to see them fighting like a pack of wild dogs over scraps.
The tears came from nowhere.
I was crying, sobbing, trying my best to stay quiet as I trudged through the snow in the blackness—alone, but surrounded by millions.
Day 23 – January 14
“NEW YORK POWER Authority says that power will be restored to many parts of Manhattan within the week,” promised the radio announcer, and then he added, “but then again, we’ve all heard that before, haven’t we? Stay warm, stay safe—”
“Would you like some more tea?” asked Lauren.
Pam nodded, and Lauren crossed over to her with the large pot and filled her cup.
“Anyone else?”
Not more tea, but I’d sure like some biscuits.
Sitting on one of the couches at our end of the hallway, I began to daydream about cookies.
Chocolate-covered biscuits, like the ones my grandmother used to bring on the holidays, the graham cracker kind.
“Yes, more tea, please,” said one of the Chinese family at the end of the hall, the younger man. Lauren smiled and began to make her way down there, stepping carefully between legs and feet and blankets on her way.
Her baby bump was noticeable even under her sweater, at least to me—fifteen weeks. I was down four notches on my belt, as skinny as I’d been in college.
As my stomach disappeared, hers was growing.
A meshnet alert pinged my phone, and I reached into my pocket to read it. It was announcing a med-swap meet-up on the corner of Sixth and Thirty-Fourth. They better be defending it. A lot of people out there wanted what they were bartering.
Noon tea was Susie’s idea. Boiling the water meant we could sterilize it, and the girls were making a fuss about trying to keep in contact with everyone at least once a day. The hallway had become like a convalescent home for a hunger strike, with rows of gaunt faces peering out from beneath stained blankets. The tea had bits floating in it, but it hydrated and warmed the body and, Susie hoped, the soul as well.
Chuck pointed out that getting as many warm bodies together in one room helped with heating. Each human body, he’d explained, gave off about as much heat as a hundred-watt lightbulb. So twenty-seven bodies equalled twenty-seven hundred watts of heating power, half as much power as our generator produced.
We didn’t talk about where all that energy came from. We used less energy if we moved as little as possible, but we used much more, he’d whispered to me quietly, if it was cold.
It was cold.
After three weeks, even with us being as sparing as possible, all of Chuck’s kerosene supplies were finished, and we were almost out of diesel. The two-hundred-gallon tank downstairs was nearly empty after three weeks of running two small generators and heaters and stoves, plus what scavengers had stolen.
We weren’t running the electric generator much anymore. The hallway was lit with lamps we’d made, using heating oil from the furnace in the basement. It was nearly the only thing we could use it for, as it was too viscous to run in the generator. Running the kerosene heaters on diesel alone created heat, but also nearly unbearable fumes, so we had to keep windows open when we ran it. This defeated the purpose.
“In a few minutes we’ll be providing the latest updates on the cyberattack investigation, with—”
Crossing back to fill up the teapot, Susie turned down the volume on the radio.
“I think we’ve all had enough of that.”
“I haven’t,” said Lauren, sitting next to me at our end of the hallway.
We’d removed half of the barricade but still kept most of it in place—an upturned coffee table and some boxes demarcating which end of the hallway other people weren’t allowed into. Lauren was doing her best to keep our end clean, bleaching blankets and clothing. The strong smell of the bleach was nearly eye-watering.
Lauren sat upright.
“What I really want to know is, why didn’t they just make the internet more secure?”
It was a question circling the meshnet, asked with rising anger, and most of the blame was coming down on an inept government that should have protected us more.
“I’ll tell you why,” croaked Rory from beneath his blankets in the middle of the hall. “You can try and lay blame, but the central reason the internet isn’t secure is because we don’t want it to be secure.”
Hearing Rory speak, Chuck got into the conversation.
“What do you mean we? I’m all for a secure internet.”
Rory sat up a little. “You might think you want a secure internet, but you really don’t, and that’s part of what makes this possible. In the end, a perfectly secure internet isn’t in the interest of the general public or software producers.”
“Why wouldn’t consumers want a secure internet?”
“Because a truly secure internet wouldn’t serve a common interest in freedom.”
“Seems like it would right now,” said Tony quietly. Luke was lying asleep on top of him on the couch next to Lauren and me.
“It does right now, but it comes down to what we were talking about before, about privacy being the cornerstone of freedom. More and more of our lives are moving into cyberspace, and we need to preserve what we have in the physical world as we move into the cyber world. A perfectly secure internet implies a trail of information somewhere, always tracking what you’re doing.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. A completely secure internet would be the same as a world with cameras on every corner and in every home, recording our every movement, but it would be even more intrusive. A perfect record of every interaction we had would give someone the ability to peer into our very thoughts.
“I’d be willing to give up my online privacy to avoid this mess,” snorted Tony, but quietly. Luke stirred in the blankets on top of him, and he whispered to him, saying he was sorry.
“Wait, doesn’t this contradict your speech about needing to make the internet more secure?”
“The problem is that we’re trying to use the same technology—the internet—for social networking and to run nuclear power plants. Those are two very different requirements. We need to try and make it as secure as possible without giving some centralized power all the responsibility,” replied Rory in a tired voice. “What we’re talking about is a balancing act, an attempt to make it difficult to abuse the rights of individuals in the cyber world of the future. Even this”—Rory waved his arms feebly around in the c
andlelight—“whatever is happening now, it’ll be fixed soon enough.”
Rory barely looked strong enough to stand, and yet he spoke with such confidence.
Hope was fading. “There’s something they aren’t telling us. They wouldn’t be leaving us here to die like this,” was the whisper on the meshnet. We didn’t even really know what “this” was.
“Even all this suffering, we can’t use this as an excuse to give up our right to privacy, to freedom. No matter how many people die here, infinitely more have died under the thumbs of dictators and secret police in the past. Human nature doesn’t change, and we need to protect freedom, and privacy, and learn from our past. We should be protecting the right to privacy as much as our right to bear arms, and for exactly the same reasons.”
Silence.
Rory’s words made rational sense, but hunger and fear had a way of overpowering intellect.
“You may be right, but that’s a philosophical issue,” said Vince, breaking the silence. As ever, he was bent over his laptop, his face illuminated in the soft glow of its screen. He kept it running in low-power mode, charging it overnight when we ran the generator. “The bigger problem is that producers of software don’t want consumers to be secure.”
“So technology companies purposely want an insecure internet?” I said incredulously.
“They want it to be secure from hackers,” replied Vince, “but they don’t want consumers to be secure from letting them in. They hardwire back doors to update and modify software remotely—it’s a fundamental security risk they purposely create. The Stuxnet cyberweapon exploited it.”
“Of course they don’t want consumers to be secure from them,” snorted Rory. “They give us all that software for free specifically so that we aren’t secure from them—so they can watch us, sell our information.”
Vince looked absently into his computer screen. “If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product.”
“How does someone tracking my online shopping affect security?” asked Susie, perplexed.
Vince shrugged. “It’s all the little loopholes, all the hooks and ways to track and get inside that are purposely put there by software companies—that’s a lot of what hackers exploit.”
CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013 Page 24