CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013

by Matthew Mather

  With communications down and the storms grinding into the city, reporters on the outside hadn’t been able to get inside to see what was happening. Instead, CNN and others had stationed themselves in Queens and the outer boroughs, reporting on conditions there, but nobody understood what was happening deep inside Manhattan.

  So the world heard reports that New York was experiencing difficulties, but with the impression that Manhattan was sleeping underneath its blanket of snow. The real disaster only became apparent when they quarantined the island “temporarily,” and the world had watched in horror as they saw people drowning and freezing to death as they tried to escape across the Hudson and East Rivers.

  I picked up my latte, blowing on it to cool it down.

  It was half natural disaster and half manmade disaster, but even there, the distinction wasn’t obvious. Some climatologists were loudly declaring that the physical storms were the result of the changing climate, so that really these were manmade storms just as much as the CyberStorm that had collided with them. And if everyone was to blame, was this the same as nobody being to blame?

  “You okay, Mike?”

  I looked up from my latte. It was Vince, surrounded by the reporters. He was standing next to an elderly lady.

  “Yeah, just thinking.”

  “I think we’re all thinking,” said the lady in a kind voice.

  “Mike,” said Vince formally, “I’d like to introduce you to Patricia Killiam, my thesis advisor at MIT.”

  I held out my hand. “A pleasure. Vince told me a lot about you.”

  “Good things I hope?” she replied, smiling. I knew she was in her eighties, yet she barely looked sixty. “Congratulations on your new baby daughter.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was still holding my hand.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said Vince, “but Patricia was here for a day, and I wanted to introduce the two of you.”

  “I heard about how you used augmented reality during the New York episode,” said Patricia. “Fascinating.”

  I laughed. “That was more Vince.”

  “I’d like to talk sometime, if you’d be interested.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She had such a kind, warm smile that it was impossible to consider refusing her.

  “But maybe a bit later?”

  She laughed. “I’d love to see Antonia, if you’d allow me the honor.”

  I smiled back at her and nodded toward the hallway.

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  July 4

  “DO YOU WANT to go see Uncle Vince?” I cooed at Antonia.

  She stared at me and stuck a few fingers in her mouth.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  I laughed, picking her up to wrap her in the baby sling hanging on my front. She was so tiny, and this would be her first walk outside, the first time she would see New York, and I wanted it to be special. We were going to walk up to Central Park, to see the Fourth of July festivities.

  Our apartment was filled with packing boxes, and with Antonia safely stowed, I paused, taking a moment to say good-bye.

  Power and water had been returned to our area within a few days of us leaving for Virginia. There had already been water when we left, but the pipes into our building had burst. We should have stayed, but then they’d been saying services would be restored every day of the disaster. There was no way of knowing that it would actually happen, until it did.

  Temperatures had started rising even before we’d left, and by the time we returned to New York in the first week of March, they’d had power and services for six weeks, all the snow was gone, and New York was scrubbed clean.

  It was almost as if it had never happened.

  Most of the people in our building had managed to get away before the siege of New York began. They’d returned to what looked like a war zone, but very quickly the garbage had been collected, doors and windows fixed, and fresh coats of paint applied.

  There was almost a manic urgency to push the episode into the past. Lauren’s family, desperately wondering where we were, had even contracted someone to clean our place and the hallway. When we returned, everything was back to how it was before.

  Everything, that was, except Tony.

  I sighed, taking one last look. The movers would be taking our stuff up to our new place on the Upper West Side. Closing the door behind me, I knocked on the Borodins’ door.

  “Ah, Mih-kah-yal, An-ton-ia,” said Irena warmly, opening the door. Aleksandr had the TV on, but he wasn’t asleep. He nodded toward me, smiling, and I waved back. “You come in to eat?”

  “Another time,” I promised. “I just wanted to say good-bye, to thank you again.”

  They’d held Paul’s gang until Sergeant Williams had taken them. Like everyone else, the prisoners had nearly starved, but they’d been no worse for wear than that.

  The Borodins seemed almost unaffected, as if they couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about, but then they’d lived through something even more horrific. In the siege of Leningrad, the city’s population of four million had been reduced to less than half a million over an event that lasted 787 days, where this one had lasted a mere thirty-six. Over two million had died during Leningrad, where only seventy thousand had died here.

  Only seventy thousand.

  Still, it could have been so much worse.

  “We will see you, yes? We will come up to see Antonia and Luke,” said Irena, leaning forward on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek and giving Antonia a tiny kiss on her bare, pink head as well.

  “Anytime,” I replied.

  We stood and stared at each other for a moment, and then she nodded and returned to her cooking, leaving the door ajar. I turned and continued down the hallway.

  The hallway.

  In my mind’s eye, I could still see the couches and chairs lining it, crowded with people under blankets. The most powerful memory was the smell. The carpets had been torn out, the wallpaper replaced, but I could still smell it. Even so, it had been our sanctuary, and a part of me warmly remembered the days we’d spent huddled together, sharing our fears and crumbs of food.

  Pam and Rory had survived; in fact, everyone who was there when we left had been fine. We’d visited Pam and Rory, but we hadn’t spoken about the blood. It wasn’t necessary. In a strange way, they’d remained as true to their vegan sensibilities as they could have—the blood was donated willingly, and they hadn’t harmed anyone.

  The only one we didn’t speak to was Sarah. She was gone by the time we got back.

  Sergeant Williams had made it his personal mission to catch up with Paul, whose case had become a multiple-homicide investigation based on evidence from images collected on Vince’s laptop. When they caught him, the full story had come out. While Richard came from money, he’d been in debt, so he’d started an identity theft scheme with Stan and Paul, targeting out-of-town businessmen who used their limo service. Nobody asked us where Richard was, and he became just another one of the thousands of missing.

  Richard had been the one who had stolen Lauren’s identity, which was also probably the reason he had been so keen to cozy up to her parents, to angle for their information. It had all spun out of control when the disaster had started. Paul had threatened Richard, saying he was going to tell them what he’d been doing if Richard wouldn’t help him steal supplies.

  From there it was all downhill. We suspected the deaths of the nine people on the second floor weren’t as innocent as he’d made it out to be, but all we could do was speculate.

  Reaching the elevators, I went to push the down button, but then stopped myself and made for the emergency exit down. The familiar sounds of echoing footsteps on the metal stairs filled my ears as I descended. Down in the lobby, the manicured Japanese gardens were back with the flowing fountains. Instead of going out the front, I continued out the back.

  Outside I was greeted by a blast of warm air and the hum of New York. A jackhammer
chattered in the distance, joined by a cacophony of honking cars and a helicopter flying overhead. Looking toward the Hudson, I saw the top of a sailboat pass by.

  Life had returned to normal.

  Walking along Twenty-Fourth, I crossed Ninth Avenue, and I looked downtown toward the Financial District. The Russian criminals had been targeting only the hedge funds in Connecticut, but they had nearly brought down the entire system. Amazingly, once power was back up and the networks cleaned, it had all started back up again.

  The row of buildings that had burnt down was already demolished, with scaffolding going up for new buildings to replace them.

  They were calculating the cost of CyberStorm into the hundreds of billions of dollars, dwarfing any previous disaster in US history, and that didn’t include the tens of billions of dollars of lost revenue and costs to clean the networks and internet. But the biggest cost was in human lives. At over seventy thousand and rising, it was a costlier conflict than the Vietnam War, if that classification made any sense.

  The media, however, was already making comparisons to wars and other climate disasters, like the heat wave in Europe in 2003 that had killed seventy thousand people—in Paris they’d had to open refrigerated warehouses to start storing the dead when morgues had overflowed. I remembered reading about it, a few lines of text I’d skimmed one morning with my coffee before getting on with my day. Now people all over the world were doing the same about what had happened in New York, a few lines of text in the daily news cycle until the next disaster hit.

  Reaching the corner of Eighth Avenue, I turned north and checked my phone. Ten after two. I was supposed to be meeting Vince and Lauren at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park at three o’clock. Enough time to enjoy a stroll up there.

  Starting uptown, I walked a few more blocks and soon passed Madison Square Garden. It was closed and would probably never reopen, but it was crowded with people. The block was surrounded by an enormous memorial of flowers, piling out into the street, with photos and letters affixed to the walls.

  Like a cyber version of the flowers and pictures around Madison Square Garden, Vince and his followers had created a website where the hundreds of thousands of images collected from people taking pictures with their cell phones had been organized. Loved ones were getting closure, even connecting with people who had taken the pictures to discuss and find out what happened. Thousands more people were being brought to justice for crimes, with witnesses contacted through their meshnet accounts. Rows of FEMA trucks still occupied the block around the makeshift memorial.

  FEMA had done their best to respond, but there was no contingency plan for rescuing sixty million people suddenly stranded under six feet of snow, without power or food and many without water. Compounding the problem was the loss of communications and computer networks—they didn’t know where anything was, how to get it, or how to contact people, and even then the roads had been jammed up with snow and impassible.

  It had taken two weeks to recover enough information systems and communications to mount any significant response, and they’d started in Washington and Baltimore. It was only around the time we were leaving that they’d started restoring communications in New York.

  There was a massive outpouring of people and resources once it became apparent what had happened, but there was no way to get them there for the first few weeks. It wasn’t just the cyberattacks—thousands of telephone lines, electrical lines, and cell towers had been brought down by the snow and ice.

  The main water systems had only been down for a week, but in that week pipes had burst everywhere in the extreme cold. When it was turned on, only a trickle had made it down to lower Manhattan, and they’d had to turn it off to make repairs. With a city covered in several feet of snow and ice, with no communications or staff or power, this became an impossible task.

  After the initial attack, the president had immediately invoked the Stanford Act so the military could operate domestically, but for the first few weeks we’d been on the brink of war with China and Iran, and the military had had its hands tied.

  Add to that the radar signatures indicating a breach of US airspace on the first day of the attack. Most analysts thought it was some kind of automated drone attack, a new threat they were just trying to understand. It was a month before they confirmed that the radar reports were artifacts from a viral infection of the air force radar computer systems at McChord Field.

  Once an outline of what had happened had been sketched out in the fourth week, and Chinese and American cybersecurity teams had a chance to have some back-room discussions, a full-scale rescue had been initiated. This included the Chinese teams that had brought replacement parts and manpower to repair the electrical grid.

  Passing Forty-Seventh Street, I spotted the red double-decker buses of the New York Sightseeing tour company lining the street. The tops of them were full of people. In the distance, toward Midtown, the electric neon of Times Square glowed even in the daylight, and above me a digital billboard scrolled a headline, “Senate Investigation Hearings Begin Into Why Cyber Threat Not Taken More Seriously.”

  I laughed quietly, shaking my head as I read it.

  What are they going to discuss?

  It wasn’t like the government hadn’t taken it seriously, but the problem was that there’d never been damage done by a cyber incident that could compare with conventional war. Before CyberStorm, the term cyberwar had more of a metaphorical quality, like the War on Obesity, but not anymore, now that the damage had been seen, the costs tallied, and the horrors witnessed.

  Was it just an unlikely series of events?

  Maybe, but once-in-a-lifetime events were happening to the world with unsettling regularity.

  Everything was interconnected in the modern world—knock out a few supporting legs, and the entire thing ground to a halt. Cities relied on these intricate systems to work perfectly, all the time, and when they didn’t, people began to die very quickly.

  Knocking out a few systems created problems too big to fix, overloading emergency services, producing gridlock and paralysis with no graceful degradation to previous technologies or systems.

  The real problem was that, to contain the terrifying danger of nuclear weapons, the politicians and military had built statecraft, and rules of engagement, based on deterrence against known adversaries. But there was no similar expertise for dealing with cyberweapons, and no rules of engagement had been clearly expressed.

  This had allowed the escalation to happen.

  What was the blast radius of a cyberweapon? How do you know who deployed it?

  The vacuum of rules and international agreements had been as much to blame as the circumstances and people involved in creating the CyberStorm.

  People, of course, always found a way to survive, and this had been no different. There was some talk in the media about cannibalism, and it had happened, but rather than demonizing it, the media had begun normalizing it, comparing it to similar historical incidents.

  They’d done an investigation into the cottages near us in Virginia.

  It turned out that the Baylors had been on vacation, and whoever we’d encountered were simply interlopers. They probably stole the gear from Chuck’s cottage, but then again, we’d stolen what we’d needed from neighbors in New York to survive. Everyone had been jumpy, and they probably thought we were coming to steal from them. The initial pull of the trigger was maybe more of an accident than anything else, but after Chuck exchanged shots with them on that back deck, everything had taken a bad turn.

  There was no evidence of cannibalism in the cabins, just some bones from pigs they must have caught, just like us. Looking back, it was hard to imagine how I could have jumped to such an extreme conclusion, but at the time, my mind was primed. Lauren had thought the same thing as me. We’d just been scared.

  I’d reached Columbus Circle, and I stood watching the cars and trucks rumble around it. Ahead, the trees of Central Park appeared like a green canyon
between the high-rise buildings, and the tall monument in the middle of Columbus Circle stared down on us while fountains sprayed up around it. People were sitting on benches, enjoying the sun.

  Life was being lived.

  Waiting for the light to change so I could cross, I looked up at the gray wall of the Museum of Art and Design to my right, and a message was spray-painted in black in huge, looping letters across its curved front, stretching all the way from ten stories up near its roof to nearly ground level.

  “Sometimes things break apart,” read the message, “so that better things can come together.” It was signed, “Marilyn Monroe.”

  I pointed up at the message. “See that, Antonia? That’s true, isn’t it?”

  As with all things terrible, some good was resulting. Sweeping changes to international law were being quickly enacted, enabling law enforcement to chase down cybercriminals wherever they were. There was a lot of talk about laws between nations being normalized, so that what was illegal in one place would also be illegal in others. Cyberespionage would no longer be tolerated, and would be treated the same as a physical incursion into another country’s sovereign space.

  At least, that was what they wrote in the papers. We’d see if any of it actually happened.

  Perhaps more importantly, they were talking about changing regulations to make software companies more accountable. Secure coding practices were going to be enforced, and backdoor security holes eliminated. There would be no more free lunch if software crashed and caused damage, if some security hole was exploited.

  Of course, the cost of all this would be passed onto the public, but whatever the cost, it was better to pay with money than lives.

  Privacy laws were being strengthened. As our lives moved increasingly into the cyber-realm, the importance of much stricter personal information laws were recognized—privacy was freedom, and it had taken this awful event for people to understand it in this way.

  The separation between the cyber and the physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war—the true age of cyber began when we started removing it as a descriptor.