Then came the murmuring and exclamations of people from downstairs. The generator was finally done, the last drop of fuel having been used up.
Maddie stared at the dark screen of the computer in her room, the illusion of a phosphorescent glow matching the sky full of stars outside her window—she had already been keeping the monitor off to conserve electricity. With no lights for miles around, the stars were especially bright on this summer evening, brighter than she had ever known.
“Goodbye, Dad,” she whispered into the dark, and could not stop the hot tears from rolling down her face.
• • • •
They heard on the radio that power was being restored in some of the big cities. The government was promising stability—they were lucky that they were in America rather than somewhere else, somewhere less well-defended. The wars raged on, but people were beginning to make things work without connecting everything together. Millions had already died, and millions more would die as the wars spun on like out-of-control roller coasters, following a logic of their own, but many would survive in a slower, less convenient world. The hyper-connected, hyper-informational world where Centillion and ShareAll and all those darling companies of an age where bits had become far more valuable than atoms, where anything had seemed possible with a touchscreen and a wireless connection, might never return again. But humanity, or at least some portion of it, would survive.
The government called for volunteers in the big cities, people who could contribute to the rebuilding effort. Mom wanted to head for Boston, where Maddie had grown up.
“They could use a historian,” she said. “Someone who knew something about how things used to work.”
Maddie thought perhaps Mom just wanted to stay busy, to feel that she was doing something to keep grief at bay. Dad had promised to protect them, but look how that had turned out. She had recovered her husband from beyond the grave only to lose him again—Maddie could only imagine how Mom suffered under that strong, calm exterior. The world was a harsh place, and everyone had to pitch in to make it less so.
Grandma was staying. “I’m safe here with my garden and chickens. And if things get really bad, you need a place to come home to.”
So Maddie and Mom hugged Grandma and packed for the trip. The car’s tank was full, and they had additional plastic jugs of gas from the neighbors. “Thanks for everything,” they said. Here in rural Pennsylvania, everyone was going to have to learn to cultivate their own gardens and how to do everything by hand—there was no telling how long it might take before power was restored where they were, but a tank of gas wasn’t going to make any difference. They weren’t going anywhere.
Just before they got into the car, Maddie ran into the basement and took out the hard drive that she had thought of as the shell in which her father had lived. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving those bits behind, even if they were no more than a pale echo, a mere image or death-mask of the man himself.
And she had a sliver of hope that she dared not nourish lest she be disappointed.
• • • •
Along the sides of the highway, they saw many abandoned cars. When the tank got close to empty, they stopped and pried open the tanks of the abandoned cars so that they could siphon out the gas. Mom took the opportunity to explain to Maddie about the history of the land they passed through, about the meaning of the interstate highway system and the railroads before them that linked the continent together, shrank distances, and made their civilization possible.
“Everything developed in layers,” Mom said. “The cables that make up the Internet with pulses of light follow the right-of-way of nineteenth century railroads, and those followed the wagon trails of pioneers, who followed the paths of the Indians before them. When the world falls apart, it falls apart in layers, too. We’re peeling away the skin of the present to live on the bones of the past.”
“What about us? Have we also developed in layers so that we’re falling back down the ladder of civilization?”
Mom considered this. “I’m not sure. Some think we’ve come a long way since the days when we fought with clubs and stones and mourned our dead with strings of flowers in the grave, but maybe we haven’t changed so much as we’ve been able to do much more, both for good and ill, with our powers magnified by technology, until we’re close to being gods. An unchanging human nature could be a cause for despair or comfort, depending on your perspective.”
They reached the suburbs of Boston, and Maddie insisted that they stop by the old headquarters of Logorhythms, Dad’s old company.
“Why?” Mom asked.
If you ever get a chance to visit the past . . .
“History.”
• • • •
The building was deserted. Though the lights were on, the doors were left open, the electronic security locks off-line. Power had apparently not been restored to all the systems. As Mom looked at the framed photographs of Dad and Dr. Waxman in the lobby, Maddie sensed that she wanted some time to herself. She went up to Dad’s old office, leaving her Mom in the lobby.
It had never been fully cleaned out after his death and the horrors visited upon his brain afterward. Whether out of guilt or a sense of history, the company had not assigned it a new occupant. Instead, it had been turned into a kind of storage room, filled with boxes of old files and outdated computers.
Maddie went to the desk and turned on her father’s old desktop. The screen flashed through the boot sequence, and she stared at the password prompt.
Taking a deep breath, she typed YouAreMySunshine into the box. She hoped that was what her father had meant with his final, cryptic hints in the language they shared.
The prompt refreshed without letting her in.
Okay, she thought. That would be too easy. Most corporate systems have strict password policies requiring numbers, punctuation marks, and so on.
She tried
and
but still no luck.
Her father knew she liked code, so his hint should be interpreted based on that.
She closed her eyes and imagined the Unicode plane in which the emoji characters were neatly arranged like rings and pins and brooches sorted into a jewelry box. She had memorized the coding sequences back when it had been impossible to type them directly and she had had to use escape sequences to instruct the computer to look them up. She hoped that she was finally on the right path.
The screen flickered, and was replaced by a desktop with a terminal emulator active. Logorhythms’s servers must have automatically come back online after power was restored.
She took another deep breath, and typed in at the terminal prompt:
She hoped she was interpreting her father’s use of the clock emoji correctly.
The terminal took the command without complaint, and after a while, a chat window popped up onto the screen.
She understood. This was an old copy of her father, from before he had managed to escape. Though she and Mom had demanded Dr. Waxman destroy all copies after releasing Dad, Logorhythms had not strictly complied, and Dad knew that.
Fumbling, she retrieved the hard drive from her father’s computer in Grandma’s house, placed it into an enclosure, and plugged it into the computer. Then she typed at the prompt, letting her father know what she had done.
The hard drive began to whirl, and she waited, her heart pounding.
She let out a whoop! This was her hunch: her father had stored enough of the man he had become on this disk so that, when combined with his old self, some semblance of the person could be resurrected.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she tried to bring her father up to speed. But
he was far ahead of her already. The network connections at Logorhythms were more robust, with satellite links and multiple backups. He was able to reach into the ether and gain an understanding of the situation.
The last line was in a blood-red font, and Maddie knew someone else was speaking. Her heart sank.
Understanding came to her in a flash. The corruption that Chanda had injected into Dad during their last fight had been saved onto the hard drive in Grandma’s house, and she had brought it here, infected the old copy of her father with it, and led the warmongering Chanda straight to him.
No more words appeared in the chat window. The office was deathly quiet save for the whirring of the PC and the occasional hungry screams of seagulls in the parking lot. But Maddie knew that the calmness was illusory. The combatants were simply too absorbed with each other to be able to update her. Unlike the movies, there wasn’t going to be some fancy graphical gauge showing her what was happening in the ether.
Struggling with the unfamiliar interface, she managed to launch a new terminal window and explored around the system. She knew that the artificial sentiences tended to disguise their running processes as common system tasks to avoid detection by standard system monitoring, which was why they had escaped notice by the sysadmins and security programs. The list of processes revealed nothing extraordinary, but she knew that down in the torrents of bits, the flipping voltages of billions of transistors, the most epic, horrifying battle was being waged, every bit as brutal and relentless and consequential as war on a physical battlefield. And the same scene was probably being played out on thousands of computers across the world, as the secure control systems of the world’s nuclear arsenal was being fought over by the distributed consciousnesses of two electronic titans.
Growing more confident with the layout of the system, she traced out the locations of the executables, resources, databases—the components of her father. And she realized that he was being erased bit by bit; he was losing himself to Chanda.
Of course Chanda was winning. He was prepared, whereas her father was but a shadow of his former self: freshly awakened, unfamiliar in a new world, having no access to the bulk of the knowledge he had learned since his escape. He had no stockpile of vulnerabilities, no experience fighting this war; the infection in him was eating away at his memories; he was, indeed, but a rabbit charging at a wolf.
A rabbit.
. . . surely live on in song and story.
She went back to the chat window. She wasn’t sure how much of her father’s consciousness was left, but she had to try to get the message to him. She had to speak in their shared language so that Chanda wouldn’t understand.
• • • •
When she was younger, Maddie had asked her father once what an odd-looking program, so short that it was made up of only five characters, did:
“That’s a fork bomb for Windows batch scripts,” he had said, laughing. “Try it and tell me if you can figure out how it works.”
She tried running the program on her father’s old laptop, and within seconds the machine seemed to turn into a sluggish zombie: the mouse stopped responding, and the command window stopped echoing keystrokes. She couldn’t get the computer to respond to anything.
She examined the program and tried to work out in her mind how it executed. The invocation was recursive, creating a Windows pipe that required two copies of the program itself to be launched, which in turn . . .
“It creates copies of itself exponentially,” she said. That was how the program had so quickly consumed resources and brought the system to its knees.
“That’s right,” her father said. “It’s called a fork bomb, or a rabbit virus.”
She thought of the Fibonacci sequence, modeled on exploding rabbit populations. Now that she was looking at the short program again, the string of five characters did seem to be two rabbits seen sideways, with bows in their ears and a thin line between them.
• • • •
She continued to examine the system with strings of commands, watched as bits of her father were slowly erased. She hoped that her message had gotten through, had managed to make a difference.
When it was clear that her father was not going to come back, that the executables and databases were gone, she dashed out of the office, through the empty corridors, down the wide echoing spiral stairs, past her surprised mother, and into the server room.
She went straight for the thick bundle of network cables at the end of the room, the cables that fed into the machines in the data center. She yanked them out. Chanda, or whatever was left of him, would be trapped here, and she was going to have these machines erased until nothing was left of her father’s killer.
Her mother appeared in the door to the server room. “He was here,” Maddie said. And then the reality of what had happened struck her, and she sobbed uncontrollably as her mother came toward her, arms open. “And now he’s gone.”
• • • •
Rumors of Massive Server Slowdown In Secured Defense Computing Facilities Untrue, Says Pentagon
Russia Denies Claims of Thorough Scrubbing of Top Secret Computing Centers After Virus Infection or Cyber Penetration
British PM Orders Critical Nuclear Arsenal Placed Under Exclusive Manual Control
Everlasting Inc. Announces New Round of Funding, Pledging Accelerated Research Into Digital Immortality; “Cyberspace needs minds, not AIs,” Says Founder
Maddie moved her eyes away from the email digest. Reading between the lines, she knew that her father’s final, desperate gambit had worked. He had turned himself into a fork bomb on the computing centers around the world, overwhelmed the system resources until it was impossible for either he or Chanda to do anything, introduced enough delay so that the sysadmins, alerted to the fact that something was wrong with their machines, could intervene. It was a brutal, primitive strategy, but it was effective. Even rabbits, when numbering in the millions, could overcome wolves.
The bomb had also revealed the existences of the last of the gods, and the humans were swift to react, shutting down the crippled machines and cleansing them of the presence of artificial sentiences. But the military-developed artificial sentiences would probably be resurrected from backups, after people added more safeguards and assured themselves that they could keep the gods chained. The mad arms race would never end, and Maddie had come to appreciate her mother’s dim view of the human capacity for change.
The gods were dead, or at least tamed, for the moment, but the conventional wars around the globe raged on, and it seemed that
the situation would only grow worse once the efforts to digitize humans became more than the province of secret labs. Immortality that could be had with enough knowledge would fan the flames of war even higher.
Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral. Still, a nuclear winter had been averted, and with the world falling apart slowly, at least there was a chance to rebuild.
“Dad,” Maddie whispered. “I miss you.”
And as if on cue, a familiar chat window popped onto the screen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. A collection of his short stories will also be published by Saga in 2015.
YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING
Elizabeth Bear
No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody’s ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn’t already made up my mind to say.
I’m Alyce Hemingway, no relation. And I’m facing the Rocky Mountains on foot, coming home.
Or going home, maybe. It’s hard to say.
Casey and you are waiting for me. Casey is going-on-eleven and crazy about horses, which we can’t afford. You? You’re two years younger than me and six times more fun to be around. You’d make a joke about not knowing if you were coming or going. You’d hold my hand when I got too tired to walk. To climb.
You’re both waiting for me. And that’s why I know I have to get home.
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