by Nick Mamatas
The rogue bus drove right through the marble-lined visitors’ lobby at speeds of over twenty-five miles per hour, according to NYPD skid mark ex perts.”Our main concern was safety of the UN staff and employees, including physical plant staff,” said UN docent Paul Sedia. “We cleared out everyone we could. We didn’t know who the driver was until afterwards, when we reviewed the tape.” The UN, which is outside U.S. jurisdiction, has its own police force and firefighters. “Our goal was site protection, not capturing a fugitive.” The UN is cooperating with both the NYPD and FBI in attempting to locate Julia Ott Hernandez. She allegedly exited the bus, and assaulted Hernandez after he confronted her.
Hernandez made no comment as he left One Police Plaza this morning and has not been charged. According to one NYPD spokesperson, “Hernandez remains a person of interest in our investigations of Ott Hernandez but is not a suspect at this time. The wasp or hornet nest was not recovered. It is our understanding that the nest has some kind of cultural importance as regards Hernandez’s work as an anthropologist.”
Security surrounding the United Nations has been increased, and visitor tours are cancelled today and tomorrow.
RECORD OF TXT MSGS, HERMANN LIZ
6.22.__VERIZON WIRELESS # 6468783435
MESSAGES RECEIVED
10:38AM – CALLING ALL CARS: Go find Queen Bee; John t/ Baptist just showed up. Go Jehovah on the doors in your hood.
11:02AM – YAY good idea
3:01PM – OMFG, WTG! UN U say?
4:20PM – keep it up; hey check the time!
o_ө =~~~
6:32PM – FUCK!!
7:48PM – SOS ABANDON SHIP
MESSAGES SENT
10:49AM – I’ll knock on Johns door, OK?
2:15PM – QUEEN BEE IS HERE. Crazy claims:re totlzing nrrtiv. On way to UN, change history
4:18PM – CHECK IN OK
6:28PM – QB LFT BONNET
6:59PM – QB BACK – TERROR ATCK @ UN w BUS!!
7:14PM SHT HT FN. PLAN Z!
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, CONDUCTED BY DET. LOUIS ORANGE, HOMICIDE. 6/22/20__+1.
Q: Been a while since we last had you here, eh Doc?
A: Just about a year, I think. Q: And how have you been? A: Up and down.
Q: Up and down. That’s something to say again. Up and down. Let me tell you how I’ve been, okay?
A: Please do.
Q: My son died in Iraq. Improvised explosive device.
A: I’m sorry to hear that.
Q: So was I. Right after whatsisname was found funneling all the money to Iraq too. You know, the feds believe that Julia secreted some money in a similar way from that web company she worked for? Isn’t that an interesting coincidence. A lot of the movement people are against the war, you know? Some even want Iraq to win, to teach America a lesson, they say.
A: I can’t keep track of the political positions of that movement.
Q: What can you keep track of, Doc? How about the whereabouts of your wife?
A: I had no contact with my wife until this afternoon. I’m sure you know that; I’m sure that the police keep an eye on me, tap my phone and email, maybe even put someone in my classes to audit me.
Q: So, when your wife made contact with you this afternoon, why didn’t you call the police? Why did you follow her to the United Nations?
A: She followed me to the UN, I didn’t follow her. I wanted to get her out in the open before contacting the police.
Q: So she could escape. Nice, harboring and abetting an escape. Thanks for letting me know—
A: No!
Q: No? What would you call it then? Your wife shows up after a year on the run, coming to ground right in front of you, and the first place you go is the United Nations so she can ram a bus through it!
A: No, I was in fear of my own life and the life of Liz, my new girlfriend, who happened to come by just as I was going to call the police. I wanted to get her out of the house—
Q: So you could go back to fucking your wife, the murderer and terrorist.
A: I wanted to get Liz out of the house, not Julia.
Q: So you hoped that Julia would stay with you.
A: I wanted to get to a public place. It’s safer in public, isn’t it?
Q: Not when people start hijacking buses and running them through buildings!A: Nobody was hurt!
Q: Disappointed, I bet. Did she forget to strap dynamite to her chest, or was that going to be your job?
A: I think I’d like a lawyer now.
Q: I think you can get the fuck out of here now.
Gotham Apple Tours, LLC. 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1344 New York, New York 10118 (212)GOT-APPL [email protected]
June 23, 20__
Gus Petrakis, Mr. Petrakis, this letter is to inform you that, effective immediately, you are terminated from your position as a bus driver, A1 for Gotham Apple Tours. This reason for this termination is due to a flagrant violation of the Gotham Apple Tours code of conduct, “driver shall always remain in vehicle when out of garage,” and the Gotham Apple Tours employee handbook, which states, “Employees in the field may leave their vehicles for hygienic or medical reasons, provided they radio ahead to headquarters for permission” (emphasis added).
Please make yourself available at home on June 28, 20__from the hours 11 AM – 4 PM, as a messenger will be dispatched to retrieve the Gotham Apple Tours uniform and other Gotham Apple Tours property. Please have the uniform cleaned and pressed.
Best,
GOTHAM APPLE TOURS, LLC
THE cooler was knocked over, the mutant nest splattered against the floor like rotten fruit and the wasps flew in every direction. Why did we let Julia and Raymond enter the United Nations building and release Hymenoepimescis sp. through their improvised fight? So we could destroy the wasps once and for all, irradiated as they were by the radon in Raymond’s mother’s basement. The United Nations is our territory, a complex in which innumerable men and women of indeterminate ethnicity can walk the halls with impunity. Had we stopped the pair, perhaps we would have lost track of the nest—unique as it was amongst Hymenoepimescis sp. it may have attracted the attention of scientists, many of whom are already familiar with the wasp’s targeting of Plesiometa argyra. We did not want this form of attention.
Further, had Julia and Raymond been repelled, either by us or by the human security forces of the United Nations, the wasps may have remained free to consume us, or to sting other human beings. Had Raymond retained possession of the cache of Hymenoepimescis sp., they may have tried again and again. If not at the UN, then perhaps at the White House or a meeting of one of the major political parties. Finance capital could have been targeted, or a convention of captains of industry. Better here, where we rule the halls.
Julia’s rush of the visitors’ entrance gave us free rein within the halls of the United Nations. Security was tightened, but only to keep people out, not to track the movements of men of indeterminate ethnicity who were already a part of the complex’s daily life.
On the fourteenth floor of the Secretariat Tower, a Finnish envoy pinched a wasp with a tissue held between two fingers and quickly walked with it, arm out as if holding a lantern, to the men’s restroom, where the wasp was flushed down a commode. On the way back to his desk, he spotted another insect and with his elbow smeared it against the Vermont marble slab wall of the hallway, but it was not Hymenoepimescis sp.
In the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, an American library assistant wheeled a cart of VHS videotapes being collected to transfer to BD-R over two of the insects. She stopped over their bodies and ground her heel into the mess, just to be sure. Another American vacuumed up a wasp and, sad to say, the Plesiometa argyra the wasp had cornered and mounted, in the media gallery of the Security Council chambers.
In the gift shop, on a Thursday afternoon when the store was quite crowded, we spotted a wasp and quickly moved within our cashier of indeterminate ethnicity to destroy it. We had cornered it and held a world
atlas to our chest to crush it against a wall, but the wasp managed to sting us on the hand. We dropped the book and clamped the hand under an armpit. Our legs were unraveling within our slacks as we ran for the restroom and we barely made it to the stall to kick off our left shoe and flush the disincorporating webbing down the commode before I FELT LIKE SPAGHETTI ON A FORK TWIRLING AND FLYING TILES SINK LITTLE BOY SCREAMS RUN TOWHEAD BOWLCUT SKITTER SCATTER RUNRUNRUN FLOOOOOOOSH
In the General Assembly, a representative from the Ivory Coast rose from his chair and slammed his fists and hands repeatedly against the table in front of him, bellowing all the while about French imperialism. When he managed to crush the wasp that had been attracted to the spiders
within his form, he sat back down. We were thankful he did not disincorporate due to a lucky sting, but after our previous encounter we adapted and were quite methodical in our fist-slamming—the first three shook the table sufficiently to upset our enemy, the fourth damaged her stinger and the final flat palm smashed her utterly against the slick pressed wood of the tabletop.
It took over a week, but we killed them all, every one of them.
20
THOUGH social animals, individual Homo sapiens sapiens are often much like Hymenoepimescis sp.: predatory, individualistic, and cooperative only to the extent a spontaneous order emerges from simultaneous anomistic decisions. That was Plan Z. It was declared as a possibility and yet left undefined. Spoken of in a few isolated but widely heard exchanges between partisans, but its content was occulted. Plan Z could be called upon by anyone in the movement at any time, but was never fully described, in order to keep it from being used by the marginal figures who may have found a sense of community and personal importance within Sans Nom. Movement propagandist Snarly Temple referred to this concept as “Mutually Assured Confusion.”
“Dearie,” said the bored looking police officer at the front desk, as he folded his copy of The Reformer in his hands, “even in these latter days of the law, where tyranny and sadism seem to have filled to overflowing the scales of blind justice, there ain’t no criminal statutes about being tedious. Scram!”
Plan Z was sufficiently opaque a concept that a number of people took it to mean that the movement was to be disbanded. Some people attempted to turn themselves in. Jorrie Torres, whose post-Fishman campaign involved moving to Brattleboro, Vermont, and standing in the Harmony Parking Lot in the middle of town while wearing a pair of paper butterfly wings and holding in one fist a roll of quarters and in the other hand a sign reading FREE HUGS AND/OR A PUNCH IN THE FUCKING FACE, reported to the local police department for her punishment.
On the West Coast, Plan Z was more directed, even explicitly political after a fashion. A flash mob in San Francisco formed on Fisherman’s Wharf and swarmed over the pleasure boats. Sails were unfurled, some engines hotwired—other ships were actually owned by members of the mob who boarded their own crafts with keys jingling—and a flotilla launched themselves into the bay and toward Alcatraz Island.
The drive toward the prison island was chaotic. Some ships were handled by fairly accomplished sailors, while others were captained by enthusiastic tyros. A few ships bumped into one another, creating obstacles for other ships to slam into. A half-dozen small sailboats found themselves winding in ever-widening circles, their bows oriented toward Alcatraz but then drifting away, only to orient back toward the island again several minutes of waving arms and shouting later. Still, nearly forty pleasure craft had managed to chart and follow a course toward the island. Banners were rolled down the sides of several the larger ships, with messages reading I CAN HAZ FREE DREW NOW and INVISIBLE JUSTICE flapping in the breeze.
Police boats and a barge used by the FBI to handle the massive number of parcels mailed to Drew Schnell from admirers and movement members moved to intercept the flotilla. A police loudspeaker demanded that the ships disperse and return to their port. Flares were fired in response; they streaked just over the bows of the police boats. Three military helicopters took off from the prison’s courtyard and dipped low over the waves, turning the warm waters to a frothy chop, and sending some of the lighter and less competently handled sailboats tilting on their sides.
“Turn back!” The sound was nearly swamped out by the chaos of the waves, the shouts between boats in the flotilla, and the hollow warp of the digital amplification. “You are in violation of federal law. We will fire upon ships that do not turn back!” Those power boats owned by their drivers began turning back, and in a hurry, engines roaring. The water boiled with wakes streaking back to Fisherman’s Wharf, but this further upset many of the sailboats. A few sailors had megaphones of their own and shouted back, “Don’t shoot! We can’t drive this thing!” and “Help!” The barge was brought into position and police boats managed to corral many of the small craft that couldn’t or wouldn’t turn back. Only three ships, all under sail and all manned by one or two white males, washed up against the island. Divers were quickly deployed to pluck the Sans Nommers from the waves; they were then brought to the prison and arrested.
And the plan worked. For one of the correctional officers—a deep-cover agent with the rather obvious pseudonym of Doug Graves—was a member of the movement. While the flotilla swarmed outside in the Bay, he entered the cell of Drew Schnell, quickly gave the prisoner a haircut, and gave him an orange jumpsuit with another prisoner ID number. He then moved Schnell to a broom closet. When the rescued invaders were handcuffed together in a hallway to be dried out, Graves added Schnell to the line and changed the headcount to reflect the additional prisoner. Graves, exercising a little CO discretion, then put the whole line in a large holding cell and waited for the shift to change. The new crew, which came onto the island for work at 8 p.m., had not seen the new prisoners, and all the records had been updated by Graves to match the new reality. Schnell, Graves, and the others were transported by police boat to San Francisco County to await bail.
Once in SF, Graves dropped his badge in a sewer and paid for a Chinatown bus ticket to Los Angeles with cash.
Schnell, when asked to identify himself before the police at morning headcount in the county lockup, did so honestly: “I’m Drew Schnell,” he said. “I was snuck in here by a CO as part of an attempt to free me. This is all part of the plan.” The local COs, working from reports from the divers who picked up the movement members on the rocks of The Rock, figured that Schnell was just a local movement wiseass who broke into prison, and sent him on his way. Schnell spent several hours in the San Francisco Mission District begging for change, in order to buy a wig that matched his old haircut from a discount store. Once so outfitted, he easily found someone willing to drive him across country, back to New York.
At the end of that week, the real Plan Z was instituted. The World Wide Web went away.
IT wasn’t all that hard. Globally, there are only a handful of registrars and root servers, the machines that tell web browsers that 216.109.112.135 is Yahoo.com. It was a simple denial of service attack, but instead of attacking Yahoo.com or Whitehouse.gov, the movement attacked the registrars and root servers. The hackers who received Liz’s Plan Z message turned to their keyboards and enslaved servers—it was easy, most of the conspirators actually worked for server farms in the first place. They used the machines to make tens of thousands of http: requests to root servers at the very foundation of Internet traffic. Then there were the viruses, sending the same program out to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of other machines. Embedded in email—you’ve received these, haven’t you?—the viruses did not attack hard drivers or make nuisances of themselves to the end user who received them. Common subject headings included I JUST WANT YOUR HALF and SANS NOM NOM NOM and PLEASE HELP US DESTROY THE INTERNET TODAY!!—enough members of the movement downloaded them, as did the usual dupes and marks, to enslave their machines as well. Whatever resources the user wasn’t actually using, the virus was, to send http: requests to the roots, and to replicate and distribute itself via email client ad
dress books. After twenty minutes, one thousand major servers were pinging the roots and registrars ten thousand times a minute. After an hour, forty thousand servers and half a million PCs were hammering the servers with a billion requests a minute.
The servers quickly failed. It was nothing an end user would notice at all, except that every URL in one’s bookmark file, and any other location one tried, began to fail. Not CNN.com, not NYTimes.com, not Facebook, and not even the annoying websites that usually pop up when someone makes a typographical error. The language of the web was derailed, as if Google and Yahoo and Twitter and Blogspot meant nothing at all. It wasn’t even a domino effect—imagine a fragile and beautiful collection of dominations, arranged to collapse in a wondrous splay across the length of a football field, then the field itself erupts into fissures and collapses.
A few people were able to remain connected—at first those Plan Z cell members had a virtual monopoly on the entire environment. They’d carefully memorized or written down the IP addresses, those lists of numbers that the root servers translated into easy-to-remember words, and could thus continue communicating with one another, and post and upload what they liked on the sites for which they had accounts. Of course, there were many technicians who also knew the IP addresses of their own home sites and other pages that were their responsibilities, but they were mostly very busy, these poor men and women. They were all on the phone, handling dozens of calls at once.
Then the landlines and cell phone servers were overwhelmed. This wasn’t even Plan Z. One might call it Plan Z+1. What letter is there on the edge of the English language? The Greek Xi with his bubbling hiss between tongue and palate? A Laotian tone? A! Kung glottal click? Millions of users gave up in frustration, sure that the ‘net would be back soon enough, but millions more immediately called tech support, their personal geek friends or relations, or random numbers they found in user manuals or CD-ROMs. Cable companies. Baby Bells. ISPs. Their bosses. Their underlings. The local brick-and-mortar version of the store whose online phantasm faded away so abruptly. That football field of dominos, now a steaming hole? Let’s say that forty thousand tons of concrete and bleachers fell into the chasm as well.