Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  Eric reached down and thumbed the wheels of his chair so that he turned to face Terry.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,” he said. “Where did you grow up?”

  Perhaps caught off guard, Terry locked up in a stammer for a moment before recovering.

  “Well, there isn’t much to tell.” He looked around nervously as if searching for an escape route. “I’ve always lived in Cambridgeshire, actually.”

  “In the city?”

  “No. I grew up in a small village in the fens. Went to Trinity College as an undergraduate.”

  “What did you study?”

  Terry fixed him with a steady look. “Mathematics and cryptography. But that’s all behind me now.”

  Of course it was. Trinity had been heavily damaged during the terrorist attacks and the uprisings that followed, but unlike some of its neighbouring colleges, it had not been completely destroyed. By the early 2000s it had been sufficiently rebuilt to start accepting students once more. But that was long after Terry had left academia and established Cambridge Computers.

  Before Eric could ask any more questions, Terry had swept out of the office. The clink of coffee mugs came from the tiny box-room where, Eric could see if he strained his neck, the sysadmin kept an electric kettle, a hot plate, and a few other domestic odds and ends.

  “Do you live here?” Eric called through to him.

  “Sometimes. How do you like your coffee? Or do you prefer tea?”

  ‘Tea, please. With sugar, if you have it.”

  The kettle hissed. Terry returned a few minutes later with two steaming mugs, one red and one blue, and placed the red mug in front of Eric.

  “Thank you,” Eric said, touched by the simple gesture of a cup of tea. “You’re a gentleman.”

  But Terry looked embarrassed. “All right—that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m—” he began, but stopped. Nobody had actually asked him that question before. He was the disabled guy, the person who couldn’t work in a country where the unemployed were given no help or compassion. But he was trying to be true to himself.

  He forced himself to smile. “I’m studying to be a computer engineer, but it’s hard. I have to teach myself how to do everything. I... I had to leave school early, you see. You know what it was like, back then.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Terry looked at him for a few moments more as if struggling to come to a decision. “I suppose you can’t pay your own way?”

  Eric shook his head, embarrassed. “I’ll pay you back for this Acanet session some day, I promise—”

  “It’s all right. Let me help you out. I can’t do anything about the library, but I have a shop full of parts going to waste right here and a fatlink to the Internetwork. Maybe if I can help, I can change the world just a little bit. Stop the rot. Maybe we can make people care about the Web.”

  The Web. The phrase tugged at something lodged deep in Eric’s brain, touching an old memory perhaps, but he didn’t know why.

  “What is the Web?”

  “It’s the biggest missed opportunity, the biggest screwup, in the history of mankind.”

  * * *

  Eric went home that evening feeling happier than he’d been in years. He had a plastic bag containing a few computer parts on his lap—a memdisk with some code on it, plus a tape spooler—and Terry hadn’t charged him a penny for the loan of these precious and rare items. More importantly, he felt like someone was on his side, and that something positive had happened to him at last.

  It didn’t take long for his good mood to be soured.

  When he passed the entrance of the pub on the street corner, keeping close to the wall on one side of the pavement to avoid the biting wind and rain that drove down the street, he noticed a larger than usual crowd thronging within. Some held pint mugs of beer, but all the men were silent, leaning against the worn woodwork of the Victorian tavern as they focused on the small black-and-white television screen behind the bar. All looked ragged and poor, like most people in Cambridge these days, but beer was cheap. The Government subsidised it. Alcohol—and state-approved television, of course—was the last pleasure available to many of the poorest in society.

  Eric manoeuvred his wheelchair towards the entrance until he could hear the grave cut-glass BBC accent of the newsreader.

  ‘The situation in the Eastern Bloc has again become critical. The rebel army has recaptured Belgrade. In light of last week’s defeats in Poland, the European president authorised neutron cruise missile strikes against the Soviet tank brigades at fifteen-hundred hours GMT.”

  Murmurs of concern and fear rose from the assembled crowd, but Eric heard a few cynical laughs as well. Tactical strikes with small atomic weapons had been used many times over the last twenty years. At no point had the world been pushed over the edge into full-blown thermonuclear war.

  Eric strained his neck to see the screen. The picture of the newsreader faded, to be replaced with a view of the devastated battlefields of the Eastern Bloc. Hundreds of tanks crawled over a pitted wasteland resembling a scene straight out of World War I. As the crowd watched, enthralled, a point of light burst high above the ground before expanding to a brilliant white fireball that washed out the picture for a moment. A radiating shockwave scoured the landscape clean. Within moments the intensity of the pulse faded, leaving an ugly grey mushroom cloud rising above a column of fallout. Invisible neutron radiation would be pulsing down over everything within several hundred metres. The tank crews who had survived the initial blast would now suffer a painful death from radiation poisoning.

  Such scenes were a sad reality of the modern world. Eric sighed and turned back towards home.

  * * *

  “Tell me about our friend Eric Critchley and what he’s been up to lately, John.”

  The Minister strode along a steel-lined corridor deep beneath the streets of London. The subterranean maze of GCHQ had started small, back at the start of the war decades ago, but in 2015 it stretched for many miles. Some sections had fallen into disuse; others had subsided or collapsed; yet more had been armoured and hardened against atomic strike. The Government had moved down here in 1996 after the country had gone insane for a few weeks. The time had never been right to resurface again.

  “His pattern of behaviour changed this week,” John replied through the wireless earpiece of Weyland’s radiophone. “We think he is working with a part-time sysadmin called Terry Richards.”

  “Elaborate, please.”

  “Well, Richards works at the computer centre in the library, but since we denied Eric access to the library he has been looking for other opportunities to get online. You were right—all he needed was the chance to get out of the house by himself, and he went straight to Cambridge Computers.”

  “Do we have a file on that place?”

  “Yes—we thought there was a connection with the Web supremacist movement back in the nineties, but in the end he helped us out with several cases. I’m convinced he’s as clean as they come.” John hesitated. “Our agent thinks Eric is just a kid with a computer.”

  “That’s how it starts. Look at what happened in Cambridge twenty years ago. Look at what happened to Apple and IBM back in the eighties. I tell you, he’s dangerous, and I’d be willing to bet there’s a connection with B.RIC.”

  Weyland didn’t trust academics or computer scientists. Nobody did, really—not after the Soviet cyberattack of 1982 that left the world reeling and damaged public trust in the technology. Sometimes he wondered what the world would look like today if all those tech companies had been able to bring their early microcomputers to market.

  The power would be with the people, he realised with deep unease, and not with us where it belongs.

  “Is it technically a crime to build a microcomputer?” John asked after a moment.

  “Not yet. Look, we have to consider the big picture here. The war isn’t going well this year. The Prime Minister is looking for an excuse to shut down public
Acanet access—he’s wanted to do it for ten years—so if Eric Critchley has a link to B.RIC then this could give him exactly what he needs to pull the plug.”

  “Sir, that’s a dangerous move.”

  “Why? The public won’t care.”

  “They won’t care about the Acanet, but won’t such a move make the, ah... nature of our government obvious to all?”

  Weyland laughed. “You mean people will finally realise they’re living in a police state? What are they going to do about it?” He checked his watch. “I have to meet the Minister of War in ten minutes. Keep me informed on Cambridge.”

  * * *

  After years of wondering what it would be like to have his own microcomputer, it took Eric less than a week to actually build it.

  He looked down at the mess of wires and circuit boards on his table, then across at the scrawled diagrams and assembly code he and Terry had worked on together. On his second visit to Cambridge Computers he had realised that he knew more about the subject than he’d given himself credit for, but still didn’t quite know enough. On his third visit Terry had filled in most of the blanks, and loaned him some more parts. Brian had helped with the code. It had been a team effort.

  Now he had a working machine. His dream had come true.

  The CPU and main board from an old Nintendo console interacted with a memdisk bank and an array of high-speed tape spoolers, similar to the ones used in Acanet-connected servers. Terry had given him a keyboard to use for input. The most difficult thing to get his head around was that this was not a huge computer hidden away in a basement somewhere, feeding data to dozens of dumb terminals; it was an entirely self-contained unit that could hook up to a TV, and it was tiny.

  He couldn’t wait to try it out. But first he had to get Mandy out of the house again.

  It was just before lunchtime and she was downstairs watching TV, using the very appliance he needed in order to test out his invention. Eric tidied the electronics away, hiding them in a small cardboard box which he taped securely to the underside of his wheelchair. He needed to carry them downstairs but he didn’t want his sister to see them.

  When he’d finished, he yelled for Mandy to come and help him get downstairs.

  She arrived, grumbling, a few minutes later.

  “What do you want? I’m in the middle of Countdown.”

  “I’d like the full use of my legs and the last ten years of my life back, but in the absence of those things a lift downstairs would be nice.”

  He smiled to show he was joking, and his sister smiled back.

  * * *

  “Listen, I felt bad for being so annoying this week,” Eric said half an hour later. “So I did something for you.”

  Mandy glanced up from her crossword puzzle. She looked apprehensive. “What have you done?”

  “I pulled a few strings. Someone who works in the local council office said they might have an opening for—”

  She jumped out of her seat. “A job? You got me a job?”

  “Don’t get too excited. It’s just an interview. There’ll be dozens of other people there.”

  Eric knew Mandy’s expressions. So good at keeping the deadpan look under most circumstances, occasionally she let emotion break across her features like a wave. Now that first instinctual response—joy, relief—morphed to something akin to fear.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He sensed the moment slipping away. “For God’s sake, Mandy. Don’t ruin this for yourself. Go and do the interview. It’s in half an hour.”

  She hesitated again, but seemed to steel herself. “Ok. Let me go and get ready. Eric... thanks.” She looked at him; again that soft smile, an echo from their childhood when things had been different. “I can be a bitch at times. I’m really sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, and meant it.

  She left on time for the meeting. Eric had told the truth, and although he might find it difficult to manage at home if Mandy got the job, he wished her well. Terry had arranged everything. Apparently his cousin worked in the local council office.

  Now to get to work.

  * * *

  “Holy crap,” he breathed.

  Lines of code ran across the television screen. The analogue signal was fuzzy, interlaced with static, but readable. He reached down to his tangle of wires and toggled switches, tugged at connectors, adjusted this and that. The picture improved.

  He prodded at the keyboard. Text appeared at the prompt. Incredibly, everything seemed to work.

  Now to go online, he thought with mounting excitement as he reached for the telephone, disconnected it, and plugged the cable into a waiting port on his circuit board.

  Nothing happened. He was confused for a moment before remembering that nothing would happen automatically; it was all a bodge, and he’d have to launch subroutines himself. Consulting Terry’s notes, he found the section about connecting to the ‘net.

  He typed the code, then he waited.

  * * *

  Commands filtered through the Internetwork. They passed through some subnets without causing so much as a ripple. The network of four ageing mainframes that regulated the UK’s tax accounting system was not affected; neither was the Gridnet, a hardened mesh of underground computers that controlled the nation’s electricity supply and television network.

  But in other subnets it caused havoc. The virus multiplied and slipped past firewalls undetected.

  The Parliamentary Document Server, an old system colloquially known as the Govnet, was overwhelmed and disabled at 16.00 GMT. The Soviets had been probing the system for years, but Britain had learned how to guard against cyberattack. It was the first time since 1982 that any of the Government’s information servers had been successfully disabled.

  Mr Weyland was in the underground war room beneath Whitehall when all of the monitors went dark. The drone operators in their cubicles prodded at unresponsive controls and yelled for help before throwing their light pens down in disgust and tearing off their headsets. Commanders shouted into their radiophones, trying to establish lines of communication the old-fashioned way, desperate to figure out what the hell was happening on the field.

  Weyland turned and looked at the sudden chaos in the war room, and his first horrified thought was, this is what Armageddon looks like. He remembered those old movies, the old fear of total nuclear destruction. The millennials had convinced themselves it could never happen to them, and the fear had faded. But the world was still at war.

  He touched the quickdial on the side of his radiophone. “John, what happened?”

  “Everything’s down. Christ! Everything except a few utility subnets. And the Acanet, that’s still up.”

  Weyland thought fast. The Party depended on communication and illusion to maintain its control.

  “Where did the command come from?”

  “Cambridge. It came from Cambridge.”

  Of course it did.

  “Push the button. Kill the Acanet. Do it now.”

  “Sir, this could be an attempted coup. If the public rise up again, when we’re weak—”

  “How will the public know? We control the radio, the press! Do it! And I want Eric Critchley and Terry Richards in custody right now.”

  He cut the call, praying that they were in time. Praying it was just a coincidence that this cyberattack happened to coincide with an ongoing tactical nuclear exchange between the European Union and the USSR. Praying this desperate act of censorship, disabling the last free and open corner of the Internetwork, would not finally reveal the true nature of the government that had oppressed and controlled the people of Britain for so long.

  * * *

  Eric had managed to access UEA’s School of Computing Science bulletin board. He could not be happier with the outcome of his experiment, and hummed to himself as he keyed through the right sequence of commands and authentication details to grant access.

  / hey bro, what you doing online? you get the machine to work?


  Brian!

  / It’s a bit untidy but it runs. Got it hooked up to the phone line and the TV.

  / oldschool mate. chuffed for you.

  The television screen crackled, and a few stray characters appeared on the window frame containing the conversation, then vanished again. Eric frowned.

  / There are still some bugs.

  Brian didn’t respond. Eric was about to type another message when shadows moved on the other side of the curtains, blocking out the orange glare from the street lamp outside; then the entire house shook from a massive blow to the front door.

  “Open up! Police!”

  Eric froze. What was happening? He’d done nothing wrong. Accessing the Acanet was not a crime!

  The door shook in its hinges. He couldn’t think.

  / you there mate?

  He looked at the screen and saw that Brian had typed several messages. Perhaps Brian can help me, he thought desperately. Explain what I’ve been doing. Prove this is all a mistake.

  He typed fast.

  / Listen dont have much time police at the door theyve come to arrest me. Dont know what is happening but i must have broken rules somehow. You have to help me tell them they have the wrong guy

  He pressed return and watched the text flow from his hands and down the line into the Internetwork.

  / shit mate this is a joke right?

  He heard wood splinter. A window smashed, and more figures moved beyond the curtains.

  / YOU HAVE TO LISTEN THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW THEY ARE COMING THROUGH THE DOOR

  / whoa systems are going down all over the lab. this something to do with you? hold on th

  Then the monitor went blank, and the door burst inwards. The last thing Eric did before the agents took him was shove his tangle of wires and circuit boards underneath the television stand to hide it from sight.