Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

by Kelly, James Patrick

  “What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down—spared you the trip.”

  Felix’s own server — a box he shared with five other friends — was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

  “What’s the story?”

  “Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too—like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a Trojan.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long ponytail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

  Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.

  “Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category—if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with the lusers — they were the fault of incompetent engineers.

  “No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2 AM, it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”

  They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage — like guards in a Minuteman silo. Ninety-five percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.

  Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes—putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10 AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.

  “I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.

  “Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”

  “What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

  “Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

  “I wanna eat,” Van said.

  “Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day off.”

  “You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”

  “It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the 486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.

  “Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? “Kelly?”

  The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get anything — no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.

  “Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up for the family. She’d leave voicemail.

  He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang again. He snatched it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked to keep anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past three hours had been purely personal—even if he planned on billing them to the company.

  There was sobbing on the line.

  “Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.

  “Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s dead, oh Jesus, he’s dead.”

  “Who? Who, Kelly?”

  “Will,” she said.

  Will? he thought. Who the fuck is —” He dropped to his knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth certificate, though they’d called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick bark.

  “I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I love you so much.”

  “Kelly? What’s going on?”

  “Everyone, everyone—” she said. “Only two channels left on the tube. Christ, Felix, it looks like dawn of the dead out the window—” He heard her retch. The phone started to break up, washing her puke-noises back like an echoplex.

  “Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He punched 911, but the phone went NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.

  He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s network cable and launched Firefox off the command line and googled for the Metro Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an online contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He solved problems and freaking out didn’t solve problems.

  He located an online form and wrote out the details of his conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description complete, and then he hit SUBMIT.

  Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix—” he began.

  “God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the superworm.

  “I need to get home,” Felix said.

  “I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”

  They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few windows was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited for the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Were there more police cars than usual?

  “Oh my God—” Van pointed.

  The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It was heeli
ng over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure crashed through building after building.

  “The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was—the CBC’S towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way, were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the porthole, it was like watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.

  Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the destruction.

  “What happened?” one of them asked.

  “The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.

  “Was it the virus?”

  “The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin with just a little type-two flab around the middle.

  “Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an email that the whole city’s quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix his Blackberry.

  Felix was so engrossed in the report — purportedly forwarded from Health Canada — that he didn’t even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand, and let out one small sob.

  The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.

  “Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.

  “What about Kelly?” Van said.

  Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get into the cage, now.” The cage had microparticulate air-filters.

  They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it hiss shut behind him.

  “Felix, you need to get home — ”

  “It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be OK in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out.”

  “What?”

  “Get on IRC,” he said.

  They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some familiar handles.

  pentagons gone/white house too

  MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO

  Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like rats.

  I heard that the Ginza’s on fire

  Felix typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve heard reports of bioweapons, something very fast.

  Van read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe we were all exposed three days ago.”

  Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some symptoms, I think.”

  Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris — realtime sat footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren’t routing

  You’re in Toronto?

  It was an unfamiliar handle.

  Yes — on Front Street

  my sisters at U of T and i cnt reach her—can you call her?

  No phone service

  Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.

  “I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his voice-over-IP app. “I just remembered.”

  Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It rang once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian movie.

  No phone service

  Felix typed again.

  He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”

  Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was hot — radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had been hanged before their palaces.

  His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the police. It didn’t work any better than it had the last twenty times.

  He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam. More spam. Automated messages. There — an urgent message from the intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.

  He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly probing his routers. It didn’t match a worm’s signature, either. He followed the traceroute and discovered that the attack had originated in the same building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.

  He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker and found that port 1337 was open—1337 was “leet” or “elite” in hacker number/letter substitution code. That was the kind of port that a worm left open to slither in and out of. He googled known sploits that left a listener on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the fingerprinted operating system of the compromised server, and then he had it.

  It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have been patched against years before. No mind. He had the client for it, and he used it to create a root account for himself on the box, which he then logged into, and took a look around.

  There was one other user logged in, “scaredy,” and he checked the process monitor and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds of processes that were probing him and plenty of other boxen.

  He opened a chat:

  Stop probing my server

  He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.

  Are you in the Front Street data-center?

  Yes

  Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I’m on the fourth floor. I think there’s a bioweapon attack outside. I don’t want to leave the clean room.

  Felix whooshed out a breath.

  You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?

  Yeah

  That was smart

  Clever bastard.

  I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more with me.

  What do you know?

  Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other guy digested it. Van stood up and paced. His eyes were glazed over.

  “Van? Pal?”

  “I have to pee,” he said.

  “No opening the door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty Mountain Dew bottle in the trash there.”

  “Right,” Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash can and pulled out the empty magnum. He turned his back.

  I’m Felix

  Will

  Felix’s stomach did a slow somersault as he thought about 2.0.

  “Felix, I think I need to go outside,” Van said. He was moving toward the airlock door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran head-long to Van, tackling him before he reached the door.

  “Van,” he said, looking into his friend’s glazed, unfocused eyes. “Look at me, Van.”

  “I need to go,” Van said. “I need to get home and feed the cats.”

  “There’s something out there, something fast-acting and lethal. Maybe it will blow away with the wind. Maybe it’s already gone. But we’re going to sit here until we know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down, Van. Sit.”

  “I’m cold, Felix.”

  It was freezing. Felix’s arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his feet felt like blocks of ice.

  “Sit against the servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust heat.” He found a rack and nestled up against it.

  Are you there?

  Still here — sorting out some logistics

  How long until we can go out?

  I have no idea

  No one typed anything for quite some time then.

  Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it again. Felix tried calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was down.

  Finally, he slid back against the servers and wrapped his arms around his knees and wept like a baby.
<
br />   After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with his arm around Felix’s shoulder.

  “They’re dead, Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s — son. My family is gone.”

  “You don’t know for sure,” Van said.

  “I’m sure enough,” Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. Things should be getting back to normal soon. The fire department will fix it. They’ll mobilize the Army. It’ll be OK.”

  Felix’s ribs hurt. He hadn’t cried since — Since 2.0 was born. He hugged his knees harder.

  Then the doors opened.

  The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt.

  “Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top floor. Take the stairs.”

  Felix found he was holding his breath.

  “If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK NERDY said. “Just go, we’ll meet you there.”

  “There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his feet.

  “Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.”

  TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna.

  There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water and coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue.

  He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee before running out of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.