by Jim Nelson
My knife sliced through the roast beef without effort. Thierry had marinated and braised it to near perfection. Years of bachelor cooking and eating out had left me with distant memories of home-cooked meals. I’d eaten in five-star restaurants every week since moving back to San Francisco. My earlier crack to Clift about getting a better lunch on the mainland was bluster. The truth was, I’d not eaten this well in years.
“For decades, the world poured every scrap of knowledge and culture and debate into a single electronic medium: the Internet. Then—” Clift snapped his fingers. “The Nexternet wiped it aside. Why read a blog about Tahiti when you can live a trip to Tahiti? Why watch someone make a cake when you can taste a slice of the most luscious chocolate cake in the world, all without consuming a calorie?”
“And this place, this prison, this is the Old Internet’s last refuge.”
“Humanity produced the greatest system for disseminating information ever, and we came perilously close to losing it all overnight,” Clift said. “The Internet was a flame kept alive by the collective willpower of eight billion people. When we turned our back on the Internet, the flame nearly extinguished. That is the Commission’s mission, to keep the flame burning. We are the last refuge of mankind’s collective memory.”
Brill topped off everyone’s wine glass. He shut the clamshell and began pushing the cart on its long journey back to the kitchen.
“When they powered off the Old Internet, I remember there was some ruckus about what to do with it,” I said.
“We almost lost it all,” Marker said.
“No more paper newspapers by the end,” Warwick added. “Broadcast television was on its last legs. Streaming video and social media were most people’s only source of information.”
“The history of the prior forty years was entirely stored in old-fashioned hard drives,” said Marker.
“Spinning steel platters and feeble solid state drives,” said Warwick. “Technology guaranteed to degrade over time.”
“Worldwide, it would have been as Europe slipping into the Middle Ages,” Clift said boldly, winding up his pitch. This was a man who wrote up proposals for grant-providing non-profits. This was a man who made presentations before the boards of trust funds and government commissions. Clift was the evangelist of this place.
“Rome was sacked and the barbarians decimated its libraries and universities and literature,” Clift said. “Countless works of priceless art and literature were destroyed in the feverous height of the French Revolution. During the Internet’s lifetime, humanity did a monumental job transferring all its works of print, film, and tape to the Internet. But when the Internet lost its shine and failed to transition to newer, more tempting technologies—”
“It was almost like the Library of Alexandria burning to the ground,” I said.
“Exactly,” Clift whispered across the table. “Utter collapse.”
Knife and fork in hand, I started on the roasted baby potatoes. “So you have your funding,” I said. “You have your data center and you have your meals served thrice daily. You have your servers and you have a sterling reputation as the foremost academic center for near-history studies. You’ve enjoyed all this for ten years now, and as best as I can tell, you built this up without a peep or a problem. And then, yesterday, you called me.”
“And then we called you,” Clift echoed. He looked away vacantly. His jaw clicked with each chew of his meat. In a swift motion, as though a heady notion had struck him, he pointed the tines of his fork at me. “We are in need of a man like you.”
“And what kind of man am I?”
“A man who will take out his memex when it’s required of him,” Clift said. “Today we live in a culture where every first thought is broadcast worldwide on the public square. Every opinion, no matter how ill-informed or trivial, is disseminated across the Nexternet microseconds after it's formed. Every carnal desire is satiated via effortless and anonymous micropayment. Every experience is rated and discussed broadly with the buoyancy of two sailors bragging about their conquests in port.” He was breathing now. Clift was inflamed. “We need a man unlike the rest of our culture. Alien to it, even.”
I checked and straightened my tie. “I don’t know about all that,” I said. “My business is discretion.”
The other two bearded men watched the exchange through saucerous, watery eyes. They touched the beef and pureed spinach with the tips of their forks but did not partake. Their jaws hung loosely as they hung on every word of the discussion.
Clift speared a square of beef, skated it through the port wine reduction, and chewed thoughtfully while staring out the rain-coated barred windows.
“Someone is deleting the Old Internet, Mr. Naroy.”
Now he spoke with a weariness in his voice. It suggested to me this was not a new problem, but one he’d confronted for weeks, or even longer. It was the first downbeat note I’d detected from Clift.
“Someone has vaulted over our defenses, elevated their privilege level, and has deleted bits and pieces of the Internet. They’ve deleted it from every backup copy we have.”
Dr. Clift stared across the table at me, forlorn.
“They’re destroying our collective history and thumbing their nose at us,” he said. “These are not memories we can reconstruct. They’re a part of a fragile past, and they’re gone forever. This bastard has the potential to do more damage than you or anyone can possibly imagine.”
3.
Dr. Warwick asked me a question in a soft voice. From across the table, his neck and body covered by the blanket, he appeared as a detached head floating over a field of tartan. "Are you aware of the field of historical reconstruction?”
“I can make a guess from its name,” I said.
“We had an grad student,” Dr. Warwick said. “She was performing a historical reconstruction of the second decade of this century. To aid in her research, we'd granted her privileged access to the Old Internet.”
“I believe our dessert is ready,” Clift said.
Brill returned with yet another rolling service. He brought us warm brownie slices with white chocolate chunks protruding from their surface. A modest scoop of French vanilla ice cream melted on top of each. The coffee was hot and rich and did not require cream. The barely-touched wine bottles were replaced by a squat, well-consumed bottle of tawny port wine, its label stained with red drippings like prison cell bars.
“You eat like this every day?” I asked.
“I confess to a weakness for fine dining,” Clift said. His cheery grin returned with the coffee and sweets. “A weakness for all the fine things in life, I suppose.”
“Leigh Blessing,” Dr. Warwick reminded us.
“In good time,” Clift said. “After the meal.”
I asked, “Who lives on the island now? Just you three?”
“We keep a staff. The men you saw at the dock comprise the bulk of our employees. Most of them live elsewhere on the island.”
“Do you have guests out here at all?”
“Researchers and interns,” Clift said. “All are historians and archivists performing studies on the Old Internet.”
Drs. Marker and Warwick each took a bite of the dessert and returned to shivering under their blankets and vacantly waiting for the meal to conclude. Dr. Clift consumed his brownie and ice cream with relish. He scraped the last of the muddy mixture from the bottom of his dish with the tines of his fork. He poured port into one of the thimble-sized crystal-stemmed glasses the plum-suited Brill set out with the desserts. Without a word, Dr. Clift motioned if I would care for a glass of the tawny. I accepted. It was quite good.
“Shall we retire to the research room?” he asked.
Thimble glasses in hand, we leisurely strolled down a corridor of prison cells toward the other end of the cell block, Clift's walking stick clicking against the floor, my equipment satchel banging against the back of my leg with each step. In each cell stood a black monolith studded with flashing blue light
s. Dr. Clift called out each server’s role as we passed, although they were unmarked and otherwise appeared identical.
“Russia, education and government, 2010 to 2012,” he said, pointing into one cell with his walking stick. “Egypt, art and literature, 1998 to 2000.” He pointed to one across from it.
The prison house was four levels high, a tightly packed beehive accessible by scaffold walkways and spiral staircases constructed of steel bars. All of it was original from the days when this was a massive prison holding the worst of the worst. We walked at ground level, only Dr. Clift and I looking up and around. The other two stumbled forth as though barely able to move. Brill walked behind them with his arms slightly out as though either might stumble to the concrete floor at any moment.
“United States, news and finance, 2021.” Clift continued pointing out cells. “United States, news and finance, 2022. Northern China, social and medical sciences, 2025.” And so on, like Adam naming the animals.
“On December 31st, 2027, what we used to call the Internet was officially retired.” Dr. Clift’s voice echoed across the concrete canyon of the ancient, repurposed penitentiary. “The world shifted to the Nexternet in a one great leap. The next morning, January 1st, 2028, we’d all moved to the next stage of worldwide networking.” He spread his arms. “The Old Internet Preservation Commission gathered every last web page we could in those final days and housed it here, along with the historical Internet of the prior thirty-five years. We bottled lightning, Mr. Naroy. We bottled a slice of the world’s history. A rather significant slice, I would say. We watch over it day and night to ensure it remains preserved for the future.”
“You just had your ten-year anniversary, then,” I said. “About two weeks ago.”
“That’s correct,” he said, carefully though, and not with the boastful pride I expected of him. “We held a little party on New Year’s Eve to celebrate, in fact. A rather sedate one, I’m sure you would think.” He smiled as way of regaining himself. “We are old men, Mr. Naroy.”
“How much outside traffic do you get?” I asked. “From the Nexternet?”
“Oh, we’re not worried about popularity,” Clift said. “We stand for broader purposes.”
“Humor me,” I said. “How many people access the Old Internet each day?”
“It’s minimal,” he said. “People these days are so wrapped up in their own little worlds, very few access the web pages stored here. But some come sniffing around. Schoolchildren writing a report on the O.J. Simpson trial. Movie lovers seeking some independent film not migrated to the Nexternet. Connoisseurs of the first wave of grunge music. That sort of thing.”
The corridor ended at oak double-doors propped open. We traveled down a hall of crummy laminated flooring to what was once, I gathered, a private lounge for the warden and his family. Now it was a research room, a long carpeted chamber with abstract framed paintings on the plaster walls and groups of club chairs separated by end tables.
Across the far wall was a series of barred windows with chicken mesh baked into the glass. Through them I could see a landscape of the gray and stormy San Francisco skyline. Below us, waves smashed into the island’s rocky base like liquid fists into bricks. The ferry fought its dock moorings, a junkyard dog muzzled and chained.
“I’m afraid it’ll be a bumpy ride home,” Clift said.
An extended beech table ran down the center of the chamber. At some of the seats stood old-fashioned workstations, antique personal computers with flat-screen monitors and actual keyboards and mice. It required exertion to use the Internet. The distance between the monitor and my eyes was a light-year compared to the distance between my memex’s filaments and my cerebral cortex. The Old Internet required work: interrogating a search engine, clicking links, reading text, watching videos, and so on. With a memex connected to the Nexternet, almost any desire could be quenched instantaneously with a couple of quick thoughts.
“Archaic, isn’t it?” Clift said. “They used to have college courses on how to use these machines. They had to teach people how to use the Internet.”
I ran a finger over the smooth curved backside of the computer mouse. It had been years—no, over a decade—since I’d used one.
“Think how the television generation looked back on their grandparents listening to radio dramas,” Clift said. “Or the radio generation looking back on their grandparents reading the Saturday Evening Post by gaslight.”
Dr. Clift offered the chair before a computer workstation with a toothy salesman smile. “Care to give it a spin?”
My nostalgia for the past was quenched by a quick tap of the keyboard's SHIFT key. Black plastic keys, each with a metal spring tuned to provide just the right amount of tactile resistance. I remembered how Dell keyboards were crisp, IBM's keyboards were loud, and Apple's keyboards were mushy. I harbored no desire to relive the past.
“How did your intruder gain access?” I asked.
“No physical entry, obviously,” Clift said. “He got in through the Nexternet.”
Now we were talking. “Tell me how your servers are connected to the outside world.”
“Transforming the old bits and bytes of the Internet to the Nexternet’s neurotransmission protocol is tricky,” he said. “We have a custom bridge transforming signals between the Nexternet and our copy of the Old Internet. The transformer should permit no more than read-only access to the Old Internet.”
“It sounds like someone was able to gain read-write access,” I said.
“We can fix that,” Clift said. "Your job is to locate the missing data and return it to us."
“Really? Do you even care to know who gained accessed? Their motivation?”
"If our hacker kept a copy of the web pages they deleted, all I want is them returned so we can restore the integrity of the corpus.” He held his hands out before him, patting the air reassuringly. “We will file no charges against them. We will not hold them responsible—if they return all the data to us.”
"Hold up," I said. "This is a government facility, right?"
"The facility is," he said. "Not the data. When I brought the Old Internet to the Federal government, I arranged specifically for the Commission to remain an independent non-governmental organization."
"And you don't want this hacker to face charges? Independent commission or not, they've committed a major crime."
"I would prefer to keep this all under the radar, so to speak." He added, "If I really wanted the hacker to go to prison, I would have contacted the BCE."
This was most definitely in the wheelhouse for the Bureau of Computational Enforcement. I couldn't believe, given the scope of breach, Clift hadn't contacted them immediately. But if he wanted this resolved quietly, then reaching out to the BCE would have been the last option.
“And what about fixing your transforming bridge so this won’t happen again?”
“That’s a problem for Dr. Marker to solve,” Clift said. “Yours is to find the man responsible for the loss and retrieve our data.”
Dr. Marker, stuporous from the meal, had nodded off in a tartan easy chair. His light snore and bobbing chin did not steel my confidence in their network security. Brill threw a thick blanket over him, just as he’d done at the dining table.
“And you can’t recover what your intruder deleted?" I asked. "He got all your backups?”
“The data is unrecoverable on our end,” Clift said flatly.
“You don’t keep offline copies?”
Clift grimaced. My prodding about the data loss was akin to poking at a bleeding wound with a hot curling iron.
“Our lunch may make us appear a highly-funded organization,” he said. “This drafty, aging facility should prove we’re not. Storing offline copies in a secure underground complex is simply beyond our means.”
“If your hackers go public with the theft—to embarrass you—”
“Yes, yes," Clift said. "If they go public, we’ll have no choice but to go to the BCE. Until then, we h
ave you."
Nodding, I said, "Well, you should steel yourself to the possibility of data blackmail."
“I believe the term is ‘data extortion,’” Clift said tartly. “If you learn the data is being ransomed, do not take action without informing me first.”
It was the second time, maybe the third, I’d been spoken down to by Clift since I set foot on the island.
I downed the last of my port and set the empty glass on the long beech table. Brill promptly picked it up and carried it to an amply-stocked wet bar in the corner. He refilled my thimble glass and returned it to me with a pristine cocktail napkin.
“We discussed payment yesterday,” I said to Clift. “I explained my current schedule.”
“We’ll double your standard fee if you’ll set aside your current obligations and prioritize ours,” he said without hesitation. “We cannot afford another attack.”
“What do you mean, ‘afford?’”
“We have researchers around the world relying on the availability of the Old Internet. We can’t shut them out. They are on their own schedules as well.”
Clift appeared ready to say more and hesitated. I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to finish the thought. This fingers of his wrinkled hand strummed against the ball of his elephant walking stick. Up close, I noticed for the first time the continents of the world were carved into the back of the elephant.
“Data loss would also affect our finances,” he said. “Our funding stream is due in part to the outward appearance of reliability and security.”
No more Old Internet, no more roast beef and port wine lunches. It was a cold, wet existence out here on this rock in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, but it was Clift’s rock and Clift’s staff and Clift’s prestige on the line. He was a king lording over our planet’s past, and he had two slumbering bishops helping him do it.