Downward Cycle

by JK Franks

  It was beginning to get dark inside the quiet cottage, and he knew he would need to be lighting the candles and hurricane lanterns soon. He could smell the slightly salty breeze blowing through the shuttered windows. It was not helping to cool the interior of the house very much today, but it was welcome just the same.

  Scott wondered just how long he would be able to take refuge or “Bug-In” as it was called in this house. So many good memories were here—of his mom and dad, and even more of being here with his brother. Rubbing his hand along the wooden bar top, he remembered how long the sanding and varnishing had taken to get this deep mirror finish. That had been one of his jobs in the remodel, and he still looked at it with pride. The cottage had been a refuge for Scott in other dark times, and he hoped he could stay here for the duration.

  Finished with his tasks and now well fed, Scott was still unsettled. He knew what was causing it, and finally he went to the garage and grabbed a shovel and an old canvas drop cloth. He was soon heading back up the road to the old Buick. He couldn’t do much for the man, but he could offer him a decent burial. Getting the now stiff body out of the car wasn’t easy, but the man had not been heavy. He looked briefly for ID but found no wallet. To the side of the road was a small open area in the trees. It took only about an hour to dig a moderately deep hole. Wrapping the man in the canvas tarp and laying him as gently into the hole as possible, Scott stood and paid his respects.

  “I did not know you in life, but I hope you are at peace.” He filled in the hole and walked back to the road. Turning the Buick lights off, he noticed the fuel gauge said half a tank.

  Back at the cottage, Scott was tired and ready for sleep. He heard a sound and thought he saw a brief glimmer of light in the darkened rooms. The lights in the kitchen then came on and then back off again. Several long seconds later, they came on again, and this time, they stayed on. He checked his watch: 6:00p.m. exactly, one hour until Bobby’s power was back on, hopefully. He had a lot to do and no idea how long the power would last. The first thing he did, though, was make himself a small pot of Kona coffee.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Scott found his mood brightening with the lights in the little cottage as the AC and appliances came back on. He closed the open windows to preserve the refreshing, cool air coming from the vents. In one way the on and off nature of the power grid was cruel, as it became increasingly clear how dependent he was on it. The more dependent you felt, the less you would be willing to move away from it. He connected his cell phone and some small battery blocks to power adapters to begin charging. He also went to the garage and did the same with an emergency twelve-volt battery backup. Back inside at his work desk, he connected his laptop to charge as well, but also opened up the computer and powered it on. The cable modem lights were blinking awake and going through the process of identifying gateways and searching for connections.

  Desperate for news, he turned on the television and began scanning channels to find live broadcasts. He was disappointed to find none. He found several channels that contained only crawling news banners stating that they would resume broadcasting as soon as full power was restored. He then turned his attention back to the laptop.

  He had to perform his IP address trick to get any pages to load but found that none had been updated. Appalled at the lack of information, he tried several international websites including Euronews, BBC News, France24, Reuters and Al Jazeera. Thankfully, a few of these did have a very basic feed of updated articles. Scott triggered a Clipper program to access and download each of these to separate folders on his laptop so he could review them later. This was much quicker than viewing them all now, and he would have them if the Internet or power went down before he was done.

  From what he saw from the headlines, he gathered that things must not be improving. In fact, it looked like things were deteriorating worldwide. His encrypted Cryptocat private chat windows were not connecting, and although his email program connected to the server, it seemed stuck in trying to download new messages. Clicking on his VPN link, Scott was relieved to see that his work servers at DHS came up immediately. Once logged in, his taskbox alert icon was flashing, which meant someone had left him an internal message or some new priority work to do. The taskbox was a way to share information, schedules and even files or snippets of code with other developers without the material leaving the protected environment of the agencies’ servers. He clicked the window to open up his message center.

  He found new tasking requirements to update and then a request to run continuous audit sweeps looking specifically for intrusion attempts whose patterns tended to originate from North Korea. That was one of his specialties, and he had designed several filters and ‘honey traps’ specifically to look for that. He deployed those to all active ports on the servers. Additional tasks were not specifically for him but for whatever Level 4 or more developer that was able to log in. Scott was only a relatively new Level 3 analyst. Level 4 was very senior, but when he clicked on the resource links included in the tasking, he was able to view the work folders. Apparently, he had been given the equivalence as field promotion. Either that, or someone had made a mistake.

  In the corner of his screen, his Cryptocat messenger finally connected, and immediately a chat bubble popped up. He only had a few contacts on Cryptocat, and he recognized the username on the chat bubble of AlphaCatHCF12. Although he had never personally met the man, he had known him for years. His real name was Tahir, and he lived in Alexandria, VA. He was a young and phenomenally talented former hacker turned white-hat security analyst working for the same government contractor as Scott. Tahir was the person who had first invited Scott to use Cryptocat. It was one of the most secure and private messaging services available.

  While most work-related discussions were done in the internal Taskbox app, being able to freely discuss topics the government might frown upon was better done in more anonymous ways like this. Over the years, the working relationship with Tahir, or AlphaCatHCF12, had grown into a pretty close friendship. Scott appreciated the young man’s brilliance and the daring nature that showed through at times. The two had also become regular teammates in several multiplayer online combat games where Tahir regularly kicked ass.

  The awaiting message was simple and had been sent several hours earlier:

  BikerBoy, I saw the logs where you signed on, probably doing the same thing I did to try and pull up any information. Glad you are alive; hope you are doing ok down there in the bayou. Listen, my friend; I have stumbled onto some fucked up shit. I mean, some serious end of the world level shit going down. Not just the CME blast either, looks like we may all be Pwned. I upgraded your access level and dropped a few things in our shared private folder for you to look at. You will know what it is. Not sure what we can do about it except to be prepared. Dude take precautions, and you know…FFS, be invisible.

  Scott was unsure of what Tahir had left him, but it seemed he thought someone might be watching for activity on the server. He sent a quick chat message back to say thanks and that he was doing okay. Hopefully, they could talk live later, but he would use the chat app to leave him messages in the meantime. Pwned was geek speak for someone getting clobbered in a game. FFS was for fuck sake, as in ‘this is serious’. Now to get back into the work server and see who he was talking about and what else had his friend so rattled.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Scott quickly navigated to the part of his personal folder that he and Tahir shared. They had set up the encryption protocols on the folder so no one but a full Sysadmin could access it. If that happened,, a useful subroutine that the DHS supplied for all top secret work would engage, and the data in the folder would self-delete.

  He pulled up the only new item, a file called TEOTWAWKI. The name sounded Native American to Scott. He opened up the text document. It was a long file with the title “The End of the World as We Know It”. Not wanting to download any files, as that would leave a record, he again clicked his Clipper program to
take pictures of the screen and quickly began scrolling to the bottom of the file. In it were several links to other files and folders that just by the address Scott knew were also in Level 4 restricted access areas.

  He clicked on the first file folder, named “Catalyst.” He was surprised to see that nearly all the files and sub-folders had been updated in the last twenty-four hours. He pulled up several video files included in the top-level briefing folder. The first showed a DHS logo and official “Briefing Only” headline. The screen then showed a green image of the sun with an SDO watermark in the corner. The Solar Dynamics Observatory was responsible for reporting most solar weather events to the government. The timestamp showed that the images were from late morning on the previous day.

  Scott watched as several dramatic sunspots came into view and a large arc of plasma looped out from several places, the largest of which appeared to reach the end of its arc and snap away from the sun, blasting into space. A countdown clock started up at the top of the screen: 08:21. The 21 was quickly descending. Not privy to the briefing notes that would have accompanied this video, Scott assumed that the solar flare would reach Earth in just over eight minutes from when the flare had broken away. The screen went dark for a moment and was replaced by more video from the European Space Agency. ESA had a solar observing satellite called SOHO—Solar and Heliosphere Observatory. As the video advanced, he saw even more of the looping coronal arcs reach out and break away. Again, the clock showed the countdown and the screen of the satellite flared white, then went dark as it reached zero.

  The next video was recorded apparently from within the International Space Station. It showed the astronauts looking panicked but speaking to someone with a handheld microphone. Scott could not hear the audio due to the limits of the VPN connection. The conversation was animated and very unlike the calm, professional clips usually released to the media outlets by NASA. It appeared to Scott that the crew was beginning to gather belongings, and he saw an open hatch to what he guessed was one of the two lifeboat capsules attached to the ISS. An Asian man was tossing several small bags into one when another astronaut floated over to him and held his arm. Shaking his head, he pointed briefly up past the camera. It appeared to Scott that they both went limp as the camera flared and went dark. The text on the screen said “ISS 10:48 EST All SOB Lost”. Scott knew SOB in this case meant “Souls on Board”. The initial ultraviolet rays must have been lethal up above Earth’s protective atmosphere.

  The three other videos were a montage of various clips apparently gathered from around the world in the hours after the CME. One showed a window view of a city skyline he recognized instantly as Chicago. There were no cars moving on the empty streets. Smoke from hundreds of fires streaked the horizon, emanating from several neighboring high-rises. People could be seen attempting to break windows in attempts to get fresh air or maybe just escape. Whoever was filming was apparently using a cell phone as the scene tilted and shook as they ran to the other side of what looked to be a luxury apartment. The awe-inspiring height of the Hancock Building was visible out this window, only its side was darkened, and smoke billowed out of multiple scars down its side. Hanging on the edge of one of the deep gashes in the building was the burnt tail section of a commercial jet. Scott thought briefly about all the times he had flown out of O’Hare and Midway airports and circled up over the beautiful city. All those flights just raining down on the city he used to call home. That clip ended with a US map covered with hundreds of red dots. The map legend was labeled “Major Known Crash Sites”.

  Another clip showed celebrations of hundreds of people in a desert region. They had banners, big grins on their faces, were firing guns in the air and hugging each other. Scott was unsure of the country but guessed that the loss of electricity was not something that would bother this group if they even noticed. They apparently were just delighted that the Great Satan of the US was finally on its knees. That scene faded and was replaced by what had to be the ruined city of Jerusalem. It appeared the city had suffered terribly, even the always recognizable Dome of the Rock was nothing but scattered debris. Military jets, usually hardened against an EMP blast, orbited overhead, but it was unclear if that was Israeli or some other air force.

  More video showed looters in various cities around the world. Some of the footage looked professional, but most appeared to be taken from security, webcam or cell phone footage. One particular video was of two nurses wheeling an obviously dead naked body on a surgical gurney out of a hospital and into the parking lot. They placed the corpse on a blue tarp, and the shot widened to show hundreds more bodies. The video panned around to the darkened and seemingly abandoned hospital, then up to the windows. Floor after floor of sad faces looked out of nearly every window, taking in the horror around them. Each expression seemed to imply that it, too, would end up on the overflowing tarp in the parking lot. Apparently unable to go back into that building where they probably could offer no more help, two hospital workers walked out into the dark street.

  Other clips showed power transformers arcing blue sparks, some on fire. A plant that Scott thought might be a fuel refinery appeared on screen: a fire raging out of control. Then came a series of grainy CCD videos of what looked to Scott to be nuclear plants belching water and choking smoke from the sides and base of the domes. The faces of the people caught on camera told the story that something had gone horribly wrong.

  Some of these videos had not been taken in the US. Others he was less sure about. He finished up the briefing videos and looked at the various other files. He opened and scrolled, capturing everything he could to view them in-depth later. He knew he could probably lose his job for what he was doing, but at this point, that didn’t seem to matter. Two other folders caught his eye. The first was named “ASSETS_ACTIVE” and the other “CATALYST-CME”. Others, such as “CATALYST-PANDEM1,””, “CATALYST-ECO,””, “PRAETOR5,””, “and PRAETOR9,” could wait for now.

  Opening “ASSETS_ACTIVE” first, Scott viewed two short PowerPoint documents whose slides focused on what were deemed to be trouble spots. One slide deck was labeled “Domestic” and the other “International.’ It appeared to be the type of boring government data he would sometimes see from the Census Bureau, and indeed some of the slides in the domestic presentation even had the Department of Agriculture seal and copyright. What this was indicating, though, was that the national food supply existed in 15-day increments.

  Other slides showed the most vulnerable power sub-stations, power grid-down areas and critical connections, LPT or Large Power Transformer ratings, and specs and resupply information. He was surprised to see that these things were very expensive, custom-built and mostly over thirty years old. The other thing that caught his attention was that all of the transformers’ replacements indicated overseas suppliers; virtually nothing was kept in inventory. Apparently, these were custom to each site installation and not just a standard item whose inventory could be made in advance and held in reserve. Even worse, the delivery estimates beside each item ranged from eighteen to twenty-four months. That was assuming the manufacturing plants were operating at peak efficiency, and worldwide demand was no more than average. Right now, Scott thought, these plants were probably as dark as everywhere else, and every power grid in the world would likely be needing replacement parts that now would not exist.

  Opening more files, he saw timelines and a projected rise of social unrest, looting, limiting media coverage and what appeared to be a minimal domestic FEMA assistance as well as possible troop deployment. Another map indicated certain areas that could remain relatively unscathed, likely those run by private or alternative energy. These areas were so small they barely showed up on the map.

  A similar map was dated several years previous and showed a feasibility study for failsafe fallback zones—areas in which power, water and even food supply routes could be reestablished more easily. Most of these were near a stand-alone power supply such as a hydroelectric dam, a nuclear plant or
a wind farm. The color-coded charts were mostly colorless but showed many areas in the Midwest, California marked in green and blue, which apparently meant survivable regions. Scattered around the Southern US were also a few isolated pockets of color. Even here in the gulf, there was a large section in dark gray. When Scott checked the map legend, it indicated the area was marginal but possibly survivable. At least we must have some of what is needed, Scott thought. Much of the country and all of the northern states were a stark, empty white.

  Many of the files were of a similar nature. Lastly, he clicked his mouse on the folder “CATALYST-CME” and opened up the first file titled “Mission Action Report.” The files were coded SAP, or Specialized Access Program, a condition of ultra-high confidential and secret data. It was only used for the most sensitive information. Scott knew damn well he did not have this level of clearance and could only assume Tahir had recovered these files elsewhere and placed them here for Scott to view. He probably should just close the folders and cancel the session. Even inadvertently accessing something like this would be big trouble for him.