by Mark Doten
I might begin on 1/23, when an attack on the internet larger than any before paralyzed global communications.
I might begin with the Aviary’s Pastebin postings.
I might begin with The Subversive.
I might begin with Birdcrash.
Here’s where I’ll start: six weeks before the one-year anniversary of 1/28, with a phone call.
Galloway reached me in Minneapolis and told me he wanted me back on the job.
Galloway wanted an article for the first issue of the newly reconstituted New York Times Magazine, to be released on the first anniversary of 1/28.
He wanted a piece on internet humor at the end of the world.
Yeah I’m into ICBMs:
I
Can’t
Believe
My life is ending because her email
s
Yeah I’m into ICBMs:
I
Cocks, stick them in my
Butt quick
M
s
Yeah I’m into ICBMs:
I
Can’t
Believe
My life is ending because she didn’t campaign in the upper midwe
st
Yeah I’m into ICBMs:
I wasted my life on memes
C
B
M
sorry mom
Yeah I’m into ICBMs
I
C
Being dead
M
s
Minneapolis had been known for months off and on in official communications as the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone.
That it was still more containment zone than Minneapolis was apparent from the fact that in the building in which I was confined (a tapering deco building, completed in 1929 by public utilities magnate Wilbur B. Foshay, just weeks before the stock market crash that would wipe out his fortune) men with AR-15s and bulletproof vests patroled the floors.
It was made clear by the fact that we were in assigned rooms that could be locked from the outside “for resident safety,” and by the fact that Xeroxed blue papers, slid under our doorways weekly, provided schedules of when we could “circulate in the building,” though we were not to “roam the halls.”
It was made clear by the fact that “circulation” and “roaming” were left undefined, thus no need for pretext to escort you back to your room.
Not that they needed a pretext to escort you back to your room.
AR-15s were pretext enough.
It was made clear by the fact that the windows were covered by heavy black curtains backed by a sheet of radiation cloth, and that we were permitted to draw back the curtains for only one hour a day, between noon and one.
Does it sound right, I asked Galloway, that this is the precise acceptable amount of exposure, a year after the event? One hour, no more, no less.
Rachel, Galloway said, everything is arranged. And this is the only way you’re getting out of there.
There is a certain wise old Mr. Lewandowski here, I said. Retired military, then a stint at Rand, then some tellingly hazy international consulting work. He went blind in the Fargo blast, but we take it in turns to keep him updated. He actually doesn’t believe it, that our eyes have all turned gold. He thinks it some prank we’re playing. It’s actually funny: we see his blind golden eyes rolling around, and he’s saying no, no one’s eyes are gold.
Galloway let out a breath. And what else does old Mr. Lewandowski have to say? he asked.
He said if our eyes were really gold it sounded like security theater bullshit, something in the water, and bellowed at length for a Dewar’s. After someone brought him some kind of pruno, he crowed for twenty minutes about it being nukes, not climate change, that got us. He was very pleased. Everyone had been saying climate change, oh yes, climate change, it was very fashionable for a lot of years how climate change was going to be our end and apocalypse, but all down the line, he’d kept saying: nukes. And nukes it was! Nukes to beat the band.
Well perhaps you can include him in your piece. Old Mr. Lewandowski. That’s fun.
I told Galloway that I was sorry, the piece wasn’t for me.
Bullshit it’s not for you. Internet humor at the end of the world. A discussion of technology and internet culture that opens up and illuminates the larger system. Says things about who we are as a culture. This is what you do. You can do this in your sleep.
Not anymore. I’m an information worker. They take us to terminals and we sort information. It’s necessary work. You have no idea how much. As a matter of fact, it’s time for my shift.
I lifted my curtain back an inch. A pigeon on the windowsill looked at me, black eyes shot through with panhandler’s gold. With a dulled flick of its head, a half hop, it took off across Marquette Avenue and over the ruins of the IDS Center where it joined an immense flock of various species and sizes, wrens and crows and herons impossibly mixed and turning, a small dark bit of information among thousands of others.
If they truly believed in the curtains, I said, they could have built some control device, automated the process, instead of having us do it by hand.
You’re saying they should build you an automatic curtain opener?
My point is they prefer us to think about the curtains and how we’re managing them and what they mean instead of bigger questions.
The birds were swooping in crosscutting patterns, forming for a moment into an oblate spheroid that began to distend, taking the shape of primitive life vastly magnified, a unicellular organism reaching out with pseudopods, one to the sky, one toward the Mississippi, it reached and reached, until at some critical point it was no longer a single shifting shape, it was just a seething bunch of birds that flew apart.
Rachel, no one needs you right now but me. And I don’t even need you, I can get someone else.
Get someone else. There’s a charming young triple amputee here, Nate something. A network engineer. Stanford degree. He told me one. He holds up his last limb, this really gnarly hand, he says, his girlfriend in Duluth, it doesn’t bother him that one of her tits is bigger than the other five. And he makes that sort of classic tit-squeezy gesture with his blackened claw.
Don’t you want this? You’ll be able to travel. You can circulate and roam, totally at your own discretion. See the little black room where they’re keeping the internet. On 1/28, you told me you want to write about the system breaking down, a big investigative piece on everything that was happening.
You’re holding me to things I said on 1/28? I also told my wife I’d be back soon, no need to wake my daughter for a last I love you …
This is a chance to do that piece, Rachel—a small version of it, focused, yes, but to start the process of the nation publicly thinking about the BIND attack, the botnets, 1/28, the nukes, the control of nuclear weapons, Trump Sky Alpha, where we were then and where we are now. Something real, Rachel. Something that can shape the narrative. No one knows jack shit right know. There is no history, no journalism now. Not really. The system could go in any direction. We need to start telling the story.
You should talk to Nate. Not only does he tell great jokes, but as a network engineer, he’s full of theories about how the internet attacks went down. That’s an actual piece. What caused all this. Not the little jokes as it was ending.
Maybe so, but we’re starting with this. A sanctioned piece about internet humor at the end of the world. This is the piece.
The internet goes down for four days, when it comes back up the world is exploding, and no one will tell us why or what happened. And you want, what, Distracted Boyfriend memes?
It’s a story. One story.
How about how many are left? How many of us are registered in places like this, and how many are just out there. Are we all going to die of cancer? How the central government is doing, to the extent that there is one. If you’re looking for pitches.
We can’t talk about any of that, not right now.
How many survivors here in this country. A million? Twenty million? How many in the world? How many in places like this?
Do you want to be part of rebuilding, or just let the last of it rot? It all starts somewhere.
I see the world around me and it’s all guns and survival and control. I’m in a nice place here. There’s no magic hashtag resistance position right now for journalists, there’s no democracy dies in darkness or the fucking news fit to print. Just accomplices to whatever this is.
There’s been a huge shock to the system, Galloway said. It’s all very precarious. We give up? How about you fucking pull yourself together and do the thing you’re good at and not sulk around bitching about the world fucking blew up, boo hoo. It did blow up. Deal with it.
This is a former W hotel. We have an hour of light a day. We pass the time together. I’m useful here. I sort information. I talk to the sick and the dying, I fuck a chick who is twenty-three and worked at REI and did lots of sports and canoeing before all this. We all keep each other company. It’s not going to get better than this.
Rachel, Galloway said. Wake up. Get up. Just get up and do this. Your self-pity is unbecoming. They’ve got you in this meat locker, doing nothing. You know, we used to joke about the first draft of history? I mean, this is it. This is really when we do it.
History’s over. It’s the end of the end of the end of history. History stole all our shit and left the building. History fucked us. I owe precisely nothing to history.
This isn’t you, he said.
I said, Time for my shift.
There were three “information centers” in the hotel, banquet halls set up with long tables and computer terminals that seated about a hundred people.
The terminals were connected to a single program, InfoGo.
There were multiple “information modules,” and the system rotated you between them, adjusting for—it was said—competency and fatigue, keeping you for longer stretches on the programs on which you hit higher reliability targets.
One module had you read the automated transcripts of calls that were now produced any time someone used the government-issued “dumbphone” (as they were colloquially known), reading the transcripts the system had flagged, and that you were then to give a holistic score of 1 to 5 according to a scoring rubric and periodic group training sessions. It was rumored in my information center that a 3 or higher would get the user a visit from the authorities, but this was only a rumor; and it was further rumored that if you shaved points off your scores out of some misplaced sympathy for the users, then it was you who would be visited.
Another module: viewing aerial drone footage, ostensibly looking for settlements of survivors, signs of life.
Another module: checking documents—a seemingly random assortment of old newspapers, books, magazines, internet pages, photos of billboards, of sweatshirts with writing on them—that had been converted to pure text through an OCR program, again scored 1 to 5 based on a rubric.
But the module I spent most of my time in was Face Match. On the left side of the screen a picture of the face of a living person would appear, and on the right, a picture of the face of a dead person. You pressed y if you thought they matched, and n if you thought they didn’t match, and u for unrecognizable if you felt that the pictures were insufficient for identification.
You were to move quickly, make your best guess. A few seconds per screen. Our training had emphasized that you would not be right all of the time—but there were multiple sites, other InfoGo workers seeing the faces, various pairings of the living and the dead. And gradually consensuses would emerge, according to an algorithm. They told us to just do our best, our clicks were part of a larger system that ultimately was more reliable than any of us as individuals, a system that gathered information even from our mistakes, and there was a comfort to that, making your choices, but also leaving it to this higher power.
In the days and weeks after 1/28, there had been so many millions of dead that rescue teams had been instructed to leave them, to save survivors, and to photograph and ankle-tag the dead, when possible. Drones were sent into areas where people couldn’t go.
It had been explained: yes, possible matches had been provided by facial recognition software, but the software had not been intended to work on the dead. And so machines in partnership with the living were best able to ID the dead.
Just as others throughout the country were working in food production, electricity, fabrication of machine parts, we had our task.
much extinctions, such sad.
When the terminal told me to, I logged out and was through the door, moving mechanically to Andrea’s room. A few seconds after she let me in we had our pants on the floor and were bringing each other off, or trying to. I was on top of her, pushing down on her neck with my forearm, and the quick movements of our hands and mouths were rough in a way that felt necessary and yet pro forma. I felt her tense and clutch around my hand, and there was a whimper, like some small part of her did not want this, but that wasn’t the part that was in control, and she grabbed my wrist and thrust me farther in. It didn’t matter. It was both ineffective and impersonal, and we were going nowhere. But then that changed. Her thumb was doing something to me, and she was biting my nipple. Even as I was climaxing, though, it seemed like I was pulled away at top speed; even as it was still cresting, the sensation became quite distant, and then it was done.
Then we were just there and Andrea was talking, and I let her words fall across me. Her hand was in mine, but mine was limp, hers alternately gripping and absently stroking. She was talking about the radiation curtains, and I remembered that the words I had said to Galloway were hers, not mine, and I was alarmed, because in the moment they had felt like mine.
How can it be true? Andrea asked. One hour? Sixty minutes? That whatever science—whatever medical, biological science—is going on just happens to be timed to the human calendar, to our conception of time and this very convenient one hour, sixty minutes, 3,600 seconds? I would feel much better if they said, Oh, we made a mistake, it’s actually sixty-four minutes and thirty-two seconds you can have the curtains open. And what really really bothers me most of all is not knowing whether they’re watching from across the street or from a hidden camera inside your room. But if you don’t do the curtains right you get a knock. They’re watching. But where from?
I made a sound, some murmured agreement. We were on our backs side by side, midway down the bed, feet on the floor. My eyes were closed, and I was feeling her hand, and trying not to feel it. I was trying not to feel anything.
She asked if I got the survivor aerial photography module.
I said I didn’t want to talk about it, about work.
Work, she said. And she laughed. You know what our work is? Looking for survivors through drones, we’re hunting for kids, families—these encampments? I mean, what do you think we’re doing? I’ve seen the same territory a week apart, the first day it’s these families trying to survive. We press a button identifying a human, then they send a team in and get rid of them. Tell me it’s not the truth. They’ve told everyone to report in, to come in, that’s how I got here. The big microphone blasting that you had to go to such and such a place the next day, and if not? What do you think?
I said I didn’t know what I thought.
I said, You don’t know any more than I do. You think you’re seeing the same place, based on what? A tree, a road, a lake, a barn? It might not be. And they might have been rescued, then the place burned up. Or maybe they were wiped out. I don’t know, and you don’t know.
You’re an accomplice. You’ve got to find a way to resist. Of course, the algorithm will catch you, and they’ll take you off information, move you to a different team. You know what that means.
Jesus, I said.
I remember though how I had just said those words myself: accomplice, resistance. I thought I might be going crazy.
We’ve got to resist, she said. She flicked her golden
eyes at me.
This isn’t you, she said.
Why’d you say that?
What do you mean?
I turned on the bed, I was pushing her down again.
That’s what Galloway said. Exact words. Who’s telling everyone to tell me that?
She was stronger, she threw me off. What the fuck do you mean? she asked.
And I was out in the hallway and moving to my room.
Then I was back in my room and the door was closed, the chain and the deadbolt. I was standing at the thick black curtains, a sort of synthetic velvet, and I pushed my face against the fabric, then banged my skull against the glass through the fabric. Then I stepped away from the curtain and stood there in what I thought of as the mathematical center of my room.
01:55:26 I have faith.
01:55:29 We shall rest to the songs of the angels -
01:55:33 [Laughing]
01:55:35 In a firmament arrayed in jewels, and we’ll look down …
01:55:40 and we’ll see evil …
01:55:43 all the evil in the world …
01:55:46 and all our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy …
01:55:52 and our lives grown sweet as a caress.
What was or was not me.
To think about me in any but the most vaporous sense was to hit up against them.
Though I had been familiar with survivor guilt—though I had myself, fresh out of J-school, interviewed family members of those who had died on 9/11, Cantor Fitzgerald spouses, the brother of a bike messenger, the partner of a victim of Flight 93, though I understood the mechanics of it, the way that certain ideas are latched onto, become obsessive and unshakeable kernels of truth—I had not experienced it. I had studied it from a distance. It was a good story.
When my wife and daughter died, I was on the phone with them, or with my wife, who was holding my daughter’s hand.
And I was on assignment.
I was working for Tom Galloway for the New York Times proper, I had been in Lower Manhattan doing a story on preparations for what was coming, how the previous days’ internet attack had affected the communications infrastructure that the financial sector relied on, and trying to see how the events now unfolding might affect the markets moving forward. I was tying together threads from the mayor’s office, the first responders, finance guys, heading to an interview with a contact at Morgan Stanley, the streets filling with protesters, when Trump in his zeppelin told the military to pull the nuclear trigger, to pull a lot of nuclear triggers.