by Mark Doten
And I couldn’t get back to them.
I had thought I was moving into danger, leaving my family safe.
But I was moving out of danger, releasing my girls to their end.
I finally got a call through an hour later.
I said I wish I was there with you, I said I love you.
And then it was over.
If I had been there, we might have taken a different street, have found some place to hide, to save ourselves, or simply faced our end together.
I couldn’t let go of that thought, the thought of a street in Brooklyn black and slick with rain, lights out, a glow on the horizon, or moving by moonlight, the three of us together, and I spot a hatch, an iron lid of some type on the street, a square, a circle, a grating, something iron. What doesn’t change is the sound of it, that noise, the low resonant grind of metal on metal, and I am, impossibly, propping it open with one hand, as though it weighs no more than a photograph of what it is, and with the other hand I am helping my girls in.
In addition to the information centers, the Foshay Tower had a smaller conference room called the “media center,” several terminals hooked up to a simple, text-only email program. We had all been given addresses linked to the ID numbers that had been assigned post-1/28.
At these terminals, we could access a dozen media brands that were ostensibly issuing reports through this system, CNN, Fox News, the New York Times, Reuters, AP.
A grid of buttons four wide by three high, CNN upper left, San Jose Mercury News lower right.
These had come to be known, at least among the journalists I was in email contact with, as the functioning entities.
There were a lot of us, reporters, editors, features writers, critics, in vague contact, wondering what the hell was going on.
It had been an early triumph of the post-1/28 world, equipping all, or most all, of the survivor camps with a media center.
An early triumph reported by means of the media brands, the functioning entities.
Functioning entity was a term that had cycled through a few of these pieces early on in moments of self-description.
“The New York Times is a functioning entity, and will continue to bring you all the news fit to print.”
And also:
“USA Today is a functioning entity, and will continue to bring you all the news fit to print.”
No mastheads, no bylines, you went to the news home page at a terminal in the information center, clicked the button of the media brand you wanted to access, and there you could see the most recent week of stories.
There was a general whose name appeared in a few pieces on the state of the media, the increased space for the media, under the watchful eye of the Office of Communication Oversight.
The stories disappeared after a week, as if to prevent any accountability, or to prepare the way for some larger cultural forgetting. It was unclear who was left and who was running the show, government employees of some kind, packaging limited chunks of morale-boosting news, enough verisimilitude to give it all a glint of plausibility.
The voices were wrong, the editorial slants were wrong, the pieces were vague capsules.
I had participated in some of these discussions, wondering if anyone from the New York Times was working at the New York Times, hearing from Fox people, Reuters people, there was a group of journalists dispersed throughout the settlements who had found each other, started this email group, at least until our accounts were suspended.
The media center was shut down for a week, our dumbphones were collected.
Our accounts went out, and we received vague notices to not talk about certain types of “operational logistics” for the time being.
When our phones were returned and the media center reopened, contacts among other surviving journalists were blocked, or the journalists were gone now, perhaps, it wasn’t clear.
And the stories kept rolling, power was reestablished, roads were reestablished, a family was rescued after surviving underground in the Carlsbad Caverns, surviving on the cereal bars in the underground gift shop.
The president met the family. There were photos, there was a speech.
There was talk of the time when the magnificent Carlsbad Caverns, a gem of the Southwest, would reopen to the public.
In these pieces, no mention was made of any surprise from the survivors about the president’s identity.
No mention of how it was explained to the family that our new president had in fact been secretary of the treasury, and that he was president only because now four people in the order of succession had been killed.
This was the sort of forgetting that came in handy in our new world.
Whether or not this new president was still in power was unclear, for a month it was always photos from the same two shoots accompanying the stories about him, the president standing in front of some ruins, shovel in hand, flag waving behind him, peering at the horizon with an oily, anxious look, or him at a desk, phone to ear, or writing something on a notepad, or listening to a general, and then for the past month I hadn’t seen any stories about him at all.
We had our dumbphones, they could make calls, that was it, your hand went to your phone for news, texts, tweets, games, but those weren’t there anymore, your hand would just have to forget that those had ever been there; and yet the hand remembered, and moved on memory.
That I had had a wife and daughter was another type of handy forgetting that had failed to take.
Or that outside of this, out of this hotel, we were being supported, somehow, by teeming layers of governmental life: by vast groups of governmental workers, doing, building, burying, securing, killing.
That was the best case scenario.
The system was repairing itself. It was alive, for now.
There was, there had to be, a great deal of life outside these boundaries, to support the life inside, and there was no sense in it to me. We knew there to be many such spaces as ours, holding survivors, but we had no sense if there were more of us, or of them, more in the camps or out.
But of course it was more of them that were outside.
There was a whole planet of survivors, here it was locked down, or so it seemed, elsewhere we didn’t know, though you imagined them: the survivors of the destruction our country had unleashed, the rage they must have had for us, the rage unto death.
There was human circulation and human life, there were the military and government folks, and thousands of feral settlements—these were mentioned now and again in the functioning entities, how the people outside (feral had been used at first, then it was dropped for unregistered) were gradually being registered and equipped with services—and we, in our containment zones, were for now some necessary adjunct to that, which would perhaps at one point be found not necessary.
Perhaps preserving us was just some transitional step, a sort of acceptance and letting go.
But perhaps the unregistered people, they were maintaining us in some way—it was whispered that there were masses of them, whole anarchic armies being built, and so even we, who seemed useless, were being held for some war against these massed enemies who wanted to seize power, and that might be our lot, defensive fodder to be sacrificed to an untold horde.
I went and sat with Nate, who was grinning, showing his teeth, pushing his long hair out of his wide eyes and rocking a bit as I approached.
If they beat us we can join them, Nate said. You know that, right? I’m going to betray whatever and flip and roll right over. I think they’ll like me. I’m fun. Or I can stay here, if the stuff continues as is. I’m easy.
It was the window hour, and there were Keebler Fudge Stripes cookies packed before the end of the world, and a pot of coffee, and the light fell across the cookies and the shiny yellow packaging was reflected liquidly by the black carafe in its spiral grooves.
Nate had been a network engineer in Milwaukee. I told him that my old editor had survived and he wanted a piece on internet humor at the end of
the world.
Nate said, Did you hear about the comedian on 1/28? He received a glowing reception.
Who’s out there? Who’s in control? Who started this? Where are the borders between us and them? The size of the attack, the number of zero days involved, Nate said, suggest a state actor, but what’s the strategy there, exactly?
We were into something that was important to him, something I could see he needed to say. His hand was on his gut, and his lips were drawn back over his teeth and releasing. He would say something to me, but after, the lips would keep moving, a shivering twitch, as though there were a second dialogue alongside the first that only he could hear, a stuttered series of reactions, splaying teeth and gums.
He said, Maybe the global internet shutdown was an accident. Sometimes you have a party and it gets out of hand.
He said, The internet got shut down for four full days. If we did it one hundred times, if we could run that experiment, how many times would the spinner land on apocalypse? Are we just in a particularly fucked-up timeline? Or is that the way things are now, the internet is some kind of magical mesh holding a horribly precarious world-system together, and a days-long system shutdown inevitably lead to system collapse, to a mass human die-off? And run the experiment again, but it’s three days. It’s two days. It’s an hour—what happens if the global internet shuts down for a single hour? If you game it out for all possible durations from a minute to a year, how many times is the outcome likely to be the end of the world? Because we don’t really know, do we? We don’t have the data on that.
This is somewhat speculative, he said. My own theories, things people were saying on Reddit. IRC was back up before anything else, there were ideas going there the last day. And here at Foshay, there were some ISOC friends I found through the terminals before they closed down that kind of communication.
Speculative stuff, he said. Grain of salt.
Grain of salt, I said.
What we know, Nate said, is it started in BIND. The first day, January 23, when we still had access to the online spaces where people who had jobs like mine talked about what’s happening, it was identified as BIND, at least part of it.
BIND, he said, handles a lot of the internet’s addressing function—servers that essentially direct the traffic of the internet.
The attack came. There was an exploit, a zero day, a back door.
BIND servers were taken over.
There were botnets, massive botnets, the internet of things—lightbulbs, for instance, millions of smart lightbulbs—these had been hacked.
The pipes for the internet started to slow.
The capacity of the tubes, it’s much higher downstream than upstream. Choke points, traffic jams, if all the surface streets are full of cars the highway will overflow. You can shut out any legit traffic to any website or network, you could topple CDNs. Akamai and Cloud Player—could you take them down? Could you take down Google? Paralyze the internet? It was happening, attempts at that were happening.
Take down financial institutions, high-frequency traders lose their link to financial.
Places that clear money can’t clear, everything is frozen, nothing is moving, the traffic is coming from everywhere. And so they’re trying to preserve the core infrastructure. The hackers aren’t inside Facebook or Google, let’s assume that. There’s no evidence that they’re inside. So what’s happening is that there’s still just a huge traffic snarl outside their gates. The normal responses to these attacks don’t work. Normally you try to block stuff upstream, but there’s no place that’s not entirely choked off. If you’re Google or Facebook, you can pull up the drawbridge, but then there’s no customers, no one can connect to it. Everything times out. Google is doing everything they can, turning on as much as they can, but it’s 1,000 to 1 gibberish to real people, and the gibberish can keep changing, too. Computers are dynamic factors.
Imagine that the internet, or a part of it, is a bar. And someone is acting in an unruly fashion. At some point, you have to kick that person out of the bar.
And you’re ready for that. You have bouncers so you can do just that: you can kick out one person, even a whole table.
But what if it’s coming from everywhere?
They’re all chanting, all making noise, and no one can order a drink, if they’re a legit client, they’re not being served, but you can’t figure out who to silence, who to kick out, because the system within the bar is modulating, and maybe even your bouncers are part of it, or some of them.
So now power grids fail, hospitals fail, and people die.
He said, Sometimes you have a party and it gets out of control.
Whatever the initial idea was, people are dying all over. Banking failures, logistics chains fail. Massive cargo ships with only eight people on board are adrift and what’s on them is rotting. Walmarts empty out, all the grocery stores empty out, internet-guided surgeries are on hold, medical supplies are gone, there’s no blood, medicine starts to run out, the resupply mechanisms are fucked, there’s so much that’s reliant on just-in-time supply chains, and all that’s totally fucked, and even the people with shit warehoused nearby can’t move it because there’s no gas and no workers and the roads are jammed up. There’s civil unrest, and it starts spilling across borders. There are people out there, even if they don’t know this is what they’ve been waiting for, it’s what they’ve been waiting for. If you want to kill your neighbor, kill him now. If you want to start a war, start it now. Carpe diem, baby.
So the attacks wind down, the internet comes back online, but World War III is already starting.
So there are big questions. The people who shut it down, what did they want? Was it some specific attack that got out of hand, was it China or Russia and it got out of hand, was it just fuck-up-the-system, watch-the-world-burn lulz that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams? Was it individuals or state actors or something in between? Was it a US intelligence action that blew up in our face? This—the world now—this couldn’t be what anyone wanted, unless we’re talking James-Bond-style madman. Unless we’re talking some really dark lulz. China and Russia, the US establishment, they didn’t want this. This isn’t good for Kim Jong Un. This isn’t good for Rouhani or Netanyahu. Trump, you know, we had Trump in our particular timeline and of course he’s the guy who’s going to blow it all up if he gets the chance, and I’m not saying he couldn’t have had some involvement in the shutdown, but I also don’t see the angle there. I don’t see Trump saying, Let’s take down the internet. The internet is where people talk about him! The internet was where he got to barf the contents of his brain out for his adoring fans. Be that as it may, we’re in Trump’s timeline, and Trump is a symptom of the internet, of American sickness on the internet, he’s an internet creation, this avatar of white regressive blowhard resentment and blah blah blah, so it’s not clear that you can really say what if it was Obama or Hillary or Rubio? What would they have done? Because it’s Trump that we chose. And maybe in some weird sense we had to choose him, we’re so stupid as a country that this was in some fucked-up way inevitable. But that’s just my brain making excuses, saying that it was preordained, saying we couldn’t have done anything, when it was so close to going another direction. If a butterfly had flapped its wings in the Upper Midwest, Hillary would be president. So imagine: What would have happened if it was one of these more normie types when the attack came? Hillary, Rubio. Maybe all this would have been at least postponed. I mean, Trump, I think a lot of us had the sense from very early on in the Republican primaries that if Trump got the chance to blow up the world he’d do it, that was clear from his whole career, he got off on rolling the dice on big bets and seeing everyone around him get blown up, all his partners totally screwed and ruined and just leaving these smoking wastelands wherever he went. The fact that he got elected, I mean, it was a real death-wish situation for America, but then you have to ask, What would Hillary or Rubio or whoever have done in a situation where the lights go dark, the in
ternet gets knocked out for four days, and when the lights are back up, there’s some nuclear events happening, there’s a global system that’s suddenly got these huge ruptures. Elizabeth Warren. Bernie. I don’t know what would have happened with them but these things have their own logic and maybe it doesn’t even matter so much who’s president, maybe even Bernie would have pushed the button. What I think about is all those old cartoons, Bugs Bunny or whatever, there’s a trope where someone goes to sleep, all the lights are out, it’s peaceful, and I don’t know where this bedroom is—maybe it’s in a haunted house, I don’t remember, it’s a trope, there are lots of bedrooms where this happened—and Bugs Bunny or whoever is sleeping, and then for some reason they reach for a light, they strike a match and it’s all these eyes around them, staring, or it’s knives and axes and guns, it’s monsters surrounding their bed. I don’t know, I think I’m overlapping a bunch of different cartoons here. Maybe the eyes appear in the dark, and then the match gets struck. It’s a trope, the trope is, the lights go out, and then they come back up, and it’s a nightmare around your bed. And how do you react? You know what I’m saying? There’s monsters around your bed, how would any of these presidents have responded? Of course, we had the president we had, and the results are we’re here.
That’s my rough sense of it, he said. Take it with a huge grain of salt.
I got it, I said. Huge grain.
He said, Whatever happened happened.
I called Galloway back. I said I’d write his story, but first I had a story of my own I wanted to do.