Enter the Apocalypse

by Gondolfi, Thomas

  He fingered one of the mustard packets that came with the sandwich and sized himself up. He was the perfect worker of the information age. He owned no real estate and few things. With no family and friendships as ephemeral as his address, he could go practically anywhere to work, and often did. He was, as one brochure describing his services explained, “...able to travel the globe in search of opportunity, and follow wherever it goes.” Mostly for lack of anything better to do with his life.

  He remembered the e-mail explaining the last major job change, the one that would kill him. “To ensure our continued competitiveness” it had begun, before going on to explain that recent labor law changes had opened the “exciting new possibility” of making almost all employees independent contractors, able to pursue “a wide range of opportunities.” As such, they would be free to pursue “multiple options” for health insurance, which would no longer be furnished to “independent knowledge workers.”

  A few phone calls confirmed what he already knew. “We can’t afford to accept a known problem,” the health insurance agents had explained, with just the right mix of regret and firmness. As a diabetic, he couldn’t get insurance for much less than the cost of his treatments. Those costs, added to bare-bones living expenses, would exhaust his savings and credit lines in about three years, meaning his treatments would stop about a year before he reached the end of the waiting period for subsidized care.

  He checked with hospitals and they assured him that emergency rooms would, of course, treat all patients with immediate, life-threatening conditions, but no, they could not dispense maintenance medication without being paid in full. They had stockholders to answer to, after all.

  Six: Loyalty

  He tapped the security code into the palmtop. If he connected to the bar’s wireless access point and uploaded a few small pieces of code, it would be over. The world where he had spent most of his adult life—the world of datasets and connections, the world of instant information, the world where fortunes existed only as magnetic squiggles on metallic disks—would be gone. Along with it would go the world of everyday devices—the ones that allowed people to get their bank balances and driving directions from a portable phone and the card reader that verified their identity at an apartment door. Everything that depended on the big networks would simply cease to function. All the way from the big machines that produced electricity to the little ones that played music. And that would be his gift.

  He remembered passing, bleary-eyed, through an office checkout point somewhere in the Midwest. It was four in the morning, the end of third shift. Employees and contractors alike lined up to be scanned and searched to ensure that they weren’t leaving with any company property, either actual or virtual. The security guard, looking twenty, rumpled, and hungover, spotted his music player.

  “I gotta scan that.”

  “It’s just my music, probably stuff you’ve never heard of.” He put the player in the guard’s outstretched hand.

  His partner, who’d gone through without incident, looked annoyed. The guard jacked the player into a network port, and a security algorithm began searching for suspicious information.

  The guard glanced at the readout, wrinkled his nose, and looked up.

  “It’s encrypted?”

  “Copy-protected, yeah. It’s some really old stuff.”

  “Look, I can’t let this go by if I can’t scan it.”

  His partner rolled his eyes and set his coat on the security sorting table. The growing line of third-shift workers waiting behind him began a collective fidget.

  “Look, really, it’s just some old DRM-protected tunes, it’s nothing.”

  “The rig says it’s encryption, and I can’t let it out because I can’t tell what it is.” The guard’s eyes were bloodshot, but firm.

  “Look, I need that for the flight I’ve got coming up. It’s like twenty hours to Sydney…”

  “OK, you can keep the player, but I have to wipe it.”

  “Wipe it!! Do you know how hard it is to reinstall copy-protected music?” His voice rose, slightly, inflected. The guard winced, but remained firm.

  “I keep the device, or I wipe it.”

  The line stirred in a way that was almost menacing. His partner flopped in a chair and looked toward the ceiling in supplication.

  He hung his head. “OK then, wipe it.”

  At his capitulation, the guard softened. “Sorry to do this.”

  The guard pressed a few keys, and the security routine began erasing the contents of his player, following up with a random-pattern quadruple-write, a security measure once reserved for protecting information like the execution codes for nuclear weapons.

  The other doors had long lines now, compensating for the blocked one. The guard’s supervisor walked over, saying nothing as the guard completed the bag search.

  That’s probably why the guard never stopped to ask himself why a computer-security contractor had an old-fashioned, pen-and-ink address book. Even if he had thought to ask, it’s unlikely he would have known that the bogus street name for a nonexistent dentist’s office was also the administrative password for the application server cluster. Or that the membership code for the discount program of a small car parts vendor was the MAC address of the site’s core router. Or about any number of other valuable details that were much easier to get if you were inside the network than if you were outside it.

  The advantage of being a highly-skilled but not entirely trusted technician was that while they expected you to try something, they always expected you to try something complicated.

  The security panel chirped, indicating that the music player had been wiped clean. The guard handed it back.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s OK, I understand. We all got jobs to do.”

  He combined information from the address book with information obtained in similar ways from other sites. He’d considered selling his findings, of course. That might have brought in enough to extend his life for a while. But he knew what happened to people who sold information to hackers. Eventually, contacts were identified and they went to prison. The buyers moved on to the next source, just like any other client. And nothing really changed.

  And he found that as the numbers in his bank account and his days to live slowly wound down toward zero, the one thing he really wanted was to make the world change.

  His work brought him a flood of free samples for security programs, firewalls and backup programs. Slowly and systematically, during off hours and in the stretches between jobs, he began to probe them for vulnerabilities.

  He found them, of course. Most security software was installed and maintained by people every bit as harried as he was, and designed and built by people under even more pressure to “produce.” As one of his former bosses explained, “You can do no better job than the customer will let you do.” As the years went by, the customers were willing to let you do damn little.

  In another apartment, rented with cash and filled with used equipment, he put the information to work, penetrating the security of his test environment, and finding ways to corrupt the backups.

  That was the key, really. If you wanted to cause real damage, you had to destroy the backups. Otherwise, even the worst attacks were little more than a nuisance. Systems might go down for a time, but once the backups were retrieved, the programs and data could be reinstalled, and everything continued.

  And so he infected the backup software, starting at the source. Security companies, it turned out, had astonishingly shoddy security. Software containing his code was installed all over the cloud farms and the great corporate networks, disguised as part of a normal update.

  The infection was swift, silent, and almost unnoticeable. His code was tight and economical, a relic from his training back in the days when system resources had been sparse.

  He didn’t get every machine in every organization, of course. Smaller networks and a lot of individual units would survive just fine. But t
he ones that kept track of financial transactions, personnel data, payroll, billing information, assets and trades, and flows of everything from electrical power to site traffic…Those would go blank when he gave the word. Blank beyond the hope of backup.

  He didn't know exactly what would happen when the data went away. He was pretty sure some very, very rich people would lose a lot of money when the systems forgot who it all belonged to. Almost certainly, lots of not-so-rich people would lose money as well. He expected that phone systems and utilities would fail, at least temporarily. Air travel might be halted for a while. The one certain casualty was people’s trust in the machines that underpinned the world. He was sure that people would never have confidence in them again. But he didn’t know what people would do next.

  But they would do something different. He was sure of that. They wouldn’t re-create all the same companies and the same flawed systems. They would have a clean slate, a chance to think and start again with different people, different ideas, and above all, the knowledge of what would happen if certain choices were made.

  Reboot the world. That would be his parting gift.

  He took a swig of beer.

  Seven: Control

  His reverie was interrupted by an urgent warble from his phone. Text. From Central Security. One of his traps at the Toronto Exchange installation had found something, and wanted him to look at it. Without thinking, he agreed.

  His phone displayed the results of a code interrogation. A suspicious program had turned up, apparently trying to substitute itself for the backup program on the Exchange’s mail server. His eyebrows arched as the code analysis slid by on the screen. He’d designed that particular piece specifically to avoid the new Chrystal Fence IV software the Exchange was using. His breaths shortened, and he fought the urge to look around the room by pretending to focus on the phone.

  Gradually, his mind slowed down, and his focus on the screen became genuine. He took in what the display was telling him about the analysis. The captured program was code intended to achieve his objective. It would destroy both the backups and the primary data, but it wasn’t something he had written. Numbly, he instructed the security program to remove the backup software and reinstall from the vendor’s home servers.

  Of course, the new installation would be infected, too. But with a program he could control. Or at least he thought so.

  It had been stupid, he realized, to assume he was the only one. There were thousands, maybe millions of people like him, who were skilled, rootless, and despairing. Why should he be the only one to come up with the support technician’s solution: re-boot and start over? Why should he think he was the first?

  He left enough money beside his plate to cover the meal plus a 100% tip, and then headed out the door and into the cool summer night.

  There was no way to tell how long they had. If there really were hundreds or even thousands like him, the end would come when any one of them decided to give up. Which could be any time at all.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket, determined to reexamine the program his trap had captured. There was no signal. Across the street, an entire bank of ATMs displayed the “No Service” sign. Traffic began to thicken, slowing. He looked down the street, and as far as he could see, every stoplight was flashing red, the fallback used when central control failed.

  Beside him on the sidewalk, people stopped. They were looking east, toward the skyscrapers of downtown. Eventually, he stopped and looked, too.

  One building at a time, without any fuss, the lights of the city were going out.

  Alone

  Jessica Conoley

  Editor: There are many mistakes that can be made at the start of an apocalypse. This is one that can be made before it begins.

  Liadne pulled the covers over her head, just like she had when the trumpets sounded last night.

  The thump, thump, thump of her heart was the only sound in her room. In the moments of silence between each beat she listened for the sounds that should have been—trash trucks dropping dumpsters, rattling mufflers on passing cars, the gurgle of the coffeemaker, the whiz of a bicycle as it sped down the hill, voices of the village awakening outside her shuttered windows. She listened for the rapping fall of footsteps of a marching army, or the heavy tread of slippered feet on wooden floorboards. But she only found the silence that had lurked in falling clouds before last night. If not for the relentless beat in her chest, Liadne may have thought she had awoken this morning to find herself deaf. It was the thump, thump, thump over the labored hrummph, hrummph, hrummph of her breath that let her know it was not her ears that had failed.

  Liadne pushed the covers from her, and slipped one foot to the cold wooden floor. Chills ran from her toes to her neck, and she forced her other leg from beneath the warmth of the thick down comforter. She reached for the plush robe that lay across the foot of her bed, wrapped the velvety garment about her shoulders, and crossed to her shuttered window. Beneath each of Liadne’s reluctant steps, sun fell in slanting lines across the wood, warming the floor. Her heart told her to stop, leave the blinds as they were and go no further, but her brain urged her to reach for the latch on her window casing. The metal hook pricked her finger as she loosed it from its clasp. The pain was sharp but fleeting, and in that brief agony Liadne knew it was not her touch that had failed.

  The opening shutters spilled sunbeams across the room, forcing Liadne to shade her eyes. For a few moments she stood, hand toward the bright sun above, eyes squinting at the street she had lived on her entire life. Flowers bloomed pink in Miss Vionette’s window box across the lane, but Miss V. was not there to water them. Cobblestones all purple and gray, shone with no people to cast long shadows onto them. The untended street cart brimming with wares, the bakery display filled with the morning’s still-cooling bread, but no flour-dusted baker was there to hand out the loaves. Beyond the roofs of the town, resplendent against the clear blue sky stood her mountain—white topped and magnificent. It was in that lonely, beautiful scene Liadne knew it was not her sight that had failed.

  Liadne pulled her robe close and saw the drop of crimson dripping down her finger. She raised her hand to her mouth and sucked on the nuisance of a wound. Her salty metallic blood twisted on her tongue with the cotton-mouthed first breaths of the morning. Each breath flung tastes of spring, carried on the morning breeze, to her, but it was the quick life of her blood that overpowered all other flavors. Nursing her wound in the silence between the thumps of her heart Liadne knew it was not her taste that had failed.

  She leaned out the window, and breathed deep to stifle her impending sobs. The bakery sent smells of flour and sugar as the bread browned to caramel coated crusts. The scent of snow from her mountain, crisp with the freshness of ice-cooled streams and tenacious plants fighting toward the sun, wove through her as they had every morning before. When her tears left her breathing in gasps and her nose was stuffed with the absence that lay below, Liadne knew it was not her scent that had failed.

  She stood at her window hearing the silence of desertion, feeling the emptiness, seeing nothing but loneliness, tasting her inadequacy, and smelling only fear. It was in this moment Liadne was sure of what she had feared at the first call of God’s trumpets. It was not her senses that had failed her—it was her faith.

  The Infestation

  Simon Kewin

  Editor: Marketing claims can be a painful.

  Jack was shopping for his week's groceries when he noticed the business card among those pinned to the supermarket’s notice board.

  Monster-B-Gone Magical Pest Removal

  Ghosts exorcised * Demons banished * Vampyres slain

  Pixie infestations humanely disposed of

  Free Estimates * Bulk discounts for large outbreaks

  Satisfaction guaranteed * No job too large or too small

  He stopped and took the card. A familiar rage coiled a little tighter within him as he read. But with the rage came an idea. Fight fire with fire. He'd t
ried everything else. Monsters? Perhaps. That was a word that depended on your perspective.

  Back home at Woodland Road he made himself green tea and called the number on the card. The white van drew up outside his house an hour later. On its side was a stylised representation of a dead fairy lying on its back, legs in the air. Jack opened the door on a short, middle-aged man dressed in blue overalls. The man wore a belt around his thickening waist from which dangled an array of tools, electronic devices and wooden stakes.

  “Morning, sir. Albert Mann, Monster-B-Gone Magical Pest Removal. Got a little problem that needs sorting?”

  “You could say that,” said Jack. “Come in, please.”

  “Thank you, sir. You do have a lot of pot plants. Is it wood nymphs? Very hard to shift, wood nymphs, once they take hold.”

  “No,” said Jack, trying to keep his voice level. “Nothing like that. I can show you best from upstairs.”

  “Ah, gargoyles, then? Tricky bleeders. Cling like limpets.”

  “It’s not gargoyles, either. Come this way.”

  “Right you are.”

  Jack led him upstairs onto his balcony. He liked to come up here at night, when it was a little darker and quieter. Now, the suburbs of London stretched off into the grey distance. Here and there, scattered and isolated, little stands of trees clung on.

  “It used to be woods as far as the eye could see from here,” said Jack.

  “Well, yeah, I expect so, sir. Hundreds of years back.”

  “Before time was even counted. An ocean of green from one end of the world to the other.”

  “Right. Must have been quite a sight, I expect.”

  The man seemed bored. Jack’s knot of rage tightened further. None of this was what he wanted. He was supposed to be mischievous. A trickster. A child. Now he was aged and jaded and he’d become something else. He’d crossed over into malicious. These were the times he lived in. He resented what they’d turned him into.