Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn't eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.

  Water was running short, too.

  Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.

  "We're going to open the doors," Popovich said. Like all of them, he'd lost weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off a trash-bags behind a fish-market on a sunny day. Felix was quite sure he smelled no better.

  "You're going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group for it—great idea."

  Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. "We're going to go find our families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it hasn't. Either way, there's no future in here."

  "What about network maintenance?" Felix said, thought he knew the answers. "Who'll keep the routers up?"

  "We'll give you the root passwords to everything," Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the data-center, he'd gone cold turkey this week. They'd run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.

  "And I'll just stay here and keep everything online?"

  "You and anyone else who cares anymore."

  Felix knew that he'd squandered his opportunity. The election had seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight all it had been was an excuse for infighting when they should have been figuring out what to do next. The problem was that there was nothing to do next.

  "I can't make you stay," he said.

  "Yeah, you can't." Popovich turned on his heel and walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go, then he gripped Felix's shoulder and squeezed it.

  "Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe we'll find something to eat and some fuel and come back."

  Rosenbaum had a sister whom he'd been in contact with over IM for the first days after the crisis broke. Then she'd stopped answering. The sysadmins were split among those who'd had a chance to say goodbye and those who hadn't. Each was sure the other had it better.

  They posted about it on the internal newsgroup—they were still geeks, after all, and there was a little honor guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the first set of doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors opened. It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart from how empty it was, it looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.

  The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then another. They turned to wave at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed their throats and began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.

  "Shiii—!" was all Felix managed to choke out before they both dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing so hard they were clutching their sides. They waved once more and turned on their heels.

  "Man, those guys are sick," Van said. He scratched his arms, which had long, bloody scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in scurf they looked like they'd been dusted with icing sugar.

  "I thought it was pretty funny," Felix said.

  "Christ I'm hungry," Van said, conversationally.

  "Lucky for you, we've got all the packets we can eat," Felix said.

  "You're too good to us grunts, Mr President," Van said.

  "Prime Minister," he said. "And you're no grunt, you're the Deputy Prime Minister. You're my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out of oversized novelty checks."

  It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that they'd all be going soon.

  That had been pre-ordained by the fuel-supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel to run out, anyway?

  ****

  > half my crew split this morning

  Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford.

  > we're down to a quarter

  Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn't had much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They'd been too busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in Canada.

  Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much food—it was all gone.

  He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.

  > Runaway processes on Solaris TK

  >

  > Uh, hi. I'm just a lightweight MSCE but I'm the only one awake here and four of the DSLAMs just went down. Looks like there's some custom accounting code that's trying to figure out how much to bill our corporate customers and it's spawned ten thousand threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can't seem to do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do to get this goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it's not as if any of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I'd ask the guy who wrote this code, but he's pretty much dead as far as anyone can work out.

  He reloaded. There was a response. It was short, authoritative, and helpful—just the sort of thing you almost never saw in a high-caliber newsgroup when a noob posted a dumb question. The apocalypse had awoken the spirit of patient helpfulness in the world's sysop community.

  Van shoulder-surfed him. "Holy shit, who knew he had it in him?"

  He looked at the message again. It was from Will Sario.

  He dropped into his chat window.

  > sario i thought you wanted the network dead why are you helping msces fix their boxen?

  > [sheepish grin] Gee Mr PM, maybe I just can't bear to watch a computer suffer at the hands of an amateur.

  He flipped to the channel with Queen Kong in it.

  > How long?

  > Since I slept? Two days. Until we run out of fuel? Three days. Since we ran out of food? Two days.

  > Jeez. I didn't sleep last night either. We're a little short handed around here.

  > asl? Im monica and I live in pasadena and Im bored with my homework. WOuld you like to download my pic???

  The trojan bots were all over IRC these days, jumping to every channel that had any traffic on it. Sometimes you caught five or six flirting with each other. It was pretty weird to watch a piece of malware try to con another instance of itself into downloading a trojan.

  They both kicked the bot off the channel simultaneously. He had a script for it now. The spam hadn't even tailed off a little.

  > How come the spam isn't reducing? Half the goddamned data-centers have gone dark

  Queen Kong paused a long time before typing. As had become automatic when she went high-latency, he reloaded the Google homepage. Sure enough, it was down.

  > Sario, you got any food?

  > You won't miss a couple more meals, Your Excellency

  Van had gone back to Mayor McCheese but he was in the same channel.

  "What a dick. You're looking pretty buff, though, dude."

  Van didn't look so good. He looked like you could knock him over with a stiff breeze and he had a phlegmy, weak quality to his speech.

  > hey kong everything ok?

  > everything's fine just had to go kick some ass

  "How's the traffic, Van?"

  "Down 25 percent from this morning," he said. There were a bunch of nodes whose connections routed through them. Presumably most of the
se were home or commercial customers in places where the power was still on and the phone company's COs were still alive.

  Every once in a while, Felix would wiretap the connections to see if he could find a person who had news of the wide world. Almost all of it was automated traffic, though: network backups, status updates. Spam. Lots of spam.

  > Spam's still up because the services that stop spam are failing faster than the services that create it. All the anti-worm stuff is centralized in a couple places. The bad stuff is on a million zombie computers. If only the lusers had had the good sense to turn off their home PCs before keeling over or taking off

  > at the rate were going well be routing nothing but spam by dinnertime

  Van cleared his throat, a painful sound. "About that," he said. "I think it's going to hit sooner than that. Felix, I don't think anyone would notice if we just walked away from here."

  Felix looked at him, his skin the color of corned-beef and streaked with long, angry scabs. His fingers trembled.

  "You drinking enough water?"

  Van nodded. "All frigging day, every ten seconds. Anything to keep my belly full." He pointed to a refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of water by his side.

  "Let's have a meeting," he said.

  ****

  There had been forty-three of them on D-Day. Now there were fifteen. Six had responded to the call for a meeting by simply leaving. Everyone knew without having to be told what the meeting was about.

  "So that's it, you're going to let it all fall apart?" Sario was the only one with the energy left to get properly angry. He'd go angry to his grave. The veins on his throat and forehead stood out angrily. His fists shook angrily. All the other geeks went lids-down at the site of him, looking up in unison for once at the discussion, not keeping one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service log.

  "Sario, you've got to be shitting me," Felix said. "You wanted to pull the goddamned plug!"

  "I wanted it to go clean," he shouted. "I didn't want it to bleed out and keel over in little gasps and pukes forever. I wanted it to be an act of will by the global community of its caretakers. I wanted it to be an affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy and bad code and worms winning out. Fuck that, that's just what's happened out there."

  Up in the top-floor cafeteria, there were windows all around, hardened and light-bending, and by custom, they were all blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the room, yanking down the blinds. How the hell can he get the energy to run? Felix wondered. He could barely walk up the stairs to the meeting room.

  Harsh daylight flooded in. It was a fine sunny day out there, but everywhere you looked across that commanding view of Toronto's skyline, there were rising plumes of smoke. The TD tower, a gigantic black modernist glass brick, was gouting flame to the sky. "It's all falling apart, the way everything does.

  "Listen, listen. If we leave the network to fall over slowly, parts of it will stay online for months. Maybe years. And what will run on it? Malware. Worms. Spam. System-processes. Zone transfers. The things we use fall apart and require constant maintenance. The things we abandon don't get used and they last forever. We're going to leave the network behind like a lime-pit filled with industrial waste. That will be our fucking legacy—the legacy of every keystroke you and I and anyone, anywhere ever typed. You understand? We're going to leave it to die slow like a wounded dog, instead of giving it one clean shot through the head."

  Van scratched his cheeks, then Felix saw that he was wiping away tears.

  "Sario, you're not wrong, but you're not right either," he said. "Leaving it up to limp along is right. We're going to all be limping for a long time, and maybe it will be some use to someone. If there's one packet being routed from any user to any other user, anywhere in the world, it's doing its job."

  "If you want a clean kill, you can do that," Felix said. "I'm the PM and I say so. I'm giving you root. All of you." He turned to the white-board where the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day's specials. Now it was covered with the remnants of heated technical debates that the sysadmins had engaged in over the days since the day.

  He scrubbed away a clean spot with his sleeve and began to write out long, complicated alphanumeric passwords salted with punctuation. Felix had a gift for remembering that kind of password. He doubted it would do him much good, ever again.

  ****

  > Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway

  > yeah well thats right then. it was an honor, mr prime minister

  > you going to be ok?

  > ive commandeered a young sysadmin to see to my feminine needs and weve found another cache of food thatll last us a coupel weeks now that were down to fifteen admins—im in hog heaven pal

  > youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. Dont be a hero though. When you need to go go. Theres got to be something out there

  > be safe felix, seriously—btw did i tell you queries are up in Romania? maybe theyre getting back on their feet

  > really?

  > yeah, really. we're hard to kill—like fucking roaches

  Her connection died. He dropped to Firefox and reloaded Google and it was down. He hit reload and hit reload and hit reload, but it didn't come up. He closed his eyes and listened to Van scratch his legs and then heard Van type a little.

  "They're back up," he said.

  Felix whooshed out a breath. He sent the message to the newsgroup, one that he'd run through five drafts before settling on, "Take care of the place, OK? We'll be back, someday."

  Everyone was going except Sario. Sario wouldn't leave. He came down to see them off, though.

  The sysadmins gathered in the lobby and Felix made the safety door go up, and the light rushed in.

  Sario stuck his hand out.

  "Good luck," he said.

  "You too," Felix said. He had a firm grip, Sario, stronger than he had any right to be. "Maybe you were right," he said.

  "Maybe," he said.

  "You going to pull the plug?"

  Sario looked up at the drop-ceiling, seeming to peer through the reinforced floors at the humming racks above. "Who knows?" he said at last.

  Van scratched and a flurry of white motes danced in the sunlight.

  "Let's go find you a pharmacy," Felix said. He walked to the door and the other sysadmins followed.

  They waited for the interior doors to close behind them and then Felix opened the exterior doors. The air smelled and tasted like a mown grass, like the first drops of rain, like the lake and the sky, like the outdoors and the world, an old friend not heard from in an eternity.

  "Bye, Felix," the other sysadmins said. They were drifting away while he stood transfixed at the top of the short concrete staircase. The light hurt his eyes and made them water.

  "I think there's a Shopper's Drug Mart on King Street," he said to Van. "We'll throw a brick through the window and get you some cortisone, OK?"

  "You're the Prime Minister," Van said. "Lead on."

  ****

  They didn't see a single soul on the fifteen minute walk. There wasn't a single sound except for some bird noises and some distant groans, and the wind in the electric cables overhead. It was like walking on the surface of the moon.

  "Bet they have chocolate bars at the Shopper's," Van said.

  Felix's stomach lurched. Food. "Wow," he said, around a mouthful of saliva.

  They walked past a little hatchback and in the front seat was the dried body of a woman holding the dried body of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour bile, even though the smell was faint through the rolled-up windows.

  He hadn't thought of Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped to his knees and retched again. Out here in the real world, his family was dead. Everyone he knew was dead. He just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and wait to die, too.

  Van's rough hands slipped under his armpits and hauled weakly at him. "Not now," he said. "Once we're safe inside somewhere and we've eaten something, then and then you can do this, but not now. Understand me, Felix? Not fucking no
w."

  The profanity got through to him. He got to his feet. His knees were trembling.

  "Just a block more," Van said, and slipped Felix's arm around his shoulders and led him along.

  "Thank you, Van. I'm sorry."

  "No sweat," he said. "You need a shower, bad. No offense."

  "None taken."

  The Shoppers had a metal security gate, but it had been torn away from the front windows, which had been rudely smashed. Felix and Van squeezed through the gap and stepped into the dim drug-store. A few of the displays were knocked over, but other than that, it looked OK. By the cash-registers, Felix spotted the racks of candy bars at the same instant that Van saw them, and they hurried over and grabbed a handful each, stuffing their faces.

  "You two eat like pigs."

  They both whirled at the sound of the woman's voice. She was holding a fire-axe that was nearly as big as she was. She wore a lab-coat and comfortable shoes.

  "You take what you need and go, OK? No sense in there being any trouble." Her chin was pointy and her eyes were sharp. She looked to be in her forties. She looked nothing like Kelly, which was good, because Felix felt like running and giving her a hug as it was. Another person alive!

  "Are you a doctor?" Felix said. She was wearing scrubs under the coat, he saw.

  "You going to go?" She brandished the axe.

  Felix held his hands up. "Seriously, are you a doctor? A pharmacist?"

  "I used to be a RN, ten years ago. I'm mostly a Web-designer."

  "You're shitting me," Felix said.

  "Haven't you ever met a girl who knew about computers?"

  "Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google's data-center is a girl. A woman, I mean."

  "You're shitting me," she said. "A woman ran Google's data-center?"

  "Runs," Felix said. "It's still online."

  "NFW," she said. She let the axe lower.

  "Way. Have you got any cortisone cream? I can tell you the story. My name's Felix and this is Van, who needs any anti-histamines you can spare."