by Samuel Fort
Chapter 49 - Fire
The Fleming Stradivarius that Lilian had played since she was a child had been on “perpetual loan” from King James II of England since the late 1600’s. The king had loaned it to one of her ancestors who, posing as a royal advisor, provided James intelligence that assisted him in quashing a rebellion in southern England. Never mind that the rebellion was scripted to both occur and to be crushed, the Nisirtu nobleman was fond of music and so accepted the violin on condition that the king write in his own hand a letter stating that the instrument was a loan and not a gift. That letter, sealed in wax, was still in Lilian’s possession, and should the late king or his descendants ever appear to reclaim the violin, she would hand it over without question.
Until then she would take good care of it.
She surveyed the ballroom as she lifted the violin to her shoulder. Most of Steepleguard’s residents were present. Lilian imagined that many Nisirtu attended because they deemed it impolitic to reject the queen’s invitation but hoped that her reputation as a virtuoso attracted many more. The Ardoon present seemed pleased just to have something to do.
Her program called for her to play a few pieces and then to sing a few songs before returning to the violin. A mezzo-soprano, she had included in the program excerpts from La damnation de Faust, Giulio Cesare, and The Marriage of Figero. To conclude the evening she had arranged a performance by some of the children.
She looked at a distant clock and saw that the apocalypse was about to begin in earnest. Smiling radiantly at those gathered before her, she raised her bow and said, “Tonight, let us remember our ancestors. Qualis artifex pereo!”
There were murmurs of approval and a respectful silence.
At last she smiled and said, “Now, Paganini’s 24 Caprices,” and began to play.
The first major crack in the veneer called civilization occurred at 7:27 PM, Mountain Time, when one of the major U.S. news networks ran the banner Internet Outages Reported Worldwide. On the screen, a perplexed female reporter held one hand to her ear, nodding and while she held the other hand in the air in a gesture that said, “Wait.”
“Turn up the volume on monitor eight,” said Ben. He watched as the volume bars grew from left to right at the bottom of screen.
“Yes, Jason,” said the woman on the television, studying a sheet of paper in front of her, “right, okay…yes.”
She looked back toward the camera and said, “We are being told, telephonically, and anecdotally, that the internet is down in many…what?...okay…I should say, is reportedly down in many places around the world, to include Atlanta and New York. Unfortunately, many of our network’s wire feeds are internet-based, so paradoxically, we are unable to collaborate from our usual sources how widespread this outage really is.”
The camera zoomed in on a stern-faced reporter to her right, a man with gray hair and a bowtie. “Sue, everyone I’ve talked to, and I mean everyone, is reporting an outage. Of course, any voice-over-internet-protocols are - is that the right term, Scott? It’s okay? - right, so any computer-based or internet-based phones are down, too. That’s what I’m trying to say. This has put everyone on their heels…”
“Definitely,” said the woman, “and it couldn’t come at a worse time, because there have been some amazing and, I think it’s fair to say, unbelievable reports appearing on the web these past few hours - everything from launches of nuclear weapons to alien spacecraft spotted - what? Okay, right, I must emphasize that these are, to say the least, ‘unsubstantiated’ reports.”
“Right, Sue, but it can’t be a coincidence that this internet outage has occurred simultaneous to the rumors of war that - unsubstantiated rumors of war between the United States and-” He tilted his head down, listening to someone speak to him via his earpiece. “Fine, fine. I’ll just shut up then. Vance is here - Vance, what could cause this?”
Another reporter appeared, a young man without a suit coat. “Any number of things can cause a temporary outage, but one as widespread as this? I mean, in the booth we’re seeing reports of this from every television news channel we monitor, so it’s clearly not a local problem.”
“A virus, maybe?”
“It would be one heck of a virus. It could be a combination of different types of attacks, to include physical destruction of the infrastructure that makes the internet possible, though the effort required to do that would be-”
“Vance, sorry to interrupt, but assuming this is a worldwide outage, will it affect texting services, emails, things of that nature?”
“Without question, yes. It will shut everything like that down. We’re essentially back to the 1970s until a solution can be found, but that will be problematic given that the people who solve such problems largely rely on the internet to communicate with one another. You can imagine the isolation being felt by literally billions of people who suddenly find themselves detached from the rest of the world. It’s something the current generation has never had to deal with.”
“But it is clearly no accident, right? I mean, the internet doesn’t just go down - some nation state must be behind this. Would the U.S. have a reason or the ability to do this? For example, if there was a war?”
“It’s hard to believe that it could, really, but if it could, war is only one of many reasons they might do that. Reports of border incursions around the world, of approaching meteors, of spacecraft-”
“Vance, we can’t validate any of that and we don’t want viewers to assume-”
“We can’t validate shit, Sue. Sorry, but we’ve got nothing. The wires are down.”
At that point, the camera on “Vance” went dark and his microphone was cut off. “Sue” was visibly upset as someone seemed to be escorting the young man from the set, even as another reporter ranted about illegal state militias mobilizing.
“The internet will not be coming back up,” said Disparthian. “Not for a few centuries. Now the paranoia will begin to set in.”
“How long before the television broadcasts stop?”
“Twenty or thirty minutes. It is important that the broadcasters not be given an opportunity to discount any of the misinformation spread on the internet before it went down. The misinformation varies according the demographics of the websites’ viewers. It is catered to maximize its believability. Conservative websites that were hijacked blamed the coming collapse, in some form, on minorities, anarchists, communists, and so forth. Liberal websites were tweaked to blame gun-wielding vigilantes, survivalists, the U.S. military, the industrial-military complex, and so on.
“Sites that catered to conspiracy theorists were fed misinformation about aliens and comets and meteors and solar flares. Environmentalists’ websites were fed stories about ‘runaway global warming’ and the rapid melting of ice sheets and coastal flooding. And so forth. Whatever scenario the audience feared most and wanted to believe has been delivered to them.
“Social media outlets were, prior to the outage moments ago, barraged with desperate pleas from people supposedly caught in nuclear blasts, or being rounded up and put into containment camps, or fleeing government entities sent to kill those who had come in contact with someone who had died from Cage’s disease. These messages were pre-generated by the Nisirtu and are now imprinted upon the minds of hundreds of millions of people, who will spread the lies to millions of others, by word of mouth. Now that the seeds of discord and anarchy are planted, they must be allowed to grow, so all news sources will be taken down before they can disavow any of the claims.”
“All of them?” asked Ben.
“All of them.”
The intermission ended, Lilian again stood front and center. An elderly man with Einstein hair sat behind her, a violin - not hers - at the ready. The queen waited patiently for everyone to retake their seats before saying, “I am minus an orchestra but William here has been kind enough to offer his services. I assure you, he plays splendidly.”
The audience applauded and the man named William stood an
d nodded humbly before returning to his seat.
Lilian said, “This is a short piece from La damnation de Faust. She nodded at the violinist behind her who began to play. She sang:
Autrefois un roi de Thulé,
Qui jusqu’au tombeau fut fidèle,
Reçut, à la mort de sa belle,
Une coupe d’or ciselé.
Comme elle ne le quittait guère,
Dans les festins les plus joyeux,
Toujours une larme légère
A sa vue humectait ses yeux.
Fiela sat in wheelchair at the back of the room, and IV bag dangling next to her. She loved Lilian’s voice but understood not a word of French, and so had begged her sister in advance for a translation of anything she might sing that was not in English or Agati. Lilian had generously provided a translation, written in her own hand, before the performance began. Fiela tried to follow it as her sister sang:
Once there was a king of Thule
Who was faithful until death,
Received, on his fair one’s death,
A carved cup of gold.
As it never left him,
In the happiest festivals
Always a light tear
Moistened his eyes.
At 8:12 PM, the television stations started blinking out. It was like watching dominoes fall. First one, then two, then four, then eight screens went black mid-broadcast. When they were all gone, Ben had the radios turned on.
Local broadcasters were in a panic. They were repeating what they had read on the internet or had seen on television before those two bastions of information had expired. The radio announcers urged listeners to remain calm but to take cover in the event that any of the myriad reports regarding war, an incoming meteor, rogue militias, or anything else were true, while also encouraging them to take their radios with them.
Many were astonished that the Emergency Broadcast System had not been activated, though a few pointed out that the people in charge of the system, whoever they were, might be unable to activate it, or the antennas might have been destroyed. Law enforcement personnel and local government leaders appeared at the radio stations to plea for calm and to ensure listeners that everything that could be done was being done, without specifying what the problem actually was, since clearly they didn’t know. There were discussions about contacting local HAM operators.
At 8:43 PM the radio stations went off the air just seconds before all the radios and televisions went dead. The lights at Steepleguard flickered, but remained operational. Ben, knowing what had just happened, stepped out onto the balcony and looked up at the sky, but he didn’t see anything unusual. He was surprised. He thought that an EMP blast would light up the sky, especially at night. Maybe the nearest blast had occurred too far away. Still, he knew that the lights were blinking off around the world. The grid was dying and the engines of earth were grinding to a halt.
Electricity was again an untethered force of nature.
The evening’s performance was nearly concluded. Lilian now stood in middle of the ballroom surrounded by the children, Nisirtu and Ardoon, ages six to eleven. As their smiling parents watched from the perimeter, she said, “Are you ready to show your parents what we have practiced?”
“Yes!” said several of the children, while others look away bashfully and just nodded.
“Good. Now, form a circle and hold hands. That’s right…like that, yes. Very good!”
When they were in position, the queen said, “Okay, let’s start.”
The children, began to move in a circle around Lilian, “the Fair Lady,” and sang.
London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Lilian, pretending to be astonished the bridge might fall, sang with them, suggesting in consecutive verses that the bridge be rebuilt with wood and clay, bricks and mortar, iron and steel, and silver and gold.
The wise children, however, warned her that wood and clay would wash away, bricks and mortar would not stay, iron and steel would bend and bow, and silver and gold would be stolen away.
At last, Lilian, a finger in the air, suggested a man could keep watch over the bridge, only to be advised by the children that the man watching the bridge might fall asleep.
She addressed this concern, singing:
Give him a pipe to smoke all night,
Smoke all night, smoke all night,
Give him a pipe to smoke all night!
To which the children yelled, “My fair lady!” before falling to the floor in a laughing fit. The ballroom erupted in applause.
In Los Angeles, the night became as day.