engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of
every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.
“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between
Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category—if people were
smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a
thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with
the lusers—they were the fault of incompetent engineers.
“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2 AM, it’s
either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”
They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not
Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after
shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose
Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access
to their cage—like guards in a Minuteman silo. Ninety-five percent of the
long-distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better
security than most Minuteman silos.
Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were
being pounded by worm-probes—putting the routers back online just
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exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was
drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to
get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and
download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put
on the machines in his care. It was 10 AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the
machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative
keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.
“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the
oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after
Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters,
starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.
“Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over
five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”
“What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”
“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years’ uptime? That’s
like euthanizing your grandmother.”
“I wanna eat,” Van said.
“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll
take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the
rest of the day off.”
“You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should
keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”
“It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the
486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power
supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it
fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while
he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.
“Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background.
Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? “Kelly?”
The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get anything—no ring
nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.
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“Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted
to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up
for the family. She’d leave voicemail.
He was testing the power supply when his phone rang again. He snatched
it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked to keep anything
like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he had
discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC once the Ardent servers
were back online. The past three hours had been purely personal—even if
he planned on billing them to the company.
There was sobbing on the line.
“Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.
“Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s dead,
oh Jesus, he’s dead.”
“Who? Who, Kelly?”
“Will,” she said.
Will? he thought. Who the fuck is— He dropped to his knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth certificate, though they’d called him
2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick bark.
“I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I love you so
much.”
“Kelly? What’s going on?”
“Everyone, everyone—” she said. “Only two channels left on the tube.
Christ, Felix, it looks like Dawn of the Dead out the window—” He heard her retch. The phone started to break up, washing her puke-noises back
like an echoplex.
“Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He punched 911, but the
phone went NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.
He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s
network cable and launched Firefox off the command line and Googled for
the Metro Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an online
contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He solved problems and
freaking out didn’t solve problems.
He located an online form and wrote out the details of his conversation
with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description
complete, and then he hit SUBMIT.
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Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix—” he began.
“God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly
pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but
they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something
terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the
superworm.
“I need to get home,” Felix said.
“I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”
They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few windows
was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited
for the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Were there more police
cars than usual?
“Oh my God—” Van pointed.
The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building, loomed to
the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it
moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling
northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping
point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole
building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage,
and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure
crashed through buildi
ng after building.
“The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was—the CBC’S
towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way,
were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the porthole, it was like
watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.
Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the
destruction.
“What happened?” one of them asked.
“The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.
“Was it the virus?”
“The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin
with just a little type-two flab around the middle.
“Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an email that the whole city’s
quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix
his Blackberry.
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CORY DOCTOROW
Felix was so engrossed in the report—purportedly forwarded from Health
Canada—that he didn’t even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then
he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand, and let out
one small sob.
The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs.
Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.
“Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.
“What about Kelly?” Van said.
Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get into the cage,
now.” The cage had microparticulate air filters.
They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it
hiss shut behind him.
“Felix, you need to get home—”
“It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be okay in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out.”
“What?”
“Get on IRC,” he said.
They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They
skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some familiar
handles.
> pentagons gone/white house too
> MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN
DIEGO
> Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like
rats.
> I heard that the Ginza’s on fire
Felix typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve heard
reports of bioweapons, something very fast.
Van read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe we
were all exposed three days ago.”
Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some symptoms, I think.”
> Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris—realtime sat
footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren’t routing
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> You’re in Toronto?
It was an unfamiliar handle.
> Yes—on Front Street
> my sisters at Uof T and i cnt reach her—can you call her?
> No phone service
Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.
“I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his voice-
over-ip app. “I just remembered.”
Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It rang
once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an
Italian movie.
> No phone service
Felix typed again.
He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van
said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”
Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was hot—radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over
Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca was
a smoking pit and the Saudi royals had been hanged before their palaces.
His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of
the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the police. It didn’t work
any better than it had the last twenty times.
He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam.
More spam. Automated messages. There—an urgent message from the
intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.
He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly probing
his routers. It didn’t match a worm’s signature, either. He followed the
traceroute and discovered that the attack had originated in the same
building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.
He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker and found that
port 1337 was open—1337 was “leet” or “elite” in hacker number/letter
substitution code. That was the kind of port that a worm left open to slither
in and out of. He Googled known sploits that left a listener on port 1337,
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CORY DOCTOROW
narrowed this down based on the fingerprinted operating system of the
compromised server, and then he had it.
It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have been patched
against years before. No mind. He had the client for it, and he used it to
create a root account for himself on the box, which he then logged into,
and took a look around.
There was one other user logged in, “scaredy,” and he checked the process
monitor and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds of processes
that were probing him and plenty of other boxen.
He opened a chat:
> Stop probing my server
He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.
> Are you in the Front Street data center?
> Yes
> Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I’m on the fourth floor. I think there’s a bioweapon attack outside. I don’t want to leave the clean room.
Felix whooshed out a breath.
> You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?
> Yeah
> That was smart
Clever bastard.
> I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more with me.
> What do you know?
Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other guy digested it.
Van stood up and paced. His eyes were glazed over.
“Van? Pal?”
“I have to pee,” he said.
“No opening the door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty Mountain Dew bottle
in the trash there.”
“Right,” Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash can and pulled
out the empty magnum. He turned his back.
> I’m Felix
> Will
Felix’s stomach did a slow somersault as he thought about 2.0.
“Felix, I think I need to go outside,” Van said. He was moving toward the
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airlock door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran
headlong to Van, tackling him before he reached the door.
“Van,” he said, looking into his friend’s glazed, unfocused eyes. “Look at
me, Van.”
“I need to go,” Van said. “I need to get home and feed the cats.”
“There’s something out there, something fast acting and lethal. Maybe
it will blow away with the wind. Maybe it’s already gone. But we’re going
to sit here un
til we know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down,
Van. Sit.”
“I’m cold, Felix.”
It was freezing. Felix’s arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his feet felt
like blocks of ice.
“Sit against the servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust heat.” He found a
rack and nestled up against it.
> Are you there?
> Still here—sorting out some logistics
> How long until we can go out?
> I have no idea
No one typed anything for quite some time then.
Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it again.
Felix tried calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was down.
Finally, he slid back against the servers and wrapped his arms around his
knees and wept like a baby.
After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with his arm around
Felix’s shoulder.
“They’re dead, Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s—son. My family is gone.”
“You don’t know for sure,” Van said.
“I’m sure enough,” Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t it?”
“We’ll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. Things should be
getting back to normal soon. The fire department will fix it. They’ll mobilize
the army. It’ll be okay.”
Felix’s ribs hurt. He hadn’t cried since—Since 2.0 was born. He hugged
his knees harder.
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Then the doors opened.
The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that said
TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic
Frontiers Canada shirt.
“Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top
floor. Take the stairs.”
Felix found he was holding his breath.
“If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK NERDY
said. “Just go, we’ll meet you there.”
“There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his feet.
“Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.”
TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d
unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their
steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the
stairwell felt like a sauna.
There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water and
coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins
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