Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  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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  WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH

  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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  CORY DOCTOROW

  “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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  WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH

  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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  WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH

  > 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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  WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH

  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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  CORY DOCTOROW

  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