Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will

  and then he joined the vending machine queue.

  He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee

  before running out of change. Van had scored them some table space and

  Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save

  some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.

  By the time they were all settled in, thoroughly evacuated, and eating,

  TALK NERDY and his friend had returned again. They cleared off the cash

  register at the end of the food-prep area and TALK NERDY got up on it.

  Slowly the conversation died down.

  “I’m Uri Popovich, this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank you all for coming up

  here. Here’s what we know for sure: the building’s been on generators for

  three hours now. Visual observation indicates that we’re the only building

  in central Toronto with working power—which should hold out for three

  more days. There is a bioagent of unknown origin loose beyond our doors.

  It kills quickly, within hours, and it is aerosolized. You get it from breathing bad air. No one has opened any of the exterior doors to this building since

  five this morning. No one will open the doors until I give the go-ahead.

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  “Attacks on major cities all over the world have left emergency responders

  in chaos. The attacks are electronic, biological, nuclear and conventional

  explosives, and they are very widespread. I’m a security engineer, and where

  I come from, attacks in this kind of cluster are usually viewed as

  opportunistic: group B blows up a bridge because everyone is off taking care

  of group A’s dirty nuke event. It’s smart. An Aum Shinrikyo cell in Seoul

  gassed the subways there about 2 AM Eastern—that’s the earliest event we

  can locate, so it may have been the Archduke that broke the camel’s back.

  We’re pretty sure that Aum Shinrikyo couldn’t be behind this kind of

  mayhem: they have no history of infowar and have never shown the kind of

  organizational acumen necessary to take out so many targets at once.

  Basically, they’re not smart enough.

  “We’re holing up here for the foreseeable future, at least until the

  bioweapon has been identified and dispersed. We’re going to staff the racks

  and keep the networks up. This is critical infrastructure, and it’s our job to

  make sure it’s got five nines of uptime. In times of national emergency, our

  responsibility to do that doubles.”

  One sysadmin put up his hand. He was very daring in a green Incredible

  Hulk ring-tee, and he was at the young end of the scale.

  “Who died and made you king?”

  “I have controls for the main security system, keys to every cage, and passcodes for the exterior doors—they’re all locked now, by the way. I’m the one who got

  everyone up here first and called the meeting. I don’t care if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty one. But someone needs to have this job.”

  “You’re right,” the kid said. “And I can do it every bit as well as you. My

  name’s Will Sario.”

  Popovich looked down his nose at the kid. “Well, if you’ll let me finish

  talking, maybe I’ll hand things over to you when I’m done.”

  “Finish, by all means.” Sario turned his back on him and walked to the

  window. He stared out of it intensely. Felix’s gaze was drawn to it, and he

  saw that there were several oily smoke plumes rising up from the city.

  Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,”

  he said.

  The kid looked around after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is it my

  turn now?”

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  CORY DOCTOROW

  There was a round of good-natured chuckling.

  “Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There are coordinated

  attacks on every critical piece of infrastructure. There’s only one way that

  those attacks could be so well-coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you

  buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, we need to ask how an

  opportunistic attack could be organized in minutes: the Internet.”

  “So you think we should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a

  little, but stopped when Sario said nothing.

  “We saw an attack last night that nearly killed the Internet. A little DoS

  on the critical routers, a little DNS-foo, and down it goes like a preacher’s daughter. Cops and the military are a bunch of technophobic lusers, they hardly rely on the ’Net at all. If we take the Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage the attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders.

  When the time comes, we can rebuild it.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Popovich said. His jaw literally hung open.

  “It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with logic when

  it dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with people, not logic.”

  There was a buzz of conversation that quickly turned into a roar.

  “Shut up!” Popovich hollered. The conversation dimmed by one watt.

  Popovich yelled again, stamping his foot on the countertop. Finally there

  was a semblance of order. “One at a time,” he said. He was flushed red, his

  hands in his pockets.

  One sysadmin was for staying. Another for going. They should hide in the

  cages. They should inventory their supplies and appoint a quartermaster.

  They should go outside and find the police, or volunteer at hospitals. They

  should appoint defenders to keep the front door secure.

  Felix found to his surprise that he had his hand in the air. Popovich called

  on him.

  “My name is Felix Tremont,” he said, getting up on one of the tables,

  drawing out his PDA. “I want to read you something.

  “‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and

  steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the

  future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among

  us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

  “‘We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I

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  address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself

  always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be

  naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have

  no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we

  have true reason to fear.

  “‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do

  not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within

  your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public

  construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself

  through our collective actions.’

  “That’s from the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It was

  written twelve years ago. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things

  I’d ever read. I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace was

  free—and where that freedom infected the real world, so meatspace got<
br />
  freer too.”

  He swallowed hard and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Van awkwardly patted him on the shoe.

  “My beautiful son and my beautiful wife died today. Millions more, too.

  The city is literally in flames. Whole cities have disappeared from the map.”

  He coughed up a sob and swallowed it again.

  “All around the world, people like us are gathered in buildings like this.

  They were trying to recover from last night’s worm when disaster struck.

  We have independent power. Food. Water.

  “We have the network, that the bad guys use so well and that the good

  guys have never figured out.

  “We have a shared love of liberty that comes from caring about and caring

  for the network. We are in charge of the most important organizational and

  governmental tool the world has ever seen. We are the closest thing to a

  government the world has right now. Geneva is a crater. The East River is

  on fire and the UN is evacuated.

  “The Distributed Republic of Cyberspace weathered this storm basically

  unscathed. We are the custodians of a deathless, monstrous, wonderful

  machine, one with the potential to rebuild a better world.

  “I have nothing to live for but that.”

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  CORY DOCTOROW

  There were tears in Van’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one. They didn’t

  applaud him, but they did one better. They maintained respectful, total

  silence for seconds that stretched to a minute.

  “How do we do it?” Popovich said, without a trace of sarcasm.

  The newsgroups were filling up fast. They’d announced them in news.

  admin, net-abuse.email, where all the spamfighters hung out, and where

  there was a tight culture of camaraderie in the face of full-out attack. The

  new group was alt.novembers-disaster.recovery, with .recovery.goverance,

  .recovery.finance, .recovery.logistics and .recovery.defense hanging off of it.

  Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in her.

  The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The Googleplex was online,

  with the stalwart Queen Kong bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who

  wheeled through the gigantic data center swapping out dead boxen and

  hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive was offline in the Presidio,

  but the mirror in Amsterdam was live and they’d redirected the DNS SO

  that you’d hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. PayPal was up.

  Blogger, TypePad, and Live Journal were all up, and filling with millions of

  posts from scared survivors huddling together for electronic warmth.

  The Flickr photostreams were horrific. Felix had to unsubscribe from them

  after he caught a photo of a woman and a baby, dead in a kitchen, twisted

  into an agonized hieroglyph by the bioagent. They didn’t look like Kelly and

  2.0, but they didn’t have to. He started shaking and couldn’t stop.

  Wikipedia was up, but limping under load. The spam poured in as though

  nothing had changed. Worms roamed the network.

  .recovery.logistics was where most of the action was.

  > We can use the newsgroup voting mechanism to hold regional

  > elections

  Felix knew that this would work. Usenet newsgroup votes had been

  running for more than twenty years without a substantial hitch.

  > We’ll elect regional representatives and they’ll pick a Prime

  > Minister.

  The Americans insisted on President, which Felix didn’t like. Seemed

  too partisan. His future wouldn’t be the American future. The American

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  future had gone up with the White House. He was building a bigger tent

  than that.

  There were French sysadmins online from France Telecom. The EBU’S

  data center had been spared in the attacks that hammered Geneva, and it

  was filled with wry Germans whose English was better than Felix’s. They

  got on well with the remains of the BBC team in Canary Wharf.

  They spoke polyglot English in .recovery.logistics, and Felix had

  momentum on his side. Some of the admins were cooling out the inevitable

  stupid flamewars with the practice of long years. Some were chipping in

  useful suggestions.

  Surprisingly few thought that Felix was off his rocker.

  > I think we should hold elections as soon as possible. Tomorrow

  > at the latest. We can’t rule justly without the consent of the

  > governed.

  Within seconds the reply landed in his inbox.

  > You can’t be serious. Consent of the governed? Unless I miss my

  > guess, most of the people you’re proposing to govern are puking

  > their guts out, hiding under their desks, or wandering

  > shell-shocked through the city streets. When do THEY get a vote?

  Felix had to admit she had a point. Queen Kong was sharp. Not many

  women sysadmins, and that was a genuine tragedy. Women like Queen

  Kong were too good to exclude from the field. He’d have to hack a solution

  to get women balanced out in his new government. Require each region to

  elect one woman and one man?

  He happily clattered into argument with her. The elections would be the

  next day; he’d see to it.

  “Prime Minister of Cyberspace? Why not call yourself the Grand Poobah

  of the Global Data Network? It’s more dignified, sounds cooler, and it’ll

  get you just as far.” Will had the sleeping spot next to him, up in the

  cafeteria, with Van on the other side. The room smelled like a dingleberry:

  twenty-five sysadmins who hadn’t washed in at least a day all crammed

  into the same room. For some of them, it had been much, much longer

  than a day.

  407

  CORY DOCTOROW

  “Shut up, Will,” Van said. “You wanted to try to knock the Internet

  offline.”

  “Correction: I want to knock the Internet offline. Present tense.”

  Felix cracked one eye. He was so tired, it was like lifting weights.

  “Look, Sario—if you don’t like my platform, put one of your own forward.

  There are plenty of people who think I’m full of shit and I respect them for

  that, since they’re all running opposite me or backing someone who is. That’s

  your choice. What’s not on the menu is nagging and complaining. Bedtime

  now, or get up and post your platform.”

  Sario sat up slowly, unrolling the jacket he had been using for a pillow and

  putting it on. “Screw you guys, I’m out of here.”

  “I thought he’d never leave,” Felix said, and turned over, lying awake a

  long time, thinking about the election.

  There were other people in the running. Some of them weren’t even

  sysadmins. A US senator on retreat at his summer place in Wyoming had

  generator power and a satellite phone. Somehow he’d found the right

  newsgroup and thrown his hat into the ring. Some anarchist hackers in

  Italy strafed the group all night long, posting broken-English screeds about

  the political bankruptcy of “governance” in the new world. Felix looked at

  their netblock and determined that they were probably holed up in a small

  Interaction Design institute near Turin. Italy had been hit very bad, but out

  in the small town, this cell of a
narchists had taken up residence.

  A surprising number were running on a platform of shutting down the

  Internet. Felix had his doubts about whether this was even possible, but he

  thought he understood the impulse to finish the work and the world. Why

  not? From every indication, it seemed that the work to date had been a

  cascade of disasters, attacks, and opportunism, all of it adding up to

  Gotterdammerung. A terrorist attack here, a lethal counteroffensive there from an overreactive government . . . Before long, they’d made short work

  of the world.

  He fell asleep thinking about the logistics of shutting down the Internet,

  and dreamed bad dreams in which he was the network’s sole defender.

  He woke to a papery, itchy sound. He rolled over and saw that Van was

  sitting up, his jacket balled up in his lap, vigorously scratching his skinny

  arms. They’d gone the color of corned beef, and had a scaly look. In the light

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  WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH

  streaming through the cafeteria windows, skin motes floated and danced in

  great clouds.

  “What are you doing?” Felix sat up. Watching Van’s fingernails rip into

  his skin made him itch in sympathy. It had been three days since he’d last

  washed his hair and his scalp sometimes felt like there were little egg-laying

  insects picking their way through it. He’d adjusted his glasses the night

  before and had touched the backs of his ears; his fingers came away shining

  with thick sebum. He got blackheads in the backs of his ears when he didn’t

  shower for a couple days, and sometimes gigantic, deep boils that Kelly

  finally popped with sick relish.

  “Scratching,” Van said. He went to work on his head, sending a cloud of

  dandruff-crud into the sky, there to join the scurf that he’d already eliminated from his extremities. “Christ, I itch all over.”

  Felix took Mayor McCheese from Van’s backpack and plugged it into one

  of the Ethernet cables that snaked all over the floor. He Googled everything

  he could think of that could be related to this. “Itchy” yielded 40,600,000

  links. He tried compound queries and got slightly more discriminating links.

  “I think it’s stress-related eczema,” Felix said, finally.

  “I don’t get eczema,” Van said.

  Felix showed him some lurid photos of red, angry skin flaked with white.

  “Stress-related eczema,” he said, reading the caption.