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
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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 okay?
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CORY DOCTOROW
> 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 these
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 PC s 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.
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“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 whiteboard where
the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day’s specials. Now it was covered
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CORY DOCTOROW
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 okay?
> 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,
okay? 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?”
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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 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, okay?”
“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 you can do this, but not now. Understand me, Felix? Not
fucking now.”
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CORY DOCTOROW
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 Shopper’s 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 drugstore. A few of the displays
were knocked over, but other than that, it looked okay. 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, okay? 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 an 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 antihistamines you can spare.”
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WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH
“I can spare? Felix old pal, I have enough dope here to last a hundred years.
This stuff’s going to expire long before it runs out. But are you telling me that the ’Net’s still up?”
“It’s still up,” he said. “Kind of. That’s what we’ve been doing all week.
Keeping it online. It might not last much longer, though.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose it would.” She set the axe down. “Have you
got anything to trade? I don’t need much, but I’ve been trying to keep my
spirits up by trading with the neighbors. It’s like playing civilization.”
“You have neighbors?”
“At least ten,” she said. “The people in the restaurant across the way make
a pretty good soup, even if most of the veg i
s canned. They cleaned me out of
Sterno, though.”
“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”
“Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken care of
whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone—broken wrist. Listen, do you want
some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks
like he could use a meal.”
“Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re both
committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use some
assistants?”
“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind some company.”
They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people
brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw their
noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in the
back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.
“None of us know what to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and
she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from
the housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or tanks or even
looters, but it’s just quiet.”
“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.
“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”
“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing the same
thing? Maybe if we all get together we’ll come up with something to do.”
“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.
Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”
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CORY DOCTOROW
Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady, we’re at a
critical juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away
in our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better.”
“Better?” She made a rude noise.
“Okay, not better. Something though. Building something new is better
than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you’ve
read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?”
Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell are we
going to do, anyway?”
“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. Something is better
than nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world where people are
talking to each other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re going to find
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