Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  * * *

  Grids doesn’t really remember how he got home that night, his memories just fragments of stumbling through cold, unlit streets and confused crowds. He remembers looting and fires, the city full of granulated glass shards and black car-fire smoke.

  He can’t really tell Mary what happened, because he doesn’t really know. She guesses there are few people who do. He knows his spex never worked again. He knows the TV never came back on. He knows the phones never rang. He knows the power was out for weeks, and when it did come back it was fleeting, unstable. He knows there was fighting in the street, that martial law was introduced, that for months he never heard any news from beyond south Bristol, let alone the rest of the world. He knows a lot of people were cold, hungry. He knows a lot of people died. And in among it all he was there, trying to keep it together. Trying to keep the towers and the Croft alive. For his people, his community, his ends.

  He guesses that Melody triggered something, something waiting in those unopened Flight Path Estate downloads, something Anonymous or Dronegod$ or whoever had given her. He guesses it was something they hadn’t made, something they had found or stolen, something they didn’t fully understand. He guesses it wiped out decades of history in a few short days, destroying culture, money, opinions, society, the digital. People’s prized memories were lost: their photos, their music, connections with friends and lovers. He guesses governments panicked and made wrong decisions, threw dangerous switches. He guesses the global economy didn’t so much collapse as just vanish.

  He can guess that Melody rigged those explosives just right, so that they ripped her apart and harmed nobody else. Mary heard people talking about Melody just a few days ago, out in the street, outside the shop on the Croft, wondering why she did it, saying she knew what was coming, that she was too much of a coward to face what was to follow, to face her punishment, to face the world she left behind.

  But Mary thinks she knows now why Melody did it. She had got what she said she had wanted, the celebrity, the fame, and had stepped from one prison to another. She can only guess how hollow that left her.

  11. BEFORE

  It was one night when he’d been watching Scott sleep, silently moving his fingertips in front of the pinhole of his tablet’s camera, filtering light passing through their portal to play shadows across his unaware face, that he’d realized he’d fallen in love.

  They’d been watching each other sleep for weeks already at that point. When Rush said it out loud it sounded creepy somehow, or just too much, but in truth it had risen organically, a natural extension of how connected they had become. They pretty much always had a video chat window open, somehow and somewhere, in the corner of the monitor when he was coding, on the tablet in the kitchen when he was preparing food, floating in his periphery while he shopped for groceries. But however much they tried, the gap between Bristol and New York—three thousand miles and five hours—meant their lives were never quite in sync. Then late one night/early one morning, Rush’s eyes too heavy to hold open, he’d said, Well, I guess I’d better call it a night, and Scott had come back with Well, I guess I’d better log off, then, and he’d replied, Well, you don’t have to, we can just keep this open, or is that weird, and he’d got Of course it’s not, nothing is weird back, and that was it, their fifteen-hour-plus connections had become more permanent.

  And that was a big part of it, Rush realizes now, gazing at the pale green pixels that trace the dimly lit contours of Scott’s sleeping face, the ease of how they connect, how they fit together. There was everything else, of course, the usual stuff: the initial rush of sex and attraction, of the new and unexplored, but it was the familiarity that had made him fall in love, the lack of pretense, the way they’d made odd, sometimes almost trivial assumptions about each other that were right, natural. It was something Rush hadn’t encountered in a new relationship before, not online or IRL; things that had taken months to tease out with past lovers had been almost instant. Preferences, words, the language they used. Humor. Small, immeasurable things. Their ability to sit on ambient video calls for hours on end, the silence between them never growing awkward. For Rush it all came together in ways that made terror and insecurity fall away like never before. In ways that, despite all his insecurities, made him feel safe, strong. That made him fall in love.

  He hadn’t told him, of course. Don’t be crazy.

  Maybe he’ll tell him today. His gaze flicks away from the video window, finds the time pulsating dully: 13:52 GMT/08:52 EST. He could be awake any minute. Maybe he’ll tell him then.

  Scott’s sleeping face, half obscured by a duvet, floats in low light in front of a wall of code. This morning’s work, a new build of Flex, finished and slowly compiling in the background. Rush checks off items from his to-do list, filling ten-by-ten-pixel squares with cartoon ticks: updates, bug fixes. Interface tweaks requested by the Croft’s users, security improvements.

  That had been the big one. Since he’d built the Flex OS from scratch, it was largely immune to most of the malware that could damage mainstream systems, and it hadn’t as yet built up enough of a user base to warrant anyone targeting it directly. But the hardware it ran on, an almost limitless multitude of spex from countless manufacturers, was never going to be secure in the same way. There were vulnerabilities built into Wi-Fi chipsets, back doors hardwired into generic control systems just waiting to be exploited. It was why what he’d seen at that BLM protest in Times Square had both thrilled and terrified him—whatever had ripped through that space, shutting down everything from crossing lights to police drones, hadn’t cared what operating systems they were running, or even what they were. It seemingly just looked for anything connected to a network, and broke it.

  It was an outrageous idea, too much to believe. But a few days trawling dark web message boards and code depositories when he’d got back to Bristol and he’d pieced together some clues, some snippets of code alongside the hysterical conspiracy theories and excited exclamations. The consensus seemed to be it was of military or intelligence agency origin, and regardless of where it had come from there was no doubting it was meant to be a weapon. Rush had seen countless ransomware tools come and go over the decades, viruses designed to seize and infect systems, to paralyze them until their desperate, money-hemorrhaging users coughed up the requested bitcoins to get their data and businesses back. But this was different. There wasn’t even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users. This just broke stuff. It just stopped shit working. At the very least, after it had spread itself to anything else it could find, it disconnected what it infected from the network. Then it started to shut it down. To erase and corrupt data, wipe storage. To turn devices, whatever they were, into useless bricks of silicon and plastic.

  So a weapon, ostensibly designed to destroy everything, and clearly meant to flourish in cities, crammed to their gills with millions upon millions of Internet-connected devices, from toys and cell phones and spex and earbuds to streetlights and CCTV cameras and traffic sensors and driverless cars. It was a weapon designed to take advantage of cities’ overhyped, unthinking, unquestioning desire to be “smart,” to be “always on,” to be “connected.” It was designed to be the consequence of untamed, badly planned, free-market-fueled, oversaturated urban networking, and to rip through it like a dirty bomb. Rush had seen claims that it had been connected to a steady increase in technological failures over the last few months: a video games industry conference in Los Angeles that had to be abandoned and had quickly dissolved into spoiled man-children rioting; an automated container terminal in Shanghai that shut itself down for nearly a week and caused the collapse of at least two shipping companies; and countless other blackouts and disruptive infrastructure failures. He’d also seen it connected to protests—the Times Square blackout being just the latest, after an uprising of migrant workers in Singapore, and the takeover of a brand-new, built-from-scratch, concept-art-perfect smart city by an army of protesters
from the slums of Mumbai. He’d even stumbled across a claim of intent, a manifesto of sorts, pasted in plain text and flanked by cartoon ASCII art, by some barely infamous hacktivist group screaming for revolution.

  It’s exciting to Rush, he can’t deny it. He can still feel the cold air on his face, the pinpricks of goose bumps from that night in Times Square when the lights had gone out, the excitement and glee as he’d held Scott’s hands as they’d drifted away through the exuberant crowds. But it scares him too, not just because of its raw power, but also hints he’d seen in the fragments of code he’d found, hints that it wasn’t aimed just at personal or even city-level devices but at larger infrastructure. That while it weaves its way through networks it seems to be testing connections, looking for larger, deeper prey: network routers, Tier 1 connections, DNS servers, data centers. It is looking, hunting for the Internet itself.

  His computer chimes softly. The Flex build has finished compiling. He’ll push it out to Croft users later today, he thinks. As if on cue, Scott stirs in the chat window, raising himself on one elbow, and for a split second Rush thinks the chime must have woken him, before realizing that he has the sound muted anyway. He unmutes.

  “Hey,” he says softly.

  “Oh, hey, boo.” Scott stretches, smiles. Glimpses of milky white flesh under bedsheets. “How you doing this morning?”

  “I’m good. Keeping busy.”

  “Waiting for me to wake up, you mean?” That smile, that near smirk. That playful mocking that used to wound Rush so deeply, until he realized that it was genuine affection, tenderness. A signaling that what they do together is special, more than weird. He blushes.

  “You sleep well?”

  “You tell me.” The smirk again. He throws back the covers, naked except for his briefs. Pulls himself upright, sits on the edge of the bed. Stretches, rubs one eye. “Gimme a sec. I’m going to hit the bathroom and get some coffee on, then I’ll grab my spex. Okay?”

  “Of course, baby. Take your time.”

  Scott blows him a kiss, and then disappears from the tablet camera’s view. Rush turns back to his other windows, his forum posts and social-media trails full of rumor and speculation.

  Within a few minutes Scott is back, still naked from the waist up, peering at him through the pixelated blur of a lo-fi video connection. “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “What’s up?”

  “My spex are dead. They didn’t charge overnight. And the clock on the microwave is just flashing zeroes. I think we had a power outage.”

  “Really? You got power now?”

  Scott flicks on a bedside lamp, filling the tablet’s feed with oversaturated yellow noise. Flicks it off again. “Seems like it.”

  “The connection didn’t seem to drop out last night.”

  “Nah, well. This tablet is plugged in pretty much always so it’s usually got a lot of charge, and it falls back onto LTE if the Wi-Fi goes down, I think.” He scratches his chest, yawns again. “I wonder if it was just the building or what…”

  “Hang on, let me look.” Rush pulls up some news feeds, Google. Starts to check his usual sources.

  “Baby, what’s the time?”

  “Hang on. Huh. Looks like a big outage. Most of Brooklyn, for about four hours. Same in Queens and Long Island. And … and Chicago. Atlanta. Jesus. All at exactly the same time.” Goose bumps on his arms.

  “Rush.” Impatient urgency creeps into Scott’s voice. “What’s the time?”

  “Oh, sorry. It’s about quarter past two.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I mean it’s just gone nine fifteen your time.”

  “What? FUCK! FUCK!” Scott seems to explode into a flurry of panicked activity. “My fucking alarm didn’t go off! I’ve got a fucking meeting in Chelsea at ten!”

  “Oh shit, I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, you fucking did, it’s like all I’ve talked about for the last week.” Scott keeps disappearing and reappearing on the screen, running around, pulling on clothes. “I’m meeting that gallery owner bitch. Fuck!”

  “Shit, I’m sorry—” Flash of awkward guilt.

  “Look, I gotta go.” Scott has a jacket on, faded blue denim. He’s wrapping a gray cotton scarf loosely around his neck. “How d’I look?”

  “Great. As always. I—”

  “Thanks, boo. I’ll catch you later.”

  “Okay. We … we can talk while you’re on the way?”

  “How? My fucking spex are dead. And I’m going to be out all day.” Scott grabs a messenger bag off a chair, slings it over his shoulder. “I mean, maybe if I can get some charge somewhere. But otherwise it’ll be tonight.”

  “Okay. Hopefully I’ll be up, I guess. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “It’s just I wanted to … tell you about something—”

  “What? Can’t it wait?”

  “I … sure. It can wait.”

  “Okay. Boo, I gotta go. I’ll see you later. Kiss.” He leans over and thumbs off the tablet and is gone.

  “Okay,” Rush says to a black chat screen. “Bye.”

  He sits there for a minute, in silence.

  It’s the first time they’ve been forcibly disconnected like this, and it’s jarring. Like they’ve been ripped apart, like he’s lost control. Suddenly the frailty of their relationship feels exposed, like it’s utterly reliant on this vast global infrastructure that he doesn’t own or control, that’s too complex for any one person to understand, that could break or disappear without even a second’s notice. He could lose him completely, just at the flick of a switch, at the typing of a command.

  Panic starts to seep in at the thought. What if that was it? What if that was the last time they talked? What if last night’s blackouts in NYC were just a test run for something bigger, scheduled for this morning? What if the power goes off again and never comes back on? What if the Internet fails on Scott’s journey to Chelsea, and it all comes crashing down, severing connections and wiping the servers? What if civilization starts to crumble while Scott rides the Q train and that’s the last he ever sees of him, him running out the door late for a meeting, mildly annoyed at Rush’s bullshit?

  He takes a deep breath. Finds the newly compiled Flex build and zips it up.

  FLEX OS. VERSION 4.027.zip

  He opens up a secure e-mail window and attaches the file. Starts to type.

  Hey boo,

  Hope your meeting goes okay. Sorry if I made you late.

  I was looking at some news, and I think the power cut might be related to something bigger, to the same shit that went down at Times Square that night. I mean I don’t know for sure, but just in case I want us to be careful.

  So attached to this is a version of Flex. As soon as you get a chance I want you to install it on that spare pair of spex I left with you. I dunno if it’ll work, but it might mean that if shit gets really fucked up we can still find a way to be in contact. Or that if things get bad in NYC and there are no networks you might have an alternative.

  I know, I know—this sounds like me overreacting. I hope it is. But rather safe than sorry. I just can’t bear the idea of us not being in touch.

  Take care, baby, talk soon.

  And PS: I love you.

  He stares at the screen for twenty seconds.

  Then deletes the last line.

  And hits SEND.

  Then he sits in silence, staring at the screen, on his own.

  http://pastebin.com/1bHQssPs

  Posted by A Guest, 23.7.2026

  Hello, dear friends around the world,

  We do hope you are well. We have some news for you. Today this will be our last post. Not just for some time, but forever.

  How do we say that with such certainty?

  Because by the end of this week, we promise you there will be nowhere left for us to post.

  “What?” you say. “Is Dronegod$ planning to take down our beloved Pastebin?”

  Oh no, our dear friends. Well, not e
xactly.

  We have far bigger fish to fry. And we’ve finally managed to get hold of a pan big enough to toss that fish into.

  But first, let’s all catch up on a few things:

  We hate the Internet.

  Did we not mention that before?

  Well, we do. We hate the Internet now. We used to love it. We grew up loving it. For us it was always there, it was never a new thing. But boy, our friends, was it ever an exciting thing. It used to make us so happy. It used to make us so excited. We used to have so much fun on the Internet. It was our playground, our home, our school. It was somewhere we could make friends — lovely friends like you. It was somewhere we could be naughty, somewhere we could be good. Somewhere we could laugh and cry. Somewhere we could fall in love. Somewhere we could come together, somewhere we could wander off to and be on our own. But most of all, it used to be somewhere we thought we could change the world, somewhere we could start a revolution.

  Yes, that’s right. We’re so young we don’t remember a time where there was no Internet, but we’re still old enough to remember being excited that we could use it to start a revolution.

  But we were so wrong about that, our friends. So very wrong.

  There was no revolution to be had on the Internet. None at all. The idea that there ever was is false. A big fat lie.

  Sure, we thought we saw revolutions start on here. We saw people come together to fight governments, stand up to bullies, bring attention to brutality, to show how corporations are stupid and greedy (we did quite a bit of that last one ourselves, if you remember, dear friends). We watched people fight for justice and against political correctness. We watched huge battles rage. And we thought they were exciting and important.

  But we were wrong, we slowly realized. We realized those battles were just a spectacle, a distraction from what was really going on. Because those battles were taking place on a battlefield that didn’t matter. On a battlefield that had no way of making a difference. Because that’s a battlefield we don’t own, and never could. New battlefields built just to keep us occupied.