by Tim Maughan
“And angry,” adds Sarah. “Tired of eating peas, I guess.”
“Stop fucking moving, Jesus, girl. You’re such a fidget.”
Rush steps back, runs a hand through his hair. Exhales loudly. “Fuck.”
“They were mad, Rush, I’m telling you. Were taking that place apart. Like they didn’t believe the staff, like they thought they were hiding food from them.”
“Shit. Jesus.”
Rush is pacing, running his hand through his hair again. And again. Like he can’t stop. It’s an anxious tic, Anika knows it all too well. So does Claire, apparently.
She finishes sticking an adhesive bandage over Sarah’s wound, cleans her own hands with another antiseptic wipe, watching him. “What is it, Rush? What’s actually happening?”
“I … I dunno.” He sounds flustered, unsure of himself. “I’ve been reading what I can, talking to people, watching shit … I dunno for sure, and if I told you what I’ve heard, you’d say I was crazy.”
“What?”
“Well … what it looks like, long story short—it looks like something is eating the Internet.”
“Sorry?”
“What?” adds Sarah.
“Something is eating the Internet.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “Something is infecting everything and shutting it down. But not until after it’s poured massive amounts of traffic into key bits of net infrastructure, mainly DNS servers, I think. It’s like a worm, a virus. It’s spreading between everything, millions of computers and devices. Just infecting everything and bricking it all.”
“Everything?”
“Well, anything with a Net connection, which is pretty much everything. So yeah. Everything from toasters to ISPs. China just disappeared.”
“What do you mean disappeared?” asks Sarah, wincing.
“I mean disappeared. As far as the Internet is concerned. It’s just not there. No Chinese Net infrastructure seems to be online. Now, they might have just freaked out, shut the wall down tight, sealed themselves off. Would be the sensible thing to do, actually. But most of the U.S. is gone too. Apparently Wall Street hasn’t traded since Thursday.”
Anika isn’t sure what day this is, can’t be bothered to pull up the recording log.
“Grids told me about this,” Mary says. She’s standing against the wall, keeping out of the way.
“Shhh.”
“Someone in town was saying the banks hadn’t been open all week,” says Sarah. “That old lady we was talking to? Said she couldn’t get her pension.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Rush.
“So it’s … what? A virus?”
“Seems so. One that can infect anything. Apparently works on some fundamental exploit of TCP/IP, and back-door exploits that seem to be embedded into lots of ‘Internet of Things’ devices. Looks impossible to patch at the scale it’s working at right now. I know it sounds unlikely, but yeah.”
“What … I … where?” Claire squints at him, doubtful. “I mean, where’s it come from?”
He laughs. “Well, yeah. Take your pick. From what I’ve read it might be hackers, the NSA, ISIS, China, a rogue AI that’s escaped from a lab in Berkeley, or space aliens.”
He goes back to pacing, his hand in his hair again.
Claire stops fussing with Sarah, pushes herself up off the coach, and moves over to him. Her ghost passes straight through Anika.
“You heard from Scott?”
Rush takes a deep breath. “Not for hours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Can’t call him, can’t message him, e-mail’s down…”
“Shit.” She rests a hand on his shoulder, tries to fix his wandering, ever-anxious eyes. “Hey. I’m sorry. You doing okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Apart from I’m freaking the fuck out. I just … I just hope he’s okay, y’know?”
Anika freezes time. Looks around the room, at the mannequin-still ghosts.
Rewind. All the way back to the beginning. As far as it will go.
Rush is here, alone, caught in midair typing.
He pauses, steps back from his nonexistent keyboard, looks around the room, looks at his hand, nods to himself.
The door behind him bursts open.
Claire is there, she’s supporting this girl, Sarah, who’s leaning on her shoulder, arm around Claire’s neck. Blood runs from a gash on her head.
As Claire’s mouth opens, Anika hits PAUSE again.
“What are you doing?” Mary asks.
“Nothing. Just checking something.”
Anika steps through Rush to peer at the two monitors in front of him. He always used them, at a time when most people had abandoned them for spex-spaces. This was one of the few computers in the Croft with a direct, uncensored connection to the outside world, the Internet, and he used to talk about how he liked to keep it at arm’s length, contained behind glass.
The first monitor is full of windows of code, largely incomprehensible to her, but enough keywords and in-line comments jump out for her to guess she’s looking at code of Rush’s surveillance app, freshly installed into the Croft’s network. This is where the recording starts.
The other monitor is full of windows of English, yet they take Anika longer to decode. Delta Airlines, British Airways, some random forums, the U.K. Passport Office, various social-media timelines, what looks like a crashed Gmail in-box. The windows overlap and intersect, obscuring sentences and paragraphs, asking questions and answering others. Slowly she pieces together the fragments, a state of panic and desperation revealed amid the failed attempts to book flights, the error messages, the warnings about passport numbers being invalid, of permissions being denied.
He’d tried to go this early, she realizes. Tried to run even before it had started. Like he knew how bad it would get. That and his selfish need to be with Scott.
As if we haven’t all lost people.
Anika unpauses time.
“Rush, give us a hand here, yeah?”
Rush spins around, glances back at the monitors in front of him, reaches out to guiltily thumb them both off before going to the door to help Claire. Gently they help Sarah down onto the beat-up sofa in the corner of the room.
“What the fuck happened? You okay?”
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
* * *
“—so yeah, we’re running on batteries off the solar, man, pretty much. Most the city’s blacked out from what I can tell.” College is sat on the sofa, eating chicken and rice from a tinfoil tray.
“How much we got left?” asks Rush.
“Power? Ah, we should be fine, should just keep ticking over. Most the basic stuff, anyway. Y’know, as long as the sun comes up tomorrow. And who fucking knows these days—”
Anika is standing in the middle of the room between them, invisible, her back to the door, and it startles her as it’s flung open.
“Guys! You need to come upstairs!” It’s some kid, breathless and overexcited. Anika recognizes him but can’t place his name. Was always hanging around. One of Claire’s research interns from the farms, she thinks.
“What?” College doesn’t even look up from his chicken. Neither he nor Rush seems particularly bothered.
“Come up on the roof! You gotta see this! It’s all kicking off! There’s a drone up, and everything!”
“A drone?” Rush just seems irritated. “So?”
“Not one of them police ones. Like, y’know, a big one? Like one of them army ones!”
Anika turns to Mary, still watching from the sidelines, trying to take it all in, understand. She doesn’t know quite how to deal with her. Surely she must have heard stories, explanations of what went down from Grids and College and the others, but still this must be a head fuck. Maybe she should pause everything, explain things, make sure she gets what’s going on. But she’s tired, unsure she’s got the fucking energy, that she’s got the emotional capability.
She’ll be able to figure it out herself, she thinks. Pie
ce it together on her own. The kid is smart. She must be, she’s alive.
“You know what a drone is?” she asks her.
“I think so?” Mary looks embarrassed, small and awkward in that way only teenagers can. “I’ve never seen one, though.”
“Well, now’s your chance.”
Rush and College look at each other and get up to leave, following the kid out. Instinctively, Anika goes after them, following the ghosts through the dark corridors of the shattered building, suddenly aware that she’s not confined to that one room, that the simulation goes farther, out into the Croft and maybe beyond. She could go anywhere, in theory, any place and point in that recorded time, see what anyone was doing, relive their pasts, recall memories that weren’t hers, that she’d never had.
Yet she just follows these ghosts.
* * *
Up on the roof of the 5102, the first time she’s been here in a decade.
She reminds Mary to watch her step, the structure of the building not what it once was. She dials back the app’s floor detail, the shattered tiles and concrete of reality pushing up through the recording.
Gingerly she walks to the edge of the roof and stands near her younger self. Claire is here, too, and some others.
They’re looking out over Bristol, a dusk-tinted view of a city in chaos. Even though she’s seen it before—this very simulation built in no small part from what her spex saw back then, undoubtedly—it still takes her breath away.
The city is dark, devoid of electricity. It’s lit only by the rapidly fading daylight and the glow of fires—part of Cabot Circus seems to be ablaze. The streets are full of people, walking, running, shouting. Some gather in groups, some sit on the ground, looking concussed, confused. Others are trying to make their way around the vehicles that jam up the roads, self-driving cars and cabs and buses that have all ground to a halt, their passengers shouting for help or smashing windows to free themselves. There’s a constant ambient soundscape of breaking glass, chanting, and police sirens that reverberates up the architecture to where they’re watching.
“Fucking hell,” says College.
“Yeah,” says Claire.
“What the fuck happened?” says Rush.
“Explosion at that Melody gig.”
Next to her, Anika hears Mary gasp.
“Explosion?” College snaps his head to face Claire.
“Terrorist attack.” Anika recognizes her own, younger voice. “That’s what they’re saying.”
“You fucking serious?”
“Wait, we don’t know anything yet,” says Claire. “But yeah, explosion, apparently. Then all the networks went down. Everything. All the cars shut down, all the cell networks … everything finally failed.”
“Where you hearing all this?”
“Chatter on our network. That’s still running, it seems.”
“Yeah.” Rush sounds dazed. “Yeah. The virus doesn’t seem to affect it. Not yet, anyway. I thi—”
“Look!” He’s interrupted by the young kid shouting. Shouting and pointing at the sky. “Look!”
Everyone, including Mary and Anika, follows his finger.
There, between low-level clouds and silhouetted against the dusk sky, the crucifix-like outline of something darts, angular and awkward and robotic and unlikely looking. Something they’d never seen flying above the city before.
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
* * *
She stops and lets it play after about thirty-five hours. Daylight on the roof.
“—oh, it can handle the traffic, that’s not the point.” Rush holding court, as usual. “It’s completely decentralized. The more people, the stronger it is, and the faster. It’s just whether it’ll be useable for much longer.”
Claire looks at him, turning away from the city below her. “What you saying?”
They’re standing behind Anika, pretty much the same group, but on the other side of the roof. Mary and Anika walk over to join them as they look down into Stokes Croft.
From up here it’s impossible to see any road surface, so many people fill the Croft, with even more pouring in from elsewhere in the city, under the building they’re standing on, and from the side streets. The sound systems are out, dotted here and there like alien monoliths, bass resonating through the architecture. People are dancing, talking, sitting. Smoke rises from makeshift fires and barbecues. Here and there tents have been thrown up by those who won’t or can’t leave. Pure carnival vibes. It’s somehow both friendly and apocalyptic, welcoming and tense at the same time, like Glastonbury Festival or Burning Man dropped into an urban space too cramped and ill-designed to safely hold it.
“Have you seen the chat recently?” Rush is continuing. “Looked at the public timelines? It’s a fucking mess. It’s just full of randoms screaming at each other. It’s impossible to follow anything, impossible to make announcements, get information out … It’s a fucking mess. It’s all conspiracy theories and lies. People making up unsubstantiated shit and other people believing them. The network is stable, but I never thought we’d have this many users, at least not all crammed into this space. It just doesn’t scale like that.”
“Hang on, I thought that was the whole point?” Claire asks him. “The anarchic decentralized network nobody runs?”
“Well … yeah. But not … like this.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I thought it’d be more spread out. Geographically, I mean. Like it’d be citywide, not the whole city trying to get into fucking Stokes Croft to use it all at once.”
“Thing is,” College says slowly, “people leave here and their spex get infected again, and they stop working. So they come back, the client reinstalls itself, and they … they just stay here for as long as they can. Hence the happy campers.”
“Ah well, it’s a hell of a party.” Now Anika flinches at the naïveté that drips from then Anika’s voice.
“Yeah, for now. I’m just worried it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Yeah,” says College, his tone tired and serious. “I saw posts flying around saying someone saw people with guns down there.”
“What?”
“It’s what I heard. Barton Hill crew came down, apparently. Faces I recognize. Trying to hide from the feds.”
“Fuck me.”
“Guns, though? Really?”
“Yeah. Lot of that Barton crew tooled up when things got dicey with the fascists after Brexit, 3D-printed Kalashnikovs and stuff smuggled in from Ireland.”
The idea seems to stun them all, they just stand there, staring at the ever-shifting crowd. Anika reaches for the invisible jog wheel, but Claire shatters the silence.
“So what … I mean, what can we do? How we meant to stop people coming in?”
“Turn it off,” Rush says.
“What?” says then Anika.
“The network. Turn it off. That’ll stop them coming in.”
“Can you even do that?”
Rush glances over at College. “Yeah. There might be a way.”
“We … we can’t do that though, right?” Claire leans against cracked architecture, still staring down into the human maelstrom below. “I mean, this is the point, right? As of now we seem to be the only working network in the city. That’s what we always wanted. What you always wanted.”
“I guess.”
“You can’t turn it off now, man. That’d be giving up. Quitting when you’re winning.”
Rush laughs. “Yeah. Guess you’re right. I guess this is what winning looks like, right?”
“Brave new world, baby.” College slaps him on the back. “This is where it all begins. Viva la revolution.”
“Viva la revolution. I’m just worried we’ve grabbed the wrong people’s attention.”
Rush is looking up into the sky, scanning for silhouettes.
Anika takes off the spex, and the ghosts of her friends disappear.
She stops playback, quits the app.
“That’s it, that’s enough. No
more.”
Mary looks at her, disappointed. “Really?”
“Really. I’ve seen enough. You’ve seen enough.”
“But you said you’d help me! Said you’d show me how to find Melody!”
“Melody is dead. They’re all dead.”
“You said you’d help! At least show me where to look for a trace of her, her music. You said!”
Anika sighs, curses herself. For. Fuck’s. Sake. She looks out across the flat, cluttered Bristol landscape.
“Fine. Okay. But we’re not going to find her up here.”
* * *
They leave the 5102, fleeing ghosts Anika should never have disturbed, shattered dreams she should never have remembered.
In the underpass they pause by the Croft’s gate. Semipermanent now, but she remembers when it was thrown together.
She fires up the app again.
The space under the 5102 is full of people.
Hundreds of them, all flooding into Stokes Croft, their faces a mixture of confusion and elation. Despite everything she still remembers that feeling, that raw, narcotic mix of emotions. She could taste it in the crowd that day. A very real sense that something had ended, had gone, something huge and fundamental. The feeling that a structure—a way of life, something nobody could really imagine changing—had collapsed. The end of being watched. The end of being tracked. The end of being indentured to it all. The end of capital. The end of security. The end of knowing. The end of safety. The end of being reassured. The end of being connected. The end of friendships. It was all there, in that crowd, sprayed across faces that had been denied sleep and electricity and communication for days—the fear, the uncertainty, the excitement, the thrill. The relief.
She pushes herself against the wall, Mary joining her at her side, so the ghosts don’t brush against them as they march past. Ripped jeans and soiled hoodies. Some carry armfuls of looted treasures; shower gels, alcohol, VR headsets in battered boxes and games consoles trailing power leads from hastily stuffed plastic bags. Already dead and useless consumer electronics. The great ransacking of Cabot Circus, the last archive of civilization.
