Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  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.

  “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 pass-codes 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?”

  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 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 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.”

  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
.november5-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 LiveJournal 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 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 woman 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.

  “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 anarchists 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 Götterdämmerung. 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 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 finger 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.

  Van examined his arms. “I have eczema,” he said.

  “Says here to keep it moisturized and to try cortisone cream. You might try the first aid kit in the second-floor toilets. I think I saw some there.” Like all of the sysadmins, Felix had had a bit of a rummage around the offices, bathrooms, kitchen and store-rooms, squirreling away a roll of toilet-paper in his shoulder-bag along with three or four power-bars. They were sharing out the food in the caf by unspoken agreement, every sysadmin watching every other for signs of gluttony and hoarding. All were convinced that there was hoarding and gluttony going on out of eyeshot, because all were guilty of it themselves when no one else was watching.

  Van got up and when his face hove into the light, Felix saw
how puffed his eyes were. “I’ll post to the mailing-list for some antihistamine,” Felix said. There had been four mailing lists and three wikis for the survivors in the building within hours of the first meeting’s close, and in the intervening days they’d settled on just one. Felix was still on a little mailing list with five of his most trusted friends, two of whom were trapped in cages in other countries. He suspected that the rest of the sysadmins were doing the same.

  Van stumbled off. “Good luck on the elections,” he said, patting Felix on the shoulder.

  Felix stood and paced, stopping to stare out the grubby windows. The fires still burned in Toronto, more than before. He’d tried to find mailing lists or blogs that Torontonians were posting to, but the only ones he’d found were being run by other geeks in other data-centers. It was possible — likely, even — that there were survivors out there who had more pressing priorities than posting to the Internet. His home phone still worked about half the time but he’d stopped calling it after the second day, when hearing Kelly’s voice on the voicemail for the fiftieth time had made him cry in the middle of a planning meeting. He wasn’t the only one.

  Election day. Time to face the music.

  Are you nervous?

  Nope

  Felix typed.

  I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I’m just glad we’re doing this. The alternative was sitting around with our thumbs up our ass, waiting for someone to crack up and open the door.

  The cursor hung. Queen Kong was very high latency as she bossed her gang of Googloids around the Googleplex, doing everything she could to keep her data-center online. Three of the offshore cages had gone offline and two of their six redundant network links were smoked. Lucky for her, queries-per-second were way down.

  There’s still China

  she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of the world colored in Google-queries-per-second, and could do magic with it, showing the drop-off over time in colorful charts. She’d uploaded lots of video clips showing how the plague and the bombs had swept the world: the initial upswell of queries from people wanting to find out what was going on, then the grim, precipitous shelving off as the plagues took hold.