Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  China’s still running about ninety percent nominal.

  Felix shook his head.

  You can’t think that they’re responsible

  No

  she typed, but then she started to key something and then stopped.

  No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis. Every asshole in the world is using the other assholes for cover. But China put them down harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve finally found a use for totalitarian states.

  Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:

  You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You guys were pretty enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of China.

  Wasn’t my idea

  she typed.

  And my boss is dead. They’re probably all dead. The whole Bay Area got hit hard, and then there was the quake.

  They’d watched the USGS’S automated data-stream from the 6.9 that trashed northern Cal from Gilroy to Sebastopol. Soma webcams revealed the scope of the damage — gas main explosions, seismically retrofitted buildings crumpling like piles of children’s blocks after a good kicking. The Googleplex, floating on a series of gigantic steel springs, had shook like a plateful of jello, but the racks had stayed in place and the worst injury they’d had was a badly bruised eye on a sysadmin who’d caught a flying cable-crimper in the face.

  Sorry. I forgot.

  It’s OK. We all lost people, right?

  Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the election. Whoever wins, at least we’re doing SOMETHING

  Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags

  Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins were using to describe the contingent that wanted to shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it—apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to describe clueless IT managers that she’d chewed up through her career.

  They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is all. Your endorsement will carry the day

  The Googloids were one of the largest and most powerful blocs left behind, along with the satellite uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and he’d sent her an email that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t have the fuckrags in charge.”

  gtg

  she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up a browser and called up google.com. The browser timed out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the Google front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen Kong’s workplace — power failure, worms, another quake — she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced the Os in the Google logo with little planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them.

  “Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was midafternoon, not that time particularly passed in the data-center. Felix patted his pockets. They’d put a quartermaster in charge, but not before everyone had snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a dozen power-bars and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches but had wisely eaten them first before they got stale.

  “One power-bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in his waist-line that morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s teasing about his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two power-bars, leaving him with just one left.

  “Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his shoulders sloping in on his toast-rack chest.

  “Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”

  Van took the power-bar from him and then put it down on the table. “OK, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking hungry, so I’m just going to take it and eat it, OK?”

  “That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”

  “How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the wrapper clean.

  “Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been winning by a slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop was a major handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag something WiFi-enabled.

  “You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them. He’d become famous in the center for never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet flamewar. “The winner will be someone who understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then ticked off his bullet points by raising a one finger at a time. “Point: The terrorists are using the Internet to destroy the world, and we need to destroy the Internet first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough. Point: Or if we don’t, it will be because the old world will be back and running, and it won’t give a crap about your new world. Point: We’re gonna run out of food before we run out of shit to argue about or reasons not to go outside. We have the chance to do something to help the world recover: we can kill the net and cut it off as a tool for bad guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck chairs on the bridge of your personal Titanic in the service of some sweet dream about an ‘independent cyberspace.’ ”

  The thing was that Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in two days — intermittent power from the grid had stretched their generator lifespan. And if you bought his hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used as a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down would be the right thing to do.

  But Felix’s son and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one. The old world was one that didn’t have any place for him. Not anymore.

  Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scurf swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you, aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty anti-social.”

  “You’re the world’s leading authority on anti-social, Sario,” Van said. “Go away or I’ll multitool you to death.” He stopped scratching and patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.

  “Yeah, I’m anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any meds in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”

  Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that three-quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you, dickweed.”

  “Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”

  They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they added up the votes a second time.

  But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a leader-board of new and rising queries—largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and self-defense.

  Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.

  Water was running short, too.

  Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.

  “We’ve going to open the doors,” Popovich said. Like all of them, he’d lost weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off trash-bags behind a fish-market on a sunny day. Felix was quite sure he smelled no better.

  “You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group
for it—great idea.”

  Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go find our families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future inhere.”

  “What about network maintenance?” Felix said, though he knew the answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?”

  “We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,” Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.

  “And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”

  “You and anyone else who cares anymore.”

  Felix knew that he’d squandered his opportunity. The election had seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight all it had been was an excuse for infighting when they should have been figuring out what to do next. The problem was that there was nothing to do next.

  “I can’t make you stay,” he said.

  “Yeah, you can’t.” Popovich turned on his heel and walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go, then he gripped Felix’s shoulder and squeezed it.

  “Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe we’ll find something to eat and some fuel and come back.”

  Rosenbaum had a sister whom he’d been in contact with over IM for the first days after the crisis broke. Then she’d stopped answering. The sysadmins were split among those who’d had a chance to say goodbye and those who hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it better.

  They posted about it on the internal newsgroup—they were still geeks, after all, and there was a little honor guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the first set of doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors opened. It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart from how empty it was, it looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.

  The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then another. They turned to wave at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed their throats and began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.

  “Shiii —!” was all Felix managed to choke out before they both dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing so hard they were clutching their sides. They waved once more and turned on their heels.

  “Man, those guys are sick,” Van said. He scratched his arms, which had long, bloody scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in scurf they looked like they’d been dusted with icing sugar.

  “I thought it was pretty funny,” Felix said.

  “Christ I’m hungry,” Van said, conversationally.

  “Lucky for you, we’ve got all the packets we can eat,” Felix said.

  “You’re too good to us grunts, Mr. President,” Van said.

  “Prime Minister,” he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re the Deputy Prime Minister. You’re my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out of oversized novelty checks.”

  It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that they’d all be going soon.

  That had been preordained by the fuel-supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel to run out, anyway?

  half my crew split this morning

  Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford.

  we’re down to a quarter

  Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in Canada.

  Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much food—it was all gone. He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.

  Runaway processes on Solaris TK

  Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MS CE but I’m the only one awake here and four of the DSLAMS just went down. Looks like there’s some custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how much to bill our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic 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 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 ok?

  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 PCS 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.

  “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.”