Wastelands

by John Joseph Adams

  "Oh my God—" Van pointed.

  The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world's tallest freestanding structure crashed through building after building.

  "The Broadcast Centre's coming down," Van said. It was—the CBC's towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way, were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the porthole, it was like watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.

  Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the destruction.

  "What happened?" one of them asked.

  "The CN Tower fell down," Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.

  "Was it the virus?"

  "The worm? What?" Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin with just a little type-two flab around the middle.

  "Not the worm," the guy said. "I got an email that the whole city's quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say." He handed Felix his Blackberry.

  Felix was so engrossed in the report—purportedly forwarded from Health Canada—that he didn't even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner's hand, and let out one small sob.

  The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.

  "Maybe we should wait this out in the cage," he said.

  "What about Kelly?" Van said.

  Felix felt like he was going to throw up. "We should get into the cage, now." The cage had microparticulate air-filters.

  They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it hiss shut behind him.

  "Felix, you need to get home—"

  "It's a bioweapon," Felix said. "Superbug. We'll be OK in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out."

  "What?"

  "Get on IRC," he said.

  They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some familiar handles.

  > pentagons gone/white house too

  > MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO

  > Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like rats.

  > I heard that the Ginza's on fire

  Felix typed: I'm in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I've heard reports of bioweapons, something very fast.

  Van read this and said, "You don't know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe we were all exposed three days ago."

  Felix closed his eyes. "If that were so we'd be feeling some symptoms, I think."

  > Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris—real-time sat footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren't routing

  > You're in Toronto?

  It was an unfamiliar handle.

  > Yes—on Front Street

  > my sisters at UofT and i cnt reach her—can you call her?

  > No phone service

  Felix typed, staring at NETWORK ERROR.

  "I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese," Van said, launching his voice-over-IP app. "I just remembered."

  Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It rang once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian movie.

  > No phone service

  Felix typed again.

  He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van said, "Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending."

  Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was hot—radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had been hanged before their palaces.

  His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the police. It didn't work any better than it had the last twenty times.

  He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam. More spam. Automated messages. There—an urgent message from the intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.

  He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely, repeatedly probing his routers. It didn't match a worm's signature, either. He followed the traceroute and discovered that the attack had originated in the same building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.

  He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker and found that port 1337 was open—1337 was "leet" or "elite" in hacker number/letter substitution code. That was the kind of port that a worm left open to slither in and out of. He googled known sploits that left a listener on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the fingerprinted operating system of the compromised server, and then he had it.

  It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have been patched against years before. No mind. He had the client for it, and he used it to create a root account for himself on the box, which he then logged into, and took a look around.

  There was one other user logged in, "scaredy," and he checked the process monitor and saw that scaredy had spawned all the hundreds of processes that were probing him and plenty of other boxen.

  He opened a chat:

  > Stop probing my server

  He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.

  > Are you in the Front Street data-center?

  > Yes

  > Christ I thought I was the last one alive. I'm on the fourth floor. I think there's a bioweapon attack outside. I don't want to leave the clean room.

  Felix whooshed out a breath.

  > You were probing me to get me to trace back to you?

  > Yeah

  > That was smart

  Clever bastard.

  > I'm on the sixth floor, I've got one more with me.

  > What do you know?

  Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other guy digested it. Van stood up and paced. His eyes were glazed over.

  "Van? Pal?"

  "I have to pee," he said.

  "No opening the door," Felix said. "I saw an empty Mountain Dew bottle in the trash there."

  "Right," Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash can and pulled out the empty magnum. He turned his back.

  > I'm Felix

  > Will

  Felix's stomach did a slow somersault as he thought about 2.0.

  "Felix, I think I need to go outside," Van said. He was moving toward the airlock door. Felix dropped his keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran headlong to Van, tackling him before he reached the door.

  "Van," he said, looking into his friend's glazed, unfocused eyes. "Look at me, Van."

  "I need to go," Van said. "I need to get home and feed the cats."

  "There's something out there, something fast-acting and lethal. Maybe it will blow away with the wind. Maybe it's already gone. But we're going to sit here until we know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down, Van. Sit."

  "I'm cold, Felix."

  It was freezing. Felix's arms were broken out in gooseflesh and his feet felt like blocks of ice.

  "Sit against the servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust heat." He found a rack and nestled up against it."

  > Are you there?

  > Still here—sorting out some logistics

  > How long until we can go out?

  > I have no idea

  No one typed anything for quite some time then.

  Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then Van used it again. Felix tried calling Kelly again. The Metro Police site was down.

  Finally, he slid back against the servers and wra
pped his arms around his knees and wept like a baby.

  After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with his arm around Felix's shoulder.

  "They're dead, Van," Felix said. "Kelly and my s—son. My family is gone."

  "You don't know for sure," Van said.

  "I'm sure enough," Felix said. "Christ, it's all over, isn't it?"

  "We'll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. Things should be getting back to normal soon. The fire department will fix it. They'll mobilize the Army. It'll be OK."

  Felix's ribs hurt. He hadn't cried since—since 2.0 was born. He hugged his knees harder.

  Then the doors opened.

  The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt.

  "Come on," TALK NERDY said. "We're all getting together on the top floor. Take the stairs."

  Felix found he was holding his breath.

  "If there's a bioagent in the building, we're all infected," TALK NERDY said. "Just go, we'll meet you there."

  "There's one on the sixth floor," Felix said, as he climbed to his feet.

  "Will, yeah, we got him. He's up there."

  TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who'd unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna.

  There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water and coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No one met anyone's eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue.

  He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee before running out of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. "Just save some for me," he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.

  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 a.m. 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 passcodes 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.governance, .recovery.finance, .recovery.logistics and .recovery.defense hanging off of it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in her.