They paused at the door of room 418 before entering; it was a double room divided by a curtain. The person sleeping in the first bed wasn’t Doreen. They moved past, and there she was, hooked to sensors and hanging IV bottles, her ashen face tilted slightly back and her mouth gaping open. Frank caught his breath; she looked like she was dead.
Marla must have had the same impression, but she handled it better.
“She’s okay, Dad,” she whispered, pointing to the jagged lines blipping their way across the monitor.
He realized he was still holding his breath and exhaled deeply.
“Go ahead and sit down,” he whispered back. “I’ll find another chair.”
She did, and he borrowed the one on the other side of the curtain.
Neither of them could think of anything to do or say, because nothing they could do or say would make any difference. So they did what the families of plague victims had done for hundreds of years: they sat at the bedside of their loved one and waited, hoping for the best.
* * *
Frank was still sitting at his mother’s bedside the next evening, exhausted, anxious, and be-stubbled. He’d persuaded Marla to go back to her apartment around midnight of the night before, promising that he’d let her know as soon as there was any change in his mother’s condition. Since then, he hadn’t broken his vigil except for a quick trip to the hospital cafeteria to buy food to bring back to the room. The only bright spot in the otherwise bleak ordeal was the completely ridiculous picture of a very indignant, shaved corgi that Marla had texted to him. Someone from the retirement home had called to ask her to take custody of Lilly while his mother’s apartment was fumigated. The morbidly obese, hairless animal reminded him of a miniaturized Jabba the Hutt.
Frank fretted the dinner hour away, waiting for Dr. Franzen to stop by on her evening rounds. When she finally arrived, he waited silently as she studied his mother’s chart and watched as her vital signs marched their way across the monitor screen next to the bed. At last, the doctor nodded toward the door, and he followed her into the hallway.
“I think the worst is over. Her fever’s been below one hundred and two all afternoon, her pulse is stronger, and her lymph nodes aren’t as hard or warm to the touch, so the antibiotics are clearly doing what we want them to. She’s not completely out of the woods yet, but I’m optimistic now that she’ll make a complete recovery.”
“Thank goodness! How much longer do you think she’ll be in the hospital?”
“Not as long as I’d like, to tell you the truth, but we’ve only got one section of the hospital properly set up to treat plague victims, and the case count is still rising. I understand that your mother’s retirement home has a secondary care unit, which would be adequate to the task. If she continues to improve and gets through tomorrow night without any problems, we should be able to discharge her into their care the next morning, assuming they’re willing to take her.”
“That’s wonderful, Doctor. Thank you.”
“No thanks necessary to me; it’s the staff that does all the hard work. Can I make a suggestion?”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you go home and get yourself some sleep. You look like you could use it. We’ll take good care of your mother.”
* * *
17
Doodlebug, Doodlebug, Come out of your Hole
All hell had broken loose when the public absorbed the reality of the first Western epidemic of the plague in almost five hundred years. On top of the horror came hysteria and an overly zealous public response: in some states, thousands of people were quarantined who had, or might have had, some contact with someone who was infected, even though most of them had no chance whatsoever of contracting or communicating the disease. Shopping malls—even those without pet stores—stayed closed for lack of business despite extensive and unnecessary fumigation efforts. Hospitals stood half-empty, as anyone who could survive without medical care avoided them for fear of contracting the dreaded disease. And anyone with a dog was well advised to walk it in the middle of the night, when no one was watching. Frank decided that maybe there was something to be said for owning a tortoise after all.
All this irrational behavior continued unabated, even as the number of new cases of plague plummeted two weeks after the first case was diagnosed. Public health officials sought to reassure the populace that without infected fleas, the further transmission of disease would be entirely eliminated. And community leaders took great pains to spread the word that every reasonable—and many unreasonable—means had been and would continue to be pursued to ensure that the very last infected insect would be hunted down and destroyed.
But the truth was that this goal was impossible to achieve, because hundreds of flea-bearing dogs had already been taken home. Some of these had been abandoned by their owners as soon as the news broke, allowing the disease to spread to feral dogs and cats as well as to rats, raccoons, and other wild creatures. And some human cases of plague transitioned to the communicable, pneumonic form of the disease, which could be spread the same way as the flu—through sneezing and physical contact. When pressed, public health officials were forced to admit it was possible the disease might establish itself in pockets of infection that might take months, or even years, to eradicate, especially in southern states, where fleas could survive on wild animals through the winter. Meanwhile, demand for curative as well as precautionary doses of appropriate antibiotics overwhelmed available supplies.
The governments of stricken countries were under overwhelming popular pressure to strike back immediately against those responsible for the epidemic. But mounting the type of attack that could eliminate the widely distributed forces of the Caliphate would be no small undertaking, demanding the mobilization of tens of thousands of troops. Even with unanimity of purpose among the coalition, the sheer logistics of assembling and transporting sufficient troops, weapons, and supporting infrastructure into position would take months of preparation and implementation.
The predictable result was that any affected country that owned even a single military aircraft was scrambling to do whatever was necessary to get that plane somewhere over Caliphate territory where it could kill someone, even if that meant shoving a bomb by hand out the hatch of a cargo plane. The United States and its coalition allies, of course, were capable of bringing far greater firepower to the cause and did.
All of which seemed to leave the Caliphate curiously unconcerned. Wherever possible, his troops shamelessly co-located in hospitals and schools or melted back into the mountains. In his increasingly frequent public addresses, Foobar’s spokesman mocked the West for the futility of its preparations for war. Not one soldier, he promised, would set foot on the territory of the Caliphate before the West was defeated on its own soil.
Following on the heels of the attack on Manhattan and the chaos wrought by the ongoing epidemic, many radical extremists in the Arabic world were prepared to believe him and flocked to his flag in spite of the accelerating Western preparations for war.
* * *
Frank was having no problem saving his breath as they ran this morning; he could scarcely get a word in as Tim reported the results of his latest research. Or, more accurately, reacted to it.
“I can’t believe that we’re going down the road we are! If the government isn’t going to stop industry from warehousing everything it takes to run anything in just a small number of data centers, then they should force the private sector to put data centers fifty feet underground! All Foobar has to do is seriously damage about a third of them, and everything crashes, and there won’t be any way to set the Internet back up again.”
This was no surprise to Frank; he had recognized the folly years ago of moving computing from millions of widely dispersed locations to just a few. It was equally troubling that just about nothing important existed on paper anymo
re. If the electronic versions disappeared, the information would be gone forever. He’d even come up with a cynical slogan for it: “Vulnerability by Design.”
“It’s even worse than I thought,” Tim continued, “because everything is way too interconnected for all the big users, like multinational companies, government agencies, and financial market makers. What’s going on in one data center depends on what’s going on in lots of the others, so even if you don’t take them all out, you’ll still disable the surviving programs trying to operate somewhere else.
“But even that’s not the worst of it. I hadn’t realized it before, but with the explosion of data and the increased reliability of systems, cloud providers have decided they don’t need to do traditional, archived backups. Instead, they just mirror the data on more than one site in real time. So if you take out a primary server as well as its mirror server at another site, whatever data they were hosting is gone forever.”
That really was the worst of it, Frank thought. Almost no one knew everything about anything anymore. There probably wasn’t a paper copy in existence of the design of a single computer chip, or of the manufacturing details needed to create a silicon wafer, or to etch the circuits on it, or even to build any of the machinery necessary to perform those tasks, or to mine or refine the silicon to begin with. And the same was true for every other modern device or consumable, right down to making and filling a Pez dispenser.
“I mean, this is criminal!” Tim said. “We already run the risk that Foobar will bomb us back into the Stone Age. And if we get to him first, it will only get worse—every day, the data centers will get bigger, and more information and software will be relocated there. We’ll just be hanging around, waiting for the next enemy to take us out. What the hell’s the matter with Washington?”
Tim had picked up speed as he grew more emotional, but it appeared that he was waiting for an answer to what Frank had hoped was just a rhetorical question.
“Same thing that always has been,” Frank huffed. “Politicians are politicians, and all politicians care about is not getting beaten in the next election. That, and coming up with campaign funds to make sure that doesn’t happen. So they never want to annoy the big contributors—some of whom happen to be building and investing in the data centers. And the rest don’t want to pay a nickel more than necessary to cloud service providers. So we’re talking about just about everyone in business being on board. Once you think in terms of politicians not wanting to be beaten, it all falls into place.”
“How about not getting annihilated? Who’s going to elect them when all the voters are dead?”
“I guess that concept is a bit too abstract for most legislators to grapple with. But the cost of burying a data center fifty feet underground isn’t. If anyone even suggested he might introduce a bill to force telecom and high tech companies to do that, he’d be swarmed by so many lobbyists he’d disappear from sight. And don’t forget—while there may not be that many data centers, they’re in enough states to be sure that a bill like that would never get adopted.”
“So what are we supposed to do, just sit around and wait for something inevitable and horrible to happen?”
“You mean, kind of like global warming?”
Tim came to an abrupt halt. With relief, Frank jerked to a halt as well and turned around.
“Have you seen the projections of what would happen if a third of the big data centers were significantly damaged?”
“No,” Frank lied, “What do they say?”
Tim turned on his heel and began running again. “Everything powered by electricity stops, because the grid is controlled by computers over the Internet.
“Everything moving stops, too—the planes, the trains, and the automobiles—once they use up whatever fuel is in their tanks when the Internet and the grid go down. That’s because the refineries and the pipelines are down now, too, and the gas pumps at the local gas stations don’t work, because they need electricity, and there isn’t any. There’s no air traffic control system either, because the control towers and the radar systems use electricity, computers, and the Internet, too.”
Their footfalls slapped out a supporting tempo to Tim’s staccato tirade as he continued to pick up steam.
“There’s no food after you use up what’s in your warm, dark refrigerator, or in the local store, because there’s no way to deliver it from a farm or a factory to a store. There’s no water coming out of the tap, either, because the distribution system is computer controlled and relies on electricity, so that’s down, too.
“There’s no heat, if you use gas, because that distribution system has shut down—you know why. And no oil heat after you use up what’s in your storage tank.
“There’s no financial system, of course, because it’s all computerized—not even a working ATM. So what’s in your wallet is all you’ve got. And all of your bank accounts and savings are gone anyway, because all they amounted to was computerized financial records, which no longer exist.
“There’s no police, because they use gas-guzzling squad cars to get around, and the cops can’t get to work anyway. So there’s no public safety. And you couldn’t call for help anyway, because neither your landline nor your cell phone work.
“There’s nothing you can call a government left outside of small towns, because there’s no way for government employees to get to work or to communicate with anyone anyway, other than through emergency radio signals. And they quit working after the backup generators ran out of diesel fuel.
“And on and on through everything else society relies on. Hospitals? No staff, no electricity, no medicine after the cupboards are bare.
“There’s no way for anyone to grow food, because all the seeds for the next crop are stored in just a few locations, and there’s no way to transport them anywhere else. Even if you still have some of your last crop in a silo, you can’t replant it because the agribusiness companies these days make sure last year’s crop will be sterile so you’ll have to buy more seed to plant every year. But hell, there’s no fuel for the farm machinery anyway, and almost no horses or old-fashioned plows to use, either.
“What there is in the U.S. is looting and fear and hunger and more guns than people. According to the report, if the attack comes in the winter, most of the population will die of exposure or starvation within a month—if they didn’t die of thirst within the first few days. If it comes in the summer, it would just take a little longer, with more people starving than freezing to death. If Europe is gone, too, who’s going to save us? Russia or China? Fat chance. Most big countries have trouble feeding their own people and import food from us. They’ll be hard-pressed to help us out if their own people are on the verge of starvation. And even if they did, there’s no way they could transport enough food and fuel to the U.S. to help many people before they died.
“Whoever attacked us could just walk right in. It would be like the white men coming to the New World after smallpox wiped out eighty percent of the Native Americans. Back then, the Europeans took over the best town sites and cleared fields, all of which were now empty. But this time it will be even better, as there’d be all this great physical infrastructure in place. Whoever hit us could just waltz right in and take over our homes and our public buildings and our cars and our tractors and everything else and treat any survivors however they wanted to—turn them into slaves, even.
“And all of this isn’t in a report from some left-wing organization with an agenda. It’s from a government report. A government report—this is what our own experts predict will happen if someone launches a serious attack against the data centers. So what are we supposed to do? Just stand around and do nothing?”
Frank gave it up and skidded to a stop, mopping his brow with the bottom of his running shirt. He figured this would not be a good time to point out that at least a Christian prophecy would be fulfilled�
��the one about the meek, in the form of the Amish walking behind their horse-drawn plows, inheriting the earth.
“I guess not, no. I guess if we’re aware of something like this, we should support an organization that’s trying to do something about it, or write op/ed pieces or organize demonstrations or something.”
“And how much good would that do?”
“I don’t know; I guess as much good as anything else. People have made a difference with political issues before. Look at civil rights and environmental protection. There’s been a lot of progress made there.”
“Sure, and look at how long that took. And how about poverty and fixing the educational system, where things are getting worse? What happens in the meantime? Every new data center that gets built aboveground makes us more vulnerable and makes it that much less likely that Congress will act. Who’s going to want to take an already operating ten-billion-dollar facility apart and put it back together again at the bottom of a hole?”
“Look, okay—of course, you’re right. Something’s got to be done, or we’ll be just as vulnerable after catching Foobar as we are now. But first, we’ve got to catch him, right? The targets are already out there in plain view, and we’re not going to bury them in the next two weeks. So we’ve got to figure out how to stop the Caliphate damn quick or everything you read in that report is going to come true.”
“Fine. But we’re going to have to come back to this. Are you with me on that?”
“Sure thing. How about we head home?”
Tim nodded and started to lope off. They ran for a while in silence, each thinking his own thoughts.
The Doodlebug War Page 17
