The Gates_The Arrival

by Max Wyatt

  “Excuse me!” Harper trotted over, giving up on the statue she dubbed Tara phone snub and put her hand outstretched to catch the woman who was turning to walk the other way down the sidewalk. “I was just wondering something…”

  “I’m sorry. Peace Tea is closed.” It was amazing how a beatific smile could make even a rejection pleasant. “Please come back tomorrow, yes?” Her voice matched her clothes, soft, musical. Dark eyes met Harper’s, open and friendly.

  “I wasn’t wanting tea,” Harper waved her hands, “not that your tea is bad or anything, I don’t typically drink tea. I’m more a coffee kind of girl, but tea is great. I mean…argh. Okay, if I could just ask a question?”

  “If you propose to speak, always ask yourself, is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.” She folded her hands in front of her like a cat waiting for the bird to poke back out of the hole again.

  The woman, for she was older than she’d first seemed, had gentle laugh lines around her eyes that crinkled at Harper in amusement. Harper decided that she liked her and her odd way of speaking.

  “Harper Gentry.”

  “Mandara Anand. Was this your question?”

  “No…I was wondering,” she indicated the withdrawn Tara, “we were just eating at that restaurant down the street and now we see that stores are closing because of the power failure. I just wondered…is there a reason you’re closing already? The power was on a moment ago. Don’t you think it will come back on?”

  “Ah…I see the confusion. Yes, if it had only just gone off, I would wait and see what happens next, no? But this is the third time today…” She spread her delicate hands in a sort of elegant shrug. “I think perhaps the universe is telling us that perhaps today is a day meant to be used…differently.”

  Harper smiled, liking Ms. Anand immensely. “And how will you use this day differently?”

  Mandara graced her with a beautiful smile. “Today I shall meditate. Pray. There is change within the air. Would it not be wise to prepare our souls for this coming?” With that she bowed and turned to go. Harper watched her, and sighed a little, for while Mandara had felt at peace about this change, she most certainly did not. Every car that passed felt almost…sinister. The stores closing around them gave an emptiness that made it feel as though Harper and Tara were the last two people on earth.

  It was not a comfortable feeling.

  “Harper…I don’t think the power is coming back on anytime soon.” Tara joined her, waving her phone. Harper flung out her hand, catching Tara’s wrist so she could see what particular screen held so much interest. To her surprise, Facebook was open.

  “Tara! Since when are you on Facebook? You always said how much you hated social media. A time waste, I think you called it? A failed experiment in egalitarianism where all people are created equally vapid?”

  “Oh hush. It has its uses. Look, right now according to this here—” Tara swiped and another screen came up with a map of New England. There was a lot of red dots. These dots changed color as they watched, going from orange to yellow to green to red again, fluctuating so fast it was like watching a strange case of measles in rapid-time.

  “What is that?”

  “Power grid. That’s what’s happening to the power. It’s going out as fast as they can reroute it. Rolling blackouts - that’s nothing compared to what’s going on here. This is…well it looks like some kind of virus or something. And whatever it is, they’re not getting a handle on it.”

  As she spoke, lights went on all down the street, signs in windows, on buildings. The stoplight on the corner resumed function as though nothing had ever gone wrong. A moment later it all went out again.

  “Well, so much for our day out. What was that Facebook thing all about?”

  Tara glanced back at her phone, her face reddening noticeably. “It’s kind of silly. I’m part of this group…well I got involved because one of my LARPing buddies pointed me to it. He’s one of the admins—”

  “LARPing? You’re seriously still going to the park on weekends and bashing people with foam swords? Tara, that was fine in college, but don’t you think—”

  “Look, I’m not as hung up as you are on what constitutes being a grown-up. I go to work, I pay my bills,” she shot Harper a look, “and on the weekends, I sometimes do things I find fun. So yes, I still plan on visiting Comic-con, and if I want to do Live Action Roleplay with foam swords, that’s just part of my so-called grown-up life. It’s you who’s pretending to be someone you’re not. Where’s the Harper I used to know and love that lived in flannel shirts and hiking boots? When’s the last time you went rock climbing or did something you used to think was fun?”

  Harper’s head came up. “What do you mean pretending to be someone I’m not? I happen to work for—”

  “I know, I know, a ‘prestigious woman’s magazine.’ You’ve said it so many times I have the speech memorized.”

  “There are people who would die to work with AIRS!”

  “I remember back when journalism meant something to you. You used to want to take pictures of wars, to interview world leaders. To make a difference! Photographing models with eating disorders is hardly—”

  “Maybe I’m being realistic. Who gets those jobs? I’m doing what I love…kinda. I get to take pictures. I write text. It’s important for a woman to feel good about who she is. This kind of work is…empowering.”

  “Yes, your last article about mascara left me feeling so empowered I actually visited Ulta.”

  “Well, it’s not like you can even tell me what you do—”

  “I’ve told you before, I’m staff with a government agency. I work with computers.”

  “All jobs work with computers. Even I work with computers.”

  “Some of us more than others, Harper, just listen! This group I joined, it’s for computer nerds like me. There’s a rumor going around that this…” she waved at the indecisive lighting and the closed signs in the middle of the day, “all of this is part of an attack. Apparently, several countries have been infested with some new super virus…”

  “Really? Tara! You don’t even believe in Facebook for adults, now you’re buying every clickbait crazy idea that some idiots…”

  “But what if it’s real? It would explain everything that’s been going on!”

  “Well there you go then!” Harper threw her hands in the air. “Another opportunity for you to write another application for ‘fun.’ What the hell happened to you?”

  Somehow they’d come to this, where they were facing each other in the middle of an empty sidewalk, lights alternating flickering on and off around them, and people hurrying home as though some crisis was imminent.

  Harper stared at what she used to think was her best friend for a long time. “I think it’s time to go home. This whole outing was a mistake.”

  Chapter Three

  Finn

  Day Zero 2:03AM

  Finn Lawrence reached for his coffee cup, his eyes never leaving the screen. What he was witnessing couldn’t be happening, therefore he was convincing himself that it wasn’t. The trails of numbers, on the other hand, insisted that it was true. He put the cup to his lips and tilted it, pulled his eyes away from the monitor to glance accusingly into the cup. It was empty. Apparently, it had been empty for some time; even the residue had dried.

  He set it down and looked around. Alone in the blacked out room, there was no one to ask for help, no one to ask for orders. A sea of cubicles raced away into the darkness. A hundred desks waiting for a hundred programmers. Monitors dark. Waiting. He reached over for the phone, found it by touch and rested his hand on the receiver.

  Please, God, he said to an entity he’d spent his entire life smugly certain didn’t exist. Please don’t let this be real. Please don’t let this be real.

  The display changed. He gasped. His hand jerked violently upward and took the phone to his ear. He pressed a single button under the array of outside and inside lines. This one connected directly to som
eone who did have the authority for orders. It connected him with someone that could fire him. Someone that could bring Finn up on charges. Someone he desperately did not want to call.

  Finn could feel the erratic beating of his heart as pressed the button. He could swear the organ had moved in the last ten minutes to sit solidly in the middle of his throat. What he was seeing was way beyond one little programmer in the war of cyber security; this was life and death and the terms were written out right in front of him.

  He tried to swallow. His mouth was too dry. Where was that damn coffee when he needed it?

  “I’m putting a passive trace,” he said to the sleepy voice that answered. “It looks like we’re being hacked. I don’t know, Sir.” He reached for his mug automatically with one hand, the other still banging away at various keys, and double-clicking for all he was worth. Only it no longer mattered what he did to the keyboard, to the mouse. It was too late to stop whatever this was.

  The cup was empty. Why was he constantly reaching for an empty cup?

  “Yes, Sir,” he said to the phone, his eyes now fixated on flashing lists containing titles to files even he wasn’t supposed to see and maybe some he shouldn’t even know exist. They trailed past the firewalls, past the encryption, past the point of recovery and one of the premier experts in cybersecurity could only sit behind his terminal and watch the world bleeding out.

  He dropped the receiver into the cradle, but it bounced and slid out, rolling over the desk and striking the tile floor. He stayed where he was, fixated on the screens, calling up another monitor, running another program there, absorbing the flow of information in suspended time. It was like being in a collision. Only this time he was going head to head with a freight train.

  The lights to the room exploded on. Men and women ran in to grab at terminals, pounding at keyboards, calling orders, countering orders, cancelling and calling out to each other. They didn’t have the experience, the expertise to handle this. The whole place was in chaos, waiting for someone to take control.

  There was one man in the room who could. Only he was trying to remember how to breathe. A few men would have been better equipped to deal with this, not many, but a precious few. None of them were there. Finn sat back and watched the world burn in front of him.

  He put the cup to his lips and tried to drink. His brain noted that it was empty, again, so he simply held on to it. The cup was something simple, familiar, something …sane.

  “Officer on deck!” someone yelled.

  “As you were!” Finn knew that voice. It was the voice he’d woken up. It was the voice of command, of reason. A part of him hoped that voice would take control, take away the fear, let him go back to being a programmer, isolated in a dark room.

  Another part wondered at how quickly he’d gotten there. The man had to sleep with his uniform on.

  “Mr. Lawrence,” the voice said from behind him. Finn turned, barely able to pull away from the screen. “I would appreciate a report.”

  The man even looked military. If Finn were to cast a Hollywood movie about WWII, this man would play the lead. General Thomson looked like he was built from scrap iron and forged in an active volcano. He was broad chested in a way that Finn had once wondered if he bench pressed just to have a larger surface to hang the medals from. There was no sign that he’d dressed in haste, his uniform worn with military precision. There was no trace in those sharp eyes that he’d been woken from a sound sleep half an hour ago.

  “I was…” Finn found his throat parched, the back of it burning. He looked into the cup and set it down. “I was running a scan, Sir,” he stated with an uneasy glance at the primary computer monitor in front of him. “I had that report for you tomorrow and was finishing up when I noticed an unusual amount of processing being done through one of the ports. It was a controlled port, Sir, there shouldn’t have been any traffic there at all…”

  “Never mind the technobabble,” the General snarled. Finn raised his eyebrows at that. The man was a computer expert himself; he knew the man had a degree in computer engineering. “Was anything compromised?”

  “I put a passive trace on it the moment I discovered the breach,” Finn reported. “I have a complete list of processes and transactions, but I haven’t been able to go through that yet. It’s still tracking.”

  “Robert!” The general shot a command to one of the multitude of military techs that had swooped into the room. “What do you have for me?”

  “I can isolate the com port, Sir,” the tech answered, and Finn turned back to the screen. He didn’t care about the rest; he knew what the general would hear, what the tech would say. There was a breach. There was a hole; somewhere in the millions of miles of code, in the uncountable acres of servers scattered throughout the cloud, there was a hole. A hole never found by one Finn Lawrence whose civilian duty it was to find and patch holes.

  You had one job, Finn…

  How it was he hadn’t spotted this particular hole didn’t matter now. It was however, a hole discovered by someone else. Someone better than Finn Lawrence. And Finn could only watch in awe and fear. They were ruthless. And that was why it couldn’t be real, why none of this could be happening.

  It had to be a virus, a glitch. It had to be something that could be restored from back-up and they could all grouse and grumble about how many days were lost, curse at partial back-ups and laugh next year over a beer long after the story had passed into legend.

  Please…Finn searched for someone to beg. He came up empty.

  The list continued to scroll past him at a phenomenal rate. It couldn’t have been a glitch. It was like whoever…whatever it was, they knew they’d been spotted and without the need for stealth, they now slammed everything they had into the wires, grabbing everything they could find.

  All around him, men and women were firing every counter they could think of. It was too big, too widely dispersed to simply pull the plug. That was his grandfather’s solution to computer issues. Instead they fired anti-virus, erected firewalls, tried to close the port, anything to regain control and lick their wounds and count the dead files.

  But this…thing would have none of that. This hack, and Finn had to accede in his own mind that it was a hack, despite the taboo against using such an inflammatory word without proof, wouldn’t just die. This was a raping of data, a Viking assault against the best guarded servers in the entire world and all the tech and manpower gathered against it fell like so much chaff.

  Someone Finn had never seen before came through the door. A tall man with round Harry Potter glasses and a posture that could only come from military training. Someone once said that you could go anywhere in the world unchallenged if you carried a clipboard and looked worried. This man was obviously set to prove that as he frowned his way through the food chain until he found the man in position of highest authority that could get him what he needed.

  He smartly handed the note to the general who nodded to the young man to send him on his way. The tall man nodded and turned to go, though he craned his neck to look around the room first with such a look of awe on his face that Finn knew whatever was happening here was becoming fodder for the rumor mill outside these four walls already.

  Which only went to prove that all the computer security in the world had nothing on a staff that just never knew when to shut up.

  General Thomson glared his way through the material on the clipboard, papers snapping one after the other as he flicked each piece up and looked at it. No iPad, nothing electronic, Finn noted. Already the protocols were running – you couldn’t hack a clipboard. As he read, his expression changed. Grew darker.

  Finn’s second impression of General Thomson on the day they had met was to make a note never to play poker with him. He had two expressions, Stoic and Enigmatic. For the first time in three years as a civilian consultant, Finn discovered a third. This would be the expression an enemy might see during the general’s charge. Finn imagined it would be the last thing most enemies wo
uld have ever seen.

  This was an icy rage. Most people when angry catch a certain fire that blows within them, lights their eyes and bursts forth and is quickly gone.

  General Thomas held his anger like a prized lap dog, nursing it, feeding it. His eyes flashed with ice in the small room despite the heat of nearly a hundred pressed bodies around him. When he spoke, it was with the grinding certainty of a glacier grinding a mountain to rubble.

  “Robert.” Finn thanked the god he didn’t believe in that he hadn’t said his name in that tone. “Robert, wake the White House. Inform them that we are under attack.”

  Attack.

  Finn turned back to his monitor once more.

  Neither with a bang, nor a whimper, Finn paraphrased, a stray single tear traced down his cheek. Just a scrolling list of filenames. Ones and zeros. He looked into his cup one last time. Empty and full. But this time… They’re full. We’re empty.

  Finn rose and left the room to get coffee. There was little else for him to do. He was prevention, and he was the one who had failed. Now it was their turn. Let the programmers do what they could. It was out of his hands.

  He made it to the break room before his knees gave out.

  Chapter Four

  Finn

  Finn sat with a sheaf of papers he knew he wasn’t going to use. It contained information that everyone possessed and anyone that wanted to read it already had. Other than standing by as the printer churned out endless reams of paper, the only accomplishment he’d made in the last few hours was to finally get that cup of coffee.

  He then got another.

  Now his third was waiting for the conference to start. Here, in the depths of the installation, far underground, this assemblage was called a ‘conference.’ It was a meeting under a harder to spell name. There were only two other people in the room that did not wear uniforms. They both took seats away from the table, non-players, unimportant background characters who supported the real members of the meeting.