The Final Day

by William R. Forstchen

  As John opened the basement door, he was surprised by the profligate use of electricity. The room was now brightly lit with fluorescent lights. He had always hated that type of illumination, but it used less juice than a standard incandescent bulb. A woodstove had been rigged into the basement, so it was no longer a damp, bone-chilling room, and, indeed a wonder, a dehumidifier was humming away. The stench of mold had at least abated somewhat as a result.

  Six-foot stacks of magazines still cluttered most of the room, but a work area had been cleared in the far quarter, additional workbenches dragged over from classrooms and offices around the campus. Piled up around the benches were several dozen old computers—half a dozen more Apple IIes, early PCs, Commodore 64s, old Gateways, Dells, and half a dozen other models. Ernie, with Paul by his side, was hunched over a green computer board, and as John came up behind them, Ernie grunted out a curse and tossed the board to one side.

  “Cooked, damn it. I would have liked to have had that one.”

  “How’s it going?” John asked the two, obviously so intent on their work they had not heard him approach.

  “Good and bad,” Ernie grumbled without bothering to look back at John as he picked up another board from a pile on the table and started to examine it.

  “We’ve got half a dozen machines cobbled together,” Paul offered in a far cheerier voice.

  He pointed to the restored computers off to one side, and John went over to examine them. Three were Apples, one of them an early Mac with its ridiculously small blue-screen monitor, beside them a couple of 1980s PCs and a Commodore 64. The 64 was turned on, the old television it was hooked to flickering, a popular fantasy adventure game of the ’80s running, little stick figures being chased by a stick-figure dragon.

  While in college, John remembered, he had splurged on buying an Atari 2600 game machine, he and his friends consuming endless beers while driving two tanks around an obstacle field and shooting at each other. It had triggered the first fight with Mary, who became fed up that he was spending more time on “that damn game” than with her.

  He hated to disturb the two at what was obviously an obsessive task, but he felt he had to. Paul had been absent from the factory ever since the discovery of a functional computer. It was at least keeping Ernie busy and out of his hair, but still, Ernie’s skills could perhaps be better devoted to working with the ham radio operators or helping as well with the production of generators and alternators to provide power to their ever-expanding State of Carolina.

  Ernie and Paul were both hunched over a computer board, wearing magnifying glasses, absorbed with testing the board, quietly arguing whether it was fried or just one chip was bad.

  “Mind if I interrupt?” John finally asked.

  “In a minute,” Ernie replied without looking up, overriding Paul’s objections as he pried a chip off the board, fished a replacement out of a plastic tray, and snapped it in.

  “There!” Ernie announced, pointing to a volt meter that surged to life once the chip was replaced. “It’s good to go. We can use it!”

  John sighed. “I hate to do this, but can I ask what we can use that board for?”

  The two looked up at him as if he was a peasant rudely interrupting a royal banquet.

  “If we can just get some computers back online, it’s a huge step,” Ernie announced, still wearing his magnifying glasses, which gave him something of a crazed look when you were staring straight at him.

  “For what purposes that we can use right now?” John asked, regretting that his query did sound somewhat blunt.

  “All right, John, we’d better settle this priority right now,” Ernie replied sharply.

  “I’m just asking where this can lead us, that’s all,” John said defensively. “You two are a couple of our most valuable resources. I just want to make sure we’re spending those resources wisely.”

  “You suggesting I go out on woodcutting detail instead?” Ernie snapped.

  “No, damn it.”

  Paul stepped between the two and put his hands up in a soothing gesture. “John’s right, Ernie. We’re spending a lot of time on these old machines; there has to be a profit in it, and he has a right to know what we’re thinking about regarding all of this.”

  “All right, then,” Ernie retorted. “God knows how many times when I was with IBM or contracted to NASA I’d be working on something and some damn project manager would come along, question its worth, and shelve it. IBM could have been years ahead of Apple and the whole PC revolution if people like me had been listened to.”

  “Let me take this,” Paul said softly, sensing that Ernie was heating up.

  “Fine,” Ernie snapped, “but if our supreme leader is here to tell us to shut this down, I’ll just hole up at home and keep at it myself. My family and I survived through the first year without the interference of others, and, John, you were damn glad to have us blocking the left flank on the day we fought the Posse.”

  “Why don’t you three arguing fools come upstairs for some tea and talk it out up here?”

  They looked back to where Becka stood at the base of the stairs, holding a teapot up as a peace offering.

  John nodded a bit sheepishly and followed her back up to the sunlit warmth of the old library office. The twins were still asleep, so after gratefully accepting the herbal mint drink, John followed Paul out into the main area of the library. It was cold, but one corner of the vast room was sunlit and offered the comfort of overstuffed leather chairs. The three settled down.

  “I know the machines we are working on look like toys,” Paul began. “Compared to what we had just before the war, they are toys, but in their day, they were cutting-edge technology and used as such. Funny that we never thought about it before. The vast majority of computers being tossed aside were not broken; it was just that advances were coming so rapidly. It’s not like old cars that got sold and resold until they finally just died. Most computers getting junked simply just had a hard drive cook off or motherboard going bad, but the rest of the unit was still good. They were just junked with no resale in mind because after three to four years, they were antiques. Moore’s law at work.”

  “Refresh my memory, please,” John asked.

  Ernie sighed as if asked a dumb question by someone who should know better.

  Paul said, “Moore’s law, named after one of the founders of Intel back in the 1960s, postulated that computing power as defined by the number of transistors per square inch will double in a very rapid progression. It meant that computing power, speed of calculations, storage, all of it will increase at a geometric progression, while at the same time cost per unit such as a hard drive for example will plummet. That Apple IIe we first brought online had around 64K, not megabytes or gigabytes, but 64 kilobytes’ worth of chips in it for around three thousand dollars of 1980s money. Eight years later, it was obsolete and thus wound up in the basement down here, and I bet in Black Mountain alone we could find a couple of hundred of them not plugged in on the day things hit the fan and therefore perhaps still viable. Imagine if we had two hundred of your old clinker Edsels. Unlike computers, they were run and resold until finally just junked. Not so with computers, and that is what has Ernie and me fired up. Your average five-hundred–dollar computer just before the war wiped out nearly everything that was hooked up online was equal to the military’s top Cray of a couple of decades earlier.”

  “Therefore?” John pressed.

  “That’s the whole interesting point that we all seemed to overlook,” Paul continued. “I remember the year the college purchased new laptops for every faculty and staff member. Great idea, but three years later, they were obsolete; five years later, they were in our junk pile or just tossed into a closet and forgotten. I remember seeing a whole Dumpster load of them, recalling when they cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars on delivery and five years later we couldn’t give them away, so we just tossed them out instead. There was no secondary market for five-, let alone eight- or ten-
year-old computers. Files once stored on five-inch floppy disks or even reel-to-reel were transferred to three-and-a-half-inch disks, and then to just memory sticks, downloaded into the hard drive of your new machine and the old machines tossed. Those files are still alive, John. But we’ve got to dig up the hardware to read them again and then build off that.”

  “Build what? I’m worried about having enough food and firewood to see us through the winter. Everyone is screaming for more electricity now that we’ve got something up and running again. Hey, I’d love to have a computer in my office, even an old green-screen machine hooked to a printer. I’m sick of my old Underwood typewriter with the dang F and J keys sticking half the time. But the time to get even one computer up and running, especially now?”

  He pointed to the blowing snowdrifts outside the window, and a thought flashed of the young couple down in the park. He wondered if the cold had finally driven them back inside.

  “It’s stuff we can use now. Databases, for one,” Paul replied. “We were lucky to find hard copies of all the IEEE journals from the nineteenth century so we could figure out how to start rebuilding, using the same designs Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison did. It’d be nice to have all those millions of words in a searchable database. Even the library cataloging went online years ago, so we are no longer even sure what we have in the book stacks around us.”

  “And that would help us…?” John let the question trail off.

  “Okay, I agree,” Paul continued. “A computer working here, one in Asheville, another in Morganton … big deal other than the convenience of using writing machines we once took for granted. To talk with others? We already have some telephones up and running. Cell phones and Wi-Fi? Forget it for years to come, so yeah, I can see your point on that score. I agree; our more immediate concerns are firewood and food.”

  “I’m not saying stop working on this,” John interjected. “It’s just that as of the moment, I’m not seeing the short-term benefits. We replicate computer technology of the 1980s, maybe the ’90s, and then what?”

  “We eavesdrop,” Ernie said with a smile, acting at least somewhat nonconfrontational for a change, “like I said the other day when Paul showed you the first machine up and running. Come on, John, I’m talking about Bluemont. You’re ex-military. When you were in the Middle East, how did the White House and Pentagon micromanage every move you guys made?”

  “Commodore 64s and Apple IIes?” John replied with a cynical smile.

  “Not much better, actually, if you go back a few years. When Linda and I were writing software for Apollo, its guidance systems were 40K computers—40K! Think of it. We went to the moon on 40-kilobyte computers.”

  Ernie sighed and looked out the window at the snow-covered lawn in front of the library. “America did that in the ’60s, and it seems crazy today. The first shuttle flights had little more than a meg on board. All that data going back and forth on something your cell phone, at least before the system fried off, trumped a thousand times over. Again, Moore’s law.”

  “So with what you are doing downstairs, you think you can hack into Bluemont’s communications. How?”

  “First of all, the data goes up and down. Sat comm. Even low-earth orbit satellites are super hardened against EMPs generated by the sun, coronal mass ejections. For military use hardened against EMP hits as well. But a lot of that stuff goes all the way up to geosynch orbit. How did you get your television before the crap hit the fan?”

  John started to smile. “An eighteen-inch dish.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But it’s encrypted, isn’t it?”

  “It all comes down to zeroes and ones in the end, John. When Linda and I left IBM, we set up our own business, writing software and providing some of the precision hardware for large-array tracking dishes—mostly civilian business contracts, but a few overseas governments as well. Recall a scandal a few years back of a high government official with an unsecured server in their home that was hacked by some guys in Poland, Romania, somewhere overseas?”

  John had some recollection of it. So much of what happened before the Day, which had once seemed all so important, was now becoming hazy memories.

  “John, you remember this college was starting on a cybersecurity major before the war started.”

  He nodded with memory of that. President Hunt had even asked him, as an historian and ex-military, to think about creating a course on the history of technology. The idea had intrigued him, and he had even done some preliminary research into the fascinating history of World War II, the tales about Enigma, Ultra, the tapping into Japanese and German radio traffic, the work of the legendary Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, England.

  Is that where these two were leading?

  “Take me to the conclusion,” John said, looking out across the windswept yard in front of the campus library. Lowering clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, a light sprinkling of snow flurries swirling down. If another storm was coming in, he wanted to get home, split some more wood, and huddle in close to the woodstove with Makala before it hit.

  “Remember those huge satellite dishes folks used to have in front of their homes twenty years ago?” Ernie asked, pressing in.

  John chuckled. It was a bit of a stereotype of ramshackle trailers, with a dish half as big as the trailer planted in the front yard for television.

  “They nearly all disappeared once the big mainstream servers came in with an eighteen-inch dish you could tack to your living room window.”

  John nodded, remembering installing one himself when he and Mary moved here with two young girls. A hundred-plus channels to choose from, and he had visions of all the educational programs that could be offered, rather than what most stations had degenerated into with the advent of the nauseating reality-show craze.

  “If I could get my hands on some of those big old dishes, which hopefully were off-line and disconnected on the Day, and cobble together parts that were not cooked off, I think in a few weeks I could be tapping into communications traffic.”

  “Of…?”

  “Bluemont, for starters,” Ernie replied enthusiastically. “Raw reportage from BBC uplinking and downlinking out of Canada, even the Chinese. They still must be using comm sat systems. You just point, listen, download, and evaluate.”

  “Just? You make it sound easy, Ernie. So you got gigs of data flying around, and chances are the stuff we want to know about is highly encrypted. They’re no fools.”

  “No chain is stronger than its weakest link. No data is foolproof. Turing built a system from scratch and was able to break down the German codes, looking for patterns of usage coming from those German Enigma machines that supposedly could be programmed to create billions of variables and thus thought to be uncrackable. Come on, historian, how did we figure out the Japanese were going to hit us at Midway in June 1942?”

  John smiled at such an easy underhand pitch. “You know as well as I do if you asked the question. Paul, do you know?”

  John looked over at his electrical wizard who had once been a student and was surprised to see the quizzical look and shake of a head.

  “I remember you being in my World War II class, Paul.”

  “Sorry, sir, I was diverted a lot that year,” he replied, smiling. John remembered how Paul and Becka had shared the same class and spent most of it staring at each other.

  “All right, then. We were picking up radio chatter about a ‘Target X,’ indicating the Japanese were preparing for a massive naval strike. One of the cryptanalyst guys at Pearl Harbor came up with the idea of Midway Island sending out a report that their desalinization plant to provide fresh water on the island was off-line and they were desperate, the message to be sent via a code we knew the Japanese had already cracked.

  “The message was sent, and only hours later, radio traffic from Japan was monitored that extra desalinization equipment would have to be shipped to Target X once taken. Bingo—we knew where their next offensive would hit; we had
our carriers waiting to receive them and wiped out their carriers in a surprise counterstrike. It is a textbook example of code breaking changing the course of a war.”

  “How many kids from this school’s old cybersecurity program are still here?” Ernie asked.

  “I’m not sure.” John sighed. Too many of his students were now long gone, killed in the fighting or dead from disease and malnourishment. Those left were serving in the community’s defense force, working in the ever-expanding electrical parts factory down in Anderson Hall, or assigned to other equally crucial tasks.

  “If I could pull in four or five—even just two or three—and put them to work to help me,” Ernie pressed, with Paul nodding in eager agreement, “John, I just might be able to get something useful out of our tinkering in the basement. Just imagine if you had known Fredericks’s orders before that piece of trash even came to Asheville.” Ernie pressed in with his argument, “Hell, for all we know, five hundred troops with more choppers could be on their way here right now, and we are clueless until they arrive.”

  “Or suppose what that poor guy Reynolds said is true,” Paul interjected, “that something is up regarding another EMP. Who is thinking about it? Why? When? Do you want the answers, or do we sit back passively and wait?”

  John looked back and forth at the two and then back out the window at what was obviously another storm coming on.

  He sighed and finally nodded. “Okay, you got it.”

  The two broke into grins, the elderly Ernie and young Hawkins high-fiving each other.

  “Quietly, and I mean quietly, run a query today. If any of our old students were in our cybersecurity program pull them off whatever they are working on now. I then want this building secured. Tell Kevin Malady and Grace Freeman I want a guard on here henceforth. Nothing overt—just that we learned with our encounter with Fredericks that he did have spies inside our community. If we’re going for something like this, I don’t want it broadcasted all over town.”