Fatal Error

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Just unplug it,” Jack said.

  Instead she hit the lighted off switch on her power strip. As the screen went dark again, she looked at him with wide eyes.

  “If this is happening all over the world . . .”

  Jack said, “But it’ll happen in a wave, right? As all the computer clocks hit the trigger time?”

  “Not necessarily. Not if the virus is set to Greenwich Mean Time. If it was set for three P.M. GMT, then computers on the U.S. East Coast would trigger at eight local time. In the Central Time Zone they’d go at seven local, and in the Pacific Zone at five local.”

  “So they’d all start at once?”

  She nodded. “That’s the way I’d do it. That’s the way to get the most bang out of the virus. Don’t give anyone a chance to mount a defense. Hit them with an all-out frontal assault.”

  Jack envisioned a billion-plus computers across the globe turning themselves on and beginning to download video from the Internet. And as the data is recorded onto the hard drive, the computer begins to upload it to other computers in the botnet which in turn upload video back to it, back and forth and back and forth until their bandwidth is maxed out. All the computers in empty offices in every country, unattended but busily enslaved to Jihad4/20, trading video throughout their networks and beyond. Servers and routers all over the world crashing with the overload.

  Gia . . . Vicky.

  “How long . . .” His mouth had gone dry. “How long do you think it will take?”

  She shrugged. “I’m no expert, not even close, but I imagine it depends on the size of the Jihad botnet. If it’s as extensive as they say, could be just a matter of minutes, certainly no more than a few hours.”

  Jack pulled his phone from a pocket and speed dialed Gia. Her voice mail came up almost immediately. That meant she had her cell turned off. Of course she would. The airlines made you turn them off.

  What flight had she said—346, right?

  He dialed 411, got the number, and called American Airlines. After navigating a voice tree and punching in the flight number, a robotic female voice told him flight 346 had taken off on time and was due in at 10:50.

  “Well,” he said, turning to Weezy and Dawn, “at least that computer is still working.”

  Weezy said, “They’re in the air?”

  She kept her expression neutral but he could tell from her eyes that she didn’t like that idea.

  “They’ll make it.”

  Dawn was shaking her head, her expression baffled. “What’s happening? I’ve heard about the virus on the news, but what’s that got to do with computer video and planes?”

  As Weezy began to explain, Jack wandered back into the front room. His hands balled into fists. He jammed them into his pockets and squeezed his eyes shut as he fought to control the frustration boiling within.

  Everywhere he turned lately he found himself facing situations he couldn’t control, couldn’t do anything about. Rasalom, the Jihad virus, and now Gia and Vicky in the air, in possible danger, and he could do nothing to bring them down safely. Had to depend on someone else . . . always someone else . . .

  He needed to break something, hurt someone.

  But he wouldn’t. Instead he’d do the thing he hated, but the only thing he could do.

  He’d wait.

  11

  “. . . again, if you’re just tuning in, the message from the Department of Homeland Security is to unplug your computer and disconnect it from the Internet. In other words, if you have dial-up service, unplug the phone connector; if you have high-speed cable, disconnect from the cable; if you have Wi-Fi, disconnect and power off your router. Do this even if you have an uninfected computer. Where the Internet is working at all, transmission has slowed to a crawl. Many servers and routers are down and the ones still working are jammed.”

  Dawn hugged herself as she leaned forward on the couch and stared at the TV.

  “This is totally scary.”

  Weezy sat beside her. Jack hung back at the dining area table, listening with growing alarm as news heads from the local stations kept breaking into the regular programming with bulletins from the city and the feds.

  The botnet had been active for only an hour or so but was already sending seismic shock waves through cyberspace.

  “This just in from the mayor’s office: Unless it is absolutely necessary to be elsewhere, please stay in your homes. Traffic signals have malfunctioned and traffic is snarled. We have the mother of all traffic jams out there, folks.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  Jack jumped up and stepped to the window. Saturday night traffic on the Upper West Side was always snarled, but what he could see below wasn’t moving at all.

  “What’s wrong?” Weezy said.

  “I’ve got to head for the airport.”

  “But it’s only nine-thirty. They’re not due in till eleven.”

  Right. Less than a ten-mile trip. New York City traffic could be a hassle any time, especially on a Saturday night. But this was New York City traffic on a Saturday night in the middle of a cyber meltdown.

  “From the way things look, it could take me that long.”

  She came up beside him and stared down at the traffic.

  “I see what you mean.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Be careful out there. And stay in touch, okay?”

  “Will do. You stay put.”

  She shook her head. “I’m going over to sit with the Lady. She may need some company.”

  The Lady—in his worries about Gia and Vicky he’d forgotten about her.

  “Think she’s feeling the effects?”

  Concern tightened her features. “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever been here before. She could have a slow weakening, or might not feel a thing till the whole Net crashes.”

  He looked past her at where Dawn stared at the TV screen. “What about her?”

  “I’ll have to leave her.”

  “Yeah. The truth might be hard to explain.”

  “Too hard.”

  Jack smiled. “Momma Weezy.”

  “She needs someone, Jack. She’s all alone in the world.”

  Jack hadn’t realized how true that was. Parents dead, baby stolen, cut off from whatever friends she’d had . . . the kid had no one.

  “Going to leave her here?”

  She shook her head. “She’ll be safe in her place.”

  “Okay. Give the Lady my best. I’ll stay in touch as best I can.”

  He grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He took the stairs down and hit the sidewalk at a trot, heading west toward where he garaged the Crown Vic. Traffic on the side street was stopped dead. As he loped past a taxi he saw a young couple get out and start to walk, leaving behind an angry-looking driver.

  “It’s cold,” the girl said, tightening her coat around her neck.

  The guy laid a protective arm over her shoulders. “Yeah, but at least we’ll get there before it’s over.”

  When Jack reached Amsterdam, he stopped. Always a jam here, but at least with some sense of movement, even if only inches at a time. Right now—nothing.

  He looked up and saw why: The traffic lights were blinking yellow in both directions. In this city a yellow caution light translated as Hit the gas. Yellow both ways meant everybody had the right of way. Yielding was for pussies. No surprise at the ironclad gridlock.

  A traffic cop might have helped—if one could get here—but as Jack fought his way uptown along the crammed Broadway sidewalk, he doubted it. Every intersection was the same. This called for a cop on every corner and even that wouldn’t work. There didn’t seem anywhere left to go. It looked like every car in the five boroughs had been plunked down on the streets. The only solution Jack could see was to pave them over and start anew.

  He passed an angry crowd outside the Beacon Theater, complaining about the inability to buy tickets for the Allman Brothers because the theater’s computers were down. A waiter was taping a CASH ONLY sign to the window of a bistro. The su
btitle read: “Can’t run credit cards.”

  The faces around him showed a mixture of anger, frustration, bemusement, and bewilderment. At least no one looked bored.

  It dawned on him that his car was useless.

  Okay, he’d go subway. Catch a train down to Times Square and switch to the 7 out to Queens. It would drop him off with a good walk to the airport, but maybe he could grab a cab out there. Traffic couldn’t be as bad as here.

  He found a subway entrance and was halfway down the stairs when a haggard-looking suit coming up said, “Don’t bother.”

  Jack stopped. He’d had a niggling worry about this.

  “Not running?”

  He shook his head. “Got a 1 just sitting in the station with its doors open. Conductor says he doesn’t know what’s up. They got the word to sit tight. Something about switching or signal problems, he thinks.”

  Yeah, that made sense. They were controlled by computers, right?

  Jack slammed a fist against the railing.

  “I know how you feel,” the guy said. “Well, there’s always a cab.”

  “Not always.”

  Jack turned and followed him back up to the surface.

  “Christ!” the guy said, stopping short as he saw the traffic. “What the fuck?”

  Jack slipped past him and headed for Julio’s.

  12

  “Where’s the remote?” Weezy said.

  The Lady sat at the big table and pointed to the empty shelves built into the wall of the front room of her apartment. “Up there.”

  She didn’t look so hot. Not as pale and frail as she’d been after the Fhinntmanchca assault, but not as good as she’d looked just yesterday. Weezy was worried about her.

  But at least she was still here.

  She found the remote where the Lady had indicated—and also found a thick coating of dust on it. She blew it off and coughed.

  “I take it you don’t watch much TV.”

  “I don’t watch any.”

  “Not even news?”

  “Of human events, the state of the world? I know whatever I wish to know.”

  Of course she did. Stupid questions. She was the product of the collective human consciousness.

  “And the rest?”

  She shrugged. “The fictions—the dramas, the comedies, the commentaries hold no interest for me.”

  “They do for me.” Weezy pressed the ON button. “Especially now.”

  “—appears that preventive measures are failing,” said the channel seven newsreader.

  “Too little too late,” Weezy muttered.

  “Servers and routers all over the world are failing as they are inundated with a tsunami of video feeds that is overwhelming the bandwidth of the entire Internet. Here in the city . . .”

  Weezy heard a groan behind her and turned to find the Lady slumped forward on the table. She dropped the remote and hurried over to her.

  “Are you all right?”

  Another stupid question—of course she wasn’t all right. She looked anything but all right.

  “So weak.” Her voice was thin, husky, fragile, as if it might dissolve to dust if she spoke too loud.

  Weezy’s heart clenched. This was it. They were losing her.

  “You need to lie down. Which way’s your bedroom?”

  “I don’t have a bedroom.”

  “You don’t—?”

  “I don’t sleep.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. We’ll find you a bed.”

  Glaeken had given her a furnished apartment. One of the rooms down the hall had to have a bed.

  She put one of the Lady’s arms over her shoulder and one of her own around her back, then lifted. She’d expected near dead weight, but the Lady came right off the chair.

  So light . . . too light . . . much too light.

  Was this how she was going to go? Lose her substance bit by bit and fade away?

  She walked her down the hall. The first room on the right had a queen-size bed. Weezy stretched her out on it.

  “Should I get you a blanket?”

  “I don’t feel cold. Or warmth. Temperature doesn’t affect me. But I do feel terribly weak.” She raised an arm and let it fall. “Weaker and weaker by the moment . . . as if the life is draining out of me.”

  Weezy felt her throat constrict. “Don’t leave us.”

  “I will not go willingly. I will fight this.” She waved a hand. “Let me lie here alone. I need to conserve my strength.”

  Weezy left her and returned to the front room. She sat before the TV and stared at the screen. It was running feeds from street cams, showing massive traffic jams.

  How was Jack ever going to reach LaGuardia?

  13

  “Don’t know what’s taking him so long,” Julio said. “He’s only coming from Harlem.”

  Jack glanced at the St. Pauli Girl clock over the bar. Almost ten after ten.

  Damn. Forty minutes till they landed.

  He’d remembered that Julio’s younger brother Juan was into motorcycles. Julio had called him and prevailed upon him to drive down to the bar and lend one of his bikes to Jack.

  “If he’s dealing with this traffic, it’s going to take him a while—even weaving through it.”

  With all the arteries out of the city clogged, the only solution was something with the ability to slip between the clots. A motorcycle seemed perfect.

  One problem, though. Jack hadn’t ridden one in a while. He’d used two wheels pedaling around Burlington County as a kid, so when he was old enough for motorvating, he’d seen no reason to move up to four. His folks had hated his Harley, and his sister Kate, the doctor, repeatedly warned him about the motorcycle drivers she’d seen wheeled into the ER, brain dead from a dust-up with a car or truck. She’d called his Harley a “donorcycle.”

  Jack wouldn’t listen, and owned a succession of Harleys through college. He loved motorcycles—he’d used Arlo Guthrie’s pronunciation, rhyming with pickle—reveling in the anarchic freedom they offered. Plus, the helmet conferred anonymity.

  Of course, he’d felt immortal then.

  He’d brought one with him when he’d disappeared into the city, and rode it until a potentially fatal crash drove home how vulnerable he was on two wheels—like a turtle living outside its shell, roadkill waiting to happen at the hands of anyone who was fiddling with the radio or cell phone when traffic was coming to a sudden stop. What might be a simple fender bender in a car-to-car scenario escalated to bug-against-the-windshield potential when a motorcycle was involved. And when being chased by a gang of psychos in cars . . .

  That was when he’d bought Ralph. And when the Corvair became too conspicuous, he’d graduated to the Crown Vic.

  If he was going to be involved in any vehicle-to-vehicle mishap, Jack wanted to be the one to walk away.

  He looked around the unusually crowded bar.

  “You running a two-for-one special or something?”

  Julio made a face. “Yeah, right.” He jerked a thumb toward the street. “They’re from out there. Traffic ain’t movin’ so they come in to kill time.”

  “I see you opened up the back tables.”

  He looked sheepish. “They need a place to go. Gotta put ’em somewhere.”

  This was mucho unJulio. He didn’t like random patrons. If he had his way, his bar would be a private club that required a membership card, with him as sole arbiter of the suitability of who could be served.

  “How civicly responsible.”

  He grinned. “Community service—my middle name, meng.”

  “And that ringing cash register has nothing to do with it.”

  “Like Abe says: Ain’t nothin’ better’n doing well while doing good.”

  Then the door banged open and a young Latino who resembled Julio—minus ten years and a lot of muscle—pushed a stripped-down motocross bike into the bar.

  “Ay, Juanito. You can’t bring that in here.”

  “Ain’t leavin’ it outside. Be go
ne in a beat.”

  Julio stepped forward and shot his hand toward Juan’s face. For a second Jack thought he was going to hit him, but instead he grabbed his chin and turned his head.

  “What happen to you?”

  Jack could see it now—a good-size bruise on his chin, bleeding a little.

  “Guy tried to steal my bike. It’s getting crazy out there.”

  So soon?

  Jack had figured it would take longer for the idea to filter to the synapses of the wolves that the shepherds had lost some of their eyes and ears and the sheeple were largely unguarded.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about that,” Jack said. “I owe you.”

  Juan shrugged. “S’okay. You don’t owe this family nothing.”

  Jack looked at Julio. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Rosa.” Julio gave Jack a backhand slap across an arm. “What? You forget?”

  It took Jack a couple of seconds to realize he was talking about his sister. Rosa had been having some nasty trouble with her ex-husband. Jack had fixed it. And yeah, he’d kind of forgotten about it.

  “Long time ago.”

  “This family, we got long memories. You know that.”

  “And nobody else was supposed to know.”

  Julio’s deprecatory shrug could not quite hide his pride in his younger brother. “Juanito figured it out.”

  “Good for him.” Jack held the door and nodded toward the street. “Back her out onto the sidewalk and you can show me how it works.”

  Juan rolled his eyes. “Aw, you ain’t gonna tell me you never been on a bike before.”

  “Course I have. Just been a while is all. Be with you in a minute.” As the door closed behind Juan and the bike, Jack turned to Julio. “Got anything I can use if I run into trouble?”

  Julio’s eyebrows lifted. “You ain’t carrying?”

  Jack cocked his head and gave him a stare.

  “Silly me,” Julio said with a twisted grin.

  “Silence would be golden.”

  Julio ducked behind the bar and returned with something held tight against his outer thigh, shielding it from the room. When he reached Jack he slipped him a leather slapper. Jack gave it a surreptitious heft.