Version Zero
Page 29
But realize that for every selfish action, there’s a selfless reaction battling to preserve the collective good. I’ve learned that when we stop looking at one another in the eyes, bad things happen. Terrible things.
We all look at each other now in a darkness lit only by the glow of eighty-eight fireballs. Let’s remember this moment.
—Maximilian Portillo
The screens went dead.
The feeds tried and tried to refresh, but could not.
We wondered what to do next. Slowly it dawned on all of us that if the feeds were silent, that meant everything else had stopped working, too. So we checked our tablets and laptops and, later, our ATMs and fancy office phones, and were met with only blankness.
No planes fell out of the sky. The power blinked, but stayed on.
Cable news still works. Reporters gleefully showed the eighty-eight smoldering craters scattered around the planet. The backbone of the internet, shattered.
Pilot Markham and Maximilian Portillo have joined the canon of the greatest terrorists in history. Cameras swarmed Max’s parents’ house but found his mother and father mysteriously missing. Journalists scoured whatever they could still find about him online. Max was a bright student, a budding entrepreneur. Max had befriended one of the greatest innovators of our time, and he turned out to be a psychopath. So had Max, they said.
Max was this, Max was that, they said. There’s a book coming out about him.
Max is the most wanted man on the planet.
How weird it was for Shane and me to watch the news, knowing what only we knew.
Technically, the internet has not been killed. It has been de-backboned. It has been shrunk. Sites physically hosted near you are still reachable, but without proper exchanges traffic effectively grinds to a halt. Imagine what nightmare gridlock would ensue if all the streets of your city suddenly became single-lane. The internet needs to be big in order to work properly.
Hundreds of thousands of workers remain furloughed to this day. Silicon Valley, and all the Silicon wherevers, is a ghost town. On the other hand, television is surging. So are landline telephones, paper forms, paper newspapers, and paper everything else. People dig up old radios and typewriters. Vinyl and tape and music on chip is undergoing a renaissance. Record labels are rejoicing.
People are falling back onto what is now called the original internet, meaning the United States Postal Service. The Darknet is falling back into being the regular old black market.
And on the surface of things, everything looks and acts as it once did.
It’s a mix of better and worse.
Trolls have retreated to where they belong: grousing in solitude under bridges. People no longer leave permanent trails of online fodder for them to exploit. It’s harder to bully now.
The good parts have gone away, too. Marginalized folks lost their support networks in a blink. Protesting injustice takes much more work now.
It’s a mix of better and worse.
But if I had to pick one, I would say better. Because we as a species had let out this genie called the internet, and it turned out we were ill-equipped to handle it—but unlike other times in history, we managed to stuff this one back into the bottle.
Or really, Max did.
Teens made zines again. People still made voice phone calls—that part of the smartphone still worked. Factories and power plants—although they at first scrambled with panic—actually now felt more secure without the possibility of online attack. Bankers and finance types freaked out, and would continue to freak out until today. But fuck those people.
For the ordinary person, the world slowed down. And it was kind of nice.
At first, dumb theories flopped around about who really caused the Outage. It was the Big Five, who faked their deaths as part of a hoax designed to pave the way for a totally privatized, pay-per-bit internet version 2.0.
But a few weeks in, a letter appeared in all the major newspapers everywhere.
The letter from Max to the world.
It was reprinted in every language. It was short. It offered no clues. Sometimes I read it again, and again, since my postcards have all gone blank.
The first postcard arrived in a sealed vellum envelope at my doorstep. No stamp. Max’s square printed handwriting, writ small in watery blue fountain pen. It said:
Miami now. I thought you were dead. All them mans lying dead-ass-dead and I thought you were, too. I love you both and miss you. Please stay safe. Your new house is sick by the way. And congratulations on the bump.
Yes, I got pregnant. After we made it back, Shane and I just knew we had to. We waited a good long while, as if we needed to give our bodies time to stop jittering. We got married, too. Because what else could possibly be more important?
But also: Your new house is sick. That meant he saw the new house. Was he here? Did he hand-deliver the note? It makes my head spin, the thought of our paths coming so close but never touching. But this is the way it has to be.
The postcards kept arriving. They said things like:
Cuba now. Set up Mom and Dad in a mansion by the sea. Even a little fake ranchito there. Couldn’t risk seeing them, but I did leave a long note to sorta kinda explain things. They still don’t get it really. Parents, lol. Do we still say lol?
The postcards said less and less as the weeks passed.
A ranchito for me someday when I can stop moving around so much. A hangout just for us. Stupid. Anyway. Been thinking about morality. I’m going to write a letter to the world. Keep an eye out for it.
Later:
Budapest. Beautiful city. Don’t forget to travel before the baby comes. Tell duncie to stop buying so much crap.
And still later:
Singapore. Police state. Never again.
And:
Korea. A wonderland.
That was the last one, from weeks ago. The ink on these blank postcards vanished in twenty-four hours once exposed to air. But still, I feel the need to keep them. Safe and secure and hidden in my closet.
It’s Day 394 of the Outage now.
There my apps sit on my phone, waiting for the information plumbing to start spouting data again.
We’re still no closer to getting back online than we were on Zero Day, although the nerd elite keep trying. The nerds, frantically debating how to rebuild the internet in a genuinely decentralized, backbone-free way using personal data pods over a mix of network infrastructure—cable, broadcast wireless, copper, even peer-to-peer packet radios, how geeky is that—for better resiliency and redundancy and whatever. They talk about a return to the spirit of the early internet, like Arpanet, when there were no Big Five, no capitalist interests, no trolls, just a few hundred users who trusted each other.
For what is a civilization without trust?
Good luck, nerds.
Shane and I are headed to Japan for our babymoon. We’re flying first class. It’s still amazing to fly first class. I will never get used to it.
I stopped programming, of course. I haven’t touched a computer in a long while.
The money lives in an island in the Caribbean. Satow Pool receives funding from an anonymous, autonomous angel investor. It funded our house. It funded our plane tickets.
We waited for the cops to stop coming before buying the house. We thought Max had been at start-up boot camp this whole time, we told them. We had no idea he was capable of such a thing.
Shane made me a mixtape for the flight and got two pairs of tiny wireless earbuds for my brand-new audiophile-quality music player that probably cost a fortune. It’s stupid—Shane can be so stupid—but he says it’s so we can enjoy music together the way it was meant to be heard. That makes him happy. And when he’s happy, everything seems okay with the world.
It’s a long flight to Japan. I used the time to finish writing down
everything I remember in a thick leather notebook in permanent ink. For the things I don’t remember, I’m forced to fictionalize from newspapers and magazines stuffed into the notebook’s back gusset.
There’s no shortage of press photos of the aftermath. The shattered windows, the bodies. The avalanche. Or that now-famous comms tower, leaning at its perilous angle. It’s become this iconic visual shorthand for the Outage.
I started writing this after I knew I was going to have a baby. It didn’t seem fair that the world would never know the true story about what happened. My urge is to wait until my daughter gets old enough, and then tell her the legend of Max and Pilot in a backyard tent by flashlight.
But the truth is I don’t know what I’ll do with this notebook now that I’m finished. I can tell Shane’s not comfortable with it, and he’s right to be. I’ve fashioned a kind of bomb. But Shane also knows it’s something I needed to do, for reasons that will hopefully reveal themselves one day.
Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Maybe Max’s story will no longer be relevant in the distant future. Just a historical footnote among others much worse, and much bloodier. Maybe, after hearing the whole thing, my daughter will just say Wow, Mom and resume the joyful business of being alive.
I know I should probably burn it. But no way. I insist that this story should be shared—
—must be shared—
—even if there’s no one but me to read it.
None of what I’m saying makes much sense. Or does it, in its own strange way? It has to. It has to. Why else would I have such an urge to write everything down?
Shane opens the chrome case for the brand-new audiophile-quality earbuds as if he’s proposing to me all over again.
“Superspy shit right here,” he says.
And we kiss.
* * *
* * *
I stand under the temple gate and wait for Shane to set up his shot with his outrageous camera and its foot-long lens. I stand at profile, squinting sidelong in the bright morning light. I rest a hand on my belly. I am here visiting my father, who now lives outside Tokyo in a seaside suburb.
I used to hate him for never standing up to my mother. But now I don’t think about any of that crap from the past. I just let myself miss him, and I let myself be excited to see him for the first time in a long time.
“Hurry up, baby bear,” I say.
I am at a large intersection that plays music when it’s safe to cross. The music plays, and the crossing surges with hundreds of people before emptying again like a tide. Then the music stops. The music, I later learn, is the old folk tune “Toryanse,” performed in a robotic square-waveform drone.
The intersection has street vendors for everything: fried octopus, ice cream, toys, balloons. I hear hawkers, children whining, someone on a megaphone shouting about a sale or something. I can only understand bits and pieces. My Japanese sucks.
And then, in between rivers of foot traffic, I see him.
Our eyes lock. He looks thinner. Sharper. But those are the same Buddy Holly glasses. The same bad posture. It is Max, standing and staring. I watch as he lifts something to his lips—a vaporizer—and exhales a long curling stream of smoke into the sharp morning air.
Shane peers out from behind his lens. “What’s wrong?”
All I can do is raise my hand and point. Am I really seeing what I am seeing? I want to shout Max, but you can’t just shout such a thing in a place as crowded as this.
For we are we, and he is he.
A bus goes by, and then another, and when the intersection is finally clear of cars Max is gone but for the smoke. In his place, there on the sidewalk, rests a small stuffed animal.
Once again the intersection floods with people. I join the fray.
“Baby,” cries Shane. He jogs to catch up.
I keep pace, eyes on the toy.
“What is it?” says Shane.
We reach the other side, and I pick it up. It is a teddy bear done in the unbearably cute Japanese style. The tag on its ear bears the handwritten words:
Congrats, duncies
Shane looks at me. I look at Shane.
The ink will vanish within the next twenty-four hours. The crosswalk music plays.
Going in is easy / Returning is scary
But while it is scary
You may go in / You may pass through