It wasn’t simply the Internet that went down, although that collapsed in a screaming heap right across the country and in many other places around the world as all the main U.S. circuits imploded. The internal networks of banks and major corporations used the same circuits. Most had to close their doors.
TV stations went off the air. Radio stations broadcast static. ATMs all went off-line. The stock exchange ground to a halt. The loss of the Internet meant the loss of e-mail and instant messaging. Cell phones just roamed aimlessly, looking for networks that no longer existed. Text messages sat uselessly in outboxes. Entire regions lost basic telephone services as the sickness found its way into other networks. Some parts of the United States even lost power.
Still, nobody died. There was the occasional injury when the lights went out, and there was some rioting in Los Angeles—what was now referred to as PVPS, or post-Vegas panic syndrome—but there were no fatalities.
It took three days to sort out the chaos and get America back online.
4 | URSULA
The delivery guy piled all the boxes in a stack by the door of Sam’s apartment and handed over a PDA.
They had been waiting for this delivery for over a week.
In the immediate aftermath of the Telecomerica hack, there had been no chance of it. America had been pretty much at a standstill. At least they hadn’t lost power, unlike some states. Three days of darkness, cold showers, and no computers would have been too much to bear, Sam thought. Especially when it was your own fault!
But things had gradually returned to normal. Phones. The Internet. Deliveries.
He felt sweat break out behind his ears as he signed on the electronic screen, accepting the goods.
If they had gotten away with it, or not, this was the time they would find out.
But the delivery guy just turned and headed back to the elevators.
“Cool!” Fargas said behind him.
“Let’s get it inside,” Sam said, grabbing two of the boxes off the top. “We’ve only got a couple of hours before the convention starts.”
The elevator doors opened as he did so. Louis, the bratty fourteen-year-old from 602, got out with a couple of his longhaired Guitar Hero friends as the delivery guy got in.
If there was ever any doubt about whether humankind had descended from the apes, Sam thought, Louis was living proof. He and his gang clearly hadn’t descended as far as most other people.
“Geek alert,” Louis said immediately. “Nerds in the open.”
His buddies laughed. Sam ignored him and handed the boxes to Fargas.
“Whatcha got in the boxes?” Louis said. “Geek stuff? Are you building a robot in there?”
“Why don’t you thump him?” Fargas asked.
“Why don’t you thump him?” one of Louis’s friends mimicked.
“Ignore him,” Sam said. “His brain’s not developed enough to argue with.”
He picked up the remaining boxes and shut the apartment door with his foot as Louis struggled with a reply.
“Are you building a robot girlfriend?” Louis asked loudly in the corridor as the door closed in his face. “Can’t get a real one.”
Sam carefully negotiated the narrow and crowded hallway of the apartment with the two cartons.
“What’s your mom gonna say about all this stuff?” Fargas asked several minutes later.
“All this stuff” was the cardboard boxes, polystyrene, and other assorted packaging for two new laptops, two Neurotech neuro-headsets, and a variety of software.
Sam folded the last of the large brown boxes flat and stacked it with the others against the wall by the window, next to the computer desk with his much older, much slower, laptop.
The desk itself was tidy, as was the rest of the small bedroom, with shoes arranged in a row inside the closet, a perfectly made bed, and rows of books, sorted by size and shape on a three-shelf bookcase against one wall.
A foot-long model of Thunderbird 2 sat on top of the bookcase, lined up with the USS
Fargas was sitting on the floor, one of the new laptops on his knees and a neuro-headset next to him beside an open bag of caramel corn.
“Mom never comes in here,” Sam said. “It’s like my own apartment.”
“And my mother hunts moose on Mars with a popgun,” Fargas said, reaching out a hand to the caramel corn. Sam tried not to wince as Fargas put his sticky caramel fingers back on the computer keyboard.
“No, really—”
“Hey, dude, this chick is awesome!” Fargas said.
On Fargas’s laptop screen was a picture of a stunningly beautiful girl wearing a neuro-headset.
Sam looked at his own new equipment, in shrink-wrapped cartons, now laid out neatly on his bed.
He quickly opened and powered up his new laptop, then turned his attention to the other carton.
NEUROTECH NEURO-CONNECTION PACK was emblazoned across the top and SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR KEYBOARD AND MOUSE in a flashy graphic at the lower right.
The shrink-wrap disappeared with a couple strokes of his penknife, and he opened the carton.
On the top, in a flat section of the inner packing, were the manual and a Blu-ray of the software. He put them to one side.
Below were some cables and other paraphernalia that he couldn’t identify just yet, and underneath another layer of cardboard was the prize itself.
He lifted it out and examined it. It was the first time he had seen a neuro-headset up close. They were still quite expensive, certainly out of the budget of a high school student, although admittedly, they were getting cheaper all the time.
It looked most of all like a swimmer’s cap, except for the slight protuberances that were the receptors. From each receptor a thin wire emerged, running backward across the cap to the base of the neck, merging into a thick black wire that ended in four separate, multipinned plugs, each a different color.
Under the next layer of cardboard in the carton he found the receptor box. Gunmetal gray, it was the size of a box of chocolates. It was the biggest, heaviest thing in the carton. On the rear of the receptor device, there were four sockets, color-coded to match the plugs.
He studied the instruction manual before connecting the cables and plugging the connector into the USB3 slot on his new laptop.
He inserted the Blu-ray into the drive and installed the software, then, with a growing sense of excitement, he slid on the headset.
And nothing happened.
There was no strange sensation within his skull. No sudden flash of oneness with his computer. Nothing.
He looked over at Fargas, who was wearing his headset and playing some kind of simple game involving airplanes.
He loaded the training software and followed the setup wizard, agreeing to the terms and conditions (without reading them) and selecting all the default options.
The Blu-ray drive whirred for a moment, and his screen went entirely black, changing resolution before a face appeared on his screen. The young woman from Fargas’s computer. She was gorgeous but with a slight plasticity of skin and an unnatural smoothness of movement that showed she was computer generated rather than a real person.
“Hello,” she said in a honey-sweet voice that was entirely too natural to be simmed. A real person must have recorded the dialogue. “My name is Ursula,” she said.
“Hi, Ursula, I’m Sam,” Sam responded, knowing that she could not hear him.
“I’ll be your tutor and guide as you discover a whole new way to operate your computer, connect with friends and family, and access the Internet. Your brand-new neuro-connection,” Ursula said.
