woman, go to bed with someone, photograph a stolen document in the bathroom, and it’s back to Washington. No, first you need a Ph.D. in math, then information theory, then your specialty, and it’s half your life in school before you can even begin.”
“As a spy?”
“Spy.” He turned the word over in his mouth as if it was sour, and snapped his suspenders, which were deep blue with white stars. “I am a civil servant in a special section and privy to the highest matters of state. The word
“A little.”
“So. It turned out that information erosion wasn’t the invention of some professors of computer science but had been used by bacteria four billion years before, give or take a few hundred million. They were the oldest cells, the first, each with its own program, and they fed on each other and off each other because there was no one around yet to get herpes or cancer. But our great scientists somehow didn’t see the connection. They were too full of their own knowledge. The theory was tested only a few times, in the context of secret battles between consortiums, each trying to paralyze the others’ computers. Software warfare. You’ve heard of that, I think?”
“But it was a long time ago.”
“Forty, maybe fifty years. That’s precisely why now we are undone… Because except for clubs, kitchen knives, and pistols there are no weapons that have not been computerized! Everything became programs, chips, processors, and it’s for that reason. Have you tried to use the phone?”
“Not today. Why?”
“The telephone system is out, too. The viruses attacked everywhere at once! Did you listen to the radio?”
“No. I don’t have one.”
“They aren’t intelligent. That was clear from the beginning. They have as much intelligence as any other virus. But the erosion capability is phenomenal!” He squinted at a van Gogh on the wall, fiery sunflowers. “But why am I here talking to you? Maybe I’ll take a walk, or hang myself. On these wires.”
He kicked the nearest gizmo.
“What seems a great mystery from the front is as plain as potatoes from behind,” he said. “Did we send the best weapon-creating programs to the moon? We did. Did they improve themselves over
“Yes, Missionary of pestilence. It puts me in mind of Poe’s Red Death. Not that you spread it intentionally, because how could you have known? We are thrown back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Technologically speaking and in general. Except that there were cannon then. We’ll have to pull them out of museums.”
“Hold on, Adelaide,” I interrupted. “Why the nineteenth century? After all, there were fully equipped armies then…”
“You’re right. Our situation is without precedent. Like after a quiet little atomic war where the whole infrastructure goes up in smoke. The industrial base, communications, banking, commerce. Only simple machines are left, yet no one has been hurt, not even a fly. Although actually that’s not true. There must have been plenty of accidents, but without the media we remain uninformed. After all, newspapers have not been printed on a hand press for a very long time. Forget the editorial offices. Forget our cars too. My Cadillac is no more.”
“It was a company car, wasn’t it?” I observed. “Not your worry…”
“True,” agreed Kramer. “The poor will be on top now, the Fourth World, because they still have the old Remingtons, maybe even muskets from 1870, and of course spears and boomerangs. Those are now the weapons of mass destruction. We could not withstand an invasion of Australian Aborigines. But come, there is no reason now not to tell me: Why did you land on the moon?”
“You think I know.” It began to sink in, how small I had become, how insignificant my situation. “But I don’t. I’d happily give you five percent of my royalties from that bestseller if
He shook his head in a melancholy way.
“He doesn’t know,” he told van Gogh’s flowers, which the sun had just reached. They cast a yellow light over my unmade bed. My legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so I got up, took the bottle of bourbon hidden in my closet and some ice cubes from the refrigerator, and poured for myself and for him. I proposed a toast to the memory of the arms disarmed.
“I have high blood pressure and diabetes,” Kramer said, turning the glass in his fingers. “But one drink won’t hurt. So be it. To our dead world!”
“Why dead?” I asked.
We drank. Kramer choked, coughed a bit, put the glass down, and rubbed his face. I noticed he hadn’t shaved well. In a weak voice, as if he’d aged ten years in a moment, he said:
“The higher one has gone with computers, the farther he’ll fall. They ate every single program.” He slapped his pocket where the letter from Uncle Sam was. “The end of an era.”
“Why? There are antivirus programs…”
“Medicine is useless when the patient has died. Anyway there are no more programs of any kind, on land, in the air, at sea, in space. Even to deliver this letter an old Bellem was used, because the new models won’t move. It began a few minutes after eight… and those idiots thought it was an ordinary virus.”
“Everywhere at once?”
I tried to imagine the chaos in banks, airports, offices, hospitals, computer centers, universities, schools, factories… and couldn’t.
“No one knows for sure because there’s no communication, but from what I’ve heard, yes, everywhere at once.”
“How is that possible?”
“What you brought was in a dormant form, like spores. The spores multiplied in chain reaction to achieve a certain level of saturation in the air, water, everywhere, and that specific concentration in turn activated them. The weapons programs on the moon must have been the best shielded, so with ours on Earth it was like taking candy from a baby. Total bytocide. With the exception of living things, which on the moon the spores never had to deal with. Otherwise they would have butchered the lot of us, along with the antelopes, ants, sardines, and grass. But enough! I’m tired of talking…”
“If it is as you say, everything will start again from the beginning — in the old way.”
“Of course. In six months or a year they’ll find an antidote for
“Maybe you won’t lose your job.”
“No, I’m through,” he said firmly. “I’m too old. The new era will require new training, new courses. Antilunar information theory and so on. They’ll probably heat the moon by thermonuclear means, sterilize it, and even if the cost goes into the trillions, it’ll be worth it not to have to worry.”
“Worth it for whom?” I asked. This Kramer was an odd character: he kept saying goodbye but didn’t get up to go. Maybe he was just unburdening his heart because I was the only one in the asylum who knew who he was. Maybe, with his broken life, he should see a psychiatrist.
“What do you mean, for whom? The armorers, the industrial-military complex. Everyone. They’ll go to the libraries for old blueprints, rebuild some classic machines, rockets, and then turn to the dead computers. Because the hardware is perfectly preserved, like mummies. Only the software is kaput. Wait a couple of years. You’ll see.”
“History never repeats itself exactly,” I said, and poured him another bourbon without asking. He tossed it down and didn’t choke; his bald head reddened a little, that was all. Little flies played in a ray of sunlight coming in
