Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process- monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down — spared you the trip.”

Felix’s own server — a box he shared with five other friends — was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

“What’s the story?”

“Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too — like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a Trojan.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long ponytail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty- style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer- sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.

“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category — if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with the lusers — they were the fault of incompetent engineers.

“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2 AM, it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”

They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage — like guards in a Minuteman silo. Ninety-five percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.

Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes — putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10 AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.

“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.

“Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”

“What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

“I wanna eat,” Van said.

“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day off.”

“You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”

“It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the 486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.

“Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? “Kelly?”

The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get anything — no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.

“Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up for the family. She’d leave voicemail.

He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang again. He snatched it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, what’s up?” He worked to keep anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past three hours had been purely personal — even if he planned on billing them to the company.

There was sobbing on the line.

“Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.

“Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. “He’s dead, oh Jesus, he’s dead.”

“Who? Who, Kelly?”

“Will,” she said.

Will? he thought. Who the fuck is — ” He dropped to his knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth certificate, though they’d called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick bark.

“I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, Felix. I love you so much.”

“Kelly? What’s going on?”

“Everyone, everyone — ” she said. “Only two channels left on the tube. Christ, Felix, it looks like dawn of the dead out the window — ” He heard her retch. The phone started to break up, washing her puke-noises back like an echoplex.

“Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He punched 911, but the phone went NETWORK ERROR again as soon as he hit SEND.

He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it into the 486’s network cable and launched Firefox off the command line and googled for the Metro Police site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an online contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He solved problems and freaking out didn’t solve problems.

He located an online form and wrote out the details of his conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description complete, and then he hit SUBMIT.

Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix — ” he began.

“God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the superworm.

“I need to get home,” Felix said.

“I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.”

They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few windows was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited for the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Were there more police cars than usual?

“Oh my God — ” Van pointed.

The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast