> And my boss is dead. They’re probably all dead. The whole Bay Area got hit hard, and then there was the quake.
They’d watched the USGS’S automated datastream from the 6.9 that trashed northern Cal from Gilroy to Sebastopol. Soma webcams revealed the scope of the damage — gas main explosions, seismically retrofitted buildings crumpling like piles of children’s blocks after a good kicking. The Googleplex, floating on a series of gigantic steel springs, had shook like a plateful of jello, but the racks had stayed in place and the worst injury they’d had was a badly bruised eye on a sysadmin who’d caught a flying cable-crimper in the face.
> Sorry. I forgot.
> It’s OK. We all lost people, right?
> Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about the election. Whoever wins, at least we’re doing SOMETHING
> Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags
Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins were using to describe the contingent that wanted to shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it — apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to describe clueless IT managers that she’d chewed up through her career.
> They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is all. Your endorsement will carry the day
The Googloids were one of the largest and most powerful blocs left behind, along with the satellite uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and he’d sent her an email that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t have the fuckrags in charge.”
> gtg
she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up a browser and called up google.com. The browser timed out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the Google front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen Kong’s workplace — power failure, worms, another quake — she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced the Os in the Google logo with little planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them.
“Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was midafternoon, not that time particularly passed in the data- center. Felix patted his pockets. They’d put a quartermaster in charge, but not before everyone had snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a dozen power-bars and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches but had wisely eaten them first before they got stale.
“One power-bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in his waist-line that morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s teasing about his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two power-bars, leaving him with just one left.
“Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his shoulders sloping in on his toast-rack chest.
“Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”
Van took the power-bar from him and then put it down on the table. “OK, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking
“That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”
“How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the wrapper clean.
“Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been winning by a slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop was a major handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag something WiFi- enabled.
“You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them. He’d become famous in the center for never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet flamewar. “The winner will be someone who understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then ticked off his bullet points by raising a one finger at a time. “Point: The terrorists are using the Internet to destroy the world, and we need to destroy the Internet first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough. Point: Or if we don’t, it will be because the old world will be back and running, and it won’t give a crap about your new world. Point: We’re gonna run out of food before we run out of shit to argue about or reasons not to go outside. We have the chance to do something to help the world recover: we can kill the net and cut it off as a tool for bad guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck chairs on the bridge of your personal
The thing was that Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in two days — intermittent power from the grid had stretched their generator lifespan. And if you bought his hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used as a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down would be the right thing to do.
But Felix’s son and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one. The old world was one that didn’t have any place for him. Not anymore.
Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scurf swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you, aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty anti-social.”
“You’re the world’s leading authority on anti-social, Sario,” Van said. “Go away or I’ll multitool you to death.” He stopped scratching and patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.
“Yeah, I’m anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any meds in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”
Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that three-quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you, dickweed.”
“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”
They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they added up the votes a second time.
But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net- maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a leader-board of new and rising queries — largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and self- defense.
Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.
Water was running short, too.
Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.
“You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group for it — great idea.”
Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go find our families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future inhere.”
“What about network maintenance?” Felix said, though he knew the answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?”
“We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,” Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.
“And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”
