Cybernation

— cut a chunk out here or there, it doesn’t matter. The beat goes on.”

“I got you, babe.”

“Funny. Thing is, as the world wide web came into being and expanded, with everybody and his kid sister logging on, a lot more information started going back and forth, a whole lot more than the original guys ever figured on. This was set up pre-WWW, remember. Anyhow, along the way, things wound up getting more clumped together than the net founders intended. Everything started getting run by computers. In the beginning, when most everything in the phone company — and there was only one big phone company back then — was mechanical, you couldn’t really hack into much because there wasn’t anything much to hack into.

“Now, the phone companies are like everybody else, slaves to the computer, and what one programmer can make, another one can screw up. Shut down any substantial amount of phone service to a big city, and that city is whacko. Sure, some of the big companies have landlines to other cities that don’t run through MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and so on, but the little guys who use dial-up or T1 or DSLs and such — and there are an awful lot of little guys — they’re screwed, because no matter how good their ISP’s securityware might be, bottom line is, you can’t spike paper without a paper spike.”

“No shirt, no shoes, no service?”

“Exactly. Even if the phones work, there are ways to bollix things. The web itself these days, there are a dozen main DNS servers, or name servers — these are the ones that map from domain names, like www-dot- whoever-dot-com, or dot-org, or dot-biz, or dot-whatever. Then the raw Internet Protocol addresses, those are the IP numbers, one-eight-four-dot-two-dot-three-dot-blah-blah-blah. They all have backups, of course, but there are ways to get into them electronically and rascal ’em. So that can mess things up real good by itself.”

“Sounds just swell, Jay.”

“Hey, we aren’t even talking social engineering yet. Bribing a guy who’s got the password is a real easy way to save yourself a lot of trouble.

“The big multinational corps all have their own servers, of course, and even if you manage to throw a monkey wrench into the big DNS guys, the pool of corp info and connections won’t be affected right away — this gets kinda technical here, but let’s just say it’s kind of like shutting off a big power grid. Some houses will go dark, but a lot of folks have personal generators at home they can crank up, and they’ll work fine until they run out of gas.”

“I’m still with you.”

“But if you know what you are doing, you can maybe time things so that the big blackout hits long enough to make folks kick on their little generators, then it seems to ease a little. About the time the little generators are running out of gas, another big blackout hits. It’s tricky, but not impossible.”

“Okay. Blackout.”

“All right. But to complicate things further, there are some new, big, centralized broadband backbone switchers that serve a lot of traffic. And while a bunch of the traffic is encrypted or stegawared, especially in the military and banking areas, there are servers that have those encryption sequences or picture decoders who serve a whole lot of folks. Rascal those, and you get another kind of shutdown. Think of it like somebody not only shut off the power, they stopped the natural gas flow, or maybe flattened the tires of the heating oil trucks so they can’t deliver, and turned off the water while they were at it.”

“This all sounds complicated,” Fernandez said.

“Boy, howdy, is it complicated. There are so many triple fail-safes built into the system that making a major dent in the web, much less the entire net, is almost impossible without a multipronged attack perfectly timed. I wouldn’t want to try it without a herd of expert hackers and programmers, and even then, it’d be iffy at best. Before this happened, I’d have said it couldn’t be done.”

“Except that somebody did it.”

“No way around that, somebody did — unless it’s the biggest coincidence of all time, and I don’t believe that for a second. I’d sure like to know who ran the teams. He’s good. Real good.”

Better than I am, Jay thought, but he kept that to himself.

“Sounds like it would be easier just to go to the servers and cut the wires.”

“If you knew where they were. These places are kept out of public view, and even if you knew where to find ’em, you’d still have to get past rabid armed guards who’d just as soon shoot you as look at you.”

“Now we’re talking my language.”

“There are a couple of major switchers that carry a substantial portion of net traffic now, more than they should, some fiber-optic, some wireless, and if you blew ’em up, it would be like stopping up all the toilets at a championship football game at once — civilization wouldn’t exactly grind to a halt, but you’d be knee-deep in feces in a hurry. We’re talking billions of dollars in downtime, so you can’t just waltz in and snip a few light cables with your handy-dandy wire cutters; it would be more like breaking into Fort Knox.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Sure. And you could do it other ways, too, and never have to get in the building. FCGs, MHGs, or HPMs.”

“Excuse me?”

“Electromagnetic pulse bombs.”

“Ah, yeah, EMP I’ve heard of. Nukes.”

“Oh, that’s last century’s news, Lieutenant. EMPs come in a rainbow of flavors these days, non-nuclear, no messy radiation to deal with. Got your Flux Compression Generators, MagnetoHydrodynamic Generators, and the dreaded Virtual Cathode Oscillators, aka Vircators. These babies are packed into conventional bombs, use easy-to- find high-speed explosives and off-the-shelf electronics, and can be shoved out the back door of your basic twin- engine FedEx delivery plane for an air burst high enough so the ka-blooey doesn’t even scorch the building’s paint. But even hardened electronic components will shimmy if a big one of those suckers goes off directly overhead, and all the nonhardened stuff gets turned into chicken soup.”

“My God, you computer geeks are a dangerous lot.”

“Nah, computer geeks don’t do things like that, Julio. We sit in our offices and push buttons and talk about it. You ain’t gonna see a bunch of guys with pocket-protectors storming a backbone server, shooting it out with guards, and throwing hand grenades, dropping bombs, that’s… not cool. Not to mention most geeks I know outside the intelligence community would collapse under the weight of a flak vest, and probably pull half the muscles in their body trying to toss a baseball, much less a grenade.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Jeez, don’t be so quick to say that when you’re looking right at me, dude.”

“I’ve heard about your field exploits, Jay.”

“And this is why I get paid the big bucks to sit in my office and do what I do. Let guys like you do my heavy lifting, thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome. I’d rather be throwing grenades than pushing buttons any day.”

“Yeah. So anyway, how they did it was as computer geeks and not commandos. They electronically attacked the phone companies, the big servers, the backbone routers, the comsats, they bought some passwords and strolled right on in, and probably stuff I haven’t even thought about, the whole enchilada, they did it in very precise stages, and they were good enough to cause the snafu they caused. Numbers aren’t in, but if they managed no more than a fifteen-percent disruption, even twelve-percent, they burned up billions and billions of dollars, reals, pesos, or whatever in downtime.

“The real question is, why did they do it? What did they hope to gain?”

Fernandez shrugged. “That’s for you and the other Net Force computer ops to figure out. Me, I just go and shoot who they tell me to shoot.”

“Must be nice.”

“Yes. It is, actually. Much easier.”

The two smiled at each other. Everybody had to be somewhere, Jay figured, and if he ever wound up in a dark alley in RT, he’d want Julio Fernandez watching his back. And his front, too…