Cyberpunk

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