Cyberpunk

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 toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure crashed through building after building.
    “The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It was—the CBC’s towering building was collapsing in slow motion. People ran every way, were crushed by falling masonry. Seen through the porthole, it was like watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-sharing site.
    Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to see the destruction.
    “What happened?” one of them asked.
    “The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far away in his own ears.
    “Was it the virus?”
    “The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was a young admin with just a little type-two flab around the middle.
    “Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an email that the whole city’s quarantined because of some virus. Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix his Blackberry.
    Felix was so engrossed in the report—purportedly forwarded from Health Canada—that he didn’t even notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did, and he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand, and let out one small sob.
    The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, pulled him back.
    “Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.
    “What about Kelly?” Van said.
    Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get into the cage, now.” The cage had microparticulate air filters.
    They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door and then let it hiss shut behind him.
    “Felix, you need to get home—”
    “It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be okay in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out.”
    “What?”
    “Get on IRC,” he said.
    They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used Smurfette. They skipped around the chat channels until they found one with some familiar handles.
    > pentagons gone/white house too
    > MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO
    > Someone knocked over the Gherkin. Bankers are fleeing the City like rats.
    > I heard that the Ginza’s on fire
    Felix typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the CN Tower fall. I’ve heard reports of bioweapons, something very fast.
    Van read this and said, “You don’t know how fast it is, Felix. Maybe we were all exposed three days ago.”
    Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be feeling some symptoms, I think.”
    > Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and maybe Paris—realtime sat footage shows them completely dark, and all netblocks there aren’t routing
    > You’re in Toronto?
    It was an unfamiliar handle.
    > Yes—on Front Street
    > my sisters at Uof T and i cnt reach her—can you call her?
    > No phone service
    Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.
    “I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said, launching his voice-over-ip app. “I just remembered.”
    Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his home number. It rang once, then there was a flat, blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian movie.
    > No phone service
    Felix typed again.
    He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders were shaking. Van said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The world is ending.”
    Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had burned. Manhattan was hot—radioactive enough to screw up the webcams looking out over Lincoln Plaza. Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi royals had been hanged before their palaces.
    His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping in the far corner of the cage. He tried calling home again, and then the police. It didn’t work any better than it had the last twenty times.
    He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail. Spam, spam, spam. More spam. Automated messages. There—an urgent message from the intrusion detection system in the Ardent cage.
    He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely,