Cyberpunk

NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna.
    There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working toilets, water and coffee and vending machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue.
    He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of vanilla coffee before running out of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van.
    By the time they were all settled in, thoroughly evacuated, and eating, TALK NERDY and his friend had returned again. They cleared off the cash register at the end of the food-prep area and TALK NERDY got up on it. Slowly the conversation died down.
    “I’m Uri Popovich, this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank you all for coming up here. Here’s what we know for sure: the building’s been on generators for three hours now. Visual observation indicates that we’re the only building in central Toronto with working power—which should hold out for three more days. There is a bioagent of unknown origin loose beyond our doors. It kills quickly, within hours, and it is aerosolized. You get it from breathing bad air. No one has opened any of the exterior doors to this building since five this morning. No one will open the doors until I give the go-ahead.
    “Attacks on major cities all over the world have left emergency responders in chaos. The attacks are electronic, biological, nuclear and conventional explosives, and they are very widespread. I’m a security engineer, and where I come from, attacks in this kind of cluster are usually viewed as opportunistic: group B blows up a bridge because everyone is off taking care of group A’s dirty nuke event. It’s smart. An Aum Shinrikyo cell in Seoul gassed the subways there about 2 AM Eastern—that’s the earliest event we can locate, so it may have been the Archduke that broke the camel’s back. We’re pretty sure that Aum Shinrikyo couldn’t be behind this kind of mayhem: they have no history of infowar and have never shown the kind of organizational acumen necessary to take out so many targets at once. Basically, they’re not smart enough.
    “We’re holing up here for the foreseeable future, at least until the bioweapon has been identified and dispersed. We’re going to staff the racks and keep the networks up. This is critical infrastructure, and it’s our job to make sure it’s got five nines of uptime. In times of national emergency, our responsibility to do that doubles.”
    One sysadmin put up his hand. He was very daring in a green Incredible Hulk ring-tee, and he was at the young end of the scale.
    “Who died and made you king?”
    “I have controls for the main security system, keys to every cage, and passcodes for the exterior doors—they’re all locked now, by the way. I’m the one who got everyone up here first and called the meeting. I don’t care if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty one. But someone needs to have this job.”
    “You’re right,” the kid said. “And I can do it every bit as well as you. My name’s Will Sario.”
    Popovich looked down his nose at the kid. “Well, if you’ll let me finish talking, maybe I’ll hand things over to you when I’m done.”
    “Finish, by all means.” Sario turned his back on him and walked to the window. He stared out of it intensely. Felix’s gaze was drawn to it, and he saw that there were several oily smoke plumes rising up from the city.
    Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.
    The kid looked around after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is it my turn now?”
    There was a round of good-natured chuckling.
    “Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There are coordinated attacks on every critical piece of infrastructure. There’s only one way that those attacks could be so well-coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, we need to ask how an opportunistic attack could be organized in minutes: the Internet.”
    “So you think we should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a little, but