Cyberpunk

before. He’d tried to find mailing lists or blogs that Torontonians were posting to, but the only ones he’d found were being run by other geeks in other data centers. It was possible—likely, even—that there were survivors out there who had more pressing priorities than posting to the Internet. His home phone still worked about half the time but he’d stopped calling it after the second day, when hearing Kelly’s voice on the voicemail for the fiftieth time had made him cry in the middle of a planning meeting. He wasn’t the only one.
    Election day. Time to face the music.
    > Are you nervous?
    > Nope, Felix typed.
    > I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I’m just glad we’re doing this. The alternative was sitting around with our thumbs up our ass, waiting for someone to crack up and open the door.
    The cursor hung. Queen Kong was very high latency as she bossed her gang of Googloids around the Googleplex, doing everything she could to keep her data center online. Three of the offshore cages had gone offline and two of their six redundant network links were smoked. Lucky for her, queries-per-second were way down.
    > There’s still China,
    she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of the world colored in Googlequeries-per-second, and could do magic with it, showing the drop-off overtime in colorful charts. She’d uploaded lots of video clips showing how the plague and the bombs had swept the world: the initial upswell of queries from people wanting to find out what was going on, then the grim, precipitous shelving off as the plagues took hold.
    > China’s still running about ninety percent nominal.
    Felix shook his head.
    > You can’t think that they’re responsible
    > No
    she typed, but then she started to key something and then stopped.
    > No of course not. I believe the Popovich Hypothesis. Every asshole in the world is using the other assholes for cover. But China put them down harder and faster than anyone else. Maybe we’ve finally found a use for totalitarian states.
    Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:
    > You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type that. You guys were pretty enthusiastic participants in the Great Firewall of China.
    > Wasn’t my idea, she typed.
    > 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 data stream 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 Jell-O, 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 okay. 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 O’s 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