Cyberpunk

users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.
    Water was running short, too.
    Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.
    “We’re going to open the doors,” Popovich said. Like all of them, he’d lost weight and waxed scruffy and oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off trash bags behind a fish market on a sunny day. Felix was quite sure he smelled no better.
    “You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can charter a working group for it—great idea.”
    Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go find our families. Whatever is out there has burned itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future in here.”
    “What about network maintenance?” Felix said, though he knew the answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?”
    “We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,” Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the data center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The smokers had it rough.
    “And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”
    “You and anyone else who cares anymore.”
    Felix knew that he’d squandered his opportunity. The election had seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight all it had been was an excuse for infighting when they should have been figuring out what to do next. The problem was that there was nothing to do next.
    “I can’t make you stay,” he said.
    “Yeah, you can’t.” Popovich turned on his heel and walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go, then he gripped Felix’s shoulder and squeezed it.
    “Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is. Maybe we’ll find something to eat and some fuel and come back.”
    Rosenbaum had a sister whom he’d been in contact with over IM for the first days after the crisis broke. Then she’d stopped answering. The sysadmins were split among those who’d had a chance to say goodbye and those who hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it better.
    They posted about it on the internal newsgroup—they were still geeks, after all, and there was a little honor guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the first set of doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors opened.
    It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart from how empty it was, it looked very normal. Heartbreakingly so.
    The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then another. They turned to wave at the assembled masses. Then they both grabbed their throats and began to jerk and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.
    “Shiii—!” was all Felix managed to choke out before they both dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing so hard they were clutching their sides. They waved once more and turned on their heels.
    “Man, those guys are sick,” Van said. He scratched his arms, which had long, bloody scratches on them. His clothes were so covered in scurf they looked like they’d been dusted with icing sugar.
    “I thought it was pretty funny,” Felix said.
    “Christ, I’m hungry,” Van said, conversationally.
    “Lucky for you, we’ve got all the packets we can eat,” Felix said.
    “You’re too good to us grunts, Mr. President,” Van said.
    “Prime Minister,” he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re the Deputy Prime Minister. You’re my designated ribbon-cutter and hander-out of oversized novelty checks.”
    It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that they’d all be going soon. That had been preordained by the fuel supply, but who wanted to wait for the fuel to run out, anyway?
    > half my crew split this morning,
    Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford.
    > we’re down to a quarter Felix typed back. It was only a day since