Wastelands Read online

  Quait stirred in his sleep, but did not wake.

  "I'm sure I don't know," said Chaka.

  For a long time, neither of them spoke.

  Winston got to his feet. "I'm not comfortable here," he said.

  She thought he was expressing displeasure with her.

  "The floor is hard on an old man. And of course you are right: you must decide whether you will go on. Camelot was a never-never land. Its chief value lay in the fact that it existed only as an idea. Perhaps the same thing is true of Haven."

  "No," she said. "It exists."

  "And is anyone else looking for this place?"

  "No one. We will be the second mission to fail. I think there will be no more."

  "Then for God's sake, Chaka of Illyria, you must ask yourself why you came all this way. Why your companions died. What you seek."

  "Money. Pure and simple. Ancient manuscripts are priceless. We'd have been famous throughout the League. That's why we came."

  His eyes grew thoughtful. "Then go back," he said. "If this is a purely commercial venture, write it off and put your money in real estate."

  "Beg pardon?"

  "But I would put it to you that those are not the reasons you dared so much. And that you wish to turn back because you have forgot why you came."

  "That's not so," she said.

  "Of course it's so. Shall I tell you why you undertook to travel through an unknown world, on the hope that you might, might, find a place that's half-mythical?" Momentarily he seemed to fade, to lose definition. "Haven has nothing to do with fame or wealth. If you got there, if you were able to read its secrets, you would have all that, provided you could get home with it. But you would have acquired something infinitely more valuable, and I believe you know that: you would have discovered who you really are. You would have learned that you are a daughter of the people who designed the Acropolis, who wrote Hamlet, who visited the moons of Neptune. Do you know about Neptune?"

  "No," she said. "I don't think so."

  "Then we've lost everything, Chaka. But you can get it back. If you are willing to take it. And if not you, then someone else. But it is worth the taking, at whatever cost."

  Momentarily, he became one with the dark.

  "Winston," she said, "I can't see you. Are you still there?"

  "I am here. The system is old, and will not keep a charge." She was looking through him. "You really are a ghost," she said.

  "It is possible you will not succeed. Nothing is certain, save difficulty and trial. But have courage. Never surrender."

  She stared at him.

  "Never despair," he said.

  A sudden chill whispered through her, a sense that she had been here before, had known this man in another life. "You seem vaguely familiar. Have I seen your picture somewhere?"

  "I'm sure I do not know."

  "Perhaps it is the words. They have an echo."

  He looked directly at her. "Possibly." She could see the cave entrance and a few stars through his silhouette. "Keep in mind, whatever happens, you are one of a select company. A proud band of brothers. And sisters. You will never be alone."

  As she watched, he faded until only the glow of the cigar remained. "It is your own true self you seek."

  "You presume a great deal."

  "I know you, Chaka." Everything was gone now. Except the voice. "I know who you are. And you are about to learn."

  "Was it his first or last name?" asked Quait, as they saddled the horses.

  "Now that you mention it, I really don't know." She frowned. "I'm not sure whether he was real or not. He left no prints. No marks."

  Quait looked toward the rising sun. The sky was clear. "That's the way of it in these places. Some of it's illusion; some of it's something else. But I wish you'd woke me."

  "So do I." She climbed up and patted Brak's shoulder. "He said the sea is only forty miles."

  Warm spring air flowed over them. "You want to go on?"

  "Quait, you ever hear of Neptune?"

  He shook his head.

  "Maybe," she said, "we can try that next."

  When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

  by Cory Doctorow

  Cory Doctorow is the author of the novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Forthcoming are Little Brother and a novel with the working title Themepunks. His short fiction, which has appeared in a variety of magazines—from Asimov's Science Fiction to Salon.com—has been collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. He is a three-time winner of the Locus Award, a winner of the Canadian Starburst Award, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and in 2000, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Doctorow is also the co-editor of Boing Boing, an online "directory of wonderful things."

  "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" first appeared in the online magazine Jim Baen's Universe, and won the 2007 Locus Award for best novelette. In this story, sysadmins—computer systems administrators—huddle in their network operations centers, after a series of disasters ends civilization. The Internet was supposedly designed to withstand a nuclear blast; in this story, Doctorow—a former sysadmin himself—asks: If the Internet did survive the apocalypse, what would the surviving techs do after the world ended?

  When Felix's special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, "Why didn't you turn that fucking thing off before bed?"

  "Because I'm on call," he said.

  "You're not a fucking doctor," she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed's edge, pulling on the pants he'd left on the floor before turning in. "You're a goddamned systems administrator."

  "It's my job," he said.

  "They work you like a government mule," she said. "You know I'm right. For Christ's sake, you're a father now, you can't go running off in the middle of the night every time someone's porn supply goes down. Don't answer that phone."

  He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

  "Main routers not responding. BGP not responding." The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn't care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

  "Maybe I can fix it from here," he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.

  Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. "In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here." This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn't make a fuss, so she didn't remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—AKA Felix's Law.

  Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn't been able to fix it from home. The independent routers' netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who'd stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.

  His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.

  "Hi," he said.

  "Don't cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice."

  He smiled involuntarily. "Check, no cringing."

  "I love you, Felix," she said.

  "I'm totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed."

  "2.0's awake," she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, The Gold Master just shipped! They'd
started calling him 2.0 before he'd finished his first cry. "This little bastard was born to suck tit."

  "I'm sorry I woke you," he said. He was almost at the data-center. No traffic at 2 a.m. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn't want to lose Kelly's call underground.

  "It's not waking me," she said. "You've been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You've paid your dues."

  "I don't like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn't do," he said.

  "You've done it," she said. "Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night."

  "Kelly—"

  "I'm over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams."

  "OK," he said.

  "Simple as that?"

  "Exactly. Simple as that. Can't have you having bad dreams, and I've paid my dues. From now on, I'm only going on night call to cover holidays."

  She laughed. "Sysadmins don't take holidays."

  "This one will," he said. "Promise."

  "You're wonderful," she said. "Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe."

  "That's my boy," he said.

  "Oh that he is," she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.

  He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock's load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

  It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.

  Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

  "Felix." It was Van, who wasn't on call that night.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked. "No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow."

  "What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down—spared you the trip."

  Felix's own server—a box he shared with five other friends—was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

  "What's the story?"

  "Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too—like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there's an email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a trojan."

  "Jesus."

  "Yeah." Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long ponytail, bobbing Adam's apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

  Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They'd known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he'd ever taken, with time and date.

  "Not even PEBKAC this time," Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category—if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren't a problem with the lusers—they were the fault of incompetent engineers.

  "No, it's Microsoft's fault," Felix said. "Any time I'm at work at 2 a.m., it's either PEBKAC or Microsloth."

  They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage—like guards in a Minuteman silo. Ninety-five percent of the long-distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.

  Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes—putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10 a.m., and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van's long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each 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 l
ine.

  "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 cars than usual?