Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [223]
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 Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in Canada.
Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much food—it was all gone. He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message.
Runaway processes on Solaris TK
Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MS CE but I’m the only one awake here and four of the DSLAMS just went down. Looks like there’s some custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how much to bill our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do to get this goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it’s not as if any of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d ask the guy who wrote this code, but he’s pretty much dead as far as anyone can work out.
He reloaded. There was a response. It was short, authoritative, and helpful — just the sort of thing you almost never saw in a high-caliber newsgroup when a noob posted a dumb question. The apocalypse had awoken the spirit of patient helpfulness in the world’s sysop community.
Van shoulder-surfed him. “Holy shit, who knew he had it in him?”
He looked at the message again. It was from Will Sario.
He dropped into his chat window.
sario i thought you wanted the network dead why are you helping msces fix their boxen?
[sheepish grin] Gee Mr PM, maybe I just can’t bear to watch a computer suffer at the hands of