The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [28]
Chris snorted in disbelief, but Sandra and Mikey lunged for the right spot, which I quickly vacated. Reluctantly Chris stayed close enough to see if it would really happen.
Later, Warren and I listened to them giggling and playing overhead. "Remember?" I asked. "You gave in and said okay to one."
There was a thump and silence and we both tensed, then renewed giggling floated down, and we relaxed. My legs were cramping from the position we were in, but I didn't tell him. I closed my eyes and listened to the laughing children.
WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH
Cory Doctorow
Canadian-born Cory Doctorow burst on the scene in 1999 (though he had been bubbling under for some while) winning the Campbell Memorial Award in 2000 as the Best New Writer in the SF field, almost solely on the strength of one story, "Craphound". He has gone on to cement his position as one of the most popular writers of the new millennium with his novels, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(2003), Eastern Standard Tribe
(2004), Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) and Little Brother (2008). Selections of his short fiction will be found inA Place So Foreign (2003) and Overclocked (2007), and there's much more at his website: craphound.com.
His stories bubble with a zest and energy as you'll find in the following, which won the Locus Poll as the most popular short fiction of 2006. It brings us into the realm of terrorism, technology and the fate of the Earth.
* * *
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 router's 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 10,000 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,"