CyberStorm Part 24

"Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next," said Romales, disappearing into the crowd.

I watched him go, and a sinking feeling settled into my hungry stomach.

"You okay?"

It was Vince. The crowd around us was gone. He was finished with his mesh network lessons.

"Not really."

Tony heard what Romales had said as well, and I could see him gripping the .38 in his pocket. Vince watched the two of us silently for a moment.

"Just before that guy attacked the girl, you were asking me a question, if I had any incoming messages from somewhere?"

I laughed. "Ah, yes."

"What was it you wanted to know?"

"Did anyone e-mail you saying they had some weed for us on the way back?"

"Yep, I had two texts."

"Good, because I could use a joint about now."

Day 11 January 2.

"TWO DAYS. MAYBE three."

"Only two days?"

Chuck nodded.

"And Ellarose can't eat just anything," added Susie, cradling her baby in her arms. "We've barely gotten her off formula." She sighed and looked down. "Not that we had much choice."

I was going to mention breast-feeding, but it felt too awkward. Anyway, the calories would just be coming from Susie, and she was thin to begin with.

Lauren noticed things missing yesterday when we were out and she'd gone downstairs to help Pam with the burn victims. We were in Chuck and Susie's place doing an inventory now, sitting on their couch in the middle of their main room. Luke was running around with Chuck's night-vision goggles on, squeaking and pointing at us.

"Careful with those, Luke," I said, gently taking them away from him.

He tried to grab them back, so I rummaged around in the bag next to the couch for something else. Picking up a cardboard tube, I gave it to him, and he immediately stuck it in his mouth.

We had one of the cell phones turned on as a radio using an app Vince had found. While yesterday Manhattan had been down to two official radio stations still transmitting, we'd discovered that dozens of local stations had popped up, "pirate" ham radio stations that were being operated by local citizens, each broadcasting over a radius of a few blocks.

"The entire country is in a shambles," ranted the pirate radio announcer we were tuned into, JikeMike, in the background. "I say it ain't just the Chinese, it's those G.o.dd.a.m.n Russkies-"

Chuck looked at me, bemused.

"You know you just gave your son a flare, right?"

"Come on, Mike, be more careful!" exclaimed Lauren, reaching past me to grab it from Luke.

He shrieked his displeasure, but then he saw Tony in the hallway and ran off in his unstable gait toward him. Lauren looked at me and shook her head.

"Sorry," I mumbled, still slightly in shock at what Chuck was telling me. I hadn't really accepted that this could last, a part of me convinced that the power would come on at any moment and end the survival game we were playing. "So we only have two days of food left?"

"-round all of 'em up in the city, Iranians, Russkies, Chinese-h.e.l.l, if they got yellow skin or wear towels on their heads we should just stick 'em in a deep, dark hole until the lights come back on-"

"Could we turn that off?" asked Susie, exasperated.

Chuck reached down to the phone on the coffee table, swiping it, and it went silent.

"About two days if we keep sharing out food with everyone on our floor, going the way we've been going," continued Chuck.

"We got"-he looked toward the ceiling, counting mentally-"thirty-eight people up here now, plus four on the ground floor in the infirmary. We can't keep sharing what we have. People have been stealing from us. This isn't going to be over in a day or two or three, no matter what they're saying."

The official government radio station was still broadcasting that the New York Power Authority would have power back up to Con Edison and lower Manhattan in the next day, but n.o.body believed them anymore.

In the first real news of events outside of New York, we heard that a ma.s.sive fire had razed the South Boston suburbs, and Philly, Baltimore, and Hartford were nearly as bad. New York was the only one without water, though, at least so far. No news of Washington, and some sketchy reports saying that Europe was in a shambles as well, with the internet still down.

Some kind of cyberattack on infrastructure had been confirmed as the root cause of the system failures, but as yet, n.o.body could say with any certainty where the attacks had come from. Command and control servers were located all over the world, most of them within the US itself, and they were shutting them down one by one.

But a common thread pulled through it all, pointing toward China.

"Something isn't right," continued Chuck. "When Paul and those guys got in here that time, there were no keys missing from the front-Tony went and checked. Somebody must have let them in."

The US military was still jacked up on DEFCON 2, a condition signalling the razor edge of imminent attack, but attack from where and by whom was an open question. They continued searching for the unknown targets that had breached US airs.p.a.ce just before the first string of major power failures. Pirate radio stations were buzzing with speculation that towns all over the Midwest had been invaded like a cyber-Red Dawn.

The news was interesting, but it had become increasingly irrelevant to our immediate situation.

"So what are we going to do?"

"We need to start digging in for the long haul. No more trying to save the world." Chuck held up his hand, fending off an objection from Susie. "We need to save ourselves."

"We can't just take everything for ourselves. We'd start a war in our own building."

"I'm not suggesting that. I think we should divide up what we have, and explain to people that they're on their own from here on out. With that stuff we stashed outside, we should be okay."

"a.s.suming we can find it," I replied.

It was a clever idea at the time, but to balance our survival on it seemed incredibly risky.

"So let's go outside and see if we can recover it, and we cannot share it or tell anyone else."

"This isn't right," said Susie, but with less conviction this time.

"This is going to get ugly," said Chuck. "It's already ugly, and so far we've been soft. We can't afford that anymore."

He looked at me.

"Get Vince to send out a message for a town hall meeting."

"When?"

"End of the day, when the sun goes down."

Reaching down with one finger, he swiped the radio back on.

"-I think we're not getting any news from Washington and Los Angeles because they've been wiped out by biological attack, a new form of that bird flu. I ain't leaving New York, no G.o.dd.a.m.n way, and if anyone comes to my door I got my shotgun-"

Vince had set up his control center at the end of our hallway, between the door to my place and Chuck and Susie's. Two cell phones were attached to the back of a laptop via USB cables.

"They're how I connect to our mesh network," he explained. "I've gone out into neighboring buildings, and we have people nearby maintaining cell phones active on the network at fixed locations."

He pointed to a pad of paper with scribbled notes and diagrams.

"Usually at the third floors of buildings on the corners of blocks, and every hundred yards or so. Sort of like our own cell towers. Those give us at least some fixed points in the network nearby, but the rest is completely dynamic."

I'd asked him to explain what he was doing, but it'd been a long time since my engineering cla.s.ses.

"It's not a 'hub and spoke' network like you're used to, but point-to-point, and uses reactive instead of proactive routing."

It was beyond me. "How do people know how to use it?"

"It works as a transparent proxy at the bottom of the network stack," he explained, laughing as he looked at my face. "It's totally transparent to the user. They just use their cell phone like normal, except they need to add a new 'mesh address' for people in their contact list."

"How many people connected so far?"

"Hard to say exactly, but more than a thousand already."

Vince had created a "mesh 911" text address, routing it into the cell phones of Sergeant Williams' group. It was getting dozens of calls an hour.

"And people are sending you pictures?"

We were asking everyone on the meshnet to send images of people who were hurt or dead, and of crimes being committed, along with notes, details, anything they could think of. It was all being stored on the hard drive of Vince's laptop.

"Yeah," he replied, "dozens already. I'm excited it's working, but the pictures..."

He hung his head.

"Maybe you should stop looking at them."

He sighed. "It's hard not to."

I put a hand on his shoulder.

Vince had been busy. Another thing he'd created was a mesh repository where people could share useful tips, tricks, survival techniques for cold weather, and useful cell phone apps like the emergency radio, flashlight, compa.s.s and map for NYC, burn treatments, and first aid. The first emergency survival tip was posted by Vince himself-how to distill marijuana into a liquid painkiller.

"You're doing a lot of good, Vince, saving lives. There's nothing more you can do."

"Maybe we could have avoided all this, if we'd been able to see the future."

"We can't see the future, Vince."

He looked at me, deadly serious. "One day, I'm going to change that."

I paused, not sure what to say.

"Can you send a text out to everyone who's staying on our floor, ask them to be here for a meeting at sunset?"

"About what?"

I took a deep breath and looked down the hallway. Tony was playing with Luke, some kind of hide-and-seek game.

"Just tell them to come. We need to talk."

"None of us thought it was going to last this long," explained Chuck to everyone in the hallway. "We'll keep sharing the electricity and heating and tools, but you're going to have to take more responsibility for yourselves."

"And that means?" asked Rory.

I counted thirty-three people, all crammed together in the hallway. Despite our best efforts, it was getting dirty. There were stains on the piles of blankets and sheets covering the furniture. n.o.body had showered in a week or more, and most of them had hardly changed clothes in the same length of time.

The dank smell of sweat permeated the air. The latrine area on the fifth floor had become a mess already, and the reek of it seemed to come through the walls and floors. The carpet was soaked from hauling up all the snow for melting in the pots and barrels in the small elevator hallway, and this dampness had seeped into the furniture and cushions. Mold was creeping along the baseboards.

"What we're trying to say is that you're going to have to start finding your own food," I said, inspecting the dirt caked under my fingernails. "We can't just keep sharing what supplies we have."

What supplies Chuck had was more accurate, and everyone in the hallway understood the line that was being drawn in the sand. Those that Chuck and Susie were going to share with-and those that they weren't.

"So every man for himself? Is that what you're saying?" asked Richard.

He'd taken in several fire refugees and was still housing the Chinese family. I'd started to develop a grudging respect for him.

"No, we still need to share duties for guarding the apartment, for water and cleaning, but for food we're going to need to begin rationing what we have here."

I pointed to the food we'd piled on the coffee table.

"We've divided up what we could share. Add this together with what you have. You're going to need to start going to the emergency food lines."

In the afternoon, before this meeting, Chuck and I had slipped out and tried my treasure hunt app to recover some of the food supplies we'd hidden. It had worked perfectly. We'd dug up three bags on the first try.