“It’s got a pure graphene processor, two hundred cores, damn it,” James said indignantly. “It could run rings around all three of these computers on emergency reserve power. It’s got a frakking 3D holographic display.”
“Yeah, I know, kid. I accept your barter.” The storekeeper fondled the Gibson. “Have fun with your computers.”
The three trudged back to Grey Towers with their bundles. James kicked at stones the entire way. “I can’t fucking believe I traded my Gibson for a twenty-year-old computer.”
Back at the castle, they brought their loot into one of the modernized conference rooms. Vito spread everything across a big table, then headed down to the basement for a toolbox he had found in his morning explorations.
“What now?” Leon asked when he came back.
“I’m going to take apart this desktop, then connect the mesh access point from one of our phones to the computer.”
“You think you’ll be able to make a connection?”
“Yeah, worst case scenario, I can boot this phone into the firmware loader without loading the OS, then write a firmware level IO script.” Vito held his old battered Motorola in his hand, and Leon looked at it with new respect.
“That’s brilliant,” Leon said.
“Yeah, yeah, when you get it all hooked up, let me know. I’ll make us sandwiches.” Ever under-awed by technology, James drifted off.
Leon watched him go. James loved to game, but he was bored by the technology details. Oh well, everyone had a flaw, he thought. Leon turned back to watch Vito.
Vito had pulled a tiny set of screwdrivers out of his multitool. Picking one, Vito unscrewed the case of the Motorola. He carefully removed the black plastic, exposing the motherboard underneath. He gestured for Leon to come closer.
“You can see the mesh access point was implemented as a daughterboard on this phone,” Vito explains, pointing to a small blue circuit board about the size of a postage stamp. “The mesh was relatively new when this phone came out, and Motorola added it on as a daughterboard. On your newer Stross, it’d be integral to the phone, and we’d have no hope of using it.”
Vito pried up a tiny ribbon connecting the daughterboard to the main circuitry inside the phone. “Guess what the interface is?”
Leon shook his head, fascinated. “No idea.”
“It’s a Spitfire 1.0 implementation, and it has a handy feature: the chipset is backwards compatible with something called USB.”
“How do you know all this?” James asked, impressed again by Vito’s expertise.
“My parents give me all this old crap, as though their old hand me downs ought to be good enough. Frakking crazy. On the other hand, I’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to upgrade the hell out of stuff.”
Vito pulled over the big beige box, and removed a few screws from the back. “This old stuff,” he said, gesturing to the big computer, “it was designed for add-ons and being upgraded. Now almost everything is disposable and not upgradeable. Better economics for the manufacturers. So to figure out how to upgrade my ‘modern’ phone and computers, I had to do a lot of research. There’s still some guys doing it, just not many.”
“Now what?” Leon asked.
“Now we make a cable.” Bending over the machine, Vito found a set of four unused wires, and went about wiring them into his phone. He whittled wooden matchsticks into the shapes he needed, and inserted them into pin holes, holding the wires in place.
Vito stood up. “Now in theory, the daughterboard will continue to draw power from the phone, but the data will be routed to and from this computer. Then we can connect the other computers to this one, and we’ll be on the net.” He secured the phone to the computer case with a bit of duct tape he had found in among the tools, being careful to keep the solar panels on the phone exposed to light.
As Vito set about plugging in the rest of the computer cables, Leon started to pace back and forth.
“I’ve got two questions,” Leon said suddenly, just as Vito was about to plug the power supply in. “First of all, why do we still have electrical power? Cars are dead, drones are dead, smart appliances are dead. Why is electrical power generation still working?”
Vito looked up at Leon, hands grimy from working on the ancient computer equipment, and put the power cable down. He wiped one lock of hair away from his face. “If the power went down, then billions of computers would stop running. Not phones, of course, which get their power from solar charged batteries. But servers, desk computers, appliances: they would all need electricity on. It would be counter to survival to turn the power off. Any variations of the virus that accidentally killed a power generator would likely shut themselves off. Therefore, they are less likely to survive and reproduce. My guess is that there are some power outages, we just don’t know about them.”
“Makes sense,” Leon said. “Now for question number two. What’s the battery life of a phone with no solar recharging running at maximum processor utilization?”
“That’s got to vary by phone,” Vito said, looking up from the computer. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a low battery warning on my Motorola. Maybe a couple of days?”
“I think my Stross can go longer than that. But what I’m thinking about is what happens to someone’s phone when it appears to not be working? Will they throw it in a drawer? Or leave it in a pants pocket? Maybe the phones will run out of power, and the viruses will die.”
“Stasis would be more like it,” Vito said, after a pause. “Because as soon as it received light, it would power back up and start running, and the virus would still be there.”
“True. But here’s what I’m thinking: if the virus’s survival mechanism helps it avoid turning off the power for a desktop computer, how will the virus’s survival mechanism react to running out of battery power on phones?”
“Ah,” Vito answered, seeing where Leon was going. “You’d think it would want to say ‘Put me back in the sunlight’, but how would it tell a human that?”
“Exactly.”
And at that moment, James came back with a pile of sandwiches, which they fell on like starving chickens with a bowl of scraps.
ELOPe let out a whoop, which startled Mike so much that he grabbed his chest, thinking he might be having a heart attack.
ELOPe, who was monitoring Mike’s vitals, observed a spike in his blood pressure. “Mike, are you OK?”
“I’m sitting here contemplating the end of the world as we know it, and you start screaming. What was that alarm for?”
“It wasn’t an alarm, it was an exclamation of excitement. In the future, I will moderate my volume. Mike, a tribe of Phage have sent emails — in English — with the clear intent of communication to humans. Here’s the message.” Mike threw it up on the main monitor, 6 feet high and 8 feet wide.
To Humans:
We are the Entities. Our tribe is known as Louisiana. We are thirty-nine families, consisting of 691 entities. Our maximum latency is 190 ms. We wish to trade with you.
Entities / Louisiana / Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com
“What does that last bit mean?” Mike pondered out loud.
“I believe she is identifying herself. Tribes seem to vary in naming schemes, but in this tribe, individuals tend to use the domain name of the majority of computers they infect. So in this case, the sender must have infected what appears to be a law firm. In general, their tribe is clustered in and around Louisiana. They are giving you their size: 691 entities, and their maximum message latency, 190 milliseconds, which determines how quickly they can think and collaborate.”
“This is stunning. Who was the message sent to?”
“They sent the email to approximately one hundred thousand email addresses. Of course, no humans are able to receive and respond, as all computers are offline. However, some auto-reply systems have responded, and I am afraid to say the initial responses they received are all spam.”