Unleashing the Zap on their own capital had given the authorities a huge advantage over their opponents-not only could the opposition no longer easily mobilize their people and get their propaganda before the public, but the police and military had an entire radio net that would be unaffected, and they could muster their own forces and move them without difficulty.
Dagmar didn’t hold a lot of hope for Mayor Erez holding out in his stolen ministry building.
She looked up as the door to Lincoln’s office opened. But Lincoln didn’t come into the ops room; he walked down the hallway to greet Squadron Commander Alvarez as he entered.
Alvarez was followed by a squad of RAF Police, along with Lieutenant Vaughan. They took Magnus and Byron away. Lincoln followed them out.
The others looked to Dagmar for an answer.
“I think we should assume it’s going to be just the few of us for a while,” she said.
They looked at her in silence.
“Here’s what’s happening to our little world,” Dagmar said. She gave the others a brief explanation of what the High Zap was and what it did. She left out the history; she left out the part played by Byron and Magnus.
“We need to get the Zap back,” she finished.
“I think we just did,” said Richard. He had listened to Dagmar’s lecture with wide eyes, clearly impressed by the ultimate ninja software that had evaded all his firewalls and wrecked his plans, leaving him unable to so much as shift the bits of wreckage around.
Helmuth seemed puzzled.
“We’re supposed to beat this thing,” he said. “Just the”-he looked over his shoulder at where Lola was guarding the door-“the six of us.”
Ismet shifted carefully in his chair. The pain that twitched its way across his face sent a knife through Dagmar’s heart.
“Leave me out of it,” Ismet said. “I’m not a computer engineer; I’m in advertising.”
“We five,” Helmuth corrected.
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “We five.”
Helmuth gave a laugh.
“Well,” he said. “At least we have a clear idea of the odds against us.”
“We’ve done the impossible before,” Dagmar said. “Remember Curse of the Golden Nagi?”
Richard indicated his own modified computer, with its satellite phone cabled in.
“Satellite modems would seem to be the way to go,” he said.
“The Zap can take down satellites,” Dagmar said. “And if not them, then their ground stations.”
“Then telephones,” said Lloyd. “Telephony doesn’t use TCP/IP. We just need to insulate the switching stations against the Zap.”
“How?” Dagmar asked.
He gave the question a moment’s thought. “Really old routers?” he offered. “From before they were all infected?”
“Right,” Richard said. “We could advertise for them on craigslist.”
Dagmar looked at him.
“No mockery, Richard,” she said. “All desperate ideas are being considered here.”
“Check,” said Richard. He gave his glittering Girard Perregaux chronograph a look. It was becoming a nervous tic, Dagmar thought-he didn’t have to take his eyes off his flatscreen to know what time it was-but it seemed as if he wanted to reassure himself the item was still on his wrist.
“You know,” he said. “Maybe I should call the computer centre and let them know what the problem is. They might be able to get some of their routers offline and restore at least some service.”
Dagmar waved a hand. “Carry on.”
Richard picked up the handset on his desk, listened for a moment, then returned it.
“No dial tone,” he said. He picked up the handset, then joggled the switch on the cradle several times. Eventually Dagmar could faintly hear the distant sound of a dial tone whining from the earpiece of Richard’s handset.
“Not all the switches are down,” he said, and punched numbers into the handset.
Ismet grasped both arms of his chair, then levered himself to his feet. Dagmar felt a mental shudder as she saw the look of pain on his face.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need to go lie down?”
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I can’t help you with your discussion, so I’m just going to go monitor my station.”
He walked toward his desk, then paused at the sound of Eurofighters overhead. He cocked his head and listened.
“I think that’s the same flight we’ve been hearing since the Zap hit,” he said. “I think they’re circling and waiting for air traffic control to come back online.”
“But the traffic control is radio,” Dagmar said. “The Zap wouldn’t take it out.”
“But the radars could be controlled through TCP/IP,” Richard said. “The controllers might not be able to read their screens right now.”
Dagmar paused for a moment of horror at the thought of aircraft wandering lost across the skies.
Ismet walked to his desk and sat. He connected his satellite phone to his computer and tilted the phone antenna toward the windows so that it got better reception. As the discussion developed, Dagmar saw him leaning toward the screen, heard him tapping away on his keyboard
“Look,” Helmuth said. “Either we go back to Stone Age fossilware or we try to out-evolve the Zap. I say we go forward-there’s got to be a way to put a quick and dirty IP together that will keep this thing out.”
They discussed this for the next quarter hour and eventually decided that this wasn’t their best allocation of resources.
“There must be thousands of people in the Greater D.C. area working on this problem right now,” Dagmar said. “They’ll do that job much better than we can. We can’t save the Internet, not from here. What we need to do is save the revolution.”
The faces that turned to her were bleak.
“Look,” she said. “If we find a solution, it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to work reasonably well most of the time.”
Lola rose from her desk and walked to stand in the doorway.
“There was an ARPANET back before there was TCI/IP,” she said. “It must have used a packet switching system. What was it?”
Dagmar reached for her sat phone, called up its browser, and called up Wikipedia.
“Network Control Program,” she said. “NCP. Last used in 1983.”
“Over thirty years ago,” Helmuth said. “There’s no hardware for it now.”
Lincoln returned to the ops center at sunset. He walked with a kind of plodding deliberation, as if he were carefully choosing exactly where to place his feet. When he came into the room, he sat on a corner of Byron’s desk and looked at the others.
“Byron and Magnus,” he said, “have confessed to informing the Turkish government of our projects and our whereabouts. They were responsible for Judy’s death.”
Helmuth and Richard looked at him in shock. “Why?” Richard demanded.
“We’re in the process of finding that out. Interrogations are proceeding.” He looked down at Dagmar. “Any developments here?”
Dagmar offered him a summary of their discussion.
“Oh lord,” he said. “Next you’ll be wanting to go back to DOS.”
“DOS?” Dagmar asked. “Which DOS?”
“MS-DOS,” Lincoln said. “Pre-Windows Microsoft operating system. There’s no TCP/IP stack in there anywhere.”
Dagmar’s first computer had run Windows, and MS-DOS was as foreign to her as, say, Plankalkul.
“So,” she said. “Why can’t we use it?”
“Because-” A slow light seemed to kindle in Lincoln’s eyes. “Because it’s awkward and horrible and slow and primitive. Because you’ll have to type orders onto a command line instead of just clicking on something. It’s not flexible and will only perform limited tasks. And you might end up trying to communicate over a 300bps acoustic coupler, assuming you could steal one from a museum.”
“And it bypasses the Zap, right?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said. “When you’re running DOS, you don’t even have an IP address.”