So a weapon, ostensibly designed to destroy everything, and clearly meant to flourish in cities, crammed to their gills with millions upon millions of Internet-connected devices, from toys and cell phones and spex and earbuds to streetlights and CCTV cameras and traffic sensors and driverless cars. It was a weapon designed to take advantage of cities’ overhyped, unthinking, unquestioning desire to be “smart,” to be “always on,” to be “connected.” It was designed to be the consequence of untamed, badly planned, free-market-fueled, oversaturated urban networking, and to rip through it like a dirty bomb. Rush had seen claims that it had been connected to a steady increase in technological failures over the last few months: a video games industry conference in Los Angeles that had to be abandoned and had quickly dissolved into spoiled man-children rioting; an automated container terminal in Shanghai that shut itself down for nearly a week and caused the collapse of at least two shipping companies; and countless other blackouts and disruptive infrastructure failures. He’d also seen it connected to protests—the Times Square blackout being just the latest, after an uprising of migrant workers in Singapore, and the takeover of a brand-new, built-from-scratch, concept-art-perfect smart city by an army of protesters from the slums of Mumbai. He’d even stumbled across a claim of intent, a manifesto of sorts, pasted in plain text and flanked by cartoon ASCII art, by some barely infamous hacktivist group screaming for revolution.
It’s exciting to Rush, he can’t deny it. He can still feel the cold air on his face, the pinpricks of goose bumps from that night in Times Square when the lights had gone out, the excitement and glee as he’d held Scott’s hands as they’d drifted away through the exuberant crowds. But it scares him too, not just because of its raw power, but also hints he’d seen in the fragments of code he’d found, hints that it wasn’t aimed just at personal or even city-level devices but at larger infrastructure. That while it weaves its way through networks it seems to be testing connections, looking for larger, deeper prey: network routers, Tier 1 connections, DNS servers, data centers. It is looking, hunting for the Internet itself.
His computer chimes softly. The Flex build has finished compiling. He’ll push it out to Croft users later today, he thinks. As if on cue, Scott stirs in the chat window, raising himself on one elbow, and for a split second Rush thinks the chime must have woken him, before realizing that he has the sound muted anyway. He unmutes.
“Hey,” he says softly.
“Oh, hey, boo.” Scott stretches, smiles. Glimpses of milky white flesh under bedsheets. “How you doing this morning?”
“I’m good. Keeping busy.”
“Waiting for me to wake up, you mean?” That smile, that near smirk. That playful mocking that used to wound Rush so deeply, until he realized that it was genuine affection, tenderness. A signaling that what they do together is special, more than weird. He blushes.
“You sleep well?”
“You tell me.” The smirk again. He throws back the covers, naked except for his briefs. Pulls himself upright, sits on the edge of the bed. Stretches, rubs one eye. “Gimme a sec. I’m going to hit the bathroom and get some coffee on, then I’ll grab my spex. Okay?”
“Of course, baby. Take your time.”
Scott blows him a kiss, and then disappears from the tablet camera’s view. Rush turns back to his other windows, his forum posts and social-media trails full of rumor and speculation.
Within a few minutes Scott is back, still naked from the waist up, peering at him through the pixelated blur of a lo-fi video connection. “Huh. That’s weird.”
“What’s up?”
“My spex are dead. They didn’t charge overnight. And the clock on the microwave is just flashing zeroes. I think we had a power outage.”
“Really? You got power now?”
Scott flicks on a bedside lamp, filling the tablet’s feed with oversaturated yellow noise. Flicks it off again. “Seems like it.”
“The connection didn’t seem to drop out last night.”
“Nah, well. This tablet is plugged in pretty much always so it’s usually got a lot of charge, and it falls back onto LTE if the Wi-Fi goes down, I think.” He scratches his chest, yawns again. “I wonder if it was just the building or what…”
“Hang on, let me look.” Rush pulls up some news feeds, Google. Starts to check his usual sources.
“Baby, what’s the time?”
“Hang on. Huh. Looks like a big outage. Most of Brooklyn, for about four hours. Same in Queens and Long Island. And… and Chicago. Atlanta. Jesus. All at exactly the same time.” Goose bumps on his arms.
“Rush.” Impatient urgency creeps into Scott’s voice. “What’s the time?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s about quarter past two.”
“What?”
“Sorry. I mean it’s just gone nine fifteen your time.”
“What? FUCK! FUCK!” Scott seems to explode into a flurry of panicked activity. “My fucking alarm didn’t go off! I’ve got a fucking meeting in Chelsea at ten!”
“Oh shit, I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, you fucking did, it’s like all I’ve talked about for the last week.” Scott keeps disappearing and reappearing on the screen, running around, pulling on clothes. “I’m meeting that gallery owner bitch. Fuck!”
“Shit, I’m sorry—” Flash of awkward guilt.
“Look, I gotta go.” Scott has a jacket on, faded blue denim. He’s wrapping a gray cotton scarf loosely around his neck. “How d’I look?”
“Great. As always. I—”
“Thanks, boo. I’ll catch you later.”
“Okay. We… we can talk while you’re on the way?”
“How? My fucking spex are dead. And I’m going to be out all day.” Scott grabs a messenger bag off a chair, slings it over his shoulder. “I mean, maybe if I can get some charge somewhere. But otherwise it’ll be tonight.”
“Okay. Hopefully I’ll be up, I guess. It’s just—”
“What?”
“It’s just I wanted to… tell you about something—”
“What? Can’t it wait?”
“I… sure. It can wait.”
“Okay. Boo, I gotta go. I’ll see you later. Kiss.” He leans over and thumbs off the tablet and is gone.
“Okay,” Rush says to a black chat screen. “Bye.”
He sits there for a minute, in silence.
It’s the first time they’ve been forcibly disconnected like this, and it’s jarring. Like they’ve been ripped apart, like he’s lost control. Suddenly the frailty of their relationship feels exposed, like it’s utterly reliant on this vast global infrastructure that he doesn’t own or control, that’s too complex for any one person to understand, that could break or disappear without even a second’s notice. He could lose him completely, just at the flick of a switch, at the typing of a command.
Panic starts to seep in at the thought. What if that was it? What if that was the last time they talked? What if last night’s blackouts in NYC were just a test run for something bigger, scheduled for this morning? What if the power goes off again and never comes back on? What if the Internet fails on Scott’s journey to Chelsea, and it all comes crashing down, severing connections and wiping the servers? What if civilization starts to crumble while Scott rides the Q train and that’s the last he ever sees of him, him running out the door late for a meeting, mildly annoyed at Rush’s bullshit?
He takes a deep breath. Finds the newly compiled Flex build and zips it up.
FLEX OS. VERSION 4.027.zip
He opens up a secure e-mail window and attaches the file. Starts to type.
Hey boo,
Hope your meeting goes okay. Sorry if I made you late.