“Fucking hell,” Rush hears himself say, out loud.
Something flips in the pit of his stomach.
He slips his spex back on, but it’s still all just glitch in that space, the only motion a few flickering pixels amid the distorted interface, stretched and blurred like it’s been smeared, greasily, across the plastic lenses.
He takes them off, looks around again, finds himself laughing. Goose bumps ripple across his arms. He’d seen this coming: his obsessive poring over news speculation and social media around recent network outages and massive denial-of-service attacks meant he’d been expecting something to hit locally any day. But this is different, he can feel it—see it—just by looking around. This isn’t a targeted attack on some corporate brand or platform, or even a strike against essential infrastructure—this is an attack on everything, a switch-flick, a purposeful turning off. It’s like the Croft has exploded out of its boundaries and absorbed everything, a growing bubble that has purged the surrounding city of data and pushed back the insidious, invading fingers of the network.
It’s exciting. Like that night in Times Square, nearly two months ago now, when the lights went out and the screens died, and for a few long minutes everyone cheered in the dark, celebrating being free of surveillance and the pressure to be always connected. It takes him right back there, standing in the dark in that disconnected crowd, scarf wrapped around his face, fighting a wave of panic and euphoria, until Scott grabbed his hand and pulled him close.
Except Scott can’t grab his hand now.
Because Scott isn’t here.
Scott is three thousand miles away.
And the network that keeps him close just vanished.
As he crosses the digital perimeter into the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft his spex bleep into life again, a window flashing across his vision asking if he wants to install the Flex software needed to join the MESH network. Good. It was always meant to work like this; he’d built it from Cuban code that resurrected and repurposed devices that had been remotely bricked by governments or corporations. It’s rewarding, vindicating, to see it working in a real-world scenario. Even if the worm or virus that seemed to be taking everything down carried on spreading, perhaps the Croft’s network could stay up.
Up in their server room in the 5102 he thumbs on monitors and drops himself down in front of the computers. Although connected to the Internet outside the Croft by wired connection, they still seem to be running fine; their custom OS is built on the same code that runs the spex network, and seems to be resilient to attacks for now. Plus he’s poured years of work into security systems to protect them from exactly this. They’re getting a hammering, though—just glancing at his diagnostics software he can see unprecedented levels of network traffic trying to break in, and he doesn’t need to check IP or MAC addresses to know where it’s coming from. Spex, self-driving cars, smart lightbulbs, toys, fridges, security cameras—it’s coming from everywhere, everything and anything with a connection is pumping data into the network, flooding it. It’s not being targeted at the Croft, either, it’s being targeted at everything. He’s seen this before, in the countless analyses he’s read of all the major outages over the last few weeks, starting with Times Square: something is spreading, hijacking any and all Internet-connected devices it finds, and as it does, it floods the network with data—a distributed-denial-of-service attack without a specified target, apparently aimed at bringing the whole connected world to its knees.
Rush finds himself paralyzed at first, unable to react apart from staring at the screens. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time, the kind of massive disruption he’d dreamed of for years, a victory for everything they believed in, the final loosening of the steel grip in which corporate capitalism and authoritarian governments have held the Internet for decades.
And yet fear and anxiety crush his celebrations. Not just fear of what comes next, but fear of having to accept a loss he hasn’t prepared for, a situation his custom software can’t counter.
All he can think of is Scott. Fucking Scott. Scott, who’s not here, who’s three thousand miles away. Scott, whom he’s not seen in the flesh for nearly two months. Scott, who was yelling at him the last time they spoke.
Skype, Hangouts, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, Gmail. Every channel he tries to open fails to connect, hangs, leaves him staring at pointless spinning disks and error messages. Somewhere, behind his screens, out past the protective barriers of the Croft, the Internet is melting, and the distance between Scott and him grows ever farther.
He stands up, screams silently to himself, paces the room, takes breaths. Knows what he must do. Sits down at the computer again.
The British Airways website is down, the United one failing to load anything past the logo. The Delta site seems to be working fine, though. With frantic clicks he grabs the first seat he can, tomorrow night, horrifically overpriced, Heathrow to Newark. No idea how he’ll get to the fucking airport, but that can wait for now.
He enters his credit card details, address, as if on autopilot. It wants his passport number, so he has to dig in a nearby drawer to uncover the tattered, creased leather booklet. He taps it in. Hits SUBMIT.
Waits.
His conscience squirms at the back of his skull. Running out on the Croft now might seem harsh, but it’ll survive. College can handle the tech, Anika the people. Claire will make sure the farms keep running. They’re grown-ups. They don’t need him.
He’s not sure he’s convincing himself.
Waits. Fingers drumming the desk.
Besides, he might be a liability if he stays around here. If the authorities start pointing fingers.
And this might be his last chance to get back to Scott.
The screen goes blank.
And then refreshes.
Red text on white, hard to read. The cold, polite authority of faceless automation.
IMPORTANT
A problem has been encountered with your travel documentation.
The passport(s) numbers you have provided have been determined as invalid for travel. This may be due to increased security concerns at the present time, or may be an indication that the passport(s) you and your party are attempting to use to travel have been canceled by the issuer.
Please contact your local passport-issuing organization for more details.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
“No fucking way,” Rush says.
It might be an error. It might be that the computers are fucked because, well, all the computers are fucked. It might be, like it says, because of increased security concerns.
But Rush knows it isn’t any of those fucking things. They’ve canceled his fucking passport. They’ve been watching him for years, watching the Croft and everything he does here, putting him on lists and labeling him an enemy, waiting for something like this to happen.
It suddenly feels like the room, its cracked plaster walls and server racks, is collapsing in on top of him, broken masonry and ceiling tiles crushing his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs in huge, heavy sobs. And for unmeasured minutes that’s all he can do: sit and cry. Tears roll down his checks and his hands as he covers his face, his shoulders shuddering. So much seems lost. His freedom. His movement. The little semblance of control he still held on to. Scott.