Eventually he looks up, into the black pit of the monitor, at numbers flashing, data traffic spiraling, confused panic rolling across the few remaining timelines, the Internet melting away.
He pulls himself together. He has contingency plans to put in place. He’d planned for this. If they think he’s involved, then they’ll come for him. If they’re going to come and drag him off to some rendition site, then he wants evidence, witnesses, some narrative left behind that isn’t theirs. They’ll be here soon. Best be ready.
He opens a terminal window, types secret commands and passwords. Text appears, text he wrote himself.
REPUBLIC OF STOKES CROFT—EMERGENCY SURVEILLANCE PROCEDURE
Activating this procedure will trigger full recording of all activity occurring within the SC zone and all data broadcast across the SC network. Data will be archived not only on SC servers but also on individual users’ devices.
IMPORTANT! The data recorded is not limited to digital transmissions! It will record audio and video data collected by all devices connected to the network! THIS IS A TOTAL SURVEILLANCE PROCEDURE and should be limited only to EMERGENCY situations, such as natural disasters, the infiltration of the network/SC by security or law enforcement agencies, or any other kind of physical or network assault upon SC and its inhabitants.
THIS IS A LAST-RESORT PROCEDURE AND SHOULD BE ACTIVATED ONLY UNDER AGREEMENT OF THE SENIOR MEMBERS OF THE REPUBLIC OF STOKES CROFT STEERING COMMITTEE.
Do you want to activate the Emergency Surveillance Procedure? Y/N
Rush takes a breath.
With a couple of simple keyboard strokes he could betray everything he stands for, everything he’d built here. He could turn his little oasis of digital freedom into a tiny but highly efficient surveillance state. All on the off chance it might save his ass when the authorities come knocking, give him and the others some leverage when the shit really hits the fan.
He snorts to himself. When he’d written the code, he’d found the irony delicious—that he’d built into his utopian experiment the same moral dilemma every state faces, whether to trade freedom for some sense of security, to put power into the hands of a few on the trust that it wouldn’t be misused.
Now, staring at the screen, he realizes he’s no closer to having an answer.
He types “Y,” hits RETURN.
And then it floods him again, that huge wave of loss and panic flowing over him. The realization that whatever plans he’d made for dealing with the end of the world as he knows it, there was no plan for dealing with being separated from the one person that really, truly mattered to him.
Out of desperation he tries apps and websites again. All pointlessly. Nothing but blank screens and error messages. Everything is fucked, everything is dying.
And then it happens. Gmail loads in front of him, his in-box slowly rendering itself on screen. Google. Those motherfuckers. If anyone can keep their servers running while the rest of the Internet is aflame, it’s them. They practically are the Internet.
He hits COMPOSE, taps out a message.
Baby!
Oh god I hope you’re okay. Don’t know what’s happening over there but it’s all going down here. Something big. It’s why I can’t get hold of you, why those photos were missing.
I’ve no idea if you’ll get this. Or how long it’ll take to get to you. I just want you to know I’m thinking of you. I’ll be trying to contact you constantly. And if that doesn’t work I’ll find some way to get to you. To be with you. To hold you.
I promise.
I love you.
He stares at the last line.
He deletes it.
Pauses.
Types it again.
Hits SEND.
Nothing happens.
Then the screen goes blank, the white space of an empty browser window.
He panics.
Hits REFRESH.
Words appear.
ERROR
You Are Not Connected to the Internet
This page cannot be displayed because you are currently offline.
14. AFTER
She wasn’t sure the girl would come.
She looks anxious, standing in this abandoned room, her eyes shifting nervously from corner to corner. She’s really young, she sees now. Younger than she’d initially thought. There’s no way she could remember anything that had happened here.
“Come, sit.” She gestures at the dusty floor in front of where she’s sitting.
“I’m fine standing. Really.”
Anika smiles, tilts her head. “It’s Mary, right?” She hopes she’s got that right.
“Yeah.”
“Come and sit, Mary, please. It’s fine. I just want to talk to you.”
The girl shuffles forward awkwardly and sits, legs crossed. Her eyes continue to shift around the room, unable to meet Anika’s.
“Give me your sp—” Anika pauses, corrects herself. “Give me your glasses.”
“What? No, I—”
“It’s fine, really. It’s fine. Relax. I only need them for a few minutes. I just want to look at them, try them on. Then I’ll give them right back to you. I promise.”
Mary says nothing, just stares at the floor.
“It’s fine, really. You can trust me.”
The girl’s eyes rise to hers, finally. With paint-stained hands she slips the glasses from her face, and with slow deliberation hands them over.
“Thank you.”
Anika scratches away paint with the nail of her right thumb, Technicolor dust raining from the spex’s arm, catching sunlight filtering in through shattered walls and sparkling like air-suspended pixels. She uncovers ten tiny hidden LEDs, the only outward sign that they’re any more than just a regular pair of glasses, six of which glow green as she squeezes them. Sixty percent charged. The girl must have a charging mat hidden away somewhere, a basic, dumb one without a Net connection. She can picture it, plastic third-party wiring embedded in crappy Chinese fabric, close to twenty years old but still working. Not so dumb now.
She turns the spex over and over in her hands, suddenly scared to put them on. Scared to breathe life into this room, high in the top of the 5102, which has apparently lain dead for the last ten years. And so it should have done. As she looks around it, at the now-graffiti-soaked walls, at the chipped and shattered plaster, she can see the ghosts already. Feel them, their breath on the back of her neck. Feel the love and the passion and the anger and the betrayal. Too much, already.
Someone has blitzed through the room, or perhaps multiple people over various stages, ripping plaster apart to yank wires from walls, leaving their own layer of daubed scrawls as payment. She sits cross-legged amid the shrapnel of smashed furniture, leftovers too measly to burn, and gets that all-too-familiar sensation of being in the ruins of a dead civilization. Relics of the obsolete, like the weathered walls of Machu Picchu or the liquefying concrete of Detroit’s car factories.
She tilts her head back, skull against cold exposed brick, and takes a deep breath. Reluctantly she slips the spex onto her face.
Nothing at first, just minor glitch. Random puddles of pixelated reality pulse and slither across the floor. The spex are messed up; no wonder the girl didn’t have a clue what was going on. From what Anika can gather she had little control over what she saw, things just appearing to her like random visions, hence all the mystical bullshit. Mainly because the motion tracking is so badly aligned that the UI is barely readable, hovering forever just out of peripheral view. But Anika knows some old tricks, knows what she’s doing—knows Rush’s bespoke OS, cobbled together in this very room, like the back of her hand.