Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“It makes me want to send donations to politicians who aren’t idiots,” I lie.

Haswell sighs and slumps dramatically into the back seat. “You mean the same kind of people who can’t even remember their password properly unless they call tech support or have it on the back of a sticky note on the side of a monitor? You think they’re fit to pass laws about technology ? Are half the other useless empty-headed illiterates out there fit to have an opinion on technology and law? You know, most people can’t even explain how a light bulb works.” He hits the back of Toto’s chair. “Either of you know how a light bulb works?”

Toto, jolted out of his trance, sets his jaw. We can’t bring our marks back to their county of residence with any bruises, but Toto knows how to fuck them up without leaving a trace. I wait for him to hit the brakes and pull over. But he doesn’t want to lose time. “I usually just flip the switch,” he says.

Haswell doesn’t think that’s funny. “Sure. So do they. But they don’t even know what that really means. Yet they’re going to explain to me how evolution is fake and climate change isn’t real. Give them half a moment, and they can’t even disprove the dark-sucker theory of how a light bulb works. It’s just magic. Flip a switch, there it is, you’re right. Send them back in time, they’d never be able to recreate it. They’d be lucky to figure out fire. Because they’re parasites that live off the largesse of the greater minds that came before them.”

“So it’s time to kill them, like that senator? You think that will solve things? Seems to have just ended with you handcuffed in our back seat.”

“Okay,” Haswell says. “I wasn’t thinking, then, just lashing out. I wanted people to realize that the internet was under attack. Literally. And that if war had been declared, people online needed to realize it. Before the internet could fight back, it needed to realize a war had started. I thought I could get some attention to this. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. Not like I am now.”

“What are you thinking now?” I ask.

“It’s time to reboot,” Haswell says. “Time to put in a clean operating system. No more patches. No trying to get old buggy code to work. A fresh upgrade. Everything has to be wiped out for it to work properly. Now that I know you all are getting close, it’s time to hurry and press the power switch.”

“Societies aren’t computers,” I say, but I have to admit that his metaphor is chilling.

Haswell wants to argue that, but Toto looks up. “Potty break!” We take an exit quickly, getting off the ramp and pulling into a small gas station. The bathroom keys are attached to a giant wooden canoe paddle.

We refill the car with gas, Toto’s camelback with bottled water, and get back in the car and on the road. Toto pauses at the stoplights before the ramp, waiting for the light to change.

“Huh,” Toto mutters, right before a white electric company truck emblazoned with a familiar logo blows through the red lights and slams into us.

“It’s not your fault,” Toto tells me later. After we had been stunned by the impact, our faces covered in airbags. After Haswell’s two overall-wearing friends smashed in the window and spirited him off before we’d had time to register what had happened.

Who would have expected the crazy loner in the cabin to have a posse?

“Shut the fuck up.” I wince as I say it, feeling bad. But I don’t apologize. I’m on my phone, typing with my thumbs like a possessed demon because the laptop’s screen is cracked and useless.

“We should get you to the hospital to have someone look at your eye.”

“Fuck my eye,” I say. The bandage over the cut to my eyebrow has stopped the bleeding. It just throbs now. As does the rest of my head. I can still taste the smoke from the airbag in the back of my sinuses. There’s a slight tremble to my fingers.

“You might have a concussion,” Toto starts.

“I’m fine.”

“Happens to the best. We couldn’t have known what he was doing.”

I look up at Toto. I’ve brushed most of the glass out of my hair, and the adrenaline has long since faded and left me with the jitters. “I should’ve thought to check for other signals. Like a small GPS pip hidden somewhere. Can’t we go faster?”

The Corolla is vibrating and shimmying around. Wind whistles through cracks and warps in the doors. Toto shakes his head. “Barely in one piece,” he says. “We’ll shake apart.”

“We go back to where he lives, and we find his gear. I want to strip out every password, every user account, every one and zero he’s ever touched,” I tell Toto. “There’s going to be a mistake in there somewhere, and then we’re going to pick the bastard up again.”

I’m so full of fury. I feel like a bell that was rung when our car got hit; and that I haven’t stopped vibrating. That fury builds as we show Haswell’s photo around town to ferret out where he’d hunkered down. And that fury bleeds away into a dull sense of confusion when we find, waiting for us at Haswell’s apartment door, three FBI agents, a SWAT team with really big guns, two Department of Homeland Security officers, a local sheriff, and last but not least: the barista from the coffee shop.

“That’s them!” the barista says.

And all hell really breaks loose.

When it’s all settled, Toto and me are zip-tied to a table, and one of the blue-suited FBI agents eases into a chair across from us. Until they ran our info and realized we were skiptracers, they’d assumed we were working with Haswell. Coming back to pick up his computers for him. Now they were just pissed.

“We finally had Haswell staked out, and you got him right out of town under our noses.”

“Jesus,” one of the FBI suits keeps saying, rubbing her forehead and sighing as she paces around us. Then she grabs Toto’s shirt, and shouts into his face. “Do you have any idea what this man is currently into? When you created this algorithm to look for his writing, did you stop and read it?”

“I didn’t have time!” I protest, trying to get her away from Toto. “I was working on the match possibilities. I basically cobbled together a bunch of scripts…”

Her attention is on me, and I flinch. “So you didn’t bother to stop and read?”

“No,” I say. “Like I said…”

“He’s openly talking about trying to crack fucking nuclear missile codes. Sure, he did it under a handle, but you’re not the only one running text analysis. We found him as well. Only unlike you amateurs we actually stopped to read him.”

I remember snatches of text. Reactionary, rich Silicon Valley stuff floating around the net. Nothing I didn’t see in most anonymous forums. Between that and the anarchists, I mostly just tuned it all out as the background static that came with interfacing with a hacker community.

“Lot of idiots say a lot of stupid things,” Toto says. “Do you chase down every idiot calling for armed overthrow online? Because you’d end up wasting a lot of time at certain news sites…”

The agent’s attention is back on Toto. “This one is for real, has already struck, and you let him get away!”

One of the other agents pulls her away from us and tells her to calm down. The entire environment is really hostile.

This is feeling electric, and scary. Haswell has been getting into some seriously stupidly high level dangerous stuff online.

“He had a GPS chip on him, so his friends could find him,” I defend myself. “And he had some way of triggering it. Maybe a simple check-in sequence online. I don’t know. Maybe you can back trace that.” I’m trying to help clean up. But no one looks happy. I’m grasping at straws.