John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

"I am not a coward, Winston."

"I did not imply you are." He bit down hard on his weed. A blue cloud drifted toward her. It hurt her eyes and she backed away.

"Are you a ghost?" she asked. The question did not seem at all foolish.

"I suspect I am. I’m something left behind by the retreating tide." The fire glowed in his eyes. "I wonder whether, when an event is no longer remembered by any living person, it loses all significance. Whether it is as if it never happened?"

Quait stirred in his sleep, but did not wake.

"I’m sure I don’t know," said Chaka.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Winston got to his feet. "I’m not comfortable here," he said. She thought he was expressing displeasure with her.

"The floor is hard on an old man. And of course you are right: you must decide whether you will go on. Camelot was a never-never land. Its chief value lay in the fact that it existed only as an idea. Perhaps the same thing is true of Haven."

"No," she said. "It exists."

"And is anyone else looking for this place?"

"No one. We will be the second mission to fail. I think there will be no more."

"Then for God’s sake, Chaka of Illyria, you must ask yourself why you came all this way. Why your companions died. What you seek."

"Money. Pure and simple. Ancient manuscripts are priceless. We’d have been famous throughout the League. That’s why we came."

His eyes grew thoughtful. "Then go back," he said. "If this is a purely commercial venture, write it off and put your money in real estate."

"Beg pardon?"

"But I would put it to you that those are not the reasons you dared so much. And that you wish to turn back because you have forgot, why you came."

"That’s not so," she said.

"Of course it’s so. Shall I tell you why you undertook to travel through an unknown world, on the hope that you might, might, find a place that’s half-mythical?" Momentarily he seemed to fade, to lose definition. "Haven has nothing to do with fame or wealth. If you got there, if you were able to read its secrets, you would have all that, provided you could get home with it. But you would have acquired something infinitely more valuable, and I believe you know that: you would have discovered who you really are. You would have learned that you are a daughter of the people who designed the Acropolis, who wrote Hamlet, who visited the moons of Neptune. Do you know about Neptune?"

"No," she said. "I don’t think so."

"Then we’ve lost everything, Chaka. But you can get it back. If you are willing to take it. And if not you, then someone else. But it is worth the taking, at whatever cost." Momentarily, he became one with the dark. "Winston," she said, "I can’t see you. Are you still there?"

"I am here. The system is old, and will not keep a charge." She was looking through him. "You really are a ghost," she said.

"It is possible you will not succeed. Nothing is certain, save difficulty and trial. But have courage. Never surrender."

She stared at him.

"Never despair," he said.

A sudden chill whispered through her, a sense that she had been here before, had known this man in another life. "You seem vaguely familiar. Have I seen your picture somewhere?"

"I’m sure I do not know."

"Perhaps it is the words. They have an echo."

He looked directly at her. "Possibly." She could see the cave entrance and a few stars through his silhouette. "Keep in mind, whatever happens, you are one of a select company. A proud band of brothers. And sisters. You will never be alone."

As she watched, he faded until only the glow of the cigar remained. "It is your own true self you seek."

"You presume a great deal."

"I know you, Chaka." Everything was gone now. Except the voice. "I know who you are. And you are about to learn."

"Was it his first or last name?" asked Quait, as they saddled the horses.

"Now that you mention it, I really don’t know." She frowned. "I’m not sure whether he was real or not. He left no prints. No marks."

Quait looked toward the rising sun. The sky was clear. "That’s the way of it in these places. Some of its illusion; some of it’s something else. But I wish you’d woke me."

"So do I." She climbed up and patted Brak’s shoulder. "He said the sea is only forty miles."

Warm spring air flowed over them. "You want to go on?"

"Quait, you ever hear of Neptune?" He shook his head.

"Maybe," she said, "we can try that next."

Cory Doctorow is the author of the novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe , and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town . Forthcoming are Little Brother and a novel with the working title Themepunks . His short fiction, which has appeared in a variety of magazines—from Asimov’s Science Fiction to Salon.com —has been collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present . He is a three-time winner of the Locus Award, a winner of the Canadian Starburst Award, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and in 2000, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Doctorow is also the co-editor of Boing Boing, an online “directory of wonderful things.”

“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” first appeared in the online magazine Jim Baen’s Universe , and won the 2007 Locus Award for best novelette. In this story, sysadmins—computer systems administrators—huddle in their network operations centers, after a series of disasters ends civilization. The Internet was supposedly designed to withstand a nuclear blast; in this story, Doctorow—a former sysadmin himself—asks: If the Internet did survive the apocalypse, what would the surviving techs do after the world ended?

When Felix’s special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?”

“Because I’m on call,” he said.

“You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned systems administrator.”

“It’s my job,” he said.

“They work you like a government mule,” she said. “You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t answer that phone.”

He knew she was right. He answered the phone.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong — he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too — he had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity — AKA Felix’s Law.

Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.