John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.

“Hi,” he said.

“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.”

He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.”

“I love you, Felix,” she said.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.”

“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, ‘The Gold Master just shipped!’ They’d started calling him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little bastard was born to suck tit.”

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2AM. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t want to lose Kelly’s call underground.

“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.”

“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night.”

“Kelly — ”

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams.”

“OK,” he said.

“Simple as that?”

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe.”

“That’s my boy,” he said.

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.

Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.

“Felix.” It was Van, who wasn’t on call that night.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow.”

“What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down — spared you the trip.”

Felix’s own server — a box he shared with five other friends — was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.

“What’s the story?”

“Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too — like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a Trojan.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six-feet-tall, long pony-tail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.

Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever taken, with time and date.

“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category — if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren’t a problem with the lusers — they were the fault of incompetent engineers.

“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m at work at 2AM, it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”

They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage — like guards in a Minuteman silo. 95 percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.

Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes — putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.

“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop, Mayor McCheese.

“Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to break my heart to reboot it.”

“What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”

“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”

“I wanna eat,” Van said.

“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up, then mine, then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day off.”

“You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”