CyberStorm (18 page)

Stopping outside, we carefully watched from a distance.

Far from being a mad dash of pushing and shoving, however, this was an orderly, almost apologetic looting. Two men stopped to help an elderly lady step over the smashed glass of the window. Seeing us looking at them, one of them shrugged at us.

“Waddya gonna do?” he yelled through the falling snow. “I gotta feed my family. I’ll come back and leave some money when this is done.”

Chuck looked at me. “What do you think?”

“What? Should we try and stop them?”

He laughed, shaking his head.

“Do you want to grab something?”

I sighed and looked into the swirling white distance, toward home and my family.

“Yeah, we should grab everything we can.”

Chuck nodded, and we unclipped our skis.

We strapped our gear to his backpack and joined the line of people waiting to get into the shop. Chuck fished out our headlamps, and we strapped them on and climbed in through the window. We picked up plastic shopping bags and made our way to the back, where it was darker and there were less people.

“Anything high calorie, but try not to take junk food,” instructed Chuck.

Even with the headlamps, it was confusing, and I grabbed what I could. I wanted to get out of there. Within minutes we were stepping back out through the front window, loaded down with as much as we could carry.

My fingers were already aching from holding the bags.

“This is not going to be fun,” I complained. The wind had picked up, driving the snow into our faces.
Maybe we took too much.
“I’m not sure I can carry this much all the way across town.”

“No sense in trying to ski with all this,” replied Chuck. “We’ll just have to walk, and maybe drop a bag or two if it gets to be too much.”

That gave me an idea. I put down the bags and fished through my layers of clothing to retrieve my phone, pulling off one mitt with my teeth.

Chuck watched me as I started playing with the phone. I opened up a geo-caching treasure hunt app we’d used last summer on a field trip with Luke’s preschool. Blowing on my fingers to warm them, I tapped a few keystrokes.

“We just need to walk straight down Twenty-Third,” said Chuck, frowning. “I can show you how to work the compass later, but we’d better get moving—”

Shaking my head, I looked up at him from my phone. “Drop your bags here and go back inside to get more. I’ve got an idea. You said GPS is still working, right?”

He nodded. “What’s the idea?”

“Just trust me, and get back inside before the place is emptied.”

He looked at me curiously, but shrugged and dropped his bags. He turned to go back inside.

I put away my phone and picked up his bags with mine. Awkwardly, stepping up to my knees in snow, I dragged them back toward the path in the middle of the street. Backtracking to Second, and away from the people at the shop, I trudged off the path and into the snow, hauling the bags with me.

Stopping next in front of a store sign that was still visible, I kicked a big hole in the snow and then carefully looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Once I was sure, I deposited a few bags, taking out my camera to click a picture of the storefront using the treasure hunt app. Circling around the street back toward the food market, I repeated this a few times until I’d gotten rid of all the bags.

Chuck was waiting for me, new bags in hand, when I returned.

“Ready to explain?”

I grabbed the bags from him.

“We can drop them in the snow and tag their locations with this treasure hunt app I have. As long as we can add a local image to the GPS data, it should be accurate within a few feet. We can dig them up later.”

He laughed. “Cybersquirrels, huh?”

“Something like that.”

The wind gusted, nearly blowing us over.

“We’d better hurry.”

By the time we made two more trips into the food market, it was stripped clean, but as we continued our trek home, we came across shops being looted everywhere.

This new snowstorm was striking a deep fear into people, driving them to find what they could. Law was broken, but not order. Rules were designed to maintain a community, and in this moment, the community needed to take what it could to survive. It was self-administering its own emergency services.

On the way back, we stopped everywhere they were looting, grabbing anything useful or edible, and burying it outside along the way.

The blackness and snow would have been terrifying, but the map software that Chuck had loaded onto our phones provided a comforting connection, a small glowing screen we could open up from time to time that showed the small dot of where we were and, more importantly, where home was.

Close to ten at night, we arrived at our back door.

I was exhausted and numb with cold. Tony and Vince were waiting for us, diligently digging out the snow from behind the door. Upstairs, Lauren was still awake, and worried of course, but I collapsed into bed without a word and passed out.

Day
7 – December 29

“GRACEFUL DEGRADATION IS the problem.”

I grabbed a bowl from the counter.

“Like an aging pornstar?”

Chuck frowned, trying to make the connection.

“If you view technology as sex,” he mused after a pause, “then yes, maybe. Needs to keep working even if it gets old.”

“A lot of people like technology
better
than sex.”

“You first among them,” he replied with a smile. He picked up a bowl and waved it at me. “I’ve been watching the way you’ve been itching for your e-mail.”

“Boys, boys, we have children here,” said Susie, shaking her head but smiling, holding her hands over little Ellarose’s ears.

We were all together in Richard’s place, the only space large enough to hold twenty-eight people at the same time. We’d added three more refugees from people abandoning their apartments to come to our floor, while Rex and Ryan had left for the emergency shelters to try and find a way out.

Richard offered to make lunch for everyone, so we were crowded together in the open first floor of his place, in his kitchen, living room, and dining room.

“So how long do you think this power outage is going to last?” asked Sarah, filling my bowl with stew.

After Richard had made his invitation, he left it to his wife to cook up several large pots of stew and soup that she was sharing out in assorted bowls and plates. It was amazing the stuff Richard had managed to find.

“I’d give it another week. This new snowstorm will be done by tomorrow, and the NYPD sergeant told me Con Edison had things sorted out, at least for Manhattan. Lights should be on for New Year.”

Chuck looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. Where he was a pessimist, I was an optimist, and there was no sense in scaring people with his theories.

“Sounds good to me,” said Tony.

We were trying to rotate guard duty in the downstairs lobby, but he was taking more shifts than anyone else. I’d just texted him, using Vince’s messaging app, to come up and grab a plate of food.

The wind howled and churned outside the windows. We were down to a handful of radio stations still transmitting, and by consensus we tuned into New York Public Radio to listen to a steady stream of emergency announcements. Many were requests for assistance, but none close to us, and in any case, it was too dangerous to go outside.

“What I mean by graceful degradation,” continued Chuck as Sarah filled his plate, “is that there’s no way to revert to previous technology if something fails anymore.”

“Example?”

“Like this logistics thing that screwed up shipping. Large companies used to have dozens of local warehouses in a city that stocked and distributed locally. Now everything is ‘just in time’ with a handful of central warehouses located in the middle of nowhere that stock almost nothing.”

“So no local stock if the supply chain gets disrupted?”

“Exactly. That’s what’s happening now. No local depots for supplies. The systems supporting the cities we live in are balanced on a knife’s edge. Knock out one supporting leg—logistics for instance—and, poof,” said Chuck, blowing on his hand, “the whole thing goes down. Supply chain attack is the big weakness.”

“So back to horses and carts?” said Richard, sitting together at the kitchen counter with Vince, Chuck, Rory, and myself.

The girls were sitting on the couches with the kids.

Chuck laughed. “There is no fallback. Where are the horses?”

“The countryside?”

“There are none anymore, not like there used to be. We’re five times the population of when humans last used horses for transportation, with maybe one-fifth the horses. And back then, eighty percent of people lived in the countryside and had a shot at supporting themselves, and now that eighty percent live in cities.”

“Horses?” I said incredulously. “You’re seriously talking about horses. Again?”

“Just an example,” replied Chuck, waving a fork in the air. “I love horses. But you get the point.”

Richard nodded. “I’ll leave you boys to your fun. I gotta go to the bathroom.”

He got up to leave.

With no running water, we’d started using the apartments we’d broken into on the fifth floor as the communal latrine to maintain some sanitation. We collected wastewater in buckets and used it to flush the toilets. Richard picked up a wash bucket by the door on his way out.

“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” said Vince. “No legal framework.”

“You think lawyers could stop this snowstorm?” laughed Chuck.

“Not the snowstorm, but the cyberstorm, yeah, maybe.”

It was the first time I’d heard the term “cyberstorm.”

Everyone went quiet.

“New York isn’t being beaten by snow. It’s had big snowstorms before,” continued Vince. “It’s being beaten by cyber.”

“And you think lawyers could stop that?”

Vince looked up at the ceiling and then back at Chuck.

“Do you know what a botnet is?”

“A network of computers that have been infected to use in a cyberattack?”

“Right, except not just infected. People can voluntarily let their computers be used as part of a botnet.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Chuck, frowning.

Rory waved his spoon in the air. “There are very good reasons why someone would want to join a botnet.”

While Rory and Chuck could both be described as liberals, Chuck leaned a little more to the right, and whereas I always felt slightly guilty about being a meat eater around Rory and Pam—

“You enjoying that rabbit food?” said Chuck with raised eyebrows. Rory was trying to stick to his vegan diet, eating a plate of carrots and beans. “This may be a good time to decide to switch to a higher-octane food source.”

“Vegetarian is the best option for survival situations, and we’re not down to Funyuns yet,” replied Rory, smiling. “And speaking of botnets, denial-of-service attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience, like a cyber version of a sixties sit-in.”

“You’re that blogger for the
Times
covering Anonymous, right?” said Vince.

Rory nodded.

“So you support what Anonymous did to the logistics companies, what got us into this mess?” demanded Chuck.

“I support their right to defend and express their point of view,” replied Rory, “but I don’t think they were the ones—”

“We’ll see how much you support them,” said Chuck angrily, “when we lock you onto the goddamn roof in this storm.”

“Hey, play nice,” I said, raising my hands.

“It’s criminal is what it is,” added Chuck.

“Actually, it’s not,” pointed out Vince. “And that’s my point about legal framework.”

“So it’s legal to operate a botnet and use them to attack?”

“It’s illegal to
operate
a botnet,” explained Vince, “but it’s perfectly legal to join one, as an individual. In denial-of-service attacks, each computer just pings the target a few times a second, and there’s nothing wrong with instructing your computer to do that. But in the aggregate, when you control hundreds of thousands of computers and direct them to do the same thing, that’s when the problem starts.”

“So it’s illegal to run a botnet, but legal to join one? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It gets worse internationally. What’s illegal in one place is legal somewhere else. You can hire a botnet over the web, paid with PayPal, to attack a competitor. How is the FBI going to arrest someone in Khuzestan? They have international laws for dealing with money laundering, drugs, terrorists, but almost none for cyber.”

Chuck looked at Vince.

“We need to make sure that anyone who messes with this stuff knows they’ll be tracked down. More security. Inside or outside the country. Scare the shit out of them.”

“So fear as a weapon?” shrugged Rory. “Deterrence based on fear is a holdover from the Cold War. We’re scared, so we’ll make them scared, right? That’s the plan? It creates a society based on fear, centralizing power.”

“Worked pretty damn well for forty years.”

“And look where it got us,” said Rory, his voice getting louder. “A democracy based on fear is not a democracy. Fear of razor blades in apples at Halloween, fear of the commies, fear of the terrorists—it never ends! You know who else used fear to keep people in check? Stalin, Hitler—”

“That is such a load of leftwing horseshit. You want somebody to blame?” Chuck stared at Rory and then pointed at the Chinese family, huddled together on the stairs in the corner of the room. “Blame them, goddamn Chinese bastards!”

Chuck lowered his hand and stared at the floor.

“You know what? I am afraid,” he continued. “I’m afraid of what the hell is going on out there. I
am
afraid.”

The room went silent, the only sound that of the wind whistling outside.

“Y’all want something more concrete to be afraid of?”

We all turned to the entrance.

It was Paul, the intruder from a few days before, and he had a gun to Richard’s head. A group of men appeared through the doorway behind him. Stan, the owner of the garage, was with them, also holding a gun.