CyberStorm (44 page)

FEMA had done their best to respond, but there was no contingency plan for rescuing sixty million people suddenly stranded under six feet of snow, without power or food and many without water. Compounding the problem was the loss of communications and computer networks—they didn’t know where anything was, how to get it, or how to contact people, and even then the roads had been jammed up with snow and impassible.

It had taken two weeks to recover enough information systems and communications to mount any significant response, and they’d started in Washington and Baltimore. It was only around the time we were leaving that they’d started restoring communications in New York.

There was a massive outpouring of people and resources once it became apparent what had happened, but there was no way to get them there for the first few weeks. It wasn’t just the cyberattacks—thousands of telephone lines, electrical lines, and cell towers had been brought down by the snow and ice.

The main water systems had only been down for a week, but in that week pipes had burst everywhere in the extreme cold. When it was turned on, only a trickle had made it down to lower Manhattan, and they’d had to turn it off to make repairs. With a city covered in several feet of snow and ice, with no communications or staff or power, this became an impossible task.

After the initial attack, the president had immediately invoked the Stanford Act so the military could operate domestically, but for the first few weeks we’d been on the brink of war with China and Iran, and the military had had its hands tied.

Add to that the radar signatures indicating a breach of US airspace on the first day of the attack. Most analysts thought it was some kind of automated drone attack, a new threat they were just trying to understand. It was a month before they confirmed that the radar reports were artifacts from a viral infection of the air force radar computer systems at McChord Field.

Once an outline of what had happened had been sketched out in the fourth week, and Chinese and American cybersecurity teams had a chance to have some back-room discussions, a full-scale rescue had been initiated. This included the Chinese teams that had brought replacement parts and manpower to repair the electrical grid.

Passing Forty-Seventh Street, I spotted the red double-decker buses of the New York Sightseeing tour company lining the street. The tops of them were full of people. In the distance, toward Midtown, the electric neon of Times Square glowed even in the daylight, and above me a digital billboard scrolled a headline,
“Senate Investigation Hearings Begin Into Why Cyber Threat Not Taken More Seriously.”

I laughed quietly, shaking my head as I read it.

What are they going to discuss?

It wasn’t like the government hadn’t taken it seriously, but the problem was that there’d never been damage done by a cyber incident that could compare with conventional war. Before CyberStorm, the term
cyberwar
had more of a metaphorical quality, like the War on Obesity, but not anymore, now that the damage had been seen, the costs tallied, and the horrors witnessed.

Was it just an unlikely series of events?

Maybe, but once-in-a-lifetime events were happening to the world with unsettling regularity.

Everything was interconnected in the modern world—knock out a few supporting legs, and the entire thing ground to a halt. Cities relied on these intricate systems to work perfectly, all the time, and when they didn’t, people began to die very quickly.

Knocking out a few systems created problems too big to fix, overloading emergency services, producing gridlock and paralysis with no graceful degradation to previous technologies or systems.

The real problem was that, to contain the terrifying danger of nuclear weapons, the politicians and military had built statecraft, and rules of engagement, based on deterrence against known adversaries. But there was no similar expertise for dealing with cyberweapons, and no rules of engagement had been clearly expressed.

This had allowed the escalation to happen.

What was the blast radius of a cyberweapon? How do you know who deployed it?

The vacuum of rules and international agreements had been as much to blame as the circumstances and people involved in creating the CyberStorm.

People, of course, always found a way to survive, and this had been no different. There was some talk in the media about cannibalism, and it had happened, but rather than demonizing it, the media had begun normalizing it, comparing it to similar historical incidents.

They’d done an investigation into the cottages near us in Virginia.

It turned out that the Baylors had been on vacation, and whoever we’d encountered were simply interlopers. They probably stole the gear from Chuck’s cottage, but then again, we’d stolen what we’d needed from neighbors in New York to survive. Everyone had been jumpy, and they probably thought we were coming to steal from them. The initial pull of the trigger was maybe more of an accident than anything else, but after Chuck exchanged shots with them on that back deck, everything had taken a bad turn.

There was no evidence of cannibalism in the cabins, just some bones from pigs they must have caught, just like us. Looking back, it was hard to imagine how I could have jumped to such an extreme conclusion, but at the time, my mind was primed. Lauren had thought the same thing as me. We’d just been scared.

I’d reached Columbus Circle, and I stood watching the cars and trucks rumble around it. Ahead, the trees of Central Park appeared like a green canyon between the high-rise buildings, and the tall monument in the middle of Columbus Circle stared down on us while fountains sprayed up around it. People were sitting on benches, enjoying the sun.

Life was being lived.

Waiting for the light to change so I could cross, I looked up at the gray wall of the Museum of Art and Design to my right, and a message was spray-painted in black in huge, looping letters across its curved front, stretching all the way from ten stories up near its roof to nearly ground level.

“Sometimes things break apart,”
read the message,
“so that better things can come together.”
It was signed,
“Marilyn Monroe.”

I pointed up at the message. “See that, Antonia? That’s true, isn’t it?”

As with all things terrible, some good was resulting. Sweeping changes to international law were being quickly enacted, enabling law enforcement to chase down cybercriminals wherever they were. There was a lot of talk about laws between nations being normalized, so that what was illegal in one place would also be illegal in others. Cyberespionage would no longer be tolerated, and would be treated the same as a physical incursion into another country’s sovereign space.

At least, that was what they wrote in the papers. We’d see if any of it actually happened.

Perhaps more importantly, they were talking about changing regulations to make software companies more accountable. Secure coding practices were going to be enforced, and backdoor security holes eliminated. There would be no more free lunch if software crashed and caused damage, if some security hole was exploited.

Of course, the cost of all this would be passed onto the public, but whatever the cost, it was better to pay with money than lives.

Privacy laws were being strengthened. As our lives moved increasingly into the cyber-realm, the importance of much stricter personal information laws were recognized—privacy
was
freedom, and it had taken this awful event for people to understand it in this way.

The separation between the cyber and the physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war—the true age of cyber began when we started removing it as a descriptor.

The world had changed, and in big and small ways, I’d changed as well.

I’d started to read stories in the newspapers differently, to not just gloss over them, but to try and really understand what was happening, if there was any way I could help. I’d also started taking enjoyment in things that I’d always taken for granted—the feeling of a full stomach when going to bed, not worrying about what the children would eat tomorrow, having a safe place to sleep.

Walking into Columbus Circle, I saw Lauren standing next to Vince, and I waved. Lauren was holding a leash, attached to our new rescue dog, Buddy. The shelters had overflowed with animals after the disaster, and it was one more small way we could reduce the suffering.

“Look, there’s Mommy!”

I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind, so shortsighted to believe that she’d been unfaithful when all she’d been trying to do was better her life, and mine. It was the same prejudice that had almost cost our lives when I’d only been able to understand what was happening as a Chinese attack.

“Hey, baby!” I called out. “Antonia and I had a great walk!”

Lauren ran up to us and kissed me. Vince followed, pushing Luke in a stroller, and Patricia Killiam was here again. We’d been talking about her project she needed funding for, some amazing research into synthetic reality.

It was a beautiful day, with perfect blue skies. American flags draped the entrance to Central Park. We were here to watch the Independence Day celebrations and see Vince be awarded the key to New York City by the mayor.

I said hello to Vince and Patricia and then leaned down to kiss Luke. We all began walking into Central Park. At the edge of the crowd around the stage set for Vince’s ceremony, we met up with Chuck and Susie.

“Go on then,” I urged Vince as we greeted each other. “Time to be famous.”

He laughed. “
Time
is definitely the operative word.”

Still a strange kid.

I smiled and shook my head as he ran off toward the back of the stage. The crowd began to gather, and I pulled Antonia out of the baby sling to hold her in my arms.

“Look,” I said, lifting her up and pointing to the stage. Vince had just appeared, looking awkward in front of the crowd. “That’s your Uncle Vince.”

Antonia yawned, not understanding, and dribbled on me. I laughed and held her up against the sky, marvelling at how something so tiny could be so beautiful.

Seventy thousand people had died, but at least one life had been saved. If none of this had happened, Lauren would have probably gotten an abortion, and I would have never known about it. I would have never had Antonia in my life, never known she had ever existed, and I would have probably lost Lauren as well, off to Boston.

Looking into Antonia’s little eyes, I realized it wasn’t just her life that had been saved.

It had also been mine.

Epilogue
– September 28

A CHANDELIER GLITTERED overhead while the sounds of Mozart played through the crowd. Lauren was sitting beside me, wearing a little black evening dress, and I had on a tuxedo. We were sitting at the head table in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, and the room was packed. It was a reception to celebrate the launch of Synthetic Sensory Incorporated, the company I’d started with Dr. Patricia Killiam.

After Dr. Killiam had pitched me on the concept, I couldn’t get it out of my head. The idea was revolutionary, an embedded biological-electronic interface that could perfectly simulate sensory stimulation. The technology was in its infancy, but she didn’t simply want to make games.

Her research showed that people were just as happy with simulated, virtual objects as they were with real, physical ones. How happy they were with the simulations depended on how real they appeared. If we could make people happy with virtual goods, she reasoned, then maybe we could cut down on our use of physical resources to satisfy everyone’s material desires.

Maybe we could use this to help save the planet.

I’d heard crazier ideas.

It was a lofty goal—too lofty for investors—so I’d played it down, instead making a pitch for the amazing video games we’d be able to create and ways we could boost work productivity.

Even if it was mostly Vince’s idea, I’d become a minor celebrity when the story had surfaced of how I’d used augmented reality to survive CyberStorm. I think it was the reason Dr. Killiam had asked me to work with her.

The music stopped, and Dr. Killiam nodded to me, getting up from our table to begin her speech. Irena and Aleksandr were here as well, dressed up for the evening, sitting directly across from us. I raised my glass, and Aleksandr raised his, winking at me.

“Did you see the news about Nepal?” whispered Chuck, sitting beside me. Susie was chatting with one of our venture investors on the other side of him.

“I saw.”

After CyberStorm, the world had given itself one summer off before diving back into the pool of entrenched interests and global conflict.

In the immediate aftermath of CyberStorm, the world had seemed ready to change and normalize laws, find ways to solve the problems, but this had only lasted a few months, and already it seemed that most of it would never materialize. Fighting had broken out in Nepal, and it looked like the whole world might be dragged into it.

India and China had been quietly squaring off over the water contained in the Himalayas, the glaciers there containing over three thousand cubic miles of fresh water, nearly as much as the combined Great Lakes. These glaciers fed five of the great rivers in Asia, collectively supplying fresh water to nearly half the world’s population.

The problem was that while the majority of these rivers flowed into India, Pakistan, and Indochina, the glacial watersheds were located entirely within Tibet, a part of China. China had begun a program of damming these rivers far upstream over a decade ago, but now the two nascent superpowers, India and China, were coming to blows, and tiny Nepal was caught in the middle.

The US was sending in troops as peacekeepers, but nobody had any idea how long the “peace” part would last. There was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment, even after they’d helped rebuild our electrical grid. Many chose to see only one side to the coin, that the Chinese hackers had attacked us, ignoring the bigger picture of our own part in it.