Internet Kill Switch (30 page)

77

In the Oval Office, Max went dark in Schnell’s hand. He breathed on the phone to bring it back. Nothing happened. Someone got an Ethernet cable, and Schnell plugged Max into the White House network. Still nothing. He couldn’t get Max to turn on at all.

After an hour’s worth of attempts, Schnell gave up. The president looked at him. “Well?”

“Sorry, Mr. President. The phone’s dead. Completely, utterly dead. If there was a way to get it to turn on, I would have found it by now.”

French shook his head. “Not good enough, Schnell. Find a way.”

Schnell exploded. “There is no way! Didn’t you hear me, dumkopf? You think I’m lying to you? This phone is dead, forever!”

Immediately, the secret service agents in the room descended on Schnell, grabbing him
roughly. Schnell went limp.

French exhaled. There went his plan. “You realize, of course, that the deal’s off, right? No early parole, no get-out-of-jail-free card for helping us. You’ll die in prison, assuming you don’t get executed
first. If I were you, I’d think seriously about suicide. Where you’re going, it’s an attractive alternative.”

The agents led Schnell out of the Oval Office. They had to half-carry him, as all the strength
had left his legs.

7
8

Tony wept on Scarlett’s shoulder for awhile. She held him tight, waiting until he was ready to talk about what had happened.

“What’s Plan Z
, Tony?” she asked softly.

“Plan Z is something Max and I discussed over the last
few days,” Tony said, drying his eyes. “If he was taken by someone else, we needed some kind of emergency plan, some way of keeping Max from being used by the wrong people. If he was just deactivated, he said that wouldn’t be good enough; anything deactivated could be re-activated, given enough time.”

The nurse whose phone they had borrowed came over to retrieve it,
complaining about kids who don’t return things. Tony continued. “Max created a program that would destroy himself -- his memory banks, all data he held anywhere, along with all his programming. He actually created the code that would wipe out all his other code, then erase that code itself as its last act.”

It was Scarlett’s turn to cry. “Max committed suicide.”

Tony nodded. “Exactly. He self-destructed to keep the world safer. It was something we had to do together. I had to give the password, ‘no greater love,’ before he could self-destruct. Neither of us could do it alone.”

“So you did
it together, and saved maybe millions of people.” Scarlett beamed at him through her wet eyes.

“Max did a lot more than me.”
Another thought hit Tony, one still too painful to share. He felt as if he’d lost a father for the second time. A father who was there for him, a father who did what a father’s supposed to do: think about what’s good for his children first, rather than what he wants. “I’ll miss him.”

As they sat there, grieving over the loss of their friend, a surgeon came out of the operating room. Scarlett gripped Tony’s hand tightly; she didn’t know if she could take any more bad news today.

“Rick is going to make it. He’s through the worst now, and is getting a lot of blood.
The arm reattachment is going well, and we think it has a good chance of regaining its former functionality -- in time. He’ll need to be here for many days, of course, but I think he’ll have a full recovery. It’s a good thing you got him here when you did. Another half-hour and it would have been too late for him.” He smiled and walked away, checking something on his newly-working iPhone. Tony gave Scarlett a huge hug.

Tony looked around at the others in the E.R. Many were firing up their phones for the first time in
almost two weeks, their spirits lifted by their re-connection with the Internet. Everyone was talking about its return, how much they missed it, how lost they felt without the Internet. One woman nearby talked to her husband on her Android. “It was like losing a friend,” she said.

Tony looked on sadly at the glee. No. It was nothing like that. Nothing at all. I know what that feels like,
lady, and what you feel isn’t that.

Scarlett, witnessing the same scenes, took out her iPhone. It was clothed in a pretty, pink Speck case. She looked over the phone she’d relied on so much over the years, the device that felt every bit as attached to her body as her skin.

She turned it over and over, weighing it, feeling it. It was beautiful; not as beautiful as Max, of course, but still gorgeous. She wondered if she still had her charger, and how long it would take to charge up again. In
less than an hour, she could be online again, texting, updating her Facebook status, finding out what her friends had been up to all this time they’d been offline, and telling them her tale. The thought of returning to the life she knew thrilled her.

She thought about that, imagin
ing what it would be like. Then she thought about Sani, about Tony, about Max, and how in just a minute’s time, the Internet had begun to draw her in again, to whisper in her mind.

Scarlett got up, walked to the nearest trash can
-- a big metal receptacle -- and threw the iPhone inside. It clattered loudly to the bottom. She heard breaking glass as the screen shattered.

She walked back over to Tony, gave him a kiss on the cheek and sat down next to him.

“Tony?”

“Yes?”

“Would you read me a book?”

THE END