Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (6 page)

“And why do you guys have nicknames? I thought the /b/forums were anonymous.”

“Yes, but real life changes things,” he said. “We still keep real identities secret, but look around, you can’t hang around a place like this and just keep addressing people as ‘you’ and ‘that guy.’”

He returned to his seat and crossed his legs beneath the robe. “Now, let’s return to your questions.”

I killed my beer. He handed me another.

“These intercepted signals,” I said. “Where are they coming from? Can’t you trace the source and get this thing going?”

“We don’t know that yet. All we know is that it’s coming from far downtown or maybe Staten Island. Do with that information what you will.”

He stood up from the couch.

“Do you have to go?” I asked. “Won’t you join me in a drink?”

“I would,” he said, “but I’m not much for drinking alcohol through a straw.” He pointed to the tiny hole in the mouth of his mask.

“Well, then take it off. It would certainly help gain my trust.”

“No, Mr. Gladstone. In the age of hyper technology and cookie crumbs, you can only trust a man in a mask. Everyone else has too much to lose.”

“I’m not wearing a mask,” I offered.

He shrugged in silence. Something prevented him from saying more. Then he gestured for me to leave.

“Wait—before I go. Why are you telling me all this? I thought that was, like, one of the rules or something. Don’t talk about the /b/forums.”

“First of all, that’s just during raids, and second of all, the only people who get all butthurt about mentioning the /b/forums are newfags.”

I’m sure I looked visibly uncomfortable.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said. “You went to college in the nineties. Don’t take offense. These are just words for the masses. Not even. It’s the Internet-speak we aquire. In any event, I’m telling you this because you asked for help. And I trust you.”

“Because I have nothing left to lose?”

“Godspeed, Gladstone.”

I headed for the door, but before turning, I asked, “Are you Anonymous?”

He remained motionless for a moment, but then stood full and proud, his red velvet robe long and flowing.

“Gladstone,” he said. “You may call me QuiffMonster42.”

5.

DAY 27. POLITICS IN THE APOCALYPSE

Picking locks isn’t like the movies. It’s a two-hand job because locks only open under pressure. You can poke at the spring-loaded tumblers all day and they will snap and fire back to position as soon as you run your pick over them unless the other hand is keeping it tight. A tension wrench primed and ready to turn so the tumblers stay depressed. I didn’t expect to learn that in law school, but it was more interesting than the rule against perpetuities, and Martin, a student from Oregon, was eager to teach.

He also instructed me in the basics of making burglar tools out of everyday objects. If you place pennies on your thumb and forefinger, you can bend a paper clip into a zig-zag pick. And if you snap the metal clip off one of those cool leaky pens I’m so partial to and then bend it into an L, it makes quite the serviceable tension wrench. It was important that these things be inconspicuous because, as we learned in Crim Law, the mere possession of burglar tools was a crime, and we were, y’know, studying to be lawyers and all.

I’d sit on the radiator in my Fordham dorm room for hours, learning how to work the window locks. In their bolted state, they pulled back only a few inches into the room, allowing a mere sliver of air to enter at the very top. A safety/suicide precaution that succeeded only in providing an incentive to sharpen my skills, because if you popped the lock along the bottom, and turned the handle sideways, the entire window opened like a door. Romaya loved that. Not only because it was wrong, but because it brought the stories that much closer.

That’s what she called the people living in the luxury apartments across the way. Each in their own boxed reality and on display for us. Grown-ups. Some pulled the blinds, but others probably believed in the anonymity of New York. The privacy of living in the sky, surrounded by concrete. They were unaware two kids in their early twenties were committing a minor crime solely for the joy of sitting up in a darkened bed, smoking, and watching them live for our amusement.

There was a single man in his thirties who watched TV for four hours every night. An aging woman who did her face and hair endlessly, and another room that was impeccably furnished, lit, and exposed, but never occupied. No actor ever took the stage. But we watched anyway, content to witness the real world from the safety of youth. It couldn’t find us there. Not in the dark. But just to be sure, we’d snuff the glow of our cigarettes and lock the window before going to sleep.

*   *   *

To my credit or shame, Oz feels safe sharing the bed with me. It helps that we keep something between us—her sleeping under both the sheet and comforter and me sandwiched between the two with only a sheer layer of cotton separating my broken desire from her body. The last few mornings, I woke first and had a few moments to watch the covers rise and fall with her breathing. I stare at the flush two blankets bring to her cheek and try to divine her dreams. But the peace Oz finds in her sleep makes her inscrutable.

We’ve been spending time downtown based on that crumb of Internet intelligence from Anonymous. It seems Occupy Wall Street’s numbers are growing again. Almost as strong as when they made the world sit up and take notice of their constitutional right to take a dump in Zuccotti Park.

It was unseasonably cold this morning and we ducked into the white-tiled lobby of Deutsche Bank, looking for some coffee. Apparently, it had become OWS headquarters.

“Fuck me. Did someone wash a goat in a bucket of patchouli?” Oz said, holding her nose.

Tobey shook his head. “Smells like a pair of Birkenstocks took a shit in here.”

Mostly college-aged kids, but some older folks, were milling about in clusters, clearly in regrouping mode. Each was talking about what was really going on, what it meant, and what they had to do. At first, I thought recent changes had revitalized their economic protest. Without competition from the Net, shop owners had been free to fan the flames of inflation. And while that might have been good news for those businesses, computer and gadget sales had tanked along with all the tech and marketing jobs that go with that. Firms and businesses kept laying off IT people too. After all, how many guys do you need to fix your Excel spreadsheet or document management program? But one look at their signs and I could see this was no longer about the economy: G
IVE
U
S
B
ACK
T
HE
N
ET
;
Y
OU
C
AN
T
AKE
T
HE
W
EB
,
B
UT
N
OT
O
UR
F
REE
S
PEECH
, and one of what I’m guessing was Che Guevara wearing a Guy Fawkes mask?

“Who are these signs addressing?” I asked. “The man? They’re acting like they know who took the Net.”

“Time to investigate,” Tobey said. “I’ll kneel down behind that white guy with the dreads. You push him over and we’ll beat the truth out of him.”

I had a better idea. There was a girl with big nerd glasses, striped stockings, and a purple bob.

“How about her?” I said, pointing.

Oz shook her head. “You really can’t help yourself, can you?”

“Excuse me,” I said, walking over to the girl. “I couldn’t help but notice your sign.”

She dropped a sandwich bag of what appeared to be weed at the sound of my voice.

“It’s not mine!” she protested.

Tobey nearly pissed himself laughing.

“I don’t care about your shwag,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about your sign.”

I pointed down to her posterboard, which read, G
IVE
I
T
B
ACK
, to make it clear I wasn’t talking about astrology. “Who exactly do you think took the Net?”

“Who do you think?” she said. “The government.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Where ya been? Remember SOPA? The government’s in cahoots with the entertainment industry. They want to shut down the Web. They shut down Megaupload and BTJunkie. Now they’re like, fuck it, let’s shut down the whole damn thing.”

She kneeled to recover her stash, so I directed my question downward. “Obama wants to appease Hollywood so much he just flipped some gigantic kill switch?”

“Well, I don’t know how he did it,” she said, pushing her weed into her skirt pocket. “But yeah. Is that so hard to believe? Look how the government cracks down on us. Arresting us for sleeping on public property!”

“Well, Zuccotti Park was private property, and even if it weren’t, I mean there are laws. If you were allowed to just set up camp everywhere we could solve the homeless problem in America by just passing out tents.”

She looked at me with a kind of confused distrust. A touch of fear. Then she threw the weed out of her pocket again. “Why did I just pick that up? It’s not mine!”

“Again, I’m not a cop. And I’m not even picking on your protest. I mean, it’s good that there are laws. I mean, you
want
the cops to arrest you, right? Isn’t that the point of civil disobedience? To get arrested for what you believe in? To prove a point?”

The look returned, but without fear this time. She retrieved her weed again and asked, “Who the fuck wants to get arrested?” before walking away.

“Smooth, G-Stone,” Tobey said.

“I don’t get it. If OWS thinks Washington took the Net, why are they protesting on Wall Street?”

Oz wasn’t confused. “Because who wants to be stuck in D.C. without the Internet?”

She was right. I’d forgotten that while the exits had opened and people were free to leave, Manhattan’s entrances remained closed as a security measure. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population has now fled. And just like before the Apocalypse, all the most frightened and boring people took off for New Jersey.

That’s why the three of us had decided to hole up at Oz’s hotel in the Village. Going back to Brooklyn would have locked us out of our chances of finding the Internet. I kicked in some money for Oz’s room, and Tobey offered Oz his last fifty bucks to watch her shower. It’s probably for the best she declined, considering I’m fairly certain he just wanted to make more lame Australia jokes. “Crikey, that’s not a rack. Now
that’s
a rack!”

“Well, what now?” I asked.

“Whaddya mean, what now?” Tobey barked. “We didn’t even come down here for OWS, remember? We’re following my dream.”

“To be the most sexually retarded blogger the Net has ever seen?”

“Not that dream. The one I told you this morning.”

Tobey claimed he’d woken from a vision: that we were well on our way to discovering who stole the Internet. I was skeptical and paid no attention. After all, most of Tobey’s inspiring dreams involved jokes about how hot he still is for Demi Moore. (“If my right arm got sheared off in an industrial accident while Demi Moore was blowing me, my only concern would be losing consciousness before she finished.”)

Furthermore, while I was clearly uncomfortable with the knee-jerk liberal OWS crowd, Tobey was also falling prey to the Right’s growing influence. The Apocalypse had been hard on the political left. TV ratings and radio listenership were way up, and that’s where the Right thrives. NPR is no match for the multipronged attack of Republican talk radio, and MSNBC can’t compete with Fox. The Internet was the only thing that the Left was almost kind of good at. And while it’s refreshing not to have my inbox flooded with sophomoric MoveOn.org vids comparing Sarah Palin to Hitler, it’s a little frightening that even with a Democrat in office, the public influence war is over. All we have is
The New York Times,
and who’s shelling out two bucks for a paper in this economy?

Tobey had got up from his couch, wiping sleep out of his eyes and holding court in the hotel room. “Gladstone,” he said. “I’ve seen it. Why are we making this so hard? Terrorist Internet chatter intercepted somewhere downtown. Duh? Why don’t we go to the Ground Zero mosque?”

“Park51? For the same reason we’re not going to the Olive Garden in Times Square. It’s a stupid idea. Plus, the mosque doesn’t even come with bread sticks.”

Tobey and I went back and forth until Oz threw off the covers to interrupt. “I know you guys think I’m just some chick from a country filled with crocodile hunters and baby-eating dingos, but if I could…”

“And Vegemite sandwiches,” Tobey added.

“Yes. Vegemite sandwiches. Thank you. But it doesn’t really matter who’s right. We’re out of ideas. Terrorist sympathizers or slandered Muslims, the mosque is downtown and we’ve got fuck-all intelligence so, y’know, why not?”

The Mosque Not at Ground Zero

The three of us left the OWS crowd and headed down Rector Street still carrying the supplies we’d gathered that morning. Like any mission composed of people who didn’t know what they were doing, we decided the first thing we needed to do was pack. The Kmart in Penn Station gave us plenty of opportunities to fill our arms without reason. Swiss army knives, compasses, backpacks, and even a self-inflatable raft. It wasn’t until we were done shopping that we realized our purchases were gleaned more from old
MacGyver
episodes than anything we might need in the Apocalypse. But seeing as we didn’t know what that was exactly, who’s to say they weren’t the same thing. Besides, the whole
MacGyver
thing reminded me of Martin, and that made me happy. I liked remembering him from before he became a lawyer. Unlike me, he’d finished law school and settled in Alaska as a public defender. It didn’t agree with him. He shot himself years later, sometime after we stopped acknowledging each other’s birthdays even with the help of Facebook reminders.

I was surprised to find Park51 was still just occupying space in the abandoned Burlington Coat Factory while trying to raise construction money amid a sea of bad press. Tobey adopted a stealthy Spider-Man creep fifty yards from the destination.