“No! I’m not abandoning anyone!”
“You’re abandoning everyone!”
“Come with me!” Rush, arms outstretched, crucifix pose. Supplier of answers, hacker of problems, the solutions guy. “Seriously! Come with me, all of you!”
Anika pauses time.
She pulls herself up to her feet, dusts shattered plaster crumbs from her backside. Mary watches her, confused and awkward.
“Who’s this guy, the one that’s leaving?”
“A fucking coward,” says Anika.
She steps over to Rush, passing through her own ghost, feeling nothing. Circles him. Peering at him up close. Infinite fucking detail. The pores of his face mapped in high definition, pixel by pixel. She has to lean right in to make out the individual polygons that construct the LIDAR-scanned surface of his hair.
Angry, disgusted, she steps back.
Hand on the floating invisible jog wheel.
She thinks about unpausing, of letting the scene play out. But she knows the endgame, everybody’s answers. What happens next. Spoiler alert: he leaves, nobody goes with him.
She could, this time, she thinks. Follow his ghost as it leaves, exit stage right.
Instead she hits REWIND again.
Rewind. All the way back to the beginning. As far as it will go.
Rush is here, alone, typing at the computer. He looks shook up, upset.
He finishes typing. Something isn’t working, it’s clear. He swears, wipes a tear from his eye.
The door behind him bursts open.
Claire is there, she’s supporting this girl—Anika struggles to remember her name, Sarah?—who’s leaning on her shoulder, arm around Claire’s neck. Blood runs from a gash on her head.
“Rush, give us a hand here, yeah?”
Rush spins around, glances back at the monitors in front of him, reaches out to guiltily thumb them both off before going to the door to help Claire. Gently they help Sarah down onto the bust-up sofa in the corner of the room.
“What the fuck happened? You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“She took a can of peas to the head,” says Claire.
Anika has that sudden feeling of recognition, of being witness to events she’d only heard of thirdhand, through conversations and timeline posts.
“What?”
“You got that first-aid kit?”
“Sure…” Rush turns around, confused for a second. Rummages in a junk-filled drawer, pulls out a green plastic box. He passes it to Claire. The blood doesn’t seem to be stemming. “Jesus, you want me to call an ambulance?”
“I’m fine! Really!” Sarah is protesting too much. “Guys, stop freaking out, please…”
“I already tried,” says Claire. “Couldn’t get through.”
“Hmm?”
“Ambulance. Tried calling her one before we got back. Nothing. Networks are all fucked, no data, no voice… dunno what’s going on.”
“I don’t need an ambulance, I’m going to be fine. Really.”
“What happened?”
“Riot at Sainsbury’s.” Claire’s voice is deadpan, like it was an everyday occurrence, her attention all focused on trying to clean up Sarah’s split head with an antiseptic wipe.
“Sainsbury’s?”
“Popped out to do some shopping, and all I got was a can of peas.” Sarah laughs, wincing in pain.
“What’s—” Mary’s mouth struggles with the unfamiliar word. “Sainsberries?”
“A shop. Where we used to buy food.” Anika’s focus is on the room. She’s never seen this before. “Shhh. Watch.”
“Stay still, yeah?” Claire glances up at Rush. “It was fucking nasty down there, man, full-on riot.”
“A Smash/Grab game?”
“Nah, this was a different crowd. Like, lots of, y’know… normal people? Lots of them. All really angry.”
“Angry? Why?”
“No food. Nothing on the shelves. Apparently not been anything for days. A week, someone told me. Not just Sainsbury’s, all the supermarkets. People are getting hungry.”
“And angry,” adds Sarah. “Tired of eating peas, I guess.”
“Stop fucking moving, Jesus, girl. You’re such a fidget.”
Rush steps back, runs a hand through his hair. Exhales loudly. “Fuck.”
“They were mad, Rush, I’m telling you. Were taking that place apart. Like they didn’t believe the staff, like they thought they were hiding food from them.”
“Shit. Jesus.”
Rush is pacing, running his hand through his hair again. And again. Like he can’t stop. It’s an anxious tic, Anika knows it all too well. So does Claire, apparently.
She finishes sticking an adhesive bandage over Sarah’s wound, cleans her own hands with another antiseptic wipe, watching him. “What is it, Rush? What’s actually happening?”
“I… I dunno.” He sounds flustered, unsure of himself. “I’ve been reading what I can, talking to people, watching shit… I dunno for sure, and if I told you what I’ve heard, you’d say I was crazy.”
“What?”
“Well… what it looks like, long story short—it looks like something is eating the Internet.”
“Sorry?”
“What?” adds Sarah.
“Something is eating the Internet.” He shrugs, shakes his head. “Something is infecting everything and shutting it down. But not until after it’s poured massive amounts of traffic into key bits of net infrastructure, mainly DNS servers, I think. It’s like a worm, a virus. It’s spreading between everything, millions of computers and devices. Just infecting everything and bricking it all.”
“Everything?”
“Well, anything with a Net connection, which is pretty much everything. So yeah. Everything from toasters to ISPs. China just disappeared.”
“What do you mean disappeared?” asks Sarah, wincing.
“I mean disappeared. As far as the Internet is concerned. It’s just not there. No Chinese Net infrastructure seems to be online. Now, they might have just freaked out, shut the wall down tight, sealed themselves off. Would be the sensible thing to do, actually. But most of the U.S. is gone too. Apparently Wall Street hasn’t traded since Thursday.”
Anika isn’t sure what day this is, can’t be bothered to pull up the recording log.
“Grids told me about this,” Mary says. She’s standing against the wall, keeping out of the way.
“Shhh.”
“Someone in town was saying the banks hadn’t been open all week,” says Sarah. “That old lady we was talking to? Said she couldn’t get her pension.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Rush.
“So it’s… what? A virus?”
“Seems so. One that can infect anything. Apparently works on some fundamental exploit of TCP/IP, and back-door exploits that seem to be embedded into lots of ‘Internet of Things’ devices. Looks impossible to patch at the scale it’s working at right now. I know it sounds unlikely, but yeah.”
“What… I… where?” Claire squints at him, doubtful. “I mean, where’s it come from?”
He laughs. “Well, yeah. Take your pick. From what I’ve read it might be hackers, the NSA, ISIS, China, a rogue AI that’s escaped from a lab in Berkeley, or space aliens.”
He goes back to pacing, his hand in his hair again.
Claire stops fussing with Sarah, pushes herself up off the coach, and moves over to him. Her ghost passes straight through Anika.
“You heard from Scott?”
Rush takes a deep breath. “Not for hours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Can’t call him, can’t message him, e-mail’s down…”
“Shit.” She rests a hand on his shoulder, tries to fix his wandering, ever-anxious eyes. “Hey. I’m sorry. You doing okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Apart from I’m freaking the fuck out. I just… I just hope he’s okay, y’know?”