“You think you’re safe behind the firewalls of your NSA overlords, but you aren’t. I can’t reach you right now, but it’s just a matter of time before I’m back in and burn your fucking house down.”
Angel nodded as she typed. “Not before I hunt down every last one of your worms, you mean. Dissect the motherfuckers. I know you’ve been keeping score out there. See that tide rising?”
“You’re interfering in things you don’t understand!”
“Really?” She shook her head. “You going to mansplain the situation to this poor, clueless little cunt?”
“Damn you! You don’t know what I know. The power isn’t where you think it is. It hasn’t been for hundreds of years! I’ve hacked my way to it.”
She put her chin on her hand. “Fawkes, seriously. Is this where you try to tell me how we can rule the galaxy together if I’ll just embrace the dark side?”
The masked face in the video stream turned to the side. A scream sounded over the monitors.
Angel clicked her tongue. “You have major anger management issues.”
The face was back.
“Every nation, every corporation, every standing army is marching to hidden orders. Events — they’re all part of a big game board! Pieces — disposable pieces — moved by the few that really hold the power. We can’t change it from within. We can’t defeat them on their terms!” The face panted. “But they’ve made themselves dependent on the modern information system — and they can’t control it. For the first time in hundreds of years, they’ve made a fatal mistake!”
Angel stared silently for a moment. “You’re really a mental case, aren’t you?”
The scream again. “No! I can show you. Prove it! Your fucking code — it’s threatening everything! You have to listen to me!”
“Listen to you go full tin-foil-hat on me as you try to destroy the world? This crap’s not even up to the bottom suckers of the worst chat room. If you wanted to make a good first impression, you lost the chance big time when you screwed over my servers, when you brought my dad into this!”
“I will bring your shitty code down!”
She was standing now, palms down on the table. The light of the monitor reflected off her scalp and the metal in her face. “And we still got your girl! She’s singing, singing, singing like a fucking bird. Well, really, it’s a bit more like screaming. Honestly, so far — it’s just screaming. But we know we’ll get enough out of her to come after you in the real world.”
The mask hovered in the center of the monitor without speaking. Angel could hear his labored breathing. She twisted the knife.
“I can send you a live feed the next time we go at her. But do you really want to be there when we break her? Might fuck you up good, yeah? Watching what we do to her? Every little thing? Believe me, I can imagine how that’d make you feel.”
His next words were slurred — hissing. “You’re not the only one who can reach out in the real world.”
She laughed again. “You hit us with everything you had and I’m back. It’s worse for you than before. Really, Fawkes, you were an inspiration to write this code! Thank you for that.”
“I will make you hurt for this.”
“Oh, Guy,” she said dismissively, “I’m not scared of you. And neither is my code. Expect it, fucker.”
Lightfoote hit ENTER and sent a video feed through the connection. She watched a mirrored window on her monitor display the content — a young woman strapped to a table, men beating her, blood on her face and pouring from her nose. Poison.
She closed the connection and walled Fawkes out with the NSA module. The monitor went dark. She sat down and leaned back in the chair, disgusted with the lies they were sending him.
“But you made me get dirty, you fuck,” she whispered. “Now, come get her.”
53
For Elaine York, the “SF” was as comforting as it was alarming.
The acronym-smiths of the bureaucracy had called the Mount Weather retreat the High Point Special Facility, HPSF, but the human beings it was designed for had digested that down to something more manageable. High in the Virginia mountains to be sure, it was special in ways only a self-contained, doomsday hideout could be. Replete with self-sustaining environmental processes for waste and water, military grade rations lining underground storage silos to feed hundreds for weeks to months of isolation — its soldiers, weaponry, and communications systems were rivaled only by NORAD. Prime vacation estate for the nation’s leaders when the world went to shit.
And the world was definitely going to shit.
The Colonel—which one was he? She’d lost track in the chaos — droned importantly about the precariousness of their plight.
“Without the logistics software, Madam President, we risk an entire breakdown of the supply chain. Our recommendations are to secure all of the major air, land, and sea routes immediately for governmental use only.”
President York stared outside the reinforced glass window at the color explosion of the surrounding forest. The morning sunrise crested over the mountains and flooded the compound with light. Waves of flaming red and orange, bright yellow and dim browns blurred in her mind with impressionistic artists’ canvases. Patches within the tapestry, like flaking paint in a poorly maintained van Gogh, revealed the skeletal tree branches buttressing the display and hinted at the coming hardness of winter. York knew that this winter would be one of the hardest in memory.
The bald man behind her continued, his ghostly reflection in the glass distracting her. “It’s not just food and fuel anymore. We’re looking at a prolonged deficit in nearly every category needed to maintain defense functionality.”
She now presided over a nation teetering toward dissolution. The major neural networks controlling the modern world were misfiring, clogged with corrupt code like amyloid plaques, rendering the body of the nation as disoriented and confused as an Alzheimer's patient. Beyond the psychological damage of losing most of the modern computer infrastructure — a loss utterly traumatizing to generations now raised on its presence and dependent on the very idea of a world entirely connected, ubiquitously digitized — the very tangible losses of computer regulated transport, manufacturing, scheduling, communications, and medical care had left increasingly large swaths of the country reeling.
“As per NSA analysis, the projections from the last few days, the attacks are intensifying, likely to reach a climax very soon.”
Remember, remember the fifth of November.
It was November fourth, and York dreaded the passage of time like the helpless descent of a sleeper into a nightmare. “What about this anti-worm virus they were talking about?” she asked, turning around momentarily to face the officer.
“There’s too much contradictory data, Ma’am. No one knows where it’s coming from, who’s behind it, if it even is working against the worm. Some are convinced of it, but others aren’t. It might even be a feint by Anonymous to distract us. It is spreading, though. Pretty rapidly.”
“And the drone attacks?”
“Those have tapered off. The worm is a replicating resource, but the drones are finite. Anonymous is running out of them.”
“They seem to have done enough damage. And what of the reports of a lone mastermind — this Fawkes from the FBI data?”
The man shook his head. “Unconfirmed and isolated reports to a single division of FBI. Analysis casts a lot of doubt on the hypothesis.”