CyberStorm (31 page)

“We can hear you digging. What did you find?”

Backing up, I was pinned against the plywood wall of the scaffolding.

“It’s ours, whatever it is.
Give
it to us!” hissed another voice.

Dozens of green faces now circled me in the dark. They couldn’t see me—it was pitch black—but they could hear me, sense me there. Their outstretched hands and fingers hunted through space, their feet shuffling forward in the snow, their eyes blind. I held the gun in my pocket.

Should I shoot one of them?

I dropped my backpack and rummaged around in it. The nearest hands were only a few feet away from me.

“Back! I have a gun!”

That stopped them, but only temporarily.

Grabbing the packet of cashews from the backpack, I threw it at one of the closest ones. His face was emaciated, with eyes shrunken into hollowed-out orbitals, and he had no gloves. His hands were black and bleeding in the phosphorescent light of the night-vision goggles.

The cashews ricocheted off him, landing somewhere behind, and he turned and dove for them, colliding with two others who did the same. I flung a few more packets randomly behind them, and they all turned away from me.

Running out of the enclosure, I dragged the backpack behind me.

In a few seconds I was back out on the open street, under cover of the falling snow. Taking a few gasping breaths to calm my thumping heart, I began the trek back toward our building. In my escape, I’d glanced once over my shoulder to see them fighting like a pack of wild dogs over scraps.

The tears came from nowhere.

I was crying, sobbing, trying my best to stay quiet as I trudged through the snow in the blackness—alone, but surrounded by millions.

Day 23 – January 14

“NEW YORK POWER Authority says that power will be restored to many parts of Manhattan within the week,”
promised the radio announcer, and then he added,
“but then again, we’ve all heard that before, haven’t we? Stay warm, stay safe—”

“Would you like some more tea?” asked Lauren.

Pam nodded, and Lauren crossed over to her with the large pot and filled her cup.

“Anyone else?”

Not more tea, but I’d sure like some biscuits
.

Sitting on one of the couches at our end of the hallway, I began to daydream about cookies.

Chocolate-covered biscuits, like the ones my grandmother used to bring on the holidays, the graham cracker kind.

“Yes, more tea, please,” said one of the Chinese family at the end of the hall, the younger man. Lauren smiled and began to make her way down there, stepping carefully between legs and feet and blankets on her way.

Her baby bump was noticeable even under her sweater, at least to me—
fifteen weeks
. I was down four notches on my belt, as skinny as I’d been in college.

As my stomach disappeared, hers was growing.

A meshnet alert pinged my phone, and I reached into my pocket to read it. It was announcing a med-swap meet-up on the corner of Sixth and Thirty-Fourth.
They better be defending it.
A lot of people out there wanted what they were bartering.

Noon tea was Susie’s idea. Boiling the water meant we could sterilize it, and the girls were making a fuss about trying to keep in contact with everyone at least once a day. The hallway had become like a convalescent home for a hunger strike, with rows of gaunt faces peering out from beneath stained blankets. The tea had bits floating in it, but it hydrated and warmed the body and, Susie hoped, the soul as well.

Chuck pointed out that getting as many warm bodies together in one room helped with heating. Each human body, he’d explained, gave off about as much heat as a hundred-watt lightbulb. So twenty-seven bodies equalled twenty-seven hundred watts of heating power, half as much power as our generator produced.

We didn’t talk about where all that energy came from. We used less energy if we moved as little as possible, but we used much more, he’d whispered to me quietly, if it was cold.

It was cold.

After three weeks, even with us being as sparing as possible, all of Chuck’s kerosene supplies were finished, and we were almost out of diesel. The two-hundred-gallon tank downstairs was nearly empty after three weeks of running two small generators and heaters and stoves, plus what scavengers had stolen.

We weren’t running the electric generator much anymore. The hallway was lit with lamps we’d made, using heating oil from the furnace in the basement. It was nearly the only thing we could use it for, as it was too viscous to run in the generator. Running the kerosene heaters on diesel alone created heat, but also nearly unbearable fumes, so we had to keep windows open when we ran it. This defeated the purpose.

“
In a few minutes we’ll be providing the latest updates on the cyberattack investigation, with—”

Crossing back to fill up the teapot, Susie turned down the volume on the radio.

“I think we’ve all had enough of that.”

“I haven’t,” said Lauren, sitting next to me at our end of the hallway.

We’d removed half of the barricade but still kept most of it in place—an upturned coffee table and some boxes demarcating which end of the hallway
other
people weren’t allowed into. Lauren was doing her best to keep our end clean, bleaching blankets and clothing. The strong smell of the bleach was nearly eye-watering.

Lauren sat upright.

“What I really want to know is, why didn’t they just make the internet more secure?”

It was a question circling the meshnet, asked with rising anger, and most of the blame was coming down on an inept government that should have protected us more.

“I’ll tell you why,” croaked Rory from beneath his blankets in the middle of the hall. “You can try and lay blame, but the central reason the internet isn’t secure is because
we don’t want
it to be secure.”

Hearing Rory speak, Chuck got into the conversation.

“What do you mean
we
? I’m all for a secure internet.”

Rory sat up a little. “You might
think
you want a secure internet, but you really don’t, and that’s part of what makes this possible. In the end, a perfectly secure internet isn’t in the interest of the general public
or
software producers.”

“Why wouldn’t consumers want a secure internet?”

“Because a truly secure internet wouldn’t serve a common interest in freedom.”

“Seems like it would right now,” said Tony quietly. Luke was lying asleep on top of him on the couch next to Lauren and me.

“It does right now, but it comes down to what we were talking about before, about privacy being the cornerstone of freedom. More and more of our lives are moving into cyberspace, and we need to preserve what we have in the physical world as we move into the cyber world. A perfectly secure internet implies a trail of information somewhere, always tracking what you’re doing.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that. A completely secure internet would be the same as a world with cameras on every corner and in every home, recording our every movement, but it would be even more intrusive. A perfect record of
every
interaction we had would give someone the ability to peer into our very thoughts.

“I’d be willing to give up my online privacy to avoid this mess,” snorted Tony, but quietly. Luke stirred in the blankets on top of him, and he whispered to him, saying he was sorry.

“Wait, doesn’t this contradict your speech about needing to make the internet
more
secure?”

“The problem is that we’re trying to use the same technology—the internet—for social networking
and
to run nuclear power plants. Those are two very different requirements. We need to try and make it as secure as possible without giving some centralized power all the responsibility,” replied Rory in a tired voice. “What we’re talking about is a balancing act, an attempt to make it difficult to abuse the rights of individuals in the cyber world of the future. Even this”—Rory waved his arms feebly around in the candlelight—“whatever is happening now, it’ll be fixed soon enough.”

Rory barely looked strong enough to stand, and yet he spoke with such confidence.

Hope was fading. “
There’s something they aren’t telling us. They wouldn’t be leaving us here to die like this,”
was the whisper on the meshnet.
We didn’t even really know what
“this”
was.

“Even all this suffering, we can’t use this as an excuse to give up our right to privacy, to freedom. No matter how many people die here, infinitely more have died under the thumbs of dictators and secret police in the past. Human nature doesn’t change, and we need to protect freedom, and privacy, and learn from our past. We should be protecting the right to privacy as much as our right to bear arms, and for exactly the same reasons.”

Silence.

Rory’s words made rational sense, but hunger and fear had a way of overpowering intellect.

“You may be right, but that’s a philosophical issue,” said Vince, breaking the silence. As ever, he was bent over his laptop, his face illuminated in the soft glow of its screen. He kept it running in low-power mode, charging it overnight when we ran the generator. “The bigger problem is that producers of software don’t want consumers to be secure.”

“So technology companies
purposely
want an insecure internet?” I said incredulously.

“They want it to be secure from hackers,” replied Vince, “but they don’t want consumers to be secure from letting
them
in. They hardwire back doors to update and modify software remotely—it’s a fundamental security risk they purposely create. The Stuxnet cyberweapon exploited it.”

“Of course they don’t want consumers to be secure from them,” snorted Rory. “They
give
us all that software for free specifically so that we
aren’t secure
from them—so they can watch us, sell our information.”

Vince looked absently into his computer screen. “If you don’t
pay
for a product, then
you are
the product.”

“How does someone tracking my online shopping affect security?” asked Susie, perplexed.

Vince shrugged. “It’s all the little loopholes, all the hooks and ways to track and get inside that are purposely put there by software companies—that’s a lot of what hackers exploit.”

“And you would know, wouldn’t you?” said Richard gruffly from the other end of the hall.

We ignored him.

The day before, it came out that he was the one who’d given the group on the second floor the kerosene heater in exchange for their generator, which he’d put in his own bedroom. He was adamant that he’d told them to ventilate, and for someone that was perhaps responsible for killing nine people, he wasn’t apologetic.

Vince waved one finger in the air.

“Software companies have never accepted product liability like every other industry. If your car crashes because of a faulty pedal, you sue the car company, but if you’re hacked because of poorly built software? Forget it. There’s no incentive to make secure software, because there’s no penalty. So you end up with buggy software that has intentional security holes.”

“What about the government then, isn’t it their job to protect against this?” asked Lauren. “What’s happening now isn’t just a hacked bank account.”

“Protect what exactly?” asked Rory.

“Electricity and water for starters.”

“The government doesn’t own that stuff anymore. Not their responsibility to maintain.”

“Isn’t it the military’s job to protect us?”

“In theory, yes, a nations’ military is there to protect its citizens and industry from other nations—establish a border and then protect it—but that doesn’t work anymore. Borders are nearly impossible to define in cyberspace.”

Rory took a deep breath.

“Where the government and military
used
to be responsible for protecting a factory from attack by foreign national governments, now they’re asking private industry to take over that responsibility in cyberspace.”

He shrugged.

“But who’s going to pay for it? And can a private company really protect itself from a hostile nation? Can all of us act as our own armed forces? And what happens when corporations become as powerful as nations?”

“That’s a lot of questions,” Tony laughed. “I don’t know much, but I did do my tours, and I can tell you one thing—defensive security isn’t sexy.”

Rory laughed too. “Defense is definitely seen as a cost center in America.
Offense
is the profit center. Over ninety percent of the NSA’s budget is offense—it’s just more fun and profitable.”

“Profitable,” said Chuck quietly, stretching the word out.

Rory nodded. “We don’t have much of a leg to stand on. We complain about the Chinese and Iranians, but we’re the ones that used cyberweapons, like Stuxnet and Flame, on them first, and the problem is that all the clever cyberweapons we build end up getting used against us.”

That sounded familiar, and it made me think of something.

“If you decide to use fire in battle, make sure that anything you need yourself isn’t flammable.”

“Sun Tzu?” asked Rory.

I nodded, thinking to myself,
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Well then,” Rory laughed weakly, “we should have been more careful, because we’re about the most cyber-combustible country on the planet.”

Nobody else in the hallway thought it was funny.

Day 24 –
January 15

“DO YOU HAVE any food?”

The voice startled me, and I almost dropped the load of snow I was hauling up. I recognized the voice as Sarah’s, Richard’s wife, and I turned around, but then was startled again. The voice was Sarah’s, but the person…