Internet Kill Switch (20 page)

Abby stood up on the branch and held her arms out to her side, like she was on a tightrope. Scarlett, petrified, held out her hands
toward the girl. Out of the side of her eye, toward the river, she saw a large tree rush past, carried along by the swift current. "Abby, you should sit down. It’s dangerous up there. Please, come down so we can talk about it. I’ll help you."

Abby
either didn't hear her or ignored her. She started walking along the branch, then turning and walking the other way: over the river, then back over land, then over the river again. She slipped, but quickly regained her balance. Scarlett let out a yip. Abby continued to ramble on.

"Now those friends are gone. Bonnie and Peg and Delores and Rachel and Kari and Laura. All gone. Forever. I know it." The river was loud, but now Abby was eclipsing it.

Scarlett, nearly frantic, tried another tactic. "But what about your parents, Abby? Can't you talk to them? Can't you make new friends at school?"

"You don't understand," Abby said
firmly, now standing at the very end of the branch, the part farthest out over the river. She looked into the water. "I don't want other friends.
They
were my friends. They were
real
friends. Yeah, I know we couldn't get together. They all lived in different states and even different countries. But I saw them every day. Every day. When we weren't on Facebook, we were texting or Skyping. They loved me, Scarlett. My parents could care less whether I live or die."

“That’s not true, Abby,” Scarlett said, pleading. “They love you. They’ll tell you.”

Abby stuck a foot out over the edge of the branch, continuing on as if she couldn’t hear Scarlett at all. "And they're gone now. That's why I have to do this, don't you see? They’re gone, so I might as well be, too. It's no good anymore."

Then, w
ithout a glance back at Scarlett, Abby jumped into the river.

“Abby!”
Scarlett screamed as she shined Max’s light onto the water. She rushed to the bank, sweeping the river’s surface with the beam, looking for Abby's head to break through the water. She screamed Abby's name over and over. Abby didn't answer. She didn’t poke her head above the current, or even stick up a hand.

Scarl
ett started running downstream, following the current. Then she suddenly stopped and backed up, preparing to dive into the water.

"Scarlett, don't do it!" Max urged. "It's dark and the river's too fast. It'll carry you away. You won't stand a chance."

"But she'll die!" Scarlett shouted.

“She’s already dead!” Max yelled, on full volume. The words struck Scarlett like a physical blow, staggering her. She didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it.
That little girl can’t be dead.

“No, Max! There’s still time!” She frantically swept Max’s light across the torrent, moving both ways now, not sure how far downriver Abby might be.

"Scarlett, listen. She’s gone now. If you go after her, you'll die, too. Tony and Rick need you. They won’t be able to do this without you. Neither will I!"

The mention of Tony's name stopped her. She scanned the river
again. Abby didn't appear. After a few minutes, it was over. Abby was gone. Scarlett sat on the bank and cried.

She couldn't believe she had this many tears in her.

50

What President Cameron French noticed first as he flew over Boston in Marine One, the presidential helicopter, were the fires. They were everywhere. From his altitude of 12,000 feet, he could see the entire city, and the fires burned and burned. With no power, there was no way to put them out. A recent downpour, he was told, had kept it from being worse. That scared the president: it could be worse than this?

Boston looked much like
the other big cities he’d flown over. They all had fires burning, as lawlessness began to overcome law and put down shallow roots. If power didn’t come back on soon, and the Internet didn’t get fixed soon after, those roots would start to deepen and strengthen, until America would be unrecognizable.

President
French couldn’t let that happen. But right now, he didn’t know how to stop it.

The country had endured m
ore than a week with spotty power, and several days without any at all.

Eventually, he knew the power would come back on. Probably within the next four or five day
s, or even earlier, his energy secretary told him. The power companies were getting close. The question was, how much damage would be done in the meantime, and how much time would it take to undo the damage to the nation’s infrastructure?

A lot depended on what had
sparked the catastrophe, which they still weren’t entirely sure about. If power and the Internet were brought back online quickly, the effects were probably reversible, according to his national security advisor. The damage could be relatively minimal.

But if this was a calculated, coordinated attack, and if
it managed to cause physical damage to control systems, pumps, engines, generators, etc., the unavailability of parts and manufacturing capacity could mean months or years would be required to rebuild and re-establish basic infrastructure operation. Were they near that point yet?

Nobody seemed to know. Things were bad; that much everyone knew. Suicides
and murders were spiking, according to various reports. Business was at a near-complete standstill, and Wall Street teetered on the verge of possibly unrecoverable collapse. All critical intelligence agencies -- the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency -- were barely functioning. The military was doing what it could, but was becoming more and more ineffective as time passed. Crime was at an all-time high, with cities becoming more like the Wild West every day. Even those citizens without an inclination toward violence were starting to join gangs, just for safeties’ sake.

Marine One circled the city a few more times, and President
French watched it burn. The smoke rising above the buildings was so thick in places that he couldn’t see anything.

As he watched the blackness of the smoke drive out the sunshine on what should have been a glorious
spring day, the president fumed, his anger burning as brightly as the fires below. He told the pilot to head back to Washington. Marine One turned south.

Although it wasn’t certain what
wrecked the Internet -- the initial act that brought them here -- President French knew one thing: those responsible would be destroyed. They were America’s enemies, whether foreign or domestic. No one did this to his country. He would track them down, whatever the cost, and wipe them out, utterly.

The President had played linebacker at Florida State, and knew the value of
attacking. If you sat back and reacted to the offense, you would lose. Every time. No, the winning teams were those that blitzed the offense, that took the initiative away and dictated the terms of how the game would be played.

He liked football analogies, because they made sense to him. He’d used them throughout his
presidential campaign, even though his sissified opponent, John Burns, accused him of “talking too warlike, about bombs and blitzes.”

Burns
also used his name, an obvious handicap, against him. “No French victory,” Burns said at every campaign stop. But all his strategies backfired, and French kicked his butt in the election. That chump learned the hard way that it’s not about slogans and soundbites; it’s about strong leadership.

Unfortunately, his presidency had
thus far had given him precious few chances to be a hero. Domestic issues dominated, and Congress was its typical stubborn, useless self, keeping him from pushing through any kind of change.

So
, even though he was horrified at what was happening to his country, a part of President French (that he kept well hidden) secretly rejoiced: a crisis, at last! A chance to lead his team to victory, and crush his opponents. An opportunity to show America and the world that he was a strong man, an inspiring figure.

As he passed over the fires of New York an
d Philadelphia, the president envisioned himself lifting America onto his burly shoulders and carrying it past this tragedy. He’d be beloved, and his administration as admired any -- even Lincoln’s.

He would start by punishing those responsible
for this travesty so severely that no one would ever consider doing something like it again. So if he had to drop bombs, he would do it.

Even if those bombs had to be nuclear.

51

As Tony, Scarlett and Rick were meeting Bly at the Anderson Inn, Mitchell Bass was holding the funeral service for those killed in the drone attack on Omega Compound. He stood in front of 19 marked graves. They had died during the assault or shortly thereafter. The carnage was non-discriminatory: men, women and a five-year-old boy were martyred. Several more had serious wounds, and many more than that had suffered some type of injury.

In all, he thought, not a terrible price to pay for what he’d accomplished.

Still, this day was about mourning the fallen, not thinking about what lay ahead. And many fine people he’d known for years would no longer say good morning to him. They had all suffered loss.

A
ddressing the survivors at the row of new graves just outside the compound walls, Bass spoke of their sacrifice and what it meant.

“We’ll miss them all in the days ahead,” he said, as the
gathered sniffled and cried. “They meant the world to me, to you, to Omega. They gave their lives for what they believed in, for what we’re doing here, and we’ll never forget them.”

The mother of the boy who died
, Blake McFann, broke down over her son’s grave. Bass respectfully stopped speaking as friends comforted her.

“These brave, loyal people will stay with us, their memories living
on in our hearts. Their incredible spirit will drive us onward.” He didn’t mention heaven or hell, of course; they were fairy tales invented for the weak, and the people of Omega Compound were strong. There was no afterlife, only the here and now, and rational people knew it.

This was
n’t the time to speak of such things, though. He knew that even atheists like him tended to doubt their own version of faith -- faith that the material world was all there was -- when death became real. People wanted to believe there was more than just this life, even in the absence of any evidence. But what they needed now was comfort, not a refresher on the absurdity and futility of religion.

Bass
worked up a tear, made sure others saw it, then wiped it away and continued. “Ultimately, this tragedy will serve to make us stronger. We’ll rebuild and re-arm. We’ll rise from the ashes of this day and move forward, doing even greater things than we’ve done thus far.”

He looked around and saw some nods of agreement among the mourners.
He took note of who they were. “The more the government thinks they’ve defeated us, the more we’ll show them that our spirit, our determination, our will to triumph is stronger than ever!”

A smattering of clapping followed. Bass
grew quiet, put on his most somber expression and walked slowly back into the compound. Some followed him, while others remained at the brand-new graveyard, crying and wailing.

He didn’t want his people to get the wrong impression
. It wasn’t as though he didn’t feel for the dead or their survivors; he did. It’s just that his mind was so busy with what he’d accomplished and what lay ahead. The dead were no longer of any use to him, so he didn’t see the sense of weeping.

Bass went into the library
, one of the few buildings that wasn’t damaged in the attack, and lit a candle. Omega had been purpose-built for a post-apocalyptic society, so living off the grid was already a way of life. Relying on candles for light was standard operating procedure, not a nod to the new reality that everyone on the outside had to get used to. He and his people were already ahead of the curve.

He crossed the floor
and entered a room toward the back; his own private study. He closed the door, needing distance from the crowd. The small room was sparse, with two bookcases, a table and a chair. On the table was Bass’s most-treasured possession: his Journal. Leather-bound with pages that felt like parchment, his Journal was never far from his thoughts. He’d gone through 11 identical ones over the years, and locked them away so they’d be safe.

He lit the two candles on the table,
opened the book, dipped his fountain pen in the inkwell, and started to write. He started with the funeral, recording the name and age of each martyr. He considered his Journals to be one of his chief contributions to the new way of life, the new order he’d helped establish. It was a record of his deeds, so that others could learn from his example when it came to setting up their own versions of Omega Compound. He saw it as a blueprint for the new world, the more perfect society that he could see already beginning to sprout.

The honored dead would be pleased if they could see what’s happening. It’s a shame they won’t be here to experience it. Things are going from bad to worse in the world’s eyes – but from our vantage point, the opposite is happening. We hear that Wall Street may never fully recover from the outage, which would throw the world’s economy right down a well. So much for the profit jackals, those companies that build their empires on the backs of slave labor, i.e. the minimum wage. People are starting to barter for goods, just like it used to be. Money, which became the thing to have in the aftermath of the death of the Internet, is quickly losing its attraction, what with banks shuttering their doors all over. People feel like they have Confederate money now -- useless bits of paper -- and are panicked about what might come next.

Business has, for the most, part, come to a complete halt. The big web companies that sell stuff, of course, are doing nothing – Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc. Local businesses are also down. Most can’t run their shops without electricity and Internet access. Correction -- they could do it, they just don’t know how. They’ll have to learn (or remember) how it used to be done, how to do it without modern technology. I predict that, in the end, the local businesses will come back, and stronger, along with more of them than ever.

Why? Simple: without cars, people are locals again. They’re not commuting to soulless jobs in soulless cities anymore. They’ll have to find new jobs, new careers; careers that will satisfy them much more than what they’re doing now.

Change is coming rapidly. For example: fat Americans are starting to walk and ride bikes again. That will lead to them getting skinny, the way Europeans are, and increase their life spans. Another: people are talking to each other again, face to face. No texting, no phoning, no online status updates. Another: car crashes are a thing of the past -- no idiots texting their wives while they run their cars onto sidewalks.

Of course, there is an increase of lawlessness -- for now. This is the inevitable result of the masses throwing off their technological yoke. That burden was crushing them with its weight, but they were too stupid to realize it. So caught up in the glories of computers, of social networking, they’ve forgotten how to communicate except through moronic acronyms like “lol” and “smh”; and smiley faces, instead of periods, at the end of sentences.

Those days are gone, thanks to what we’ve done. The anarchy will gradually subside as people learn to live with the new reality. The blind learn how read braille; Americans will learn how to live without technology. And they’ll realize, in time, that they live better than they did.

A soft, tentative knock interrupted him. Bass put down his pen and closed his Journal. He wanted to write more, as usual. But his people needed him now. They needed their prophet to get them through this day. He would be there for them.