Cyberpunk

had a dozen power bars and some apples. He’d taken a couple sandwiches but had wisely eaten them first before they got stale.
    “One power bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain looseness in his waistline that morning and had briefly relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s teasing about his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two power bars, leaving him with just one left.
    “Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his shoulders sloping in on his toast-rack chest.
    “Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”
    Van took the power bar from him and then put it down on the table, “Okay, I want to give this back to you and say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking hungry, so I’m just going to take it and eat it, okay?”
    “That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.”
    “How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d licked the wrapper clean.
    “Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.” He’d been winning by a slim margin a few hours before. Not having his laptop was a major handicap when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag something Wi-Fi-enabled.
    “You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in next to them. He’d become famous in the center for never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for picking fights in RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet flamewar. “The winner will be someone who understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up a fist, then ticked off his bullet points by raising one finger at a time. “Point: The terrorists are using the Internet to destroy the world, and we need to destroy the Internet first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a joke. We’ll run out of generator fuel soon enough. Point: Or if we don’t, it will be because the old world will be back and running, and it won’t give a crap about your new world. Point: We’re gonna run out of food before we run out of shit to argue about or reasons not to go outside. We have the chance to do something to help the world recover—we can kill the ’Net and cut it off as a tool for bad guys. Or we can rearrange some more deck chairs on the bridge of your personal Titanic in the service of some sweet dream about an ‘independent cyberspace.’”
    The thing was that Sario was right. They would be out of fuel in two days—intermittent power from the grid had stretched their generator lifespan. And if you bought his hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used as a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down would be the right thing to do.
    But Felix’s son and his wife were dead. He didn’t want to rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one. The old world was one that didn’t have any place for him. Not anymore.
    Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and scurf swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip at him. “That is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you, aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty antisocial.”
    “You’re the world’s leading authority on antisocial, Sario,” Van said. “Go away or I’ll multitool you to death.” He stopped scratching and patted his sheathed multi-pliers like a gunslinger.
    “Yeah, I’m antisocial. I’ve got Asperger’s and I haven’t taken any meds in four days. What’s your fucking excuse.”
    Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
    Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that three-quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me, I’m just an asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell the truth, and that makes me better than you, dickweed.”
    “Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.” They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they added up the votes a second time.
    But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the data centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a leaderboard of new and rising queries—largely related to health, shelter, sanitation, and self-defense.
    Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC