Cyberpunk

here.”
    Felix looked at him, his skin the color of corned beef and streaked with long, angry scabs. His fingers trembled.
    “You drinking enough water?”
    Van nodded. “All frigging day, every ten seconds. Anything to keep my belly full.” He pointed to a refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of water by his side.
    “Let’s have a meeting,” he said.
    There had been forty-three of them on D-Day. Now there were fifteen. Six had responded to the call for a meeting by simply leaving. Everyone knew without having to be told what the meeting was about.
    “So that’s it, you’re going to let it all fall apart?” Sario was the only one with the energy left to get properly angry. He’d go angry to his grave. The veins on his throat and forehead stood out angrily. His fists shook angrily. All the other geeks went lids-down at the site of him, looking up in unison for once at the discussion, not keeping one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service log.
    “Sario, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Felix said. “You wanted to pull the goddamned plug!”
    “I wanted it to go clean, ” he shouted. “I didn’t want it to bleed out and keel over in little gasps and pukes forever. I wanted it to be an act of will by the global community of its caretakers. I wanted it to be an affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy and bad code and worms winning out. Fuck that, that’s just what’s happened out there.”
    Up in the top-floor cafeteria, there were windows all around, hardened and light-bending, and by custom, they were all blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the room, yanking down the blinds. How the hell can he get the energy to run? Felix wondered. He could barely walk up the stairs to the meeting room.
    Harsh daylight flooded in. It was a fine sunny day out there, but everywhere you looked across that commanding view of Toronto’s skyline, there were rising plumes of smoke. The TD Tower, a gigantic black modernist glass brick, was gouting flame to the sky. “It’s all falling apart, the way everything does.
    “Listen, listen. If we leave the network to fall over slowly, parts of it will stay online for months. Maybe years. And what will run on it? Malware. Worms. Spam. System processes. Zone transfers. The things we use fall apart and require constant maintenance. The things we abandon don’t get used and they last forever. We’re going to leave the network behind like a lime pit filled with industrial waste. That will be our fucking legacy—the legacy of every keystroke you and I and anyone, anywhere ever typed. You understand? We’re going to leave it to die slow like a wounded dog, instead of giving it one clean shot through the head.”
    Van scratched his cheeks, then Felix saw that he was wiping away tears.
    “Sario, you’re not wrong, but you’re not right either,” he said. “Leaving it up to limp along is right. We’re going to all be limping for a long time, and maybe it will be some use to someone. If there’s one packet being routed from any user to any other user, anywhere in the world, it’s doing its job.”
    “If you want a clean kill, you can do that,” Felix said. “I’m the PM and I say so. I’m giving you root. All of you.” He turned to the whiteboard where the cafeteria workers used to scrawl the day’s specials. Now it was covered with the remnants of heated technical debates that the sysadmins had engaged in over the days since the day.
    He scrubbed away a clean spot with his sleeve and began to write out long, complicated alphanumeric passwords salted with punctuation. Felix had a gift for remembering that kind of password. He doubted it would do him much good, ever again.
    > Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway
    > yeah well thats right then, it was an honor, mr prime minister
    > you going to be okay?
    > ive commandeered a young sysadmin to see to my feminine needs and weve found another cache of food thatll last us a coupel weeks now that were down to fifteen admins—im in hog heaven pal
    > youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. Dont be a hero though. When you need to go go. Theres got to be something out there
    > be safe felix, seriously—btw did i tell you queries are up in Romania? maybe theyre getting back on their feet.
    > really?
    > yeah, really, we’re hard to kill—like fucking roaches
    Her connection died. He dropped to Firefox and reloaded Google and it was down. He hit reload and hit reload and hit reload, but it didn’t come up. He closed his eyes