Internet Kill Switch (28 page)

7
2

The College Park campus was huge, but largely deserted. Classes had been cancelled for the duration, as university administrators tried to figure out what to do. The lack of traffic and bodies made it easier for Rick to find the Computer and Space Sciences Building. It was one of a number of impressive-looking buildings stitched together in what was called the “Physical Sciences Complex”, with lots of red brick and concrete, set off with large windows.

They’d decided
in the car that they’d proceed casually; they had no idea if there would be security, although given the state of things, they thought it likely. There would also probably be a host of technical experts there, trying to get the root servers working again. With all that activity going on, it was possible they’d just look like regular students and be able to connect Max with no one noticing.

No one guarded
the building’s front doors, a good sign. They strolled in and wandered about, looking in doors and windows at the classrooms and offices. They passed a young Asian woman walking quickly in the other direction. Rick had a hunch and silently put his hand out, stopping the trio. He put his finger to his lips and gestured that they should follow the woman. They turned and kept a discreet distance away, following her down numerous hallways and getting completely lost in the process. She eventually entered a room and disappeared inside. They were able to get a quick peek inside the room before a man with a buzz cut stuck his head out the door and eyed them suspiciously. “This is a restricted area, kids. Out.” He glared at them.

Without argument, Rick said “OK, sure, yeah! We just got a little lost. Sorry!” He nodded at the guard
, and they immediately moved down another hallway and out of sight. The man stared at them until they turned the corner.

“Think that’s
it?” Tony asked.

“For sure
,” said Max. “That’s a big server room. Lots of folks inside, trying to figure out how to bring the network back up. There’s no doubt that we’ve found the place.”

“It’s a good sign that there’s no armed guards outside the door,” Scarlett said.

“But we know there’s at least one on the inside,” Rick said.

“You can
bet there will be more than that,” Max said. “With the way things are now, there’s no way they won’t have at least two guards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are three or four.”

“So, what’s our plan?” Rick asked Max, hoping he’d have an answer.

Tony smiled, then looked at Scarlett. She didn’t understand. Then Tony put his hands over his ears. Scarlett smiled and nodded, remembering their first date.

This infuriated Rick, who still didn’t understand. “Will somebody please tell me why you’re suddenly happy?”

A minute later, Scarlett knocked on the door to the server room. The buzz-cut guard opened the door, saw her, and started to say “Hey, didn’t I tell...” Before he’d finished the sentence, Tony
placed Max on the floor and slid it through the door into the room. All three of them slammed the heavy door shut, with them on the outside and everyone else inside. The guard tried to push the door open, to no avail.

As soon as the door
closed, Max let loose the ultra-high-frequency tone he’d used when Tony and Scarlett were attacked on their first date. After 10 seconds, they opened the door.

The room was full of unconscious people.
“We probably have four to five minutes before they start waking up,” Max said.

Rick and Tony spent the first few minutes dragging everyone out of the room
, while Scarlett found a computer to plug Max into: one of the management computers near the front. She opened a small panel on the back side of the phone. Hidden inside was an Ethernet port. They had brought a length of Ethernet cable to hook Max up, just as if he were a laptop plugging into a home or business network. “OK, I’m connected. Now, I just have to figure out how to fix what I’ve broken so thoroughly.” Scarlett put her hand lightly on Max as it worked; she could feel a hum and vibration, and feel Max getting very hot.

“Making progress?” She asked after a minute.

“Can’t talk now. Need cycles to work this problem.”

“Sorry,” Scarlett said
.

A
s Max was starting to analyze the root server cluster, Tony and Rick worked on getting the door blocked. They discovered that the door latch had been taped, no doubt to keep it from locking permanently if a glitch or some kind of attack caused the generators running the room to fail. Ripping off the tape, they noted that the door was locked from the inside. Perfect. They simply let the door close and latch normally, locking them in and everyone else out. Now, no entry was possible from the outside unless the Internet was re-established. People normally got in by swiping a security badge down the slot next to the door, but it was Internet-connected, and therefore currently useless.

“Don’t answer
me, Max,” Tony said while the phone hummed, “But if you get the Internet going again, we need you to make sure the door to the outside stays locked. Scramble the authorization codes or something, so those key cards don’t work.” Max said nothing.

After a couple more minutes, they started hearing banging
and shouting on the other side of the door. Rick grinned. “Our sleeping beauties have awakened from their long nap.” There were three armed guards in all, and they were now shouting threats from the other side.

“Your lives are over, you know that, right?” one screamed. “The second you set foot outside, you’re history!”

Another: “Open the door! You might get less than 30 years if you come out right now!”

Another: “A SWAT team is on the way. Give yourselves up
, or it only gets worse from here on out!”

“Those threats bring up a
really fine question,” Rick said as they waited for Max. “Our plans revolved around getting in here and letting Max do his thing. We didn’t talk much about how we get out of here, did we?”

“Not really,” said Scarlett. “I just wanted to finish the job and then go back to my regular life. I guess that’s not happening now.” She looked at Tony, who shrugged his shoulders.

“I would hope,” he said, “that what we’ve done -- if Max gets it done -- will be enough to get them to cut us some slack. It’s not like we hurt anyone, you know?”

The pounding
on the door grew more intense, along with the shouting and increasingly colorful phrases.

“Good thing that door’s
holding up,” Scarlett said. “What do you think will happen to us, Rick?”

Rick looked thoughtful. “I think we’ll be hailed worldwide as heroes, and the president will invite us to the White House in gratitude. My career as a rock star will get the kickstart it deserves, and the two of you will get married, have three kids and be the most boring couple I know.”

Scarlett and Tony turned red with embarrassment. Neither thought, however, that marriage to the other would ever be boring.

The
door pounding had started to die down when Max finally spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said dramatically, like a circus barker, “the Internet... is working again.”

7
3

“You did it, Max!” Tony shouted.

“Hell yeah!” Rick yelled.

“Is everything back up now? Are there still problems to take care of?” Scarlett asked, worried that it wasn’t all over yet.

“Good question
s,” Max said. “I’ve fixed the cluster and the routing tables, so the networks know where to send stuff. This cluster will send its information to the other root server clusters, which will update other servers, and... yeah. In a couple of hours, things should be well on their way back to normal. Look at all the pretty lights on the servers now.”

They looked. The racks of servers had been mostly dark
; it was like a computer ghost town. Now, little lights on their faces blinked continuously, showing that data was passing between them again, and networks were being re-established. Some servers were still dark, though. Max said there had been so much damage that some would never come back online, but most of them eventually would. The room started to warm up as well, as server processors that had been dormant for most of the last 12 days suddenly came to life, generating heat.

As they started to turn their attention to how they’d get out, they heard an explosion, and the door to the outside hallway suddenly blew inward with incredible force. It hurtled into the room with bullet-like speed, and its edge slammed into Rick’s right arm, taking it completely off at the shoulder. Blood sprayed from the stump of his arm in a gruesome rainbow. Rick looked at his shoulder, where his arm used to be, then at his arm on the floor. He looked surprised more than scared. Then his eyes fluttered and he tumbled over onto the floor.

Scarlett screamed and screamed, as Tony rushed to
Rick’s side. He looked up in time to see Mitchell Bass enter the room, surrounded by Omega revolutionaries bulging with guns. After arriving, the team easily disarmed the guards pounding on the door, then rounded up the rest, many of whom still felt disoriented. They locked them all in a bathroom.

Then t
hey blew the server room door open with C4 plastic explosive. Bass strode in, looked around and saw a black kid on the floor in a pool of blood. He remembered the punk running out of his compound with the phone, and grimace-smiled. He’ll be dead in 20 minutes. Serves him right.

Next to him sat that computer illiterate
, Tony, who was taking off his shirt to stuff it in the hole where the punk’s arm used to be.
“You son of a bitch!”
Tony screamed at him as he held Rick’s head in his lap.

Bass
moved on, ignoring them. He looked around for the phone. Seeing Max still attached to the management computer, he unplugged it before the device could undo any more damage. “So, you got it going again, did you?” he said to Max, ignoring the sobs and screams coming from the kids. Max said nothing; it could think of a thousand things to say, of course, now that it was connected to the Internet again. But it had other things to consider at the moment, like Plan Z.

As he left the room with his comrades, Bass shook his head. “Don’t interfere with the prophet on his mission, little children. I will spare your lives this time
, although it appears as though one of you will be departing this world soon anyway. Consider it an act of mercy.”

And he was
gone, followed by his soldiers.

As
the last man left, Rick passed out.

7
4

Bass walked at the head of his unit down the corridors, a glint of triumph in his eyes. Schnell came up beside him, looking nervous as usual. Bass hated that about him, and would have gotten rid of him years ago for this character flaw, if he hadn’t been a total computer Jedi. Now Schnell had to bother him with nervous questions.

“
Why didn’t you use the phone to break the Internet again, since it was plugged in?”

“No time, Rudy. The cops will be on our tail before you know it. What good is it to bring the thing down again, when they’ll
just get the phone and bring it right back up? Now that we’ve got it again, we can use it as an Internet kill switch whenever we want.”

“But we shouldn’t wait long. They’ll start putting up safeguards to stop this from happening again. They’ll analyze how the phone destroyed everything and
determine how...”

“We’ll figure it out as soon as we’re back in the air. You’ll be able to work your sorcery again in no time.
Take it easy.”

Schnell, who never took it easy, wanted to believe Bass
. But he didn’t. There were simply too many variables in play right now. He didn’t think he could use the phone right away; to begin with, he was sure the root password had been changed, and it would take time to crack that again.

They had reached the entrance and walked outside. As they did so, Schnell
gasped as one of those unforeseen variables came into play. The moment the crew was outside, they were surrounded by at least 40 fully-loaded U.S. Marines, all of them pointing weapons at their little group.

Bass looked at the circle of death surrounding him. Across the street, he noticed that three other helicopters had joined his on the football fields. His men stood back-to-back, ready to fire at his command.

“Stand down, men,” Bass said. He knew a hopeless situation when he was in the middle of it.
They laid down their guns, followed by Bass. “We’re dropping our weapons,” he said loudly to the Marines.

The Omega team put their hands on their heads, and were thoroughly frisked by the
Marines for hidden weapons. Bass remained completely calm as he was subjected to his frisk, while two other Marines trained their guns on him.

Suddenly, Bass grabbed the frisking
Marine’s gun out of the holster on his hip. The surprised Marine, assuming the massive firepower would deter any such insane actions, moved too slowly to stop Bass. He shot the Marine, killing him instantly, then sprinted into the street.

Bass had decided long ago that he wasn’t going back to jail. Ever. He’d die first.

He
knew what was coming next, but didn’t care. He was a prophet, after all: sometimes prophets had to be sacrificed for the cause. In fact, martyrs often served as a rallying cry for the true believers, spreading the message even faster after seeing their leader cut down. He’d begun the revolution; alas that it would be for others to finish.

Bass didn’t get all the way through these thoughts, but
he’d had them many times before and recorded similar things in his Journal, which would now be left for mankind’s benefit. He didn’t have much time to do any thinking at all, because he died instantly, torn apart by a storm of bullets before getting 25 feet away.