When Sysadmins Ruled Nevertheless, it does make for a compelling scenario,

this vision of the sysadmins in their cages around the

the Earth world, watching with held breath as the generator failed
and the servers went dark, waiting out the long hours
until the power and the air run out.
Forematter:
This story originally appeared in Baen’s Universe
This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story Magazine, an admirable, high-quality online magazine
collection “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” edited by Eric Flint, himself a talented writer and a
published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon passionate advocate for open and free culture.
Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, Listeners to my podcast heard this story as it was
about which you’ll find more at the end of this file. written, read aloud in serial chinks after each
composing session. The pressure of listeners writing in,
This story and the other stories in the volume are demanding to know what happened next, kept me
available at: honest and writing.
http://craphound.com/overclocked —
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
everywhere, including Amazon:
(Originally published in Baen’s Universe, 2006)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156025981
7/downandoutint-20 When Felix’s special phone rang at two in the morning,
Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and
In the words of Woody Guthrie: hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off
before bed?”
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and “Because I’m on call,” he said.
anybody caught singin it without our permission, will
be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a “You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as
dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on the pants he’d left
We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” on the floor before turning in. “You’re a goddamned
systems administrator.”
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my
stories better. “It’s my job,” he said.
— “They work you like a government mule,” she said.
“You know I’m right. For Christ’s sake, you’re a father
Introduction to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth now, you can’t go running off in the middle of the night
every time someone’s porn supply goes down. Don’t
I’ve changed careers every two or three years ever since answer that phone.”
I dropping out of university in 1990, and one of the best
gigs I ever had was working as a freelance systems He knew she was right. He answered the phone.
administrator, working in the steam tunnels of the
information age, pulling cables, configuring machines, “Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.”
keeping the backups running, kicking the network in its The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t
soft and vulnerable places. Sysadmins are the unsung care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a
heroes of the century, and if they’re not busting you for little better.
sending racy IMs, or engaging in unprofessional email
conduct it’s purely out of their own goodwill. “Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could login
to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS
There’s a pernicious myth that the Internet was was in a different netblock, with its own independent
designed to withstand a nuclear war; while that routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.
Strangelove wet-dream was undoubtedly present in the
hindbrains of the generals who greenlighted the Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape
network’s R&D at companies like Rand and BBN, it against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you
wasn’t really a big piece of the actual engineering and have never once been able to fix anything from here.”
design. This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 2

the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, “Simple as that?”
so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he
had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could “Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad
ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only
Infinite Universal Perversity—AKA Felix’s Law. going on night call to cover holidays.”

Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”
hadn’t been able to fix it from home. The independent
router’s netblock was offline, too. The last time that had “This one will,” he said. “Promise.”
happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had
driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the “You’re wonderful,” she said. “Oh, gross. 2.0 just
data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged dumped core all over my bathrobe.”
sysadmins who’d stood atop the resulting pit for a
week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who “That’s my boy,” he said.
labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.
“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted
His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling
override the stereo and play the mechanical status up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good
reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a
“Hi,” he said. guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-
coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed
“Don’t cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice.” down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner
door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a
He smiled involuntarily. “Check, no cringing.” moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of
positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally
“I love you, Felix,” she said. to the inner sanctum.

“I’m totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed.” It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or
three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every
“2.0’s awake,” she said. The baby had been Beta Test other inch of cubic space was given over to humming
when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among
he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It
The Gold Master just shipped! They’d started calling was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with
him 2.0 before he’d finished his first cry. “This little inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with
bastard was born to suck tit.” phones and multitools.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said. He was almost at the Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all
data center. No traffic at 2AM. He slowed down and those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed
pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn’t space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he
want to lose Kelly’s call underground. came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded
his belly through the press and the cages, toward the
“It’s not waking me,” she said. “You’ve been there for Ardent racks in the back of the room.
seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you.
Give them the phone. You’ve paid your dues.” “Felix.” It was Van, who wasn’t on call that night.

“I don’t like asking my reports to do anything I “What are you doing here?” he asked. “No need for
wouldn’t do,” he said. both of us to be wrecked tomorrow.”

“You’ve done it,” she said. “Please? I hate waking up “What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went
alone in the night. I miss you most at night.” down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-
monitor. I should have called you and told you I was
“Kelly—” coming down—spared you the trip.”

“I’m over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give Felix’s own server—a box he shared with five other
me sweet dreams.” friends—was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if
it was offline too.
“OK,” he said.
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 3

“What’s the story?” Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a
time. They were being pounded by worm-probes—
“Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero- putting the routers back online just exposed the
day exploit has got every Windows box on the net downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the
running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-
including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST
interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and
more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that download some kernel patches that should reduce the
just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was
screwy, too—like maybe someone poisoned the zone 10AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of
transfer last night. Oh, and there’s an email and IM a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought
component that sends pretty lifelike messages to the machines back online. Van’s long fingers flew over
everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as
that keys off of your logged email and messages to get he ran load-stats on each one.
you to open a Trojan.”
“I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo,” Van
“Jesus.” said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the
days when they’d named the boxes after Star Wars
“Yeah.” Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and
long pony-tail, bobbing Adam’s apple. Over his toast- they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on
rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and McDonaldland characters, starting with Van’s laptop,
featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice. Mayor McCheese.
Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or “Greedo will rise again,” Felix said. “I’ve got a 486
eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full downstairs with over five years of uptime. It’s going to
beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said break my heart to reboot it.”
HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless,
Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They’d known each other for “What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?”
fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto
Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, “Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five
and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your
at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as grandmother.”
an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral
notebooks filled with the details of every step he’d ever “I wanna eat,” Van said.
taken, with time and date.
“Tell you what,” Felix said. “We’ll get your box up,
“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem then mine, then I’ll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for
Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day
into that category—if people were smart enough not to off.”
open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a
thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers “You’re on,” Van said. “Man, you’re too good to us
weren’t a problem with the lusers—they were the fault grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all
of incompetent engineers. the other bosses. It’s all we deserve.”

“No, it’s Microsoft’s fault,” Felix said. “Any time I’m #

at work at 2AM, it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”
“It’s your phone,” Van said. Felix extracted himself
# from the guts of the 486, which had refused to power up
at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from some
They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it
from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen
itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of
down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple the machine.
bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to
turn two keys at once to get access to their cage—like “Hey, Kel,” he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise
guards in a Minuteman silo. 95 percent of the long in the background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the
distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It bath? “Kelly?”
had better security than most Minuteman silos.
The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn’t get
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 4

anything—no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally report, his fingers fast, his description complete, and
timed out and said NETWORK ERROR. then he hit SUBMIT.

“Dammit,” he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix—” he began.
belt. Kelly wanted to know when he was coming home,
or wanted him to pick something up for the family. “God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the
She’d leave voicemail. cage and he slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the
laptop and tried some news sites, but they were all
He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang timing out. Impossible to say if it was because
again. He snatched it up and answered it. “Kelly, hey, something terrible was happening or because the
what’s up?” He worked to keep anything like irritation network was limping under the superworm.
out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he
had discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC “I need to get home,” Felix said.
once the Ardent servers were back online. The past
three hours had been purely personal—even if he “I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your
planned on billing them to the company. wife.”

There was sobbing on the line. They made their way to the elevators. One of the
building’s few windows was there, a thick, shielded
“Kelly?” He felt the blood draining from his face and porthole. They peered through it as they waited for the
his toes were numb. elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Where
there more police cars than usual?
“Felix,” she said, barely comprehensible through the
sobbing. “He’s dead, oh Jesus, he’s dead.” “Oh my God—” Van pointed.

“Who? Who, Kelly?” The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a

building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like
“Will,” she said. a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It
was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling
Will? he thought. Who the fuck is—He dropped to his northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it
knees. William was the name they’d written on the birth slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt
certificate, though they’d called him 2.0 all along. Felix the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking
made an anguished sound, like a sick bark. from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the
wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s
“I’m sick,” she said, “I can’t even stand anymore. Oh, tallest freestanding structure crashed through building
Felix. I love you so much.” after building.
“Kelly? What’s going on?” “The Broadcast Centre’s coming down,” Van said. It
was—the CBC’s towering building was collapsing in
“Everyone, everyone—” she said. “Only two channels slow motion. People ran every way, were crushed by
left on the tube. Christ, Felix, it looks like dawn of the falling masonry. Seen through the port-hole, it was like
dead out the window—” He heard her retch. The phone watching a neat CGI trick downloaded from a file-
started to break up, washing her puke-noises back like sharing site.
an echoplex.
Sysadmins were clustering around them now, jostling to
“Stay there, Kelly,” he shouted as the line died. He see the destruction.
punched 911, but the phone went NETWORK ERROR
again as soon as he hit SEND. “What happened?” one of them asked.
He grabbed Mayor McCheese from Van and plugged it “The CN Tower fell down,” Felix said. He sounded far
into the 486’s network cable and launched Firefox off away in his own ears.
the command line and googled for the Metro Police
site. Quickly, but not frantically, he searched for an “Was it the virus?”
online contact form. Felix didn’t lose his head, ever. He
solved problems and freaking out didn’t solve “The worm? What?” Felix focused on the guy, who was
problems. a young admin with just a little type-two flab around
the middle.
He located an online form and wrote out the details of
his conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug “Not the worm,” the guy said. “I got an email that the
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 5

whole city’s quarantined because of some virus. > Looks like an EMP took out Hong Kong and
Bioweapon, they say.” He handed Felix his Blackberry. maybe Paris—realtime sat footage shows
them completely dark, and all netblocks
Felix was so engrossed in the report—purportedly there aren’t routing
forwarded from Health Canada—that he didn’t even
notice that all the lights had gone out. Then he did, and > You’re in Toronto?
he pressed the Blackberry back into its owner’s hand,
and let out one small sob. It was an unfamiliar handle.
# > Yes—on Front Street
The generators kicked in a minute later. Sysadmins > my sisters at UofT and i cnt reach her—can
stampeded for the stairs. Felix grabbed Van by the arm, you call her?
pulled him back.
> No phone service
“Maybe we should wait this out in the cage,” he said.
Felix typed, staring at NETWORK PROBLEMS.
“What about Kelly?” Van said.
“I have a soft phone on Mayor McCheese,” Van said,
Felix felt like he was going to throw up. “We should get launching his voice-over-IP app. “I just remembered.”
into the cage, now.” The cage had microparticulate air-
filters. Felix took the laptop from him and punched in his
home number. It rang once, then there was a flat,
They ran upstairs to the big cage. Felix opened the door blatting sound like an ambulance siren in an Italian
and then let it hiss shut behind him. movie.
“Felix, you need to get home—” > No phone service
“It’s a bioweapon,” Felix said. “Superbug. We’ll be OK Felix typed again.
in here, I think, so long as the filters hold out.”
He looked up at Van, and saw that his skinny shoulders
“What?” were shaking. Van said, “Holy motherfucking shit. The
world is ending.”
“Get on IRC,” he said.
#
They did. Van had Mayor McCheese and Felix used
Smurfette. They skipped around the chat channels until Felix pried himself off of IRC an hour later. Atlanta had
they found one with some familiar handles. burned. Manhattan was hot—radioactive enough to
screw up the webcams looking out over Lincoln Plaza.
> pentagons gone/white house too
Everyone blamed Islam until it became clear that
> MY NEIGHBORS BARFING BLOOD OFF HIS Mecca was a smoking pit and the Saudi Royals had
been hanged before their palaces.
BALCONY IN SAN DIEGO
His hands were shaking, and Van was quietly weeping
> Someone knocked over the Gherkin.
in the far corner of the cage. He tried calling home
Bankers are fleeing the City like rats. again, and then the police. It didn’t work any better than
it had the last 20 times.
> I heard that the Ginza’s on fire
He sshed into his box downstairs and grabbed his mail.
Felix typed: I’m in Toronto. We just saw the Spam, spam, spam. More spam. Automated messages.
CN Tower fall. I’ve heard reports of There—an urgent message from the intrusion detection
bioweapons, something very fast. system in the Ardent cage.
Van read this and said, “You don’t know how He opened it and read quickly. Someone was crudely,
fast it is, Felix. Maybe we were all exposed repeatedly probing his routers. It didn’t match a worm’s
three days ago.” signature, either. He followed the traceroute and
discovered that the attack had originated in the same
Felix closed his eyes. “If that were so we’d be building as him, a system in a cage one floor below.
feeling some symptoms, I think.”
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 6

He had procedures for this. He portscanned his attacker “No opening the door,” Felix said. “I saw an empty
and found that port 1337 was open—1337 was “leet” or Mountain Dew bottle in the trash there.”
“elite” in hacker number/letter substitution code. That
was the kind of port that a worm left open to slither in “Right,” Van said. He walked like a zombie to the trash
and out of. He googled known sploits that left a listener can and pulled out the empty magnum. He turned his
on port 1337, narrowed this down based on the back.
fingerprinted operating system of the compromised
server, and then he had it. > I’m Felix

It was an ancient worm, one that every box should have > Will
been patched against years before. No mind. He had the
client for it, and he used it to create a root account for Felix’s stomach did a slow somersault as he thought
himself on the box, which he then logged into, and took about 2.0.
a look around.
“Felix, I think I need to go outside,” Van said. He was
There was one other user logged in, “scaredy,” and he moving toward the airlock door. Felix dropped his
checked the proccess monitor and saw that scaredy had keyboard and struggled to his feet and ran headlong to
spawned all the hundreds of processes that were Van, tackling him before he reached the door.
probing him and plenty of other boxen.
“Van,” he said, looking into his friend’s glazed,
He opened a chat: unfocused eyes. “Look at me, Van.”

> Stop probing my server “I need to go,” Van said. “I need to get home and feed
the cats.”
He expected bluster, guilt, denial. He was surprised.
“There’s something out there, something fast-acting and
> Are you in the Front Street data-center? lethal. Maybe it will blow away with the wind. Maybe
it’s already gone. But we’re going to sit here until we
> Yes know for sure or until we have no choice. Sit down,
Van. Sit.”
> Christ I thought I was the last one alive.
I’m on the fourth floor. I think there’s a “I’m cold, Felix.”
bioweapon attack outside. I don’t want to
leave the clean room. It was freezing. Felix’s arms were broken out in
gooseflesh and his feet felt like blocks of ice.
Felix whooshed out a breath.
“Sit against the servers, by the vents. Get the exhaust
> You were probing me to get me to trace heat.” He found a rack and nestled up against it.”
back to you? > Are you there?
> Yeah
> Still here—sorting out some logistics
> That was smart > How long until we can go out?
Clever bastard.
> I have no idea
> I’m on the sixth floor, I’ve got one more
No one typed anything for quite some time then.
with me.
#
> What do you know?
Felix had to use the Mountain Dew bottle twice. Then
Felix pasted in the IRC log and waited while the other Van used it again. Felix tried calling Kelly again. The
guy digested it. Van stood up and paced. His eyes were Metro Police site was down.
glazed over.
Finally, he slid back against the servers and wrapped his
“Van? Pal?” arms around his knees and wept like a baby.
“I have to pee,” he said. After a minute, Van came over and sat beside him, with
his arm around Felix’s shoulder.
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 7

“They’re dead, Van,” Felix said. “Kelly and my s—son. the end of the food-prep area and TALK NERDY got
My family is gone.” up on it. Slowly the conversation died down.

“You don’t know for sure,” Van said. “I’m Uri Popovich, this is Diego Rosenbaum. Thank
you all for coming up here. Here’s what we know for
“I’m sure enough,” Felix said. “Christ, it’s all over, isn’t sure: the building’s been on generators for three hours
it?” now. Visual observation indicates that we’re the only
building in central Toronto with working power—
“We’ll gut it out a few more hours and then head out. which should hold out for three more days. There is a
Things should be getting back to normal soon. The fire bioagent of unknown origin loose beyond our doors. It
department will fix it. They’ll mobilize the Army. It’ll kills quickly, within hours, and it is aerosolized. You get
be OK.” it from breathing bad air. No one has opened any of the
exterior doors to this building since five this morning.
Felix’s ribs hurt. He hadn’t cried since—Since 2.0 was No one will open the doors until I give the go-ahead.
born. He hugged his knees harder.
“Attacks on major cities all over the world have left
Then the doors opened. emergency responders in chaos. The attacks are
electronic, biological, nuclear and conventional
The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One explosives, and they are very widespread. I’m a
had a tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other security engineer, and where I come from, attacks in
one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt. this kind of cluster are usually viewed as opportunistic:
group B blows up a bridge because everyone is off
“Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting
taking care of group A’s dirty nuke event. It’s smart. An
together on the top floor. Take the stairs.”
Aum Shin Rikyo cell in Seoul gassed the subways there
Felix found he was holding his breath. about 2AM Eastern—that’s the earliest event we can
locate, so it may have been the Archduke that broke the
“If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all camel’s back. We’re pretty sure that Aum Shin Rikyo
infected,” TALK NERDY said. “Just go, we’ll meet couldn’t be behind this kind of mayhem: they have no
you there.” history of infowar and have never shown the kind of
organizational acumen necessary to take out so many
“There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he targets at once. Basically, they’re not smart enough.
climbed to his feet.
“We’re holing up here for the foreseeable future, at
“Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.” least until the bioweapon has been identified and
dispersed. We’re going to staff the racks and keep the
TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From networks up. This is critical infrastructure, and it’s our
Hell who’d unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van job to make sure it’s got five nines of uptime. In times
climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the of national emergency, our responsibility to do that
deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the doubles.”
stairwell felt like a sauna.
One sysadmin put up his hand. He was very daring in a
There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working green Incredible Hulk ring-tee, and he was at the young
toilets, water and coffee and vending machine food. end of the scale.
There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each.
No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one “Who died and made you king?”
was Will and then he joined the vending machine
queue. “I have controls for the main security system, keys to
every cage, and passcodes for the exterior doors—
He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic cup of they’re all locked now, by the way. I’m the one who got
vanilla coffee before running out of change. Van had everyone up here first and called the meeting. I don’t
scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff care if someone else wants this job, it’s a shitty one. But
down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save someone needs to have this job.”
some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of
Van. “You’re right,” the kid said. “And I can do it every bit
as well as you. My name’s Will Sario.”
By the time they were all settled in, thoroughly
evacuated, and eating, TALK NERDY and his friend Popovich looked down his nose at the kid. “Well, if
had returned again. They cleared off the cash-register at you’ll let me finish talking, maybe I’ll hand things over
to you when I’m done.”
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 8

“Finish, by all means.” Sario turned his back on him “My name is Felix Tremont,” he said, getting up on one
and walked to the window. He stared out of it intensely. of the tables, drawing out his PDA. “I want to read you
Felix’s gaze was drawn to it, and he saw that there were something.
several oily smoke plumes rising up from the city.
“‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary
Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the
we’re going to do,” he said. new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you
of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome
The kid looked around after a stretched moment of among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
silence. “Oh, is it my turn now?”
“‘We have no elected government, nor are we likely to
There was a round of good-natured chuckling. have one, so I address you with no greater authority
than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I
“Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There declare the global social space we are building to be
are coordinated attacks on every critical piece of naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to
infrastructure. There’s only one way that those attacks impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do
could be so well coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you possess any methods of enforcement we have true
you buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, reason to fear.
we need to ask how an opportunistic attack could be
organized in minutes: the Internet.” “‘Governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor
“So you think we should shut down the Internet?” received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know
Popovich laughed a little, but stopped when Sario said us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie
nothing. within your borders. Do not think that you can build it,
as though it were a public construction project. You
“We saw an attack last night that nearly killed the cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through
Internet. A little DoS on the critical routers, a little our collective actions.’
DNS-foo, and down it goes like a preacher’s daughter.
Cops and the military are a bunch of technophobic “That’s from the Declaration of Independence of
lusers, they hardly rely on the net at all. If we take the Cyberspace. It was written 12 years ago. I thought it
Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever read. I
the attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders. wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace
When the time comes, we can rebuild it.” was free—and where that freedom infected the real
world, so meatspace got freer too.
“You’re shitting me,” Popovich said. His jaw literally
hung open. He swallowed hard and scrubbed at his eyes with the
back of his hand. Van awkwardly patted him on the
“It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like shoe.
coping with logic when it dictates hard decisions.
That’s a problem with people, not logic.” “My beautiful son and my beautiful wife died today.
Millions more, too. The city is literally in flames.
There was a buzz of conversation that quickly turned Whole cities have disappeared from the map.”
into a roar.
He coughed up a sob and swallowed it again.
“Shut UP!” Popovich hollered. The conversation
dimmed by one Watt. Popovich yelled again, stamping “All around the world, people like us are gathered in
his foot on the countertop. Finally there was a buildings like this. They were trying to recover from
semblance of order. “One at a time,” he said. He was last night’s worm when disaster struck. We have
flushed red, his hands in his pockets. independent power. Food. Water.
One sysadmin was for staying. Another for going. They “We have the network, that the bad guys use so well
should hide in the cages. They should inventory their and that the good guys have never figured out.
supplies and appoint a quartermaster. They should go
outside and find the police, or volunteer at hospitals. “We have a shared love of liberty that comes from
They should appoint defenders to keep the front door caring about and caring for the network. We are in
secure. charge of the most important organizational and
governmental tool the world has ever seen. We are the
Felix found to his surprise that he had his hand in the closest thing to a government the world has right now.
air. Popovich called on him. Geneva is a crater. The East River is on fire and the UN
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 9

is evacuated. Felix knew that this would work. Usenet newsgroup

votes had been running for more than twenty years
“The Distributed Republic of Cyberspace weathered without a substantial hitch.
this storm basically unscathed. We are the custodians of
a deathless, monstrous, wonderful machine, one with > We’ll elect regional representatives and
the potential to rebuild a better world. they’ll pick a Prime Minister.

“I have nothing to live for but that.” The Americans insisted on President, which Felix didn’t
like. Seemed too partisan. His future wouldn’t be the
There were tears in Van’s eyes. He wasn’t the only one. American future. The American future had gone up
They didn’t applaud him, but they did one better. They with the White House. He was building a bigger tent
maintained respectful, total silence for seconds that than that.
stretched to a minute.
There were French sysadmins online from France
“How do we do it?” Popovich said, without a trace of Telecom. The EBU’s data-center had been spared in the
sarcasm. attacks that hammered Geneva, and it was filled with
wry Germans whose English was better than Felix’s.
# They got on well with the remains of the BBC team in
Canary Wharf.
The newsgroups were filling up fast. They’d announced
them in news.admin.net-abuse.email, where all the They spoke polyglot English in .recovery.logistics, and
spamfighters hung out, and where there was a tight Felix had momentum on his side. Some of the admins
culture of camaraderie in the face of full-out attack. were cooling out the inevitable stupid flamewars with
the practice of long years. Some were chipping in
The new group was alt.november5-disaster.recovery, useful suggestions.
with .recovery.goverance, .recovery.finance,
.recovery.logistics and .recovery.defense hanging off of Surprisingly few thought that Felix was off his rocker.
it. Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail
in her. > I think we should hold elections as soon as
possible. Tomorrow at the latest. We can’t
The sysadmins came out of the woodwork. The rule justly without the consent of the
Googleplex was online, with the stalwart Queen Kong
governed.
bossing a gang of rollerbladed grunts who wheeled
through the gigantic data-center swapping out dead Within seconds the reply landed in his inbox.
boxen and hitting reboot switches. The Internet Archive
was offline in the Presidio, but the mirror in Amsterdam > You can’t be serious. Consent of the
was live and they’d redirected the DNS so that you’d governed? Unless I miss my guess, most of
hardly know the difference. Amazon was down. Paypal the people you’re proposing to govern are
was up. Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal were all up,
puking their guts out, hiding under their
and filling with millions of posts from scared survivors
desks, or wandering shell-shocked through
huddling together for electronic warmth.
the city streets. When do THEY get a vote?
The Flickr photostreams were horrific. Felix had to
unsubscribe from them after he caught a photo of a Felix had to admit she had a point. Queen Kong was
woman and a baby, dead in a kitchen, twisted into an sharp. Not many woman sysadmins, and that was a
agonized heiroglyph by the bioagent. They didn’t look genuine tragedy. Women like Queen Kong were too
like Kelly and 2.0, but they didn’t have to. He started good to exclude from the field. He’d have to hack a
shaking and couldn’t stop. solution to get women balanced out in his new
government. Require each region to elect one woman
Wikipedia was up, but limping under load. The spam and one man?
poured in as though nothing had changed. Worms
roamed the network. He happily clattered into argument with her. The
elections would be the next day; he’d see to it.
.recovery.logistics was where most of the action was.
#
> We can use the newsgroup voting
“Prime Minister of Cyberspace? Why not call yourself
mechanism to hold regional
the Grand Poobah of the Global Data Network? It’s
> elections more dignified, sounds cooler and it’ll get you just as
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 10

far.” Will had the sleeping spot next to him, up in the the color of corned beef, and had a scaly look. In the
cafeteria, with Van on the other side. The room smelled light streaming through the cafeteria windows, skin
like a dingleberry: twenty-five sysadmins who hadn’t motes floated and danced in great clouds.
washed in at least a day all crammed into the same
room. For some of them, it had been much, much “What are you doing?” Felix sat up. Watching Van’s
longer than a day. fingernails rip into his skin made him itch in sympathy.
It had been three days since he’d last washed his hair
“Shut up, Will,” Van said. “You wanted to try to knock and his scalp sometimes felt like there were little egg-
the Internet offline.” laying insects picking their way through it. He’d
adjusted his glasses the night before and had touched
“Correction: I want to knock the Internet offline. the back of his ears; his finger came away shining with
Present-tense” thick sebum. He got blackheads in the backs of his ears
when he didn’t shower for a couple days, and
Felix cracked one eye. He was so tired, it was like sometimes gigantic, deep boils that Kelly finally
lifting weights. popped with sick relish.
“Look, Sario—if you don’t like my platform, put one of “Scratching,” Van said. He went to work on his head,
your own forward. There are plenty of people who sending a cloud of dandruff-crud into the sky, there to
think I’m full of shit and I respect them for that, since join the scurf that he’d already eliminated from his
they’re all running opposite me or backing someone extremeties. “Christ, I itch all over.”
who is. That’s your choice. What’s not on the menu is
nagging and complaining. Bedtime now, or get up and Felix took Mayor McCheese from Van’s backpack and
post your platform.” plugged it into one of the Ethernet cable that snaked all
over the floor. He googled everything he could think of
Sario sat up slowly, unrolling the jacket he had been that could be related to this. “Itchy” yielded 40,600,000
using for a pillow and putting it on. “Screw you guys, links. He tried compound queries and got slightly more
I’m out of here.” discriminating links.
“I thought he’d never leave,” Felix said and turned “I think it’s stress-related excema,” Felix said, finally.
over, lying awake a long time, thinking about the
election. “I don’t get excema,” Van said.

There were other people in the running. Some of them Felix showed him some lurid photos of red, angry skin
weren’t even sysadmins. A US Senator on retreat at his flaked with white. “Stress-related excema,” he said,
summer place in Wyoming had generator power and a reading the caption.
satellite phone. Somehow he’d found the right
newsgroup and thrown his hat into the ring. Some Van examined his arms. “I have excema,” he said.
anarchist hackers in Italy strafed the group all night
long, posting broken-English screeds about the political “Says here to keep it moisturized and to try cortisone
bankruptcy of “governance” in the new world. Felix cream. You might try the first aid kit in the second-floor
looked at their netblock and determined that they were toilets. I think I saw some there.” Like all of the
probably holed up in a small Interaction Design sysadmins, Felix had had a bit of a rummage around the
institute near Turin. Italy had been hit very bad, but out offices, bathrooms, kitchen and store-rooms, squirreling
in the small town, this cell of anarchists had taken up away a roll of toilet-paper in his shoulder-bag along
residence. with three or four power-bars. They were sharing out
the food in the caf by unspoken agreement, every
A surprising number were running on a platform of sysadmin watching every other for signs of gluttony
shutting down the Internet. Felix had his doubts about and hoarding. All were convinced that there was
whether this was even possible, but he thought he hoarding and gluttony going on out of eyeshot, because
understood the impulse to finish the work and the all were guilty of it themselves when no one else was
world. Why not? watching.

He fell asleep thinking about the logistics of shutting Van got up and when his face hove into the light, Felix
down the Internet, and dreamed bad dreams in which he saw how puffed his eyes were. “I’ll post to the mailing-
was the network’s sole defender. list for some antihistamine,” Felix said. There had been
four mailing lists and three wikis for the survivors in
He woke to a papery, itchy sound. He rolled over and the building within hours of the first meeting’s close,
saw that Van was sitting up, his jacket balled up in his and in the intervening days they’d settled on just one.
lap, vigorously scratching his skinny arms. They’d gone Felix was still on a little mailing list with five of his
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 11

most trusted friends, two of whom were trapped in > No

cages in other countries. He suspected that the rest of
the sysadmins were doing the same. She typed, but then she started to key something and
then stopped.
Van stumbled off. “Good luck on the elections,” he
said, patting Felix on the shoulder. > No of course not. I believe the Popovich
Hypothesis. This is a bunch of assholes all
Felix stood and paced, stopping to stare out the grubby using the rest for cover. But China put them
windows. The fires still burned in Toronto, more than down harder and faster than anyone else.
before. He’d tried to find mailing lists or blogs that Maybe we’ve finally found a use for
Torontonians were posting to, but the only ones he’d totalitarian states.
found were being run by other geeks in other data-
centers. It was possible—likely, even—that there were Felix couldn’t resist. He typed:
survivors out there who had more pressing priorities
than posting to the Internet. His home phone still > You’re lucky your boss can’t see you type
worked about half the time but he’d stopped calling it that. You guys were pretty enthusiastic
after the second day, when hearing Kelly’s voice on the participants in the Great Firewall of China.
voicemail for the fiftieth time had made him cry in the
middle of a planning meeting. He wasn’t the only one. > Wasn’t my idea
Election day. Time to face the music. she typed.
> Are you nervous? > And my boss is dead. They’re probably all
dead. The whole Bay Area got hit hard, and
> Nope, then there was the quake.
Felix typed. They’d watched the USGS’s automated data-stream
from the 6.9 that trashed northern Cal from Gilroy to
> I don’t much care if I win, to be honest. I”m
Sebastapol. Soma webcams revealed the scope of the
just glad we’re doing this. The alternative
damage—gas main explosions, seismically retrofitted
was sitting around with our thumbs up our buildings crumpling like piles of children’s blocks after
ass, waiting for someone to crack up and a good kicking. The Googleplex, floating on a series of
open the door. gigantic steel springs, had shook like a plateful of jello,
but the racks had stayed in place and the worst injury
The cursor hung. Queen Kong was very high latency as they’d had was a badly bruised eye on a sysadmin
she bossed her gang of Googloids around the who’d caught a flying cable-crimper in the face.
Googleplex, doing everything she could to keep her
data center online. Three of the offshore cages had gone > Sorry. I forgot.
offline and two of their six redundant network links
were smoked. Lucky for her, queries-per-second were > It’s OK. We all lost people, right?
way down.
> Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I’m not worried about
> There’s still China the election. Whoever wins, at least we’re
doing SOMETHING
she typed. Queen Kong had a big board with a map of
the world colored in Google-queries-per-second, and > Not if they vote for one of the fuckrags
could do magic with it, showing the drop-off over time
in colorful charts. She’d uploaded lots of video clips Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins
showing how the plague and the bombs had swept the were using to describe the contingent that wanted to
world: the initial upswell of queries from people shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it—
wanting to find out what was going on, then the grim, apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to
precipitous shelving off as the plagues took hold. describe clueless the IT managers that she’d chewed up
through her career.
> China’s still running about ninety percent
nominal. > They won’t. They’re just tired and sad is
all. Your endorsement will carry the day
Felix shook his head.
The Googloids were one of the largest and most
> You can’t think that they’re responsible
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 12

powerful blocs left behind, along with the satellite never sleeping, for eavesdropping, for picking fights in
uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. RL that had the ill-considered heat of a Usenet
Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and flamewar. “The winner will be someone who
he’d sent her an email that she’d replied to tersely: understands a couple of fundamental facts.” He held up
“can’t have the fuckrags in charge.” a fist, then ticked off his bullet points by raising a finger
at a time. “Point: The terrorists are using the Internet to
> gtg destroy the world, and we need to destroy the Internet
first. Point: Even if I’m wrong, the whole thing is a
she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up joke. We’ll run out of generator-fuel soon enough.
a browser and called up google.com. The browser timed Point: Or if we don’t, it will be because a the old world
out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the Google will be back and running, and it won’t give a crap about
front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen your new world. Point: We’re gonna run out of food
Kong’s workplace—power failure, worms, another before we run out of shit to argue about it or reasons not
quake—she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that to go outside. We have the chance to do something to
they’d replaced the O’s in the Google logo with little help the world recover: we can kill the net and cut it off
planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them. 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.’”
“Got anything to eat?” Van said to him. It was mid-
afternoon, not that time particularly passed in the data- The thing was that Sario was right. The would be out of
center. Felix patted his pockets. They’d put a fuel in two days—intermittent power from the grid had
quartermaster in charge, but not before everyone had stretched their generator lifespan. And if you bought his
snagged some chow out of the machines. He’d had a hypothesis that the Internet was primarily being used as
dozen power-bars and some apples. He’d taken a a tool to organize more mayhem, shutting it down
couple sandwiches but had wisely eaten them first would be the right thing to do.
before they got stale.
But Felix’s daughter and his wife were dead. He didn’t
“One power-bar left,” he said. He’d noticed a certain want to rebuild the old world. He wanted a new one.
looseness in his waistline that morning and had briefly The old world was one that didn’t have any place for
relished it. Then he’d remembered Kelly’s teasing about him. Not anymore.
his weight and he’d cried some. Then he’d eaten two
power bars, leaving him with just one left. Van scratched his raw, flaking skin. Puffs of dander and
scruff swirled in the musty, greasy air. Sario curled a lip
“Oh,” Van said. His face was hollower than ever, his at him. “That is disgusting. We’re breathing recycled
shoulders sloping in on his toast-rack chest. air, you know. Whatever leprosy is eating you,
aerosolizing it into the air supply is pretty anti-social.”
“Here,” Felix said. “Vote Felix.”
“You’re the world’s leading authority on anti-social,
Van took the power-bar from him and then put it down Sario,” Van said. Go away or I’ll multi-tool you to
on the table. “OK, I want to give this back to you and death.” He stopped scratching and patted his sheathed
say, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but I’m fucking hungry, so I’m multi-pliers like a gunslinger.
just going to take it and eat it, OK?”
“Yeah, I’m anti-social. I’ve got Asperger’s and I
“That’s fine by me,” Felix said. “Enjoy.” haven’t taken any meds in four days. What’s your
fucking excuse.”
“How are the elections coming?” Van said, once he’d
licked the wrapper clean. Van scratched some more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I
didn’t know.”
“Dunno,” Felix said. “Haven’t checked in a while.”
He’d been winning by a slim margin a few hours Sario cracked up. “Oh, you are priceless. I’d bet that
before. Not having his laptop was a major handicap three quarters of this bunch is borderline autistic. Me,
when it came to stuff like this. Up in the cages, there I’m just as asshole. But I’m one who isn’t afraid to tell
were a dozen more like him, poor bastards who’d left the truth, and that makes me better than you,
the house on Der Tag without thinking to snag dickweed.”
something WiFi-enabled.
“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”
“You’re going to get smoked,” Sario said, sliding in
next to them. He’d become famous in the center for #
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 13

They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix all it had been was an excuse for infighting when they
was elected the first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. should have been figuring out what to do next. The
The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the problem was that there was nothing to do next.
voting process and they lost a critical day while they
added up the votes a second time. “I can’t make you stay,” he said.

But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half “Yeah, you can’t.” Popovich turned on his heel and
the data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps walked out. Rosenbaum watched him go, then he
of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer gripped Felix’s shoulder and squeezed it.
as more of the world went offline, though she
maintained a leader-board of new and rising queries— “Thank you, Felix. It was a beautiful dream. It still is.
largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and self- Maybe we’ll find something to eat and some fuel and
defense. come back.”

Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home Rosenbaum had a sister whom he’d been in contact
PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs with over IM for the first days after the crisis broke.
were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and Then she’d stopped answering. The sysadmins were
blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were split among those who’d had a chance to say goodbye
looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in and those who hadn’t. Each was sure the other had it
a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station better.
of transoceanic head-end.
They posted about it on the internal newsgroup—they
Water was running short, too. were still geeks, after all, and there was a little honor
guard on the ground floor, geeks who watched them
Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he pass toward the double doors. They manipulated the
could do more than answer a few congratulatory keypads and the steel shutters lifted, then the first set of
messages and post a canned acceptance speech to doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and
newsgroups. pulled the doors shut behind them. The front doors
opened. It was very bright and sunny outside, and apart
“We’re going to open the doors,” Popovich said. Like from how empty it was, it looked very normal.
all of them, he’d lost weight and waxed scruffy and Heartbreakingly so.
oily. His BO was like a cloud coming off a trash-bags
behind a fish-market on a sunny day. Felix was quite The two took a tentative step out into the world. Then
sure he smelled no better. another. They turned to wave at the assembled masses.
Then they both grabbed their throats and began to jerk
“You’re going to go for a reccy? Get more fuel? We can and twitch, crumpling in a heap on the ground.
charter a working group for it—great idea.”
“Shiii—!” was all Felix managed to choke out before
Rosenbaum shook his head sadly. “We’re going to go they both dusted themselves off and stood up, laughing
find our families. Whatever is out there has burned so hard they were clutching their sides. They waved
itself out. Or it hasn’t. Either way, there’s no future in once more and turned on their heels.
here.”
“Man, those guys are sick,” Van said. He scratched his
“What about network maintenance?” Felix said, though arms, which had long, bloody scratches on them. His
he knew the answers. “Who’ll keep the routers up?” clothes were so covered in scurf they looked like they’d
been dusted with icing sugar.
“We’ll give you the root passwords to everything,”
Popovich said. His hands were shaking and his eyes “I thought it was pretty funny,” Felix said.
were bleary. Like many of the smokers stuck in the
data-center, he’d gone cold turkey this week. They’d “Christ I’m hungry,” Van said, conversationally.
run out of caffeine products two days earlier, too. The
smokers had it rough. “Lucky for you, we’ve got all the packets we can eat,”
Felix said.
“And I’ll just stay here and keep everything online?”
“You’re too good to us grunts, Mr President,” Van said.
“You and anyone else who cares anymore.”
“Prime Minister,” he said. “And you’re no grunt, you’re
Felix knew that he’d squandered his opportunity. The the Deputy Prime Minister. You’re my designated
election had seemed noble and brave, but in hindsight ribbon-cutter and hander-out of oversized novelty
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 14

checks.” He reloaded. There was a response. It was short,

authoritative, and helpful—just the sort of thing you
It buoyed both of their spirits. Watching Popovich and almost never saw in a high-caliber newsgroup when a
Rosenbaum go, it buoyed them up. Felix knew then that noob posted a dumb question. The apocalypse had
they’d all be going soon. awoken the spirit of patient helpfulness in the world’s
sysop community.
That had been pre-ordained by the fuel-supply, but who
wanted to wait for the fuel to run out, anyway? Van shoulder-surfed him. “Holy shit, who knew he had
it in him?”
#
He looked at the message again. It was from Will Sario.
> half my crew split this morning
He dropped into his chat window.
Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good
anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot > sario i thought you wanted the network
lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit dead why are you helping msces fix their
on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford. boxen?
> we’re down to a quarter > <sheepish grin> Gee Mr PM, maybe I just
can’t bear to watch a computer suffer at the
Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and hands of an amateur.
Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had
fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had much He flipped to the channel with Queen Kong in
time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too it.
busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned
over to them, the big, big routers that had went on > How long?
acting as the major interchange for all the network
backbones in Canada. > Since I slept? Two days. Until we run out of
fuel? Three days. Since we ran out of food?
Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and
Two days.
again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars
about who would be PM, or whether they would shut > Jeez. I didn’t sleep last night either. We’re
down the network, or who took too much food—it was
a little short handed around here.
all gone.
> asl? Im monica and I live in pasadena and
He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical
message. Im bored with my homework. WOuld you like
to download my pic???
> Runaway processes on Solaris
The trojan bots were all over IRC these days, jumping
> to every channel that had any traffic on it. Sometimes
you caught five or six flirting with each other. It was
> Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MSCE but I’m pretty weird to watch a piece of malware try to con
the only one awake here and four of the another instance of itself into downloading a trojan.
DSLAMs just went down. Looks like there’s
They both kicked the bot off the channel
some custom accounting code that’s trying
simultaneously. He had a script for it now. The spam
to figure out how much to bill our corporate hadn’t even tailed off a little.
customers and it’s spawned ten thousand
threads and its eating all the swap. I just > How come the spam isn’t reducing? Half
want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is the goddamned data-centers have gone dark
there some magic invocation I need to do to
get this goddamned weenix box to kill this Queen Kong paused a long time before
shit? I mean, it’s not as if any of our typing. As had become automatic when she
customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d went high-latency, he reloaded the Google
ask the guy who wrote this code, but he’s homepage. Sure enough, it was down.
pretty much dead as far as anyone can work
out. > Sario, you got any food?
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 15

> You won’t miss a couple more meals, Your “Let’s have a meeting,” he said.
Excellency
#
Van had gone back to Mayor McCheese but he was in
the same channel. There had been forty-three of them on D-Day. Now
there were fifteen. Six had responded to the call for a
“What a dick. You’re looking pretty buff, though, meeting by simply leaving. Everyone knew without
dude.” having to be told what the meeting was about.

Van didn’t look so good. He looked like you could “So that’s it, you’re going to let it all fall apart?” Sario
knock him over with a stiff breeze and he had a was the only one with the energy left to get properly
phlegmy, weak quality to his speech. angry. He’d go angry to his grave. The veins on his
throat and forehead stood out angrily. His fists shook
> hey kong everything ok? angrily. All the other geeks went lids-down at the site of
him, looking up in unison for once at the discussion, not
> everything’s fine just had to go kick some keeping one eye on a chat-log or a tailed service log.
ass
“Sario, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Felix said. “You
“How’s the traffic, Van?” wanted to pull the goddamned plug!”

“Down 25 percent from this morning,” he said. There “I wanted it to go clean,” he shouted. “I didn’t want it
were a bunch of nodes whose connections routed to bleed out and keel over in little gasps and pukes
through them. Presumably most of these were home or forever. I wanted it to be an act of will by the global
commercial customers is places where the power was community of its caretakers. I wanted it to be an
still on and the phone company’s COs were still alive. affirmative act by human hands. Not entropy and bad
code and worms winning out. Fuck that, that’s just
Every once in a while, Felix would wiretap the what’s happened out there.”
connections to see if he could find a person who had
news of the wide world. Almost all of it was automated Up in the top-floor cafeteria, there were windows all
traffic, though: network backups, status updates. Spam. around, hardened and light-bending, and by custom,
Lots of spam. they were all blinds-down. Now Sario ran around the
room, yanking down the blinds. How the hell can he get
> Spam’s still up because the services that the energy to run? Felix wondered. He could barely
stop spam are failing faster than the services walk up the stairs to the meeting room.
that create it. All the anti-worm stuff is
centralized in a couple places. The bad stuff Harsh daylight flooded in. It was a fine sunny day out
is on a million zombie computers. If only the there, but everywhere you looked across that
lusers had had the good sense to turn off commanding view of Toronto’s skyline, there were
their home PCs before keeling over or taking rising plumes of smoke. The TD tower, a gigantic black
off modernist glass brick, was gouting flame to the sky.
“It’s all falling apart, the way everything does.
> at the rate were going well be routing
“Listen, listen. If we leave the network to fall over
nothing but spam by dinnertime
slowly, parts of it will stay online for months. Maybe
years. And what will run on it? Malware. Worms.
Van cleared his throat, a painful sound. “About that,” he
Spam. System-processes. Zone transfers. The things we
said. “I think it’s going to hit sooner than that. Felix, I
use fall apart and require constant maintenance. The
don’t think anyone would notice if we just walked away
things we abandon don’t get used and they last forever.
from here.”
We’re going to leave the network behind like a lime-pit
Felix looked at him, his skin the color of corned-beef filled with industrial waste. That will be our fucking
and streaked with long, angry scabs. His fingers legacy—the legacy of every keystroke you and I and
trembled. anyone, anywhere ever typed. You understand? We’re
going to leave it to die slow like a wounded dog,
“You drinking enough water?” instead of giving it one clean shot through the head.”

Van nodded. “All frigging day, every ten seconds. Van scratched his cheeks, then Felix saw that he was
Anything to keep my belly full.” He pointed to a wiping away tears.
refilled Pepsi Max bottle full of water by his side.
“Sario, you’re not wrong, but you’re not right either,”
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 16

he said. “Leaving it up to limp along is right. We’re settling on, “Take care of the place, OK? We’ll be back,
going to all be limping for a long time, and maybe it someday.”
will be some use to someone. If there’s one packet
being routed from any user to any other user, anywhere Everyone was going except Sario. Sario wouldn’t leave.
in the world, it’s doing it’s job.” He came down to see them off, though.

“If you want a clean kill, you can do that,” Felix said. The sysadmins gathered in the lobby and Felix made
“I’m the PM and I say so. I’m giving you root. All of the safety door go up, and the light rushed in.
you.” He turned to the white-board where the cafeteria
workers used to scrawl the day’s specials. Now it was Sario stuck his hand out.
covered with the remnants of heated technical debates
that the sysadmins had engaged in over the days since “Good luck,” he said.
the day.
“You too,” Felix said. He had a firm grip, Sario,
He scrubbed away a clean spot with his sleeve and stronger than he had any right to be. “Maybe you were
began to write out long, complicated alphanumeric right,” he said.
passwords salted with punctuation. Felix had a gift for
remembering that kind of password. He doubted it “Maybe,” he said.
would do him much good, ever again.
“You going to pull the plug?”
#
Sario looked up at the drop-ceiling, seeming to peer
> Were going, kong. Fuels almost out anyway through the reinforced floors at the humming racks
above. “Who knows?” he said at last.
> yeah well thats right then. it was an honor,
Van scratched and a flurry of white motes danced in the
mr prime minister
sunlight.
> you going to be ok? “Let’s go find you a pharmacy,” Felix said. He walked
to the door and the other sysadmins followed.
> ive commandeered a young sysadmin to
see to my feminine needs and weve found They waited for the interior doors to close behind them
another cache of food thatll last us a coupel and then Felix opened the exterior doors. The air
weeks now that were down to fifteen admins smelled and tasted like a mown grass, like the first
—im in hog heaven pal drops of rain, like the lake and the sky, like the outdoors
and the world, an old friend not heard from in an
> youre amazing, Queen Kong, seriously. eternity.
Dont be a hero though. When you need to go
go. Theres got to be something out there “Bye, Felix,” the other sysadmins said. They were
drifting away while he stood transfixed at the top of the
> be safe felix, seriously—btw did i tell you short concrete staircase. The light hurt his eyes and
queries are up in Romania? maybe theyre made them water.
getting back on their feet
“I think there’s a Shopper’s Drug Mart on King Street,”
> really? he said to Van. “We’ll thrown a brick through the
window and get you some cortisone, OK?”
> yeah, really. we’re hard to kill—like fucking
roaches “You’re the Prime Minister,” Van said. “Lead on.”

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 They didn’t see a single soul on the fifteen minute
his eyes and listened to Van scratch his legs and then walk. There wasn’t a single sound except for some bird
heard Van type a little. noises and some distant groans, and the wind in the
electric cables overhead. It was like walking on the
“They’re back up,” he said. surface of the moon.

Felix whooshed out a breath. He sent the message to the “Bet they have chocolate bars at the Shopper’s,” Van
newsgroup, one that he’d run through five drafts before said.
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 17

Felix’s stomach lurched. Food. “Wow,” he said, around “You going to go?” She brandished the axe.
a mouthful of saliva.
Felix held his hands up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A
They walked past a little hatchback and in the front seat pharmacist?”
was the dried body of a woman holding the dried body
of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour bile, even “I used to be a RN, ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web-
though the smell was faint through the rolled-up designer.”
windows.
“You’re shitting me,” Felix said.
He hadn’t thought of Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped
to his knees and retched again. Out here in the real “Haven’t you ever met a girl who knew about
world, his family was dead. Everyone he knew was computers?”
dead. He just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and
wait to die, too. “Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google’s data-
center is a girl. A woman, I mean.”
Van’s rough hands slipped under his armpits and hauled
weakly at him. “Not now,” he said. “Once we’re safe “You’re shitting me,” she said. “A woman ran Google’s
inside somewhere and we’ve eaten something, then and data-center?”
then you can do this, but not now. Understand me,
Felix? Not fucking now.” “Runs,” Felix said. “It’s still online.”

The profanity got through to him. He got to his feet. His “NFW,” she said. She let the axe lower.
knees were trembling.
“Way. Have you got any cortisone cream? I can tell you
“Just a block more,” Van said, and slipped Felix’s arm the story. My name’s Felix and this is Van, who needs
around his shoulders and led him along. any anti-histamines you can spare.”

“Thank you, Van. I’m sorry.” “I can spare? Felix old pal, I have enough dope hear to
last a hundred years. This stuff’s going to expire long
“No sweat,” he said. “You need a shower, bad. No before it runs out. But are you telling me that the net’s
offense.” still up?”

“None taken.” “It’s still up,” he said. “Kind of. That’s what we’ve
been doing all week. Keeping it online. It might not last
The Shoppers had a metal security gate, but it had been much longer, though.”
torn away from the front windows, which had been
rudely smashed. Felix and Van squeezed through the “No,” she said. “I don’t suppose it would.” She set the
gap and stepped into the dim drug-store. A few of the axe down. “Have you got anything to trade? I don’t
displays were knocked over, but other than that, it need much, but I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up
looked OK. By the cash-registers, Felix spotted the by trading with the neighbors. It’s like playing
racks of candy bars at the same instant that Van saw civilization.”
them, and they hurried over and grabbed a handful
each, stuffing their faces. “You have neighbors?”

“You two eat like pigs.” “At least ten,” she said. “The people in the restaurant
across the way make a pretty good soup, even if most of
They both whirled at the sound of the woman’s voice. the veg is canned. They cleaned me out of Sterno,
She was holding a fire-axe that was nearly as big as she though.”
was. She wore a lab-coat and comfortable shoes.
“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”
“You take what you need and go, OK? No sense in
there being any trouble.” Her chin was pointy and her “Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them.
eyes were sharp. She looked to be in her forties. She I’ve taken care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone
looked nothing like Kelly, which was good, because —broken wrist. Listen, do you want some Wonder
Felix felt like running and giving her a hug as it was. Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend
Another person alive! looks like he could use a meal.”

“Are you a doctor?” Felix said. She was wearing scrubs “Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to
under the coat, he saw. trade, but we’re both committed workaholics looking to
learn a trade. Could you use some assistants?”
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 18

“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have
wouldn’t mind some company.” endings.”

They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little
restaurant people brought it over and made their now. “And you’ll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the
manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle World?”
up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in
the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and “He prefers Prime Minister,” Van said in a stagey
then he followed. whisper. The anti-histamines had worked miracles on
his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a fine pink.
“None of us know what to do,” the woman said. Her
name was Rosa, and she had found them a bottle of “You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.
wine and some disposable plastic cups from the
housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or “Boys,” she said. “Playing games. How about this. I’ll
tanks or even looters, but it’s just quiet.” help out however I can, provided you never ask me to
call you Prime Minister and you never call me the
“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix Minister of Health?”
said.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”
Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to
“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out get the last few drops out.
there doing the same thing? Maybe if we all get
together we’ll come up with something to do.” The raised their glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To
humanity.” He thought hard. “To rebuilding.”
“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.
“To anything,” Van said.
Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”
“To anything,” Felix said. “To everything.”
Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that.
Lady, we’re at a critical juncture here. We can go down “To everything,” Rosa said.
through negligence, dwindling away in our hiding
holes, or we can try to build something better.” They drank. The next day, they started to rebuild. And
months later, they started over again, when
“Better?” She made a rude noise. disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they’d
pulled together. And a year after that, they started over
“OK, not better. Something though. Building something again. And five years later, they started again.
new is better than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what
are you going to do when you’ve read all the magazines Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the
and eaten all the potato chips here?” dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and
learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a
Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what data-center for a little government—little governments
the hell are we going to do, anyway?” came and went, but this one was smart enough to want
to keep records and needed someone to keep everything
“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. running, and Van went with him.
Something is better than nothing. We’re going to take
this patch of the world where people are talking to each They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes
other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re going to find they happened upon old friends from the strange time
everyone we can and we’re going to take care of them they’d spent running the Distributed Republic of
and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM,
fuck it up. We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give though no one in the real world ever called him that
up, though.” anymore.

Van laughed. “Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds
know it?” never healed, and neither did most other people’s. There
were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on
“We’re going to go and drag him out, first thing tragedy.
tomorrow. He’s going to be a part of this, too. Everyone
will. Screw the end of the world. The world doesn’t But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 19

of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the
better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days manner specified by the author or licensor.
of one, either.
* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for
> go to bed, felix commercial purposes.

> soon, kong, soon—almost got this backup * Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon
running this work, you may distribute the resulting work only
under a license identical to this one.
> youre a junkie, dude.

> look whos talking

* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear
He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had to others the license terms of this work.
had it online for a couple years now. The Os in Google
changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today * Any of these conditions can be waived if you get
they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other permission from the copyright holder.
frowning.
Disclaimer: Your fair use and other rights are in no way
He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a affected by the above.
terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a
change. The little government’s records were safe. This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code
(the full license):
> ok night night
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
> take care sa/2.5/legalcode

Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching —

out his back with a long series of pops.
Machine-readable metadata (humans, ignore this):
“Sleep well, boss,” he said.
<!—/Creative Commons License—><!—<rdf:RDF
“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
“You need your sleep, too.” xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-
“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-
to typing. schema#">

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. <Work rdf:about="">
Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made
its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he <license
loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
computer and fight off entropy again. And why not? nc-sa/2.5/" />

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin. <dc:type

rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" />
—
</Work>
Creative Commons License Deed
<License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/2.5/"><permits
You are free: rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"
/><permits
* to Share—to copy, distribute, display, and perform rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"/
the work ><requires
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice"/><req
* to Remix—to make derivative works uires
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"/>
Under the following conditions:
Cory Doctorow: Overclocked When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: 20

<prohibits
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialU
se"/><permits
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWor
ks"/><requires
rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/ShareAlike"/>
</License></rdf:RDF>—>