CyberStorm

June 29.

THE BABY SCREAMED and screamed in my arms. It was slippery, still wet, but I held onto her-and smiled.

"It"s a girl," I said, tears streaming down my face. "It"s a girl."

Lauren looked at me. She was soaked in sweat. I took a step over and handed her our baby.

"She"s so beautiful," I whispered as I put her in Lauren"s arms. It was very warm, hot even, and I was sweating almost as much as Lauren. "What do you want to call her?"

Lauren looked at the baby, laughing, and then looked into my eyes.

"Antonia."

I laughed, nodding. "Tony"s a good name."

"Can we take her?" asked the nurse.

Lauren nodded, and the nurse reached over to take Antonia.

"She looks perfectly healthy," said the doctor, wiping his hands and walking over to the windows. "Can I?"

I looked at Lauren, and she nodded, so I nodded too.

The doctor smiled and pulled back the curtains, revealing a crowd of faces in the hallway-Vince, Chuck, Sergeant Williams, Lauren"s mother and father, and more. We were back in Presbyterian Hospital in New York, the same place that we"d evacuated in what seemed like a different world just a few months ago. Susie was holding up Luke so he could see. I gave two thumbs-up, and they erupted into cheers.

"You okay?" I asked Lauren.

The nurse and doctor were cleaning Antonia, giving her a quick physical exam. The doctor looked toward me after a minute and then walked over, holding Antonia, giving her back to Lauren. After everything we"d endured, we"d decided not to find out the s.e.x of the baby beforehand. She was a gift we wanted to uncover one small piece at a time.

"Bring your friends in if you want," said the doctor. "Everything is perfect. It"s a minor miracle after everything she went through."

I smiled at the doctor, and then down at little Antonia, before waving at the window for everyone to come in.

Chuck burst through first, holding a bottle of champagne in his artificial hand and four flutes in the other. They"d had to amputate his hand in the end, even after getting into the hospital, but he had money and good insurance. The robotic prosthetic they replaced his hand with was amazing. Even better than his old hand, Chuck liked to joke.

Gripping the bottle, he popped the cork off as everyone came into the room to congratulate Lauren and have a look at Antonia. I walked toward him as he filled two flutes, the champagne overflowing and spilling onto the floor.

"Here"s to never giving up," he laughed, handing me a gla.s.s. "And, of course, to Antonia."

Vince joined us, taking a gla.s.s from Chuck.

"And here"s to being wrong."

I laughed and shook my head.

"To being wrong."

It was the first time we"d laughed about it, and it felt good. Drinking our toasts, we watched the crowd gather around Lauren and Antonia.

I"d certainly been wrong, but then the whole world had been wrong.

It both had, and hadn"t, been a Chinese army base in the middle of Washington.

The Chinese had been invited to set up a temporary camp in the middle of Washington. It was only there for a few weeks, part of a ma.s.sive international humanitarian relief effort of equipment and manpower to help the East Coast dig itself out from under the "CyberStorm," as the media had started to call it.

The scale of the disaster wasn"t apparent for the first two weeks, at least from the outside. Communications had been totally disrupted, and the patchy reporting authorities did get indicated that power and water and emergency services would be quickly restored. In most parts of the country they were, all except for Manhattan.

By themselves, the cyberdisruptions would have been temporarily crippling, but combined with a crumbling New York infrastructure where aging pipes, long corroded by seawater, burst when they froze up from the water stoppage and cold temperatures, and the heavy snow and ice that had downed power and telephone lines and blocked roads-all together it had created a deadly trap that killed tens of thousands of people.

"You okay, Mike?" asked Chuck.

I smiled. "You"re not mad anymore?"

"I was never mad at you, more at this whole situation. I just needed a little time. We all did."

It was nearly four months since we"d been rescued, and it had been a hard four months. Ellarose had been hospitalized for malnutrition after losing nearly half of her body weight, and Chuck had been in the hospital for over a month as well. All of us had been sick.

I turned to Vince. "I still don"t know how to thank you."

Tony had dropped Vince off near his family"s place towards the end of January, and within a week or so they had power restored and things had started to return to normal. He"d tried to track us down and eventually had gotten in touch with Lauren"s family.

When n.o.body had heard from us, they"d searched for Chuck"s place, but the electronic land registries weren"t back online yet, so they couldn"t get the address of Chuck"s cabin. Vince had an approximate idea of the location, so he"d led a search party up into the mountains to find us.

Vince looked at the floor.

"It"s me that should be thanking you. You saved my life too, letting me stay with you in your building."

Hiding in the cellar when Vince arrived, I"d seen what I thought was a Chinese soldier, but in reality it was an American soldier, an Asian-American of j.a.panese descent as it turned out. But in my paranoid mind, it was only possible for me to see one thing.

It"d been the same on my walk into Washington.

I"d already decided it was the Chinese that had attacked us, so everything I"d seen had just reinforced my prejudice. Climbing out onto the roof of the museum, by chance I"d been right in front of the Chinese Corps of Engineers. They were there because the Chinese were the only ones that had replacements for, and the skilled manpower to install, the twenty-ton electrical generators that had been wrecked.

If I"d bothered to look more closely when I"d been on that roof, I would have noticed, further away from me, Indian and j.a.panese faces, and even French and Russian and German ones. The entire international community had rallied to America"s side once the scale of the disaster had become known, especially when it began to emerge exactly what had happened.

I put my gla.s.s of champagne down on a side table. After not sleeping, the alcohol was making my head swim.

"I think I"m going to get a coffee," I announced. "Anyone want one?"

"No thanks," replied Chuck. "Do you want me to come?"

"Why don"t both of you congratulate Lauren. I"ll be back in a second."

They nodded and wandered over to the rest of the crowd while I stole off toward the door. Shutting it gently behind me, I made for the vending machines. Today"s edition of the New York Times was lying on an attending table, its cover announcing, "UN Security Council Issues Cyber-Armistice and Forgiveness."

I picked it up and began reading.

It was slightly ironic that it was the Iranians who had saved the day by first admitting to some part of the CyberStorm, bringing the world back from the brink of destruction. Of course, they probably hadn"t meant to save us, but then it was hard to tell in this new world, where nothing was what it seemed.

As we"d heard on the radio what seemed a lifetime ago, at the start of the third week of the CyberStorm, the Ashiyane group had claimed that they"d released the Scramble virus to attack logistics systems. They"d announced that the Scramble virus was retaliation for the Stuxnet and Flame cyberweapons that the United States had unleashed against Iran. To muddy the waters, they"d released it at the same time the Anomymous hacker network had started its denial-of-service attack against FedEx.

After this, forensic network investigators in China were able to unravel a chain of events that included a splinter group of their own Peoples" Liberation Army unleashing a cyberattack on the US. Following the dominoes of the CyberStorm back to their origin, the investigators found that everything had started with a power failure in Connecticut, and they tracked this back to an attack by a Russian criminal group.

Bit by bit, it became clear that this Russian criminal gang had hacked into the backup systems of hedge funds in Connecticut, inserting a worm designed to modify backup financial records when the power at the hedge funds" primary locations went out. It was the Russian criminal group that had initiated the first power outages in Connecticut in an attempt to siphon money from the hedge funds.

The administrators at the hedge funds would have quickly figured it out, probably faster than the criminals would have been able to extract funds, and the Russians knew this. So to keep away as many staff as possible, they"d done two things-initiated the attack on Christmas Eve, and issued a false emergency alert about a bird flu outbreak.

The bird flu warning had been dramatically more successful in creating havoc than they"d intended, and like the power outage, it had cascaded through the system. Although they"d been successful in their campaign, they"d been too successful, turning themselves from mere criminals into terrorists.

The CIA was now hunting them down.

At the time, with the Chinese and American aircraft carriers squaring off in the South China Sea, it was impossible to understand the power outages in Connecticut, bird flu epidemic, and logistics attack as anything but a coordinated attack by the Chinese in retaliation to US forces threatening their "protectorate."

When the Amtrak train had crashed, resulting in the loss of civilian life, US Cyber Command had initiated an attack on Chinese infrastructure in response. That was when things really went off the rails. Even then, the Chinese Politburo had issued a strict warning against retaliation since they knew they hadn"t attacked America first and were trying to figure out what was going on.

Although not admitted, the rumors leaked online were that the governor of Shanxi Province had instructed a splinter group of the PLA to initiate a reb.u.t.tal attack on US infrastructure after the initial US Cyber Command attack against China. It still wasn"t clear exactly what happened, but it looked like he may have also opened the floodgates from his own dam to wreck a village in an effort to justify his actions.

It was also understood that it had been this splinter group that had knocked out electrical generators and jammed up the water systems going into New York. Under normal conditions this would have caused major disruptions, but the deadly disaster that became CyberStorm was made all the more possible by its coinciding with one of the most intense series of winter storms to ever hit New England.

In the end, CyberStorm was a swirling, simultaneous collision of events in the cyber and physical domains. If it seemed a fantastic coincidence, it wasn"t. Millions of attacks a day occurred all over cybers.p.a.ce, like waves rolling across a cyber ocean. Eventually, by simple laws of probability, a series of cyberattack waves had coalesced, the same way giant rogue waves were created in the real oceans that seemingly came from nowhere to wreak destruction.

I was standing in the waiting room, reading the endless a.n.a.lyses of what had happened, surrounded by reporters. They weren"t here for me-they were following Vince around. Vince had become the famous founder of the meshnet that had saved untold lives, helping maintain order when everything else had failed.

Millions of distress calls and messages had been logged on the meshnet, along with hundreds of thousands of images. People were now combing through this, searching for images of their loved ones, trying to find out what had happened in the chaos, and the authorities were using it to track down people who had committed crimes. The VinceNet, as they called it, was still operating.

Grabbing some change from my pocket, I popped it into the coffee machine and selected a latte.

Reporters. They"d been half the problem, part of the reason why it had taken so long for the scale of the emergency to become understood.

With communications down and the storms grinding into the city, reporters on the outside hadn"t been able to get inside to see what was happening. Instead, CNN and others had stationed themselves in Queens and the outer boroughs, reporting on conditions there, but n.o.body understood what was happening deep inside Manhattan.

So the world heard reports that New York was experiencing difficulties, but with the impression that Manhattan was sleeping underneath its blanket of snow. The real disaster only became apparent when they quarantined the island "temporarily," and the world had watched in horror as they saw people drowning and freezing to death as they tried to escape across the Hudson and East Rivers.

I picked up my latte, blowing on it to cool it down.

It was half natural disaster and half manmade disaster, but even there, the distinction wasn"t obvious. Some climatologists were loudly declaring that the physical storms were the result of the changing climate, so that really these were manmade storms just as much as the CyberStorm that had collided with them. And if everyone was to blame, was this the same as n.o.body being to blame?

"You okay, Mike?"

I looked up from my latte. It was Vince, surrounded by the reporters. He was standing next to an elderly lady.

"Yeah, just thinking."

"I think we"re all thinking," said the lady in a kind voice.

"Mike," said Vince formally, "I"d like to introduce you to Patricia Killiam, my thesis advisor at MIT."

I held out my hand. "A pleasure. Vince told me a lot about you."

"Good things I hope?" she replied, smiling. I knew she was in her eighties, yet she barely looked sixty. "Congratulations on your new baby daughter."

"Thank you."

She was still holding my hand.

"I hope you don"t mind," said Vince, "but Patricia was here for a day, and I wanted to introduce the two of you."

"I heard about how you used augmented reality during the New York episode," said Patricia. "Fascinating."

I laughed. "That was more Vince."

"I"d like to talk sometime, if you"d be interested."

"I"d like that."

She had such a kind, warm smile that it was impossible to consider refusing her.

"But maybe a bit later?"

She laughed. "I"d love to see Antonia, if you"d allow me the honor."

I smiled back at her and nodded toward the hallway.

"It would be my pleasure."

July 4.

"DO YOU WANT to go see Uncle Vince?" I cooed at Antonia.

She stared at me and stuck a few fingers in her mouth.

"I"ll take that as a yes."

I laughed, picking her up to wrap her in the baby sling hanging on my front. She was so tiny, and this would be her first walk outside, the first time she would see New York, and I wanted it to be special. We were going to walk up to Central Park, to see the Fourth of July festivities.

Our apartment was filled with packing boxes, and with Antonia safely stowed, I paused, taking a moment to say good-bye.