The baby screamed and screamed in my arms, slippery and still wet. But I held onto her—and smiled.
“It’s a girl,” I said, tears coming. “It’s a girl!”
Lauren was soaked in sweat, but I was nearly as drenched.
“She’s so beautiful.” I put her in Lauren’s arms. “What do you want to call her?”
Lauren looked at the baby, laughing, crying. “Antonia.”
I wiped away some tears. “Tony’s a good name.”
“Can we take her?” asked the nurse, leaning in to take Antonia from Lauren.
“She looks perfectly healthy,” said the doctor. He walked over to the windows. “May I?”
I nodded and he pulled back the curtains, revealing a crowd of faces—Damon, Chuck, Sergeant Williams, Lauren’s mother and father. We were at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, the same place 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 cleaned Antonia, giving her a physical before returning her to us. After everything we’d endured, we’d decided not to find out the sex 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 Antonia, before signaling everyone to come in.
Chuck burst in 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 he’d been treated in 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.
He popped the cork off as everyone came into the room to congratulate Lauren and meet 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 glass. “And, of course, to Antonia.”
Damon joined us, taking a glass 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 rest of our friends gather around Lauren and Antonia.
I’d been wrong, but then the whole world had been wrong along with me.
It both had and hadn’t been a Chinese army base in the middle of Washington, DC. The Chinese had been invited to set up a temporary camp in the middle of the city. It was only there for a few weeks, part of a massive international humanitarian relief effort to help the East Coast dig itself out from 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 outside New York. Worldwide communications had been disrupted and the patchy reporting that did get through indicated that power and water and emergency services would be quickly restored. In most parts of the country they were, except for the East Coast and particularly Manhattan.
In any disaster, there is always a delayed reaction, a gap the collective mind needs to comprehend something never seen before, and the events in New York were no different. The cyber disruptions alone would have been crippling for a short time, but add a crumbling New York infrastructure, where aging pipes, long corroded by seawater, burst when they froze during the water stoppage and cold temperatures, and then throw in the heavy snow and ice that had downed power and telephone lines and blocked roads—all combined, it created a deadly trap that killed tens of thousands.
“You okay, Mike?” asked Chuck.
I smiled. “You’re not mad anymore?”
“I was never mad at you, more at the whole situation. I just needed a little time. We all did.”
It had been 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 Damon. “I still don’t know how to thank you.”
At Damon’s family home, the power had been restored within a week and things had started to return to normal. He’d tried to track us down and had eventually gotten in touch with Lauren’s family. Nobody had heard from us, so they’d searched for the location of Chuck’s cabin, but the electronic land registries weren’t back online yet and no one could find the address. Damon had an approximate idea of how to get there, so he had led a search party up into the mountains.
Damon looked at the floor. “It’s me who should be thanking you. You saved my life too, letting me stay with you in your building.”
From the cellar, I’d seen what I thought was a Chinese soldier, but in reality it was an Asian-American military man, of Japanese descent as it turned out. But my paranoid mind was only capable of seeing one thing.
It had been the same on my walk into Washington. I’d decided it was the Chinese who had attacked us, so my mind framed everything I saw to reinforce that prejudice. On the roof of the museum, I’d been looking at the Chinese Corps of Engineers. They were there because China was the only nation that had replacements for the twenty-ton electrical generators that had been wrecked, and the skilled manpower to install them.
If I’d bothered to look farther down the Mall while on that roof, I would have noticed Indian, Japanese, French, Russian, and German soldiers too. The entire international community had rallied to support the United States once the scale of the disaster had become known, especially when facts about what had happened began to emerge.
I put my champagne down on a side table. After a sleepless night, the alcohol was making my head swim. “I think I’m going to get a coffee. Anyone want one?”
“No, thanks,” replied Chuck. “Do you want me to come?”
“Why don’t both of you stay with Lauren. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Chuck and Damon nodded and joined the crowd around the bed while I stole away. Shutting the door behind me, I made for the vending machines. Today’s edition of the New York Times was lying on a side table, its cover announcing, “UN Security Council Issues Cyber-Armistice and Forgiveness.” I picked it up.
Ironically, it was the Iranians who had saved the day by being the first to admit to some part of the cyberattack. 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 North American logistics systems in retaliation for the Stuxnet and Flame cyberweapons the United States had unleashed against Iran a few years earlier. To muddy the waters, they’d released it at the same time the Anonymous hacker network had started its denial-of-service attack against FedEx.
Forensic network investigators in China were able to unravel a chain of events that included a splinter group of their own People’s Liberation Army unleashing a cyberattack on the US at the same time. Following the trail back to its 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. The Russian gang had hacked into the backup systems of hedge fund firms in Connecticut, inserting a worm designed to modify backup financial records when the power at the firms’ primary locations went out. It was this 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 fund firms would have figured it out, probably faster than the criminals would have been able to extract funds, and the Russians knew this. So to up their chance of success, they’d done two things—initiated the attack on Christmas Eve, when few people would be working, and issued a false emergency alert about a bird flu outbreak.
The bird flu warning had been far more effective at creating havoc than they’d expected, and like the power outage, it had cascaded through the system. The Russian gang had been too successful, and had turned themselves from mere criminals into terrorists.
The CIA was hunting them down.
At the time, with 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 for 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. Even then, the Chinese Politburo had issued a strict warning against retaliatory action: they knew they hadn’t attacked America first and were trying to figure out what was going on.
The rumors online were that the governor of Shanxi Province had instructed a splinter group of the People’s Liberation Army to initiate a rebuttal attack on US infrastructure after the US attack on China. It looked like the official might also have sabotaged the dam in his region, wrecking a village in an effort to justify his actions.
It was 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 in combination with one of the most intense series of winter storms ever to hit the East Coast, the CyberStorm turned into a deadly disaster.
In the end, the CyberStorm was a swirling collision of simultaneous events in the cyber and physical domains. If it seemed a fantastic coincidence, it wasn’t. Millions of cyberattacks a day occurred all over the Internet, like waves rolling across an ocean. By simple laws of probability, a series of cyberattack waves had coalesced, the same way giant rogue waves appeared occasionally in the ocean, seemingly coming from nowhere to wreak havoc.
With me in the waiting room were a number of reporters. They weren’t here for me—they were following Damon. Damon had become famous as the founder of the meshnet, which had saved untold lives, helping maintain order when everything else had failed. Millions of distress calls and help messages had been logged on the meshnet, along with hundreds of thousands of images. People were now combing through this archive, searching for images of their loved ones, trying to figure out what had happened in the chaos. The authorities were using it as a resource to track down people who had committed crimes. The DamonNet, as they now called it, was still operating.
I grabbed some change from my pocket, popped it into the coffee machine, and selected a latte.
Reporters. They’d been half the problem, part of the reason it had taken so long for the scale of the emergency to be understood.
With communications down and the storms pounding the city, reporters had no way to learn what was happening in Manhattan. CNN and other broadcasters had stationed themselves in Queens and the outer boroughs instead, reporting on conditions there. But nobody knew how desperate things were deep inside Manhattan. So the world heard reports that New York was experiencing difficulties, but the impression given was that Manhattan was sleeping underneath its blanket of snow. The extent of the catastrophe only became apparent when the island was quarantined “temporarily,” and the world had watched in horror as people drowned and froze to death trying to escape across the Hudson and East Rivers.
I picked up my latte, blowing on it to cool it down.
It was part natural disaster and part man-made disaster, although even that distinction was debatable. Some climatologists were declaring that the storms were the result of climate change. In that case, the weather was man-made too, just like the CyberStorm that had collided with it.
And if everyone was to blame, was nobody to blame?