“Do you want to go see Uncle Damon?” I cooed at Antonia.
She stuck a few fingers in her mouth.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
I laughed, wrapping her in the baby sling on my chest. She was so tiny, and this would be her first walk outside, the first time she would see New York. I wanted it to be special. We were going up to Central Park to see the Fourth of July festivities.
Our apartment was filled with moving boxes, and with Antonia stowed, I paused, taking a moment to say good-bye.
Power and water had been returned to our area within a few days of our leaving for Virginia. The water had actually been restored when we left, but the pipes into our building had burst. We should have stayed, but they’d been saying services would be back every day of the disaster. There was no way of knowing it would actually happen until it did.
Temperatures had started rising even before we’d left the city, and by the time we returned to New York in the first week of March, they’d had power and services for six weeks, all the snow was gone, and New York was scrubbed almost clean. The only reminders were the husks of burnt-out buildings that dotted the landscape, and a dark sense of loss that still hung in the air.
Most of the people in our building had managed to get away before the siege of New York began. They’d returned to what looked like a war zone, but now the garbage had been collected, doors and windows fixed, and fresh paint applied.
There was an almost manic urgency to push the episode into the past, to pretend it hadn’t happened. Lauren’s parents, while searching for us, had contracted someone to clean our apartment and the hallway. When we returned, everything looked like it had before the CyberStorm, as if it had all been a bad dream.
Everything was back the way it was—everything except Tony.
I sighed, taking one last look. The movers would be taking our stuff up to a new place on the Upper West Side. Closing the door behind me, I knocked on the Borodins’ door. I’d tried to return their mezuzah, but Irena had insisted that I place it next to the doorway at our new place.
“Ah, Mih-kah-yal, Antonia,” said Irena. Aleksandr had the TV on, but he wasn’t asleep. He nodded at me, smiling, and I waved back. “You come in to eat?”
“Another time,” I promised. “I just wanted to say good-bye, to thank you again.”
They’d held Paul’s gang until Sergeant Williams had taken custody of the captives. The prisoners had nearly starved, like everyone else, but in the end they’d made out no worse than the rest of us.
The Borodins seemed unaffected, as if they couldn’t understand what all the fuss had been about, but then they’d lived through something even more horrific. In the siege of Leningrad, the city’s population of three million had suffered through an event that lasted nine hundred days, whereas this one had lasted a mere thirty-six. Over six hundred thousand had died in Leningrad, while only seventy thousand had perished here.
Only seventy thousand. But it could have been so much worse.
“We will see you, yes? We will come up to see Antonia and Luke,” said Irena, leaning forward on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek and giving Antonia a tiny peck on her pink head as well.
“Anytime,” I replied.
We looked at each other for a moment, and then she returned to her cooking, leaving the door ajar. I continued down the hallway.
The hallway.
In my mind’s eye, I could still see the couches and chairs lining it, crowded with people under blankets. The most powerful memory was the smell. The carpets had been torn out now, the wallpaper replaced, but I could still smell it. Even so, it had been our sanctuary, and a part of me remembered the days we’d spent huddled together, sharing our fears and crumbs of food, with a touch of fondness.
Pam and Rory had survived; in fact, everyone who was in the building when we left New York had been fine. We’d visited Pam and Rory, but we hadn’t spoken about the blood. It wasn’t necessary, somehow. In a strange way, they’d remained as true to their vegan sensibilities as they could have—the blood was donated willingly, and they hadn’t harmed anyone.
The only person we didn’t see was Sarah. She’d disappeared by the time we got back.
Sergeant Williams had made it his personal mission to catch up with Paul, whose case became a multiple homicide based on evidence from the meshnet. When he was captured, the full story had come out. Although Richard came from wealth, he’d been in debt, so he’d started an identity theft scheme with Stan and Paul, targeting out-of-town businessmen who used the garage’s limo service. Nobody asked us where Richard was, and he became just another one of the thousands of missing people.
Richard had been responsible for Lauren’s identity being stolen, which was also the reason he’d been keen to cozy up to her parents, to angle for their information. It had all spun out of control when the disaster had started. Paul had threatened Richard, saying he was going to tell people what he’d been doing if Richard wouldn’t help him steal supplies. We suspected the deaths of the nine people on the second floor weren’t as innocent as Richard had made them out to be, but we could only speculate.
Reaching the elevators, I pushed the down button, but then changed my mind and made for the stairwell. The familiar sound of footsteps on the metal stairs echoed in my ears as I descended. Down in the lobby, the Japanese gardens were back. But I went out the rear door.
Outside, I was greeted by a blast of warm air and the hum of New York. A jackhammer chattered in the distance, joined by a cacophony of honks and a helicopter flying overhead. Looking toward the Hudson, I saw a sailboat glide by.
Some semblance of normality had returned, but nothing would ever be the same again.
Walking along Twenty-Fourth, I crossed Ninth Avenue and looked downtown toward the Financial District. The Russian criminals had only been targeting hedge fund firms in Connecticut, but they’d brought down the entire system. Amazingly, once power was back on and the networks cleaned, most of the financial industry had been able to start right back up again.
The row of buildings that had burned down was already demolished, with scaffolding going up for new ones. In just a few short months, the city had returned to almost normal, but there were still scars everywhere—demolished and damaged buildings, areas still off-limits.
The cost of the CyberStorm was estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, dwarfing any previous disaster in US history, and that didn’t include the tens of billions of dollars of lost revenue and the costs of cleaning the networks and Internet. But the biggest cost was in human lives. At over seventy thousand and rising, it was a deadlier event than the Vietnam War.
The media, however, was already making comparisons to wars and other climate-based disasters, like the heat wave in Europe in 2003 that had killed seventy thousand people—in Paris, they’d had to open refrigerated warehouses to store the dead when morgues had overflowed. I remembered reading about it, a few lines of text I’d skimmed one morning with my coffee before getting on with my day. Now people all over the world were probably doing the same with the news about New York, just one item in the daily news cycle.
Reaching the corner of Eighth Avenue, I turned north and checked my phone. Ten after two. I was supposed to meet Damon and Lauren at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park at three o’clock. Enough time to enjoy a stroll.
Starting uptown, I walked a few blocks and soon passed Madison Square Garden. It was closed and would probably never reopen, but the area was crowded with people. The block was surrounded by an enormous memorial of flowers that piled out into the street, with photos and letters affixed to the exterior walls.
Damon and his followers had created a cyber version of the same thing, a memorial Web site where the hundreds of thousands of collected cell phone images from the CyberStorm had been organized. Loved ones were getting closure, even connecting with people who had taken the pictures to find out what had happened. Thousands more people were being brought to justice for their crimes, with witnesses contacted through their meshnet accounts.
In the physical world, rows of FEMA trucks still occupied the block around the makeshift memorial. FEMA had done its best to respond, but there was no contingency plan for rescuing sixty million people stranded under a frozen sheet of snow, without power or food and many without water. Compounding the problem was the loss of communications and computer networks—the rescue teams didn’t know where anything was, how to get it, or how to contact people, and the roads had been jammed up with snow and impassible.
It had taken two weeks to recover enough information systems and communications capability to mount any significant response, and the efforts had started in Washington and Baltimore. It was only around the time we were leaving that attention had turned to New York.
Massive quantities of resources and manpower were devoted to New York once it became apparent what had happened, but there was no way to reach the city for the first few weeks. It wasn’t just the cyberattacks—thousands of telephone lines, electrical lines, and cell towers had been brought down by the snow and ice.
The main water systems had only been down for a week, but in that time pipes had burst everywhere because of the extreme cold. When the water returned, only a trickle had made it to Lower Manhattan, and they’d had to turn it off to make repairs. In a city covered in several feet of snow and ice, with no communications or staff or power, this became an impossible task.
After the initial system failures, the president had immediately invoked the Stafford Act so the military could operate domestically, but for a few weeks we’d been on the brink of war with China and Iran, and the military had had its hands tied.
Add to that the radar signatures indicating a breach of US airspace on the first day of the attack. Most analysts thought it was some kind of automated drone attack, a new threat they were just beginning to understand. It was a month before it was confirmed that the radar reports were artifacts from a viral infection of the air force radar computer systems at McChord Field in Washington State.
Once an outline of what had happened had been sketched out, four weeks into the catastrophe, and Chinese and American cybersecurity teams had a chance to have some backroom discussions, a full-scale rescue had been initiated. This included the Chinese teams that had brought replacement parts and manpower to repair the East Coast electrical grid.
Passing Forty-Seventh Street, I spotted the red double-decker buses of the New York Sightseeing company lining the street. They were full of tourists, but not like before—these were “dark tourists,” here to gawk at the rebuilding of our city, the same kind of people who found fascination in road accidents.
In the distance, toward Midtown, the neon signs of Times Square glowed even in the daylight, and above me a digital billboard scrolled a headline: Senate Investigation Hearings Begin into Why Cyberthreat Not Taken More Seriously.
I laughed quietly, shaking my head as I read it. What are they going to discuss? The government had, in fact, taken the cyberthreat seriously, but before the CyberStorm, the term “cyberwar” had more of a metaphorical quality, like “the war on obesity.” Not anymore, now that the damage had been assessed, the costs tallied, and the horrors witnessed.
Was it just an unlikely series of events? Maybe, but once-in-a-lifetime events were happening in the world with unsettling regularity. Even with all the after-the-fact analyses, no one could quite figure out how it had all gone wrong at once.
Everything was interconnected, and big cities relied on intricate systems working perfectly, all the time. When they didn’t, people began to die very quickly. The loss of a few supporting legs created problems too big to fix, ending in gridlock with no graceful degradation to previous technologies or systems.
A generation ago, to contain the terrifying danger of nuclear weapons, politicians and militaries had created rules of engagement based on deterrence. But there was no similar protocol for dealing with cyberattacks. What was the blast radius of a cyberweapon? How would you know who had deployed it? The vacuum of rules and international agreements had been as much to blame as circumstances in creating the CyberStorm.
People, of course, always found a way to survive. There was some talk in the media about cannibalism, and it had happened, but rather than demonizing it, the media had begun normalizing it, citing comparable historical incidents.
There had been an investigation into the cabins near us in Virginia. It turned out that the Baylors had been on vacation, and the people we’d encountered were interlopers. They had probably stolen gear and supplies from Chuck’s cabin, but then, we’d stolen what we needed from our neighbors in New York. There was no evidence of cannibalism in the cabins, just some bones from pigs they must have caught, as we did. We’d jumped to conclusions tainted by our fears and the horrors we’d experienced.
I’d arrived at Columbus Circle, and I stood watching cars and trucks rumble around it. Up ahead, the trees of Central Park were like a green canyon between the high-rise buildings, and the monument in the middle of the intersection towered above us while fountains sprayed up around it. People were sitting on benches, enjoying the sun.
Life went on.
Waiting for the light to change, I looked up at the gray wall of the Museum of Art and Design to my right. A message was spray-painted in huge, looping letters across its curved front, stretching all the way from ground level to the roof. “Sometimes things break apart,” read the message, “so that better things can come together.” Below this was the attribution: “Marilyn Monroe.”
I pointed up at the message. “See that, Antonia? Do you think better things are coming?” I certainly hoped so, for her sake, but a deep unease had settled into my soul.
As with many terrible things, some good might come of the catastrophe, it seemed. Sweeping changes to international law were being promised. At least, that was what they wrote in the papers. We’d see if any of it actually happened.
The separation between the cyber and physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war—the true age of cyber would begin when we stopped using it as a descriptor.
Walking into Columbus Circle, I saw Lauren standing next to Damon and waved. Lauren was holding a leash: our new rescue dog, Buddy. The shelters had overflowed with animals after the disaster, and it was one small way we could reduce the suffering.
“Look, there’s Mommy!”
I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind, so short-sighted as to believe she’d been unfaithful when all she’d been trying to do was better her life, and mine. The same delusional, single-track thinking had almost cost us our lives when I’d been unable to understand what I saw in Washington as anything other than a Chinese invasion.
“Hey, baby!” I called out. “Antonia and I had a great walk!”
Lauren ran up to us and kissed me. Damon followed, pushing Luke in a stroller.
It was a beautiful day, with perfect blue skies. American flags draped the entrance to Central Park. We were here to watch the Independence Day celebrations and see Damon receive the key to New York City from the mayor.
We walked into Central Park. At the edge of the crowd around the stage set for Damon’s ceremony, we met up with Chuck and Susie.
“Go on, then,” I urged Damon as we greeted each other. “Time to be famous.”
He laughed. “‘Time’ is definitely the operative word.”
Still a strange kid. I shook my head as he ran off toward the back of the stage. A crowd gathered, and I pulled Antonia out of the baby sling to hold her in my arms.
“Look,” I said, lifting her up and pointing to the stage. Damon looked awkward in front of the crowd. “That’s your Uncle Damon.”
Antonia yawned and dribbled on me. I laughed, marveling at how something so tiny could be so beautiful.
A threshold had been crossed, and the world would never be the same again. Despite all the handshaking and smiling faces on TV, there were already rumblings of new conflicts, and I somehow doubted that the lessons we’d learned would be remembered for very long.
Looking around, one could imagine that none of it had ever happened. It reminded me of a trip I once took to Warsaw. When retreating from the city at the end of the war, the Nazis had leveled the entire urban center, destroying as many buildings as they could—Hitler was determined to wipe Warsaw off the map. Afterwards, however, its residents had rebuilt, brick by brick, effectively erasing Hitler the same way he had tried to erase them.
New York looked the same, but it wasn’t, and never would be.
Standing in the sunshine with the people who’d been my family through this disaster, tears came to my eyes.
Antonia giggled in my arms. Seventy thousand people had died, but at least one life had been saved. If none of this had happened, Lauren might have gotten an abortion, and I would never have known about it. I would never have had Antonia in my life, never known that she had existed, and I would probably have lost Lauren as well.
Looking into Antonia’s eyes, I realized my life had been saved too.