Chapter 49

December Twenty-fourth 10:30 p.m. EST

With a fond smile for Mia and Dana, who were cuddled together on the couch, Tom plopped into the comfortable leather chair in front of the computer. He had been willing to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" with them for the fourth time in two weeks, but afterwards, when they had then popped "An Unexpected Love" into the DVD player, he had to flee. He had seen the movie once a few years before, and that had been more than enough for a lifetime, even if he ended up living for a few thousand years.

Once Windows had finished booting, he opened up Firefox. A frown crossed his face when his Google homepage failed to load. After dipping his head to look under the desk to make sure everything was lit up that should be, he clicked on the bookmark for ESPN. Another 404 error. His frown deepened as he tried Amazon, USA Today, and CNN with the same result.

"Hey, Dana," he called across the room. "Something's wrong with the computer."

"So fix it," she replied, her eyes not leaving the television screen.

"Could you help me? Pretty, pretty please with sugar on top," he said sweetly.

With a disgusted grunt, she laboriously pushed herself up, pausing on the way to kiss Mia on the cheek. "Keep my spot warm for me, I'll be right back."

Mia chuckled. "I'll do my best, but you'd better hurry."

Dana ambled across the room and shooed him out of the chair with a sharp gesture. Over the next few minutes, the confident, affectionately condescending look on her face gradually faded.

"Did you make sure everything was plugged in?" she asked.

"All the lights are on."

"Well, crawl under there and make sure none of the cables are loose. Wall to modem. Modem to router. Router to the back of the computer."

"Gotcha," Tom replied as he dropped to his knees. After a few minutes of fiddling around in the shadowed and slightly dusty underbelly of the desk, he said, "Everything looks good." He then grunted in pain when he hit his head on the underside of the desk while extricating himself.

"Poor baby," Dana said mockingly, but she reached out to soothingly rub the top of his head.

Her fingers returned to the keyboard and typed busily for several minutes. Her expression grew increasingly bewildered.

Finally, she leaned back with a slow shake of her head. "Huh. I just tried to ping Amazon, Google and Yahoo, all of which have their servers on the West Coast. All of them petered out in the midwest, and the route the data took to get even that far is really weird. Usually, the data packets go from here to the D.C. area, bounce around between a couple of core routers there, and then connect to the target site. Each of these pings took thirty or more hops, and they were all over the place."

When Tom and Mia responded with blank stares, she sighed and hunched back over the keyboard. More than fifteen minutes later, she again leaned back.

"Guys, I think you should look at this. Lump, why don't you go grab Mia a chair?"

When they were gathered around, Dana brought up a map of U.S. cities and a visual trace route program. She returned to typing, and lines flew across the trace route program.

"I know it's a pain in the butt to look back and forth between the two maps, but I couldn't come up with a way to superimpose them." When her fingers stopped moving, she exclaimed, "There! Did you see?"

"Uh. No," Tom replied.

Mia studied Dana carefully before straightening up and looking at the computer with some concern.

Dana let out an exasperated sigh. "Okay. Lump, pay attention. Mia, it's rude to just go poking around in someone's head - Don't try to look innocent, I know that's what you did - without asking first. Anyway, had you been paying attention, you would have noticed that the routes didn't pass through any major urban area, and any attempt to do so, including the times when the target website was in a city, didn't receive a response. You also would have noticed that anytime the DNS caching server didn't have a particular domain name cached and tried to connect to a DNS root server, the ping failed."

"Um, I don't think I would have noticed any of that no matter how much attention I paid," said Tom. "Assuming that I had, though, what should that have meant to me?"

"Most of the core routers and the internet backbone, which is mostly high bandwidth fiber optic cables, are in or run through major metropolitan areas, but none of them seem to be there. None of the website servers located in cities are responding. And, finally, the DNS root servers, at least the ones east of the Rockies, seem to be down."

"Maybe they were just shut down for maintenance?" Tom offered.

Dana snorted. "No. They're vital for the operation of the internet, and each root 'server' has multiple redundancies, sometimes physically separate and distant from each other. Most of the ones in the Eastern U.S. are clustered around the D.C. area, but there are others in Chicago, Atlanta, Columbus ... uh, and a few other places."

"Okay. Any chance you could bring it down another level for us?"

"Every major city in the United States and Canada has been ripped from the internet. It might extend farther than that, but I can't connect to anything outside the continent to be sure."

"How is that even possible?"

Dana shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea. Even a massive denial of service campaign wouldn't result in something like this. The only conclusion I can reach is that the damage is physical."

"Maybe there's something about it on TV," said Mia.

Tom walked across the room and turned on the cable box. After pressing a number of buttons, he shot them a perplexed look. "Cable's out."

Dana asked, "Would either of you happen to know a news website that doesn't operate out of a city?"

"Fark is run out of some small towns in backwoods Kentucky," Mia supplied.

Dana twisted around to stare at her. "I don't think I even want to know how you know that."

Mia shrugged. "I get bored sometimes while Tom's taking care of the bunnies. Trolling the Fark forums is fun."

Turning back to the computer, Dana typed briefly. "Sweet! It's loading. Slow as all heck, but it's loading."

A few seconds later, she announced, "None of the links seem to be working, but the forums are up."

They clustered together to read the entries in the forum on the topic, "What in the hell is going on?" Interspersed between pictures of General Ackbar and LOLcats were frantic entries concerning loss of telephone and television services, and reports of gunfire. As they scrolled down, messages from those in cities on the East Coast dwindled and then vanished entirely, only to be replaced by similar messages from those in cities farther west. After a few pages, all that was left were entries by rural farkers asking after urban friends, reporting an inability to reach friends and family in cities, and requesting information.

"Scroll to the end and let's see if anyone drove to a city and reported back," Tom directed.

Dana gave him a dubious look. "This is an internet forum, Lump. Everyone's full of advice on what others should be doing, but, generally, when it comes to doing something themselves that involves more effort than clicking a mouse a few times, it just doesn't happen."

Nevertheless, she skipped ahead.

"Told you so," she said after they read the last page. "But look at this: a few minutes ago someone posted a link to a BitTorrent video."

After a few clicks of the mouse, she said, "The seed is gone, but hopefully there are enough people still online who have the parts that we can still get the whole thing."