CyberStorm: A Novel by Matthew Mather

Author:Matthew Mather
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Matthew Mather ULC
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Day 12: January 3

WE WERE CROWDED around the coffee table in Chuck’s apartment, looking at Damon’s laptop screen. Lauren was sitting beside me with Luke wedged between her knees. He was playing with a spatula. Ellarose had been crying in Susie’s lap, but she went quiet and a tiny fart squeaked out. She began screaming again.

“I think that one’s yours to clean up,” Susie said to Chuck, handing over Ellarose. “I’ll try to find some clean clothes and water.”

Chuck sniffed Ellarose’s backside but shrugged when he couldn’t smell anything. While we’d managed the first few diaperless days by wrapping the babies in pinned-up toweling, our attempts to recycle the makeshift cloth diapers had become difficult.

Ellarose quieted down as Chuck rocked her, humming a lullaby, with a radio announcer speaking in a steady monotone in the background: “If you are going out for emergency relief today in the Midtown area, the Red Cross is advising you to avoid Penn and Madison and head for one of the smaller relief stations.”

We had a diaper bucket in one of the latrine apartments downstairs filled with bleach, but drying them meant hanging them near the kerosene heater. This wasn’t popular.

“Using signal strength from the fixed-point cell phones I set up,” explained Damon, “I can triangulate the position of anyone on the meshnet in our neighborhood.”

“Have you found them?” I asked.

Damon wagged his head. “More or less, assuming they’re connected, which I would assume.” He pointed at seven pulsing dots on the map overlay he’d been working on all night. “The mesh addresses are sort of like phone numbers, and when people create them they usually attach their names. It’s an open network, so anybody with a little technical skill can see everyone else right now. These mesh addresses I’m tracking, they all use names like ‘Paul’ or ‘Stan’ and have all recently been in our neighborhood.”

“Won’t they be suspicious that we might be able to track them if they connect?”

Damon shrugged. “I doubt they’ve made the connection that it was us who started the meshnet. People are just sharing it now—it’s going viral by itself. Anyway, people tend to not think about that sort of thing.”

“And they don’t seem like the sharpest sticks in the shed,” added Chuck. “Can you create some sort of alert if any of them comes closer than a block away?”

Damon looked up. “I could do that, send a text to everyone.”

“Not everyone,” said Chuck. “Just our gang. I don’t trust anyone else.”

“So you really think someone on our floor is in with Paul and his gang?” asked Lauren. “I can’t imagine anyone—”

“Someone let him in,” replied Chuck. “There were no missing keys, right, Tony?”

Tony nodded.

“And how did they know we’d all be in Richard’s place at that party? Luck? I don’t think so.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” said Chuck, shaking his head. “Those couples from downstairs, I don’t know them, and Rory—”

“Rory?” Lauren exclaimed. “Are you serious?”

“He’s friends with Stan, and he’s into all that Anonymous stuff, hacking, criminals—”

“They’re hardly criminals,” I said.

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