Shimmer (18 page)

“Do you just push a button?” Whitley asked.

“I just push a button,” Leonard said. “Which launches a series of drones out into the system. The drones will reset, reboot or restart every piece of equipment on our network—every computer, router, switch, Blue Box and satellite uplink. Everything.”

California went red.

“At least,” Leonard added, “that's what is supposed to happen.”

“We have thirty-two waves,” a voice said.

“Isn't there some way to protect the remaining Blue Boxes?” Cliff asked.

“We cannot protect the Blue Boxes,” I said. “Essentially, given the situation, we can only turn them on and off.”

“Why the hell is that?” Cliff asked, and although the typing continued, the room did seem to go quiet. It was a bad question in a confused moment. Cliff knew why. Everyone knew why. Only I had access to Shimmer. And only from Shimmer could such major changes be made to the Blue Boxes. But, in the next few minutes, there was no way for me to access Shimmer and, from there, protect each Blue Box.

And there was no way I could let Leonard onto Shimmer anyway. Because of what he might see.

Leonard was still turned to me. Staring, but not speaking.

“We have sixty-four waves,” a voice said, “one of which has reached the DMZ.”

I nodded.

“Essentially,” Leonard said, “what we're left with is pulling the plug.”

I nodded again.

The whole board was red.

“We have one hundred and twenty-eight waves,” a voice said, “eight of which have reached the DMZ.”

“What is happening to Shimmer?” Cliff asked, looking toward the door to the room holding the machine. Our corporate secret. Gateway to all the data in the system. Secret gateway to the entire shadow network.

Leonard shook his head. “I don't know.”

“What will happen to the data now in the system?” Whitley asked.

Leonard shook his head. “I can't guarantee it will be okay.”

“Will the reset do even more damage?” Whitley asked.

“It's possible.”

“Will the Blue Boxes restart?” Cliff asked.

Leonard shook his head. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

This twenty-six-year-old man was not only about to shut down our $20 billion company, he was about to put our entire future at risk.

“We have two hundred and fifty-six waves,” a voice said, “thirty-two of which have reached the DMZ.”

I leaned forward, staring at Leonard's screen, but suddenly all I really wanted was to be closer to him, to touch him, even hold him, put my arm around his wide shoulders, press my face against his heavy neck. I said quietly, “I blinded you to everything, didn't I, Leonard?”

He was tapping a finger on the desk. He smiled some. “Of course you did.”

I nodded. I looked toward Perry. He started to speak but stopped. I thought for a moment he might move, might step forward from his
place against the wall. He was in some way hiding a smile, I thought, not smiling at this failure or danger but smiling at something below it all. But he only stared at me now and, in a moment, nodded.

I turned to Leonard. “Reset the system,” I said.

Cliff looked away. I saw Whitley close her eyes. I saw Julie, reaching the DMZ at just that moment, staring at the board, not knowing what was happening. But feeling it. Feeling it from every person in the room.

Leonard typed three passwords. Then another. Leaned aside and had me enter two passwords. He typed three lines of code, then one password. Then one command.

The hailstorm of typing stopped as the techs turned to the board, the silence seeming to pull the last of the air from the room. The red lights still flickered bright. But then, a second later, the board went black. Every screen in the room went dark. The computers shut down. The phones all began to ring in unison, then went silent. Even the ventilation system went quiet, the whisper of moving air now removed from the silent room.

“This is expected,” Leonard said quietly, his voice like some announcer to the darkness. “This was expected.”

The green lights of two battery-powered exit signs shone somewhere behind us.

Twenty seconds. Thirty. Sixty seconds. Silence.

I found myself expecting the floor to drop out from beneath our feet.

“This is expected,” Leonard said again, still a kind of unseen guide to us all.

Two minutes. Three. No one moved. No one spoke.

“All of this is happening as planned,” Leonard said quietly.

And in my memory I pictured these people I worked with, Perry and Cliff, Julie and Whitley and Leonard. Realized that Julie was like some older sister to me, the sister who was a better person, who would fight for me, who told me the secrets of adulthood, who I liked so much I wanted only to sit with her, quietly, in the comfort of the mailroom.
Realized Cliff looked so tired, so gray and so tired, and realized he had a silly pink bracelet on one arm, the remnants of a temporary tattoo on his cheek, all the weekend markings of a tired, loving dad. Realized for the first time how beautiful Whitley was, how she hid this, tempered it, kept it from her days as COO. Realized how much Perry worried about me, about this company, about everyone in his group, this building, how that worry and care were what kept him in the darkness of his office till nights as late as mine. And in that moment I wished that Trevor were here. Wished he could have found a way to fit into this picture. And I thought of Trevor's question:
Do you want this to end?
And I didn't. Not at all.

It was a moment later that I realized Leonard had stood up in front of me. I barely recognized him in the darkness, his size irrelevant, and now he was already out of my view.

One terminal in the room—not the phones, not the floor lights, not the status boards—just one screen of one terminal had begun to glow. White light spread across the small, thin face of the tech sitting in front of it. It was almost a minute before the rest of us all began to move toward the light. Slowly, though. Carefully. Testing the ground at our feet, the space at our sides.

The tech said quietly, “Tulsa is up.”

Leonard was standing behind the tech. He leaned forward toward the keyboard, one hand on the tech's shoulder, with the other typing a few commands. He said in a moment, “But it's not responding.”

“It's live, though,” the tech said, pausing, silent. Then he added, “Isn't it?”

Leonard typed a command, then another. “It's all live,” Leonard said, now turning to me. His face looked unexpectedly small in the bare, white light from the screen. “And the waves have ended. But it is not responding.”

“Tulsa?” I asked quietly.

“Any of it,” Leonard said, eyes flashing white with the light from that one computer. “The whole network. I'm afraid we've completely lost contact.”

And so the rescue began. We had twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours, and the Core network had to be operational again.

It had been four o'clock Saturday morning when I'd told Leonard to launch the reset. Most of our clients passed relatively little information over the weekend. Those who tried now were receiving a message that the Core network was in the midst of a routine service and upgrade that would delay their transfers until Sunday. By Sunday morning, though, massive amounts of client data would start to hit our system as our clients—first in Asia, then Europe, then in the United States—began to prepare and process information for the week ahead.

If we didn't restore the network before the clients started passing information Sunday morning, then the world's confidence in the heretofore unstoppable Core network would not simply be shaken, it would be wounded forever. We would be contractually obligated to cover a huge percentage of our clients' costs. Word would get out to the sales prospects Trevor and his staff were pitching. The press would fall into the easiest and harshest possible attacks, pushing us from the pedestal they themselves had helped build. With the press assailing us, with sales to new customers falling off even slightly, with confidence fading among observers and analysts of all kinds, the stock price would drop dramatically.

Grace would be pushed back indefinitely.

Which wouldn't matter anyway. The crashing stock and falling sales would cause an almost immediate collapse of the shadow network.

Leonard's expectations for restoring the real network were cautious at best. “We do not understand how the waves began,” he told an assembled group of the senior staff, Perry and the top tech people. Five
A.M
., and already six hundred tech staff worldwide were being put onto the task of restoring the Core network. “We don't know what kind of damage the waves have done,” Leonard said. “We don't know what kind of damage the reset itself may have caused. And, of course, we've never restored the network before.”

“Give me a percentage chance of success,” Julie said.

Leonard leaned back against a wall, staring at the ceiling. “Less than thirty percent,” he said after a moment, and his top tech people shook their heads just slightly. Leonard spoke again. “Probably less than twenty.”

Julie leaned back, turning her face to the ceiling, eyes open wide and staring. Cliff left the room, would return a few minutes later, lips wet, face pale. Whitley breathed deeply, hands at her lips as if smoking five cigarettes at once.

As the meeting ended, Leonard stayed in the room for a moment. Staring at me.

“Are you okay, Leonard?” I asked.

He nodded, then again, his huge chin swaying down, then up.

“I'm not sure—” he started, then paused.

“Not sure how to do this?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, leaned back against the window. “Yes,” he said.

I stepped toward him, his size growing as if I were approaching some statue or monument.

He opened his eyes, and I smiled. “I'll show you,” I said.

In a way, there was little I could do to help Leonard. He and his people knew the systems far better than I did. But what they didn't know was how to make the decisions—the hundreds of decisions—that would have to be made. Decisions made quickly.

And recklessly.

But that was something I did know how to do.

We left the room and saw immediately that around the DMZ, and throughout all the groups on the five floors that made up the tech group, people were moving into position, as if Leonard's proverbial tidal wave had in fact washed through every floor of our office. Employees entered the building like rescue workers pouring into a disaster zone. But rather than filling sandbags or scrambling to evacuate refugees, these workers were handling hard drives and backup tapes, transferring data from nearly destroyed computers to new servers set up in conference rooms, break rooms, even wide areas of the halls. They were stringing cable off spools like detonation wire. They were
sketching out maps and instructions with pencils and pens, many tearing open sealed plastic envelops holding disaster-recovery plans that, although they did not contemplate a system crash this severe, laid out a series of steps to be followed, directions to be taken, roles to be filled.

In all, it looked like a complete assault on the office.

I soon determined that rather than fix those systems frozen or damaged by the waves and the reset, Leonard and his top people should simply replace the computers completely. There were roughly fifty now-defunct servers and mainframes that needed to be replaced in order to manage the essential components of the Core network. In some cases, there were near exact copies of those machines working in test environments untouched by the waves. Those machines were now being moved—physically or virtually—onto the network. But in other cases, Leonard was going to have to rebuild the machines almost from scratch—software, hardware add-ons, networking components, everything. And so I sent his people in search of high-end machines throughout the building, commandeering servers, stripping them of their components or rapidly backing them up, then erasing them, then connecting them to Leonard's new network or, in some cases, rolling them into a conference room or hallway or office near the DMZ, then plugging them into the network from there.

Along with the fifty high-end servers and mainframes, many of the less sophisticated but still essential PCs used by techs and programmers companywide had also been damaged by the waves and reset. Already groups of employees had been sent out to discount computer superstores and low-price electronics warehouses in the city, out on Long Island, out in Jersey and even Connecticut, waiting in the cold morning parking lots, ready to buy a stockpile of new computers on corporate gold cards, then bring them back to the office in rented moving vans.

The crazed morning shopping sprees of desperate computer professionals.

All these machines were being brought to the area around the
DMZ, then placed on designated desks, on conference tables, on two-by-fours laid out on the floor. Techs were rapidly sketching out the details of the new network, giving directions to anyone who could help. There were people running wire between machines, between rooms, in some cases stretching cable down hallways, across lobbies, down stairwells and off into a room three floors above or below the DMZ, each room seized without apology, each seizure driven by some unwritten version of eminent domain.

Just outside the DMZ, on six huge whiteboards that had been rapidly attached to the wall, Leonard and I had created a master list of the fifty key machines that had to be replaced and the networking needed to link them to the Core network. Already the heat from those machines that had been restarted was raising the temperature around the DMZ—a serious and growing danger to the new and old equipment. Those of the building's air conditioners that were working were immediately turned up to high, fans were brought in from all areas of the building, mobile air-conditioning units were being purchased from the same discount electronics stores where we were buying so many new computers.