The Final Day (After, #3)(37)
“Build what? I’m worried about having enough food and firewood to see us through the winter. Everyone is screaming for more electricity now that we’ve got something up and running again. Hey, I’d love to have a computer in my office, even an old green-screen machine hooked to a printer. I’m sick of my old Underwood typewriter with the dang F and J keys sticking half the time. But the time to get even one computer up and running, especially now?”
He pointed to the blowing snowdrifts outside the window, and a thought flashed of the young couple down in the park. He wondered if the cold had finally driven them back inside.
“It’s stuff we can use now. Databases, for one,” Paul replied. “We were lucky to find hard copies of all the IEEE journals from the nineteenth century so we could figure out how to start rebuilding, using the same designs Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison did. It’d be nice to have all those millions of words in a searchable database. Even the library cataloging went online years ago, so we are no longer even sure what we have in the book stacks around us.”
“And that would help us…?” John let the question trail off.
“Okay, I agree,” Paul continued. “A computer working here, one in Asheville, another in Morganton … big deal other than the convenience of using writing machines we once took for granted. To talk with others? We already have some telephones up and running. Cell phones and Wi-Fi? Forget it for years to come, so yeah, I can see your point on that score. I agree; our more immediate concerns are firewood and food.”
“I’m not saying stop working on this,” John interjected. “It’s just that as of the moment, I’m not seeing the short-term benefits. We replicate computer technology of the 1980s, maybe the ’90s, and then what?”
“We eavesdrop,” Ernie said with a smile, acting at least somewhat nonconfrontational for a change, “like I said the other day when Paul showed you the first machine up and running. Come on, John, I’m talking about Bluemont. You’re ex-military. When you were in the Middle East, how did the White House and Pentagon micromanage every move you guys made?”
“Commodore 64s and Apple IIes?” John replied with a cynical smile.
“Not much better, actually, if you go back a few years. When Linda and I were writing software for Apollo, its guidance systems were 40K computers—40K! Think of it. We went to the moon on 40-kilobyte computers.”
Ernie sighed and looked out the window at the snow-covered lawn in front of the library. “America did that in the ’60s, and it seems crazy today. The first shuttle flights had little more than a meg on board. All that data going back and forth on something your cell phone, at least before the system fried off, trumped a thousand times over. Again, Moore’s law.”
“So with what you are doing downstairs, you think you can hack into Bluemont’s communications. How?”
“First of all, the data goes up and down. Sat comm. Even low-earth orbit satellites are super hardened against EMPs generated by the sun, coronal mass ejections. For military use hardened against EMP hits as well. But a lot of that stuff goes all the way up to geosynch orbit. How did you get your television before the crap hit the fan?”
John started to smile. “An eighteen-inch dish.”
“Exactly.”
“But it’s encrypted, isn’t it?”
“It all comes down to zeroes and ones in the end, John. When Linda and I left IBM, we set up our own business, writing software and providing some of the precision hardware for large-array tracking dishes—mostly civilian business contracts, but a few overseas governments as well. Recall a scandal a few years back of a high government official with an unsecured server in their home that was hacked by some guys in Poland, Romania, somewhere overseas?”
John had some recollection of it. So much of what happened before the Day, which had once seemed all so important, was now becoming hazy memories.
“John, you remember this college was starting on a cybersecurity major before the war started.”
He nodded with memory of that. President Hunt had even asked him, as an historian and ex-military, to think about creating a course on the history of technology. The idea had intrigued him, and he had even done some preliminary research into the fascinating history of World War II, the tales about Enigma, Ultra, the tapping into Japanese and German radio traffic, the work of the legendary Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, England.
Is that where these two were leading?
“Take me to the conclusion,” John said, looking out across the windswept yard in front of the campus library. Lowering clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, a light sprinkling of snow flurries swirling down. If another storm was coming in, he wanted to get home, split some more wood, and huddle in close to the woodstove with Makala before it hit.
“Remember those huge satellite dishes folks used to have in front of their homes twenty years ago?” Ernie asked, pressing in.
John chuckled. It was a bit of a stereotype of ramshackle trailers, with a dish half as big as the trailer planted in the front yard for television.
“They nearly all disappeared once the big mainstream servers came in with an eighteen-inch dish you could tack to your living room window.”
John nodded, remembering installing one himself when he and Mary moved here with two young girls. A hundred-plus channels to choose from, and he had visions of all the educational programs that could be offered, rather than what most stations had degenerated into with the advent of the nauseating reality-show craze.