3 | CHAOS
At exactly 8:59 a.m., as Sam Wilson was walking through the main entrance to his school—nodding to the security guards, who ignored him, and smiling at their aggressive-looking guard dogs, which snarled at him—a series of catastrophes was striking the largest telecommunications company in America: Telecomerica.
The scrambled database server was bad enough, but two nasty little viruses, the Black Flu and Kamikaze, chewed their way through node after node on the network as the system administrators and the antivirus software struggled to contain them.
Servers had to be shut down and rebuilt from scratch to eliminate the intruders and repair the damage.
The Thomas Street facility infected the Washington, D.C., office, which spread the disease right up and down the East Coast, as far south as Miami, from where it raced across the nation, via Albuquerque to San Diego, and quickly spread up and down the West Coast as well.
It wasn’t simply the Internet that went down, although that collapsed in a screaming heap right across the country and in many other places around the world as all the main U.S. circuits imploded. The internal networks of banks and major corporations used the same circuits. Most had to close their doors.
TV stations went off the air. Radio stations broadcast static. ATMs all went off-line. The stock exchange ground to a halt. The loss of the Internet meant the loss of e-mail and instant messaging. Cell phones just roamed aimlessly, looking for networks that no longer existed. Text messages sat uselessly in outboxes. Entire regions lost basic telephone services as the sickness found its way into other networks. Some parts of the United States even lost power.
Still, nobody died. There was the occasional injury when the lights went out, and there was some rioting in Los Angeles—what was now referred to as PVPS, or post-Vegas panic syndrome—but there were no fatalities.
It took three days to sort out the chaos and get America back online.