Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke Page A

“Sorry about that. Hope I didn’t do that too quickly—some people get vertigo.”
    â€œIf I understand you and all these lights, the internet seems to be really busy despite the bombings yesterday?” Jimmy asked.
    â€œYes. Much more so than during the ’09 Cyber Crash. So that day, when we had Zero Day hacker attacks on Sytho Routers and SofTrust servers, almost nothing moved. The monoculture of their software being used by almost everyone cost the economy hundreds of billions. That’s why the Living Software project got started, to generate error-free code. It’s almost ready to deploy in the wild.
    â€œToday, traffic within the Americas is normal, except for traffic trying to get to Europe and Asia, which just keeps trying and failing, for the most part. The packets that can’t get through send messages back saying they’re lost. That adds to the traffic load. But on a normal day there would be much more traffic. A lot of traffic from one point in Eurasia to another point in Eurasia normally goes through the U.S. Not now. So you know the old joke about the guy in Maine that says, ‘You can’t get there from here’? Well, we’re trying to map where those places are that now can’t get through and where it is they can’t get through to.” Sanders hit the touch pad and red dots starting blinking at locations on the surface below. “The trouble is that our sensors, Kamaiki’s own servers on networks around the globe, are cut off. We have twelve thousand servers in Eurasia that we can’t get to.”
    Susan stared down into the pulsing, blinking representation of cyberspace. “Kamaiki has sensors?”
    â€œWell, you could call them that,” Sanders replied. “So. We monitor the traffic loadings on the various internet companies’ fiber lines from city to city, so we can help route our customers’ traffic most rapidly and cheaply. Then we cache or store our customers’ data on our servers around the world so that when somebody wants it, they just go to the nearest Kamaiki server to get it, instead of sending a packet all the way from, say, Yahoo in California to a user in Germany.”
    â€œI’m not sure I followed all of that, “Susan admitted, “but would you monitor traffic for MIT—are they a customer?”
    â€œSo, we’re all from MIT originally. We give them a price break. I still teach there, in Course Six. Why?” Sanders asked.
    â€œWell, I see one of the red lights is labeled CAIN. I guess that’s because they’re offline now, huh?” Susan said pointing below.
    â€œTerrible tragedy. Sent Globegrid back years.”
    â€œWould you have been watching the traffic load going into CAIN just before it caught fire?” Susan asked.
    â€œThat’s what they paid us to do for them, sure. So, we made sure that people trying to reach CAIN from anywhere in the world found the fastest, most reliable path through cyberspace,” Sanders boasted.
    Susan was understanding the importance of Kamaiki. Getting excited, she asked, “Can you run this thing backwards? Could we look at what was happening with CAIN just before it blew?” Susan asked.
    â€œWell, sure, but I don’t think…” Sanders started typing into the console. “So, about sixty-five hours ago, zoom in on Boston, zoom in on MIT…” The world below them seemed to spin. Streets and buildings appeared, with the internet coursing through and below them. “Other side of Kendall Square…here’s CAIN…”
    Susan, dizzy with vertigo, grabbed on to the catwalk’s guardrail. “Can you tell us anything about the traffic going into CAIN?”
    â€œSo…country of origin. Red is Russia, old habit. Blue is France. Green is Japan,” Sanders said as a hologram appeared hovering over the surface, with long lists of numbers spiraling down. “Those colors