âSorry about that. Hope I didnât do that too quicklyâsome people get vertigo.â
âIf I understand you and all these lights, the internet seems to be really busy despite the bombings yesterday?â Jimmy asked.
âYes. Much more so than during the â09 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. Thatâs why the Living Software project got started, to generate error-free code. Itâs almost ready to deploy in the wild.
âToday, 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 canât get through send messages back saying theyâre 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, âYou canât get there from hereâ? Well, weâre trying to map where those places are that now canât get through and where it is they canât get through to.â Sanders hit the touch pad and red dots starting blinking at locations on the surface below. âThe trouble is that our sensors, Kamaikiâs own servers on networks around the globe, are cut off. We have twelve thousand servers in Eurasia that we canât get to.â
Susan stared down into the pulsing, blinking representation of cyberspace. âKamaiki has sensors?â
âWell, you could call them that,â Sanders replied. âSo. We monitor the traffic loadings on the various internet companiesâ fiber lines from city to city, so we can help route our customersâ traffic most rapidly and cheaply. Then we cache or store our customersâ 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
âIâm not sure I followed all of that, âSusan admitted, âbut would you monitor traffic for MITâare they a customer?â
âSo, weâre all from MIT originally. We give them a price break. I still teach there, in Course Six. Why?â Sanders asked.
âWell, I see one of the red lights is labeled CAIN. I guess thatâs because theyâre offline now, huh?â Susan said pointing below.
âTerrible tragedy. Sent Globegrid back years.â
âWould you have been watching the traffic load going into CAIN just before it caught fire?â Susan asked.
âThatâs 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,â Sanders boasted.
Susan was understanding the importance of Kamaiki. Getting excited, she asked, âCan you run this thing backwards? Could we look at what was happening with CAIN just before it blew?â Susan asked.
âWell, sure, but I donât thinkâ¦â Sanders started typing into the console. âSo, about sixty-five hours ago, zoom in on Boston, zoom in on MITâ¦â The world below them seemed to spin. Streets and buildings appeared, with the internet coursing through and below them. âOther side of Kendall Squareâ¦hereâs CAINâ¦â
Susan, dizzy with vertigo, grabbed on to the catwalkâs guardrail. âCan you tell us anything about the traffic going into CAIN?â
âSoâ¦country of origin. Red is Russia, old habit. Blue is France. Green is Japan,â Sanders said as a hologram appeared hovering over the surface, with long lists of numbers spiraling down. âThose colors
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