After sleeping spots had been arranged and everyone said their goodnights, I lit a candle and sequestered myself in the book room, going first to the typewriter table.

In the newspapers someone had marked up stories: one, from several months ago, about a mysterious hacker who had been released from federal lockup; other, more recent ones about a virulent new malware that was spreading across key infrastructure with alarming speed and voracity. And for some reason my mind connected the two stories, though they themselves mentioned no explicit connection.

In the first story the following had been underlined: 

The infamous hacker known as Zer0x, real name William Killbright, was released from prison today after serving three years for crimes related to his release of highly sensitive technical materials which exposed details of the NSA’s surveillance programs. Those programs, ruled illegal in 2020 after seven years of court scrutiny, were rumored to have continued, and Zer0x released documents and software tools proving that this was the case. Killbright was convicted in 2021 of crimes including espionage and theft of government property, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison, a sentence which was regarded by many legal and cybercrime experts as remarkably lenient, given the seriousness of his crimes. His release, which came after he served only three years of his sentence, raised further questions, and led some observers to speculate that Killbright had agreed to assist the government in its counterintelligence and cybersecurity efforts, in exchange for a reduction in his term of imprisonment. Reports that Winter and others associated with him possessed further highly classified documents which gave him leverage in the negotiations surrounding his early release added a further element of intrigue to the story.

In a second story, someone had highlighted: 

A terrifying new form of malware is sweeping across the networks of a number of multinational corporations, damaging critical business infrastructure and disrupting, and in some cases crippling, their operations. Cybersecurity expert Zach Collins, CEO of InterSec, explaining that this new malware contains a number of disturbing new features, said, ‘It constantly changes form to avoid detection. We have seen this in the past, but this new virus does so in a much more sophisticated way that we do not completely understand yet. Also, it appears to use artificial intelligence to identify new vulnerabilities and new ways to exploit them. Its capabilities are beyond anything we have seen before. It has demonstrated an ability to threaten systems which were previously thought to be highly secure against such attacks, and we are concerned that power and other infrastructure could be vulnerable.

A narrative of the recent events had begun to coalesce, though it remained sketchy. Against the backdrop of weakening democracies and the techno-economic system beginning to break down under its own weight, and in the midst of a pandemic and climate-change-fueled extreme weather waves, something had drastically accelerated the collapse. Cyber attacks had damaged key infrastructure, and these attacks had been interpreted by Russia, China, and other governments as the work of the US – which was perfectly plausible in light of the revival of cold wars in recent years and the rapid virtualization of warfare. The articles in front of me, read through the fluttering shadows thrown by candlelight, hinted at the possibility that these attacks were the work of one person, or a small group of people. What had started as virtual attacks, perhaps designed to give the appearance of state-backed cyberwarfare, had rapidly morphed into real attacks, as other powers responded not only with their own cybermeasures, but with physical ones as well. Russia was known to have a new class of hypersonic cruise missiles that could fly under ABM defenses, and of course they still had their nuclear submarines. China had stealth warships and effective anti-satellite capability. The list went on and on and on. We suspected that there had been nuclear attacks, though we weren’t entirely sure where (was fallout headed for us, or poisoning us at this very moment?). Why wouldn’t these countries, if they thought that the US or someone else was launching a first strike aimed at disabling their fighting capabilities, respond with everything at their disposal? Trust had broken down so far in recent years that what was unthinkable not too long ago had become a perfectly logical sequence of events. The breaking of one seal encouraged the breaking of the others. Why hold back, once the brink has been irrevocably crossed?