Short Story: Tower Defender
Welcome back to Futurism! This isn't the Tower story I originally talked about, but here's a story about a network engineer who, with some help, works to correct a strange failure.
- * *
His comm buzzed. He looked at it, and couldn't figure it out for a second, until he noticed the crossed-out tower symbol. "Damn it," he thought. "Where is it this time?"
He went to his bike and pulled his reader from the side bag. He opened the map, turned on his network tower layer, found a nearby tower, and tapped "Go." His comm vibrated in response, having received the instruction.
It guided him as he zipped down the path with urgency. He saw a couple people looking at their comms in awe, and upon seeing a man in hi-vis fly past in a hurry, they considered panicking. But they saw he was going straight for the tower, and they realized what he was doing.
He saw someone leaving the tower in just as much of a hurry, but he knew he couldn't catch up, so he didn't pursue.
Instead, he approached the tower's service room, finding the door had been broken. The inside of the service room was a mess. Yellowing dead-tree paper was littered everywhere. Some of the servers in the cabs were missing. What stood out the most to him, however, was the darkness and eerie silence. The power was out.
First order of business: returning electricity to the tower. Around the side of the building, he noticed that the connection between the panels, battery, and tower was dug up and severed. How did anyone do that without being caught?
He went back inside and searched for heavy-duty power cables. Thankfully, the crews before were prepared, and there was more than enough inside. He went to flip the switch on the battery but noticed it was already off. So he left it as-is and dragged the cables outside.
By this point, a small crowd had begun gathering. Some of them were asking the usual questions, like "when will the network be back on?" He attempted to keep calm while answering the best he could.
Once he lugged the temporary cables to where they'll need to run, he realized he was totally unequipped for electrician work. He only had to sit stumped for mere seconds before an electrician stepped up. He brought his van up, and started withdrawing things from it. Cooperating, they managed to get the cables connected again -- between the battery and the tower, and between the battery and the panels on the tower. The connection between the on-site battery and the grid was still intact.
He went back inside the service room and flipped on the power. Some of the servers powered back on, as well as an ancient device this tower used for diagnostics. Once the device fully booted up, it displayed graphs about the connection status. As it turned out, the tower wasn't receiving any data over the fiber lines.
He wasn't sure how to use this device. Desktop computers were before his time. This one, and the software on it, was so old that it required an outdated operating system called Windows. This thing felt a bit slow to him. He got curious about the processor. Apparently it used an older architecture, pre-RISC-V, and its clock speed was only 4 GHz. Go figure it felt so slow.
He cautiously reached for the next unfamiliar device attached to the computer. He remembered seeing something like this at his grandfather's house once; that poor old man refused to switch to gaze controls. This must have been a "mouse," not to be mistaken with the rodent. Upon touching it, he noticed a small white arrow on the screen move. So he moved the mouse, and the arrow moved in that direction. Neat. Next, he moved it to the bottom of the screen, where there was a row of icons, a few of them marked. Damn, this thing really was from the App Era, he thought.
Putting the white arrow on top of these icons revealed one of them represented the open interface, something to do with "Internet Statistics." Another one was apparently also open, but not being displayed, titled "Connection Map." Interesting. He pressed one of the buttons on the mouse, and it opened a menu. That's not what he wanted to do, so he pressed "Escape" and tried the other button. The Connection Map app appeared on the screen, and he noticed some familiar roads, some unfamiliar roads, and cones indicating the directions from which devices are trying to connect to the tower.
They're connecting, but they're not able to reach the network.
But aren't they supposed to connect to the micro-nodes in the village? Why are those offline?
He stepped outside, and asked for a volunteer to stand guard for a while, and put out a verbal call for a new door, and for a locksmith to get a new lock for it. The group was murmuring about smoke somewhere, but he heard sirens so he considered it none of his concern. He then went to his bike, and checked the map on his reader again. This time he paged through network line layers until he finds a line between the tower and the nodes in the village. Back on his bike again, he attentively and slowly followed the connection.
He spotted something -- a hole in the line! It's been severed here too. Fiber optic cables were still fragile things, but he had the tools to repair them. First, he cleanly and carefully cut out the damaged area. He brought out a large heat-shrink wrap and pushed it over one end. He then brought some additional cable to fill the gap, and trimmed it to just over the needed length. He stripped back the ends, cleaned the exposed strands, and carefully spliced them together. Then he pulled the heat wrap over them, took a battery-powered hair dryer out, and began shrinking the comically large heat shrink wrap over the ends to cover and protect the whole thing.
While he was doing that, someone came up to him, and after confirming his identity, they told him, "Apparently the network lines have been cut all across the village. Like someone has been working to disconnect us."
"I wonder what was on fire earlier," he responded off-handedly.
"A whole neighborhood burned down," they replied. "That area had a lot of Black and Brown people."
He paused, and returned to cleaning up. Climbing out of the hole, he asked, "Do you think it was a supremacist attack?"
"That's as good a guess as mine."
"Do you know where any of the other network people are, so we can get up to speed?"
- * *
He heard a commotion as a few people in hard-hats spoke with their frustrated neighbors. Some of them looked more distressed than others. He dismounted and came to a stop, haphazardly leaning his bike against a community bulletin-board. An associate of his recognized him and started speaking to him. "The whole town's out," he started.
"Yeah, I kinda figured."
"Deliberate, too, we found—"
"Lines cut, yeah I know, I saw that too. A tower was ransacked, and the all the power and fiber lines were cut."
"We found some spray-paint over one of the solar panels on another one."
"Any idea who might have done that?" The crowd responded with panicked chatter.
His associate looked at them, concerned, and then looked back at him. "We're not sure yet. It's not safe to make any assumptions."
"It's not safe to deny the obvious danger," one of the people in the crowd called out. "It's a white supremacist attack."
"That's my best guess," he responded. Turning back to his associate, he then asked, "Are we back online yet?"
"No, the power to the micro-nodes has been cut, too. It's like—"
Boom! A large blast occurred at the tower he had first worked on this afternoon. Something else was on fire somewhere by then, but he was back on his bike and racing like hell to get back to that tower.
Until he saw it start to lean. "TIIIIMMBEEERRRRRR," he shouted as loud as he could before turning 180 and racing like hell away from it.
By the time he had reached town square, the tower had clattered to the ground.
The crowd had disappeared; some had gone into nearby buildings for shelter, which was indicated by the guards pacing outside those buildings. He expected everyone else who was there was out to secure the other towers.
He pulled out his reader again and looked on his map for the armory. It was getting dark now so it was difficult to see. He remembered his reader's backlight, and then panned around, and eventually found it. He set off towards it at once.
It, too, had been ransacked. There was a body on the floor; maybe not dead, but definitely not awake. He tried to rouse it, which didn't seem to work. At least the guy had a pulse. This was the armory keeper. Someone had overpowered him without using the guns he was guarding.
He searched the armory for any weapons at all, and found some kind of oar, like for a canoe, that had been splintered to hell and back. This had better be enough, he said, grabbing it and taking it on his bike to a nearby tower.
This tower was pretty well guarded, so he was sent to a different one, and a different one. There was only one left and it needed some help. So he dismounted from his noble green steed and, at the same time, slapped a gun-wielder charging the tower with his mace-oar.
"Welcome to the party, Tower Defender," one of the other engineers joked with him.
"Yeah, let's just get this thing back online—"
"Watch out!" He turned around and noticed a gun aimed at his head. He ducked down just before it fired, and swung the spiky end of the oar into his leg, then his arm. He then swung again and hit his wrist with the end of the pole, causing him to finally drop his gun, which he then kicked out of his reach.
Another thug came up with a metal baseball bat, which he lowered momentarily while looking at him, saying, "Hey, that's mine!"
"You want it? Here you go," he said, swinging it into the bully's chest, knocking him over.
One more aggressor approached from the side, with a knife. He almost got the jump on him, but the oar cut his hands and knocked the knife out of it. Disarmed, the knife owner fled.
They sat and looked around for a minute before going, "I think that's the last of 'em." He was then tasked with reinstating the tower.
The power had already been restored to this one, and so had the data lines. He looked around inside the ransacked service room and on the tower from below to figure out what was wrong. Eventually, finding nothing wrong on the surface, he decided to climb it.
As he ascended, he noticed some of the rungs were missing, torn out, leaving only pieces of broken metal. The tower was quite tall, so it took him a couple minutes to finally reach the top, at which point he was quite exhausted. He sat at the edge of the platform, where the ladder-hole is, and rested for a moment.
He got up and checked the antennas. Every one cut. He would have to go back down and back up again, which was a long way and quite tiring. He decided, before he did that, he would take a look around from up there.
There was smoke rising from the village, but that area was already burnt. This was what was left of that fire. He saw a dark area where the fire was earlier. He looked out at the other three towers around the village, which had blinking red fog lights on them. Then, he took a deep breath and carefully climbed back down.
He told the engineers on the ground what he had found, went back to his bike to get what he needed into a backpack, then he went back up.
At the top again, he took off each antenna, removed the back cover, removed the cable, and simply plugged a new cable in. That cable connected through the floor, which could be lifted, to a screwed-in panel in the middle, where it reached a connector. Luckily, whoever did this didn't want to spend a lot of time up here, so they just cut the cables instead.
Once he plugged the first antenna back in, he immediately received countless messages. So there was data flowing to this tower. He repeated his process a few times until every antenna was reconnected (except for one, which had further damage and would need to be looked at another time).
He hustled to the ladder-hole and then carefully descended the ladder. He missed a step or two in the dark, and nearly fell. Once he reached the ground, he bent over and kissed it, to the amusement of the engineers around him.
- * *
"So, did we ever figure out for certain who those guys were? Sure seemed to be a lot of them," he asked.
His friend answered, "We're pretty sure they were white supremacists. As far as we know, they were all white, and attacked primarily not-white people."
"So why would they attack the network as bad as they did?"
"Not sure. We were quite communicative even without our comms, so it didn't affect us too much."
"Are we sure the network being down didn't cause a delay in the fire brigade response?"
"They were already in the area when the first one started. It was all just so fast and so widespread."
He couldn't shake the knot in his stomach. "I feel like I could have done something."
"You did. We're already warning neighboring villages, and yeah they got the warning."
"Where did they all go? Did we catch them?"
"Quite a few angry people are out there looking for them. We're going to bring them to justice."
"How are the victims doing?"
"Recovering. Losing your home, your belongings, has never been easy. At least now they have hundreds of neighbors with welcoming arms."
"Was anyone hurt?"
His friend didn't want to answer that question.
"I'm so sorry."
- * *
His comm buzzed. He wasn't going to check it just yet. He wanted to enjoy the view from this new tower for a moment, before jumping into some crisis. Ooh, maybe it'll be like that one time a fish ate the fiber line, or the time a sunstorm killed reception for a few days...
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