When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
I discovered “When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth” while looking at the ePub digital document format a couple of years ago. I was commuting into and out of London each day, and found myself dipping my toe into the ebook waters. It remains one of the best short stories I have ever read.
The story is one of a collection by Cory Doctorow called “Overclocked”, and imagines a scenario where a global apocalypse has occurred, wiping out most of the people. Chief among the survivors are the system administrators of large computer networks – holed up in the atmospherically controlled server rooms of large corporations around the world.
The story imagines the global communication – the sharing of news from country to country via IRC, email, and instant messaging, and the chaotic plans put in place by those few people who considered they might be the last left alive in the world.
Cory Doctorow has the following to say on his own website;
I started writing When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth on July 6th, 2005, while teaching Clarion. The next day, the London Underground and busses were bombed, including the bus I rode to work every morning (I was in Michigan, teaching Clarion, thankfully). These kinds of coincidences can be spooky when you're a writer. I ended up putting the story away for some months.
When I returned to it, I was fired anew with the story of Felix and Van and their vainglorious struggle to keep the servers online as the world went offline. Once created, apocalyptic anxiety can't be destroyed “ the 1980s fear of nuclear annihilation I grew up with surfaces anew with each theoretical disaster: Y2K, climate change, und so weiter. There's something primal about a story of the Earth's impending doom.
I was a sysadmin at an earlier stage in my career and I have infinite respect for the field: sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, and they keep your life running.
It's a wonderful, wonderful story if you have any past experience of the internet, network infrastructure, IRC, usenet, or the other early protocols that still underpin the infrastructure we rely on. You can download the ebook for free from Feedbooks at the following address;