Free Red Lightning by John Varley Page A

and more dire. I heard a reputable newscaster speak of 20 million dead. Then I didn't hear from him again.
    First, of course, there was the matter of digging in rubble for people who were trapped, and of flying in food and water. That had been easier in highly localized disasters, like Islamabad and New Delhi. This one was spread out over such a vast area that much of it was still chaos, and likely to remain that way for quite a while.
    We all watched tape of the wreckage from the Everglades to Cape Cod taken from aircraft, until they stopped showing it. "Out of respect for the dead," was what the United States President said, but there were other opinions. Very little was coming from the ground. People would make their way out of the zone of destruction and post their personal tapes and someone would pick it up and it would be all over the cybernet for a while, then mysteriously vanish. Newscasters were reporting that big parts of the net were being shut down, those that weren't already crippled by the wave itself.
    The net is mysterious in many ways to most of us. We experience it quite simply: Step One: we put on our stereos. There is no step two. Putting on your socks is quantum physics compared to entering cyberspace.
    But that's because it's evolved over the years. Mom and Dad tell me of when they were very young, and you used equipment so large it had to sit on a desk. You had to plug it in, or if it was battery-powered, you used a battery the size of a book, and had to change it or charge it every couple of hours. Before their time you had to run an actual wire to your computer. The data transfer rate was unbelievably slow. You couldn't send moving pictures. Even before that, you couldn't send pictures at all. People transferred data at the rate of two hundred bytes per second. I'd just as soon chisel my messages onto stone tablets and put them on the back of a mule.
    Because it's so easy and invisible, we don't think much about how it works. But it's there, undercover, often underground, in the cellars of big buildings in cities, in broadcast towers in the country, and, of course, the satellites overhead.
    Only the satellites weren't affected by the tsunami. Many central routing stations had been flooded, many towers knocked over. The rest of the system, trying to take up the slack in a period when traffic was almost ten times normal because of the disaster with everyone trying to access the same sources at once... well, it never completely crashed, but it was now chugging along like a steam engine patched with bubble gum and Band-Aids. There was no hope it would be back to anything like normal soon.
    More basic than that, the electrical grid was down for much of the East Coast of America. Even in places where the wave didn't reach, the outages and disruptions had crashed the system. Many places within a hundred miles of the coast didn't have electricity. As for the coast itself...
    The water had roared up river valleys and surged over floodplains, a term that now had a new definition, as places that hadn't seen seawater in a million years or more were suddenly inundated with twenty feet of it. We had seen endless footage of it, and like the old footage of the wave of '04, the first thing that often struck you was... where's the water? What you saw was a tumbling wave of wreckage, cars and trucks and furniture and walls, surging, swirling, tumbling, breaking apart, crashing together, getting chopped finer and finer. We saw footage of the coastal cities with storm wrack floating at third-floor level, or fourth-floor, Or sixth floor.
    The Blast-Off annex was ten stories high. We looked and looked, no longer able to surf cameras on our own but dependent on what coverage there was from helicopter cameras, but never seemed to be able to spot it. We did see a lot of tall buildings in Florida that had fallen over, including a thirty-story condominium tower in Fort Lauderdale, and a few that were leaning, the backwash of the