Free The End by Justin Chiang Page B

close enough for her to hear it. 
    She ran back to the edge of the roof and nearly tipped herself over the side looking for the source of the sound, “Shit!” her heart jumped at the sound of her own voice.  There was no sign of the car.  She ran to the other side of the roof and looked down, across, back, left, right, even up.  There was nothing and the sound was farther away now, “WAIT!” she shouted.  Then she saw it, not a car but a black figure flying through the sky.  She’d swear later that it looked at her as it shot past towards the sound.  She heard the screech of tires and what might have been a muffled yell.  Then nothing, “wait… please.” 
     
    The revelation that there are others springs Anna into action and within ten minutes she has a back pack on stuffed with candy, protein bars, and a few mini bottles of hotel shampoo.  She’s not surprised at all when she discovers the source of the sound is North West of her.  She just thinks, of course it is. It’s a short walk before she comes upon the source.  It was a car and it’s still there.  A black Ford Escort.  The driver’s side door is open but there’s nobody inside, no sign of anybody, no trail, nothing—of course there’s nothing.  She waits by the car for half an hour then waits inside the car for even longer… and then eventually she pulls away from the city and heads North West—alone.
     
    . . .
     
    In a small house in Mountain View California, Sebastian Cochran was tapping away at his computer.  For the past several days he’d been in the basement of his grandmas pale blue house that sits less than five miles from the epicenter of Google Headquarters searching for answers… well streaming movies while his compiler ran and then downloading fun files while his program did the searching.  Even after inheriting the house Cochran pretty much stuck to the basement leaving most of his grandmother’s belongings in place.
    When the darkness came, Cochran (as he refers to himself), didn’t even notice.  He was still asleep during the few seconds of darkness.  Nothing crashed into his house, blew up outside, or otherwise disturbed his slumber.  As far as he knew, it was just another day.  In fact the first thing that caught his attention wasn’t the lack of populace on the planet Earth but the sudden drastic increase in bandwidth.  He already had one of the best connections there was but this… this was something special.  We’re talking zero lag time; it was as if the entire internet was his and his alone.  In addition to that, the usual chatter was completely gone.  There were no updates, no blogs, no podcasts, no tweets, no posts, no likes, no pokes, no hit traffic… across any channel, stream, or thread.  On one hand it was a nerdgasm dream come true… on the other hand it was extremely disturbing.
    I t wasn’t until several hours later that he actually stepped outside at all and that was just to ensure that it wasn’t all a fluke. Then the research began.  That was his specialty after all.  People paid him big money to figure shit out.  He prided himself on it.  This was just another job, another puzzle… only this time he felt like more was at stake than his reputation.  It always boiled down to the same formula, if you could find the who you could find the what, why, where and how.  If you only had the what you could usually find out the who and the rest from there.  The problem with this puzzle was there weren’t any “who’s” left to find… so far.
    He decided to build a sniffer program and let it loose on the internet.  Such things already existed but this was specifically looking for anything at all anywhere in the world that occurred on-line after 1pm eastern standard time excluding any automated processes or processes that were initiated before that time that may still be running on their own.  It excluded any erroneous traffic caused by similar programs like web crawlers (and