Steffi Roderick wasn’t sure when exactly she started becoming alarmed about the reports coming in from Earth — or the lack of reports from some areas. Not just the news reports, or the various confidential reports from various government agencies, but the reports that were logged on the various network devices in the process of managing the flow of information on the Internet.
Dropped packets were such a common phenomenon that it was hardly worth the bother to log them. Especially on radio links, there were so many forms of interference that you just built a certain amount of capacity into your systems to resend dropped packets.
Of more concern were the logs of e-mail bounces, 404 errors on websites and the like. You always had a certain amount, although a lot less than when she’d been working in one of Purdue’s computer rooms. Back in those days, almost every e-mail provider and webhosting service had hard limits on the resources you could use. She still remembered what a big thing it had been when several of the big commercial e-mail providers had upped their mailbox limits from 10 megabytes to 100. Suddenly she wasn’t constantly dealing with kids all upset because important e-mails kept bouncing.
And now she was getting more failure messages in a day than she typically got in a month. Some of it was mailboxes or URLs not responding, but an astonishing amount of those messages were one or another version on “too many hops.” Which meant that the routers were having a lot more trouble making connections, to the point they hit limits that were intended to prevent infinite loops.
Yes, a lot of them were in countries where Internet connectivity had always been thin on the ground. But it wasn’t just the remote village where Internet connectivity meant the bus that came through every day, which had a WiFi hotspot and some basic store-and-forward capacity, or maybe even actual broadband equipment to provide a brief moment of live Internet. No, some of these problems were cropping up in areas where industrial civilization was old. Parts of Europe, for instance.
So she’d contacted Toni Hargreaves. They’d talked about the possibilities, and worked out a way to do an assessment of connectivity issues in the global Internet.
The data, both visual and numerical, that Toni had just sent over was not reassuring. Yes, the Internet was continuing to route around damage — it was originally designed to degrade gracefully and maintain as much connectivity as possible in the case of a nuclear war between the US and the old Soviet Union — but there was an awful lot of damage out there. Just what was going on that it had become that severe?
Was the toll of the diablovirus bad enough that there weren’t enough technical people to maintain the Internet backbone in some areas? Or were other things going on that she wasn’t hearing about, that were being brushed under the rug, even forcibly censored. She’d heard rumors of fighting over food, over medicines, over gasoline, but so far she’d never gotten any definite reports — and no, she didn’t consider fragmentary video from Third World countries to be definite reports.
Which meant she now needed to give some really hard consideration to finding out just what the situation was on the ground. Who could she even contact, who would be able to give her straight answers if the government were putting a cone of silence on things?