The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling Page A

inhabitants of the Vault all slept in similar steel bunks. They had the same military card tables and folding steel chairs. You never knew, day to day, who your new neighbors would be. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Postal Service even . . . They’d show up with plastic-coated briefing books and bewildered expressions, to spend two weeks hiding underground. The Vault had been built in 1962, in a nation still queasy from the Cuban Missile Crisis. It stayed secret because it had been built quietly, in a big hurry, by a very small group of top-notch fallout-shelter contractors. The Vault was located in the Alleghenies, just over the border of West Virginia. It had a rather delightful and well-equipped hotel sitting on top of it, to camouflage it from the Russkies and the American press. The Vault had successfully stayed unknown to the world for forty solid years. The West Virginians who ran the hotel were a clannish lot. They had never breathed a word about the giant warren lurking beneath them.
    The Vault had huge steel blast doors and its own coal-fired power plant. The coal plant doubled as the Vault’s crematorium, in case anyone died of A-bomb radiation injuries. All the telephones were red plastic with rotary dials, straight off the set of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The biggest open space in the Vault was a small gym, so the last men on earth wouldn’t go completely bats with jail fever. Van spent a lot of time in the Vault’s gym. He’d become a workout addict in the grim celibacy of Dottie’s absence. His neglected hacker’s body yelled out for attention: decent food, sex, sleep, a long vacation. None of those things were remotely available to Van. Ferocious exercise was pretty much it. That attitude fit the military tone inside the Vault, though. These guys brought heavy private burdens to their fifty-pound barbells and Nautilus racks. Every Vault rat had to be emotionally troubled. The whole point of being in the Vault was that everything you knew might be blasted to ashes overnight. There was even one big, doomed soul in the Vault’s gym who lifted his weights with a security briefcase permanently tethered to his wrist. This top-secret courier never said a word to anyone, but he was a hard guy to miss. Tall, dark, silent, chiseled-looking, very buff.
    Van took an interest in this mysterious stranger. Day after day passed, but no one ever set the courier free of his burden. The chained briefcase was waterproof and apparently blastproof. The guy even showered with it. Van, of course, never asked him about the briefcase. There was something way too personal about that subject.
    The Vault was a barracks, and had stark, simple, military routines. The cafeteria line fed everyone three times a day, on big community tables. All the federal foodstuffs had tough-guy military nicknames, like
    “elephant scabs” for the veal parmigiana and “bug juice” for the orangeade. When the lights went out at night, nobody stayed up to party. The Vault went as black as a tomb.
    Van and his CCIAB people became extremely popular in the Vault. Within two days, Van had installed securely encrypted broadband Wi-Fi. Thanks to Van and his fellow cyberwarriors, even the most bored, lonely Vaultie, stuck in a sealed cell with a cheap khaki blanket and a laptop, could securely surf news portals. Van expected someone in authority to complain about all this free Internet access from within a secure facility, but no one ever complained. They just accepted Internet access as a modern force of nature.
    Van lived much better inside the Vault than he did in his Washington apartment. The Vault was cramped, stony, and smelly, but at least he was fed and watered regularly. Van felt safe from the outside world. Most other federal employees in the Vault sheepishly feared an apocalypse that would destroy everything they knew. Van, however, was getting one. Van’s world was literally being destroyed, in