In the wake of the failed Portalien invasion of the 1980s, the world’s governments had seen the wisdom of protecting their telephone lines and other communications infrastructures against being compromised by outside forces, with countermeasures up to and including “kill switches” that would disable or destroy the networks rather than let them be used for evil purposes.
Of course, there is a difference between seeing the wisdom of a thing and actually doing it, especially if one happens to be a government. It would have been a relatively simple thing for a modern nation to include these kinds of safeguards if they were built in from the beginning, but most countries’ telecommunications networks were a hodgepodge of systems built at different times, by different agencies and companies, and upgrading all of them was an expensive and tricky proposition. The rise of fiber optics and other technological advances gave nations greater incentives to overhaul their systems, but the efforts were still piecemeal and uneven.
The arm of the US government known to the world as Department 4B, decided in the spirit of cooperation to take an existing program of theirs that was already surreptitiously modifying other countries’ telecomm lines for unrelated purposes and use it to a global solution.
Their resulting emergency kill switch for the world’s phone systems was not surgical or precise. The global voice communications infrastructure was not monolithic, nor did it stand completely separate and insulated from fiber bundles and satellites that handled data transfer. As phones across the world went silent, television sets in some areas displayed static or otherwise reflected a lack of a cable signal. Some regions lost internet access, and the net slowed to a crawl for everybody else as the number of viable routes between any two points decreased.
It was a big goddamn mess, in other words… but not even 4B itself knew the extent of the damage it would cause. It wasn’t as though they’d been able to test the system.
4B had their own separate, secure communication lines that remained in operation unless their own individual override was activated, but because a worldwide communication breakdown could naturally lead to some confusion, the global silencer was set to expire if not renewed every fifteen minutes.
Knowing that they could spot the attempted download if it started back up again when the lines were released, the 4B agents in charge elected to let the program run its course and then reactivate it if needed.
In the quarter of an hour that global telecommunications were effectively hamstringed, innumerable business dealings, personal calls, and diplomatic negotiations were interrupted. Rumors flew… so far as they were able to… of everything from a distant nuclear strike to a terrorist attack to the return of the dreaded Portaliens.
Countries around the world were able to ascertain the totality of their communication breakdowns much more quickly than they could verify the status of their neighbors, much less their distant enemies. Using radios and other off-network forms of communication, military bases were put into a state of high alert.
Stahlstadt, a micronation built around a massive oil platform in the North Sea, had no neighbors and many enemies. When it found itself completely cut off from the rest of the world following a suspicious failure to deliver on the part of one of its most reliable partners, its supreme ruler was not inclined to take this as a benign coincidence.
Though Stahlstadt’s military force was necessarily small, it was backed by technology devised by its ruler’s Darkwell-enhanced brain and funded by the tiny state’s great wealth. Baron Von Stahl was not the only super-inventor in the world, but unlike the late Vulcan, his work was unhampered by morals, and unlike his rival the Technologist he did not depend on securing outside funding for it.
Just as 4B maintained listening posts to monitor the global and local activities of Portalien machines, they also kept a close eye on the North Sea and the volatile technocrat who controlled so much of its energy reserves. They were aware that his forces were mobilizing, his fantastic energy weapons were being powered up, his exotic defenses being brought online. They knew that communications would be re-established, even if only briefly, before he did anything terribly rash, but they knew what kind of a man Von Stahl was… and that was the kind of man who said things like “What is the meaning of this?” and “Who is responsible for this outrage?”
They couldn’t very well tell him that they were responsible. They couldn’t very well admit to having the capability, no matter the reason for using it. The Baron would not react kindly to the knowledge that the government of a nation with which he had such a heated relationship possessed the ability to isolate his artificial island so completely. Even if a military conflict was averted, Von Stahl would be certain to reveal the existence of the kill switch to the world, and that would be problematic.
Had it been anybody else but another villain, 4B could simply have pinned the blame on Webmistress, but they knew perfectly well that Von Stahl was one of her biggest customers. He would trust her much further than he would trust any representatives of the United States, much less 4B. Blaming the Portaliens would lead to a bigger world-wide panic than the brief phone blackout itself had. As the minutes ticked down, 4B’s leadership decided it would be best to not offer an explanation to begin with… if they didn’t pin the blame on anybody else, they couldn’t be caught in a lie… and simply offer up the fact that they, along with every other power that the Baron might think to blame, had been hit, too.
It was not an ideal solution, but it was the best strategy available for putting out the worst of the fires that the unprecedented exercise of global sabotage had started.
Nobody dared to voice this sentiment, but everybody involved in the ass-covering operation was thinking a variation of the same thing: if an irate megalomaniac with superweapons of mass destruction was the worst thing they had to face when the phones turned back on, they’d made the right call in shutting them down.
Von Stahl on his worst day was not as big a threat to the world as the Portaliens had been on theirs.
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