by Mark Joseph
* * *
With one week to go, the Midnight Club had assembled a software package of 112 applications on Judd’s mainframe that effectively duplicated Con Edison’s system for supplying power to Manhattan. To ensure communications they’d built a state-of-the-art telephone switching station and accessed an island-wide network of wire and microwave links, every inch inspected and brought up to snuff by Carolyn. To run the subway, they’d constructed a complete train control center for seven subway lines that traversed the island and parts of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. They had confidence in all their work except the sewage system. The system was simply too old, too complex, and had too many embedded chips in places Ronnie couldn’t get into.
They didn’t sleep much the last week. As the big day approached, they still didn’t have the crucial passwords from ConEd. Doc called Deep Volt every day, but to no avail. The spy was able to supply Y2K upgrades the company had developed, but no override passwords.
On December 30 no one left the third floor of the building on Nassau Street, an old red brick structure with black iron railings and fire escapes, a piece of old New York that lay just outside the palisade wall that had given Wall Street its name. The wall had been build by the Dutch to keep the British out of New Amsterdam, but this time nothing could defend against the hostile aliens except a tiny band of outlaws. The countdown began. The war between the millennium bug and its Y2K antidotes was about to start in earnest.
PART TWO
December 31, 1999
4
The last day of the 20th Century dawned cold and clear in New York, a metropolis whose most horrific brush with calamity had been the cholera epidemic of 1832. History had been kind to the city. While the 20th Century had visited war and revolution on many great cities, nary a bomb had fallen on the Big Apple. The century was to end with New York pristine and unscathed, a virgin in the ways of cataclysm. If a city can be anthropomorphised into a sentient being, New York believed itself invulnerable to attack.
There were, of course, authorities charged with imagining an attack and preparing contingency plans for civil defense. During the Cold War, the dominating scenario was a nuclear strike, and the city had a comprehensive plan printed in voluminous quantities to be dragged out and distributed should a volley of Russian missiles be detected en route. In 1999, the location of the printed nuclear plan was stored on a computer that was not Y2K compliant. Likewise, plans were intact for all sorts of civil disturbances from labor strikes to ethnic conflict, and these plans made some sense because of frequent use. Over the years city planners had had ample opportunity to refine procedures for controlling riots and demonstrations. In a more sinister vein, the city was quite accomplished at preparing plans for dealing with terrorists, and for this received assistance from numerous federal agencies. On paper, chemical and biological terrorism posed the greatest perceived threat and thus received the most attention.
As the century drew to a close, the city was among the first municipalities to recognize the most imminent threat, the millennium bug, and in 1996 Mayor Giuliani established an office to deal with the problem. A preliminary assessment of municipal computers revealed 687 critical systems infected with Y2K glitches. Two years and $300 million dollars later, 453 systems still had problems. By the summer of 1999 the city began to realize that all the money in the treasury wasn’t sufficient to correct the glitch. Many systems were junked and replaced, but expensive, complex new systems took a long time to install and brought new problems. Old data still had to be converted to Y2K compliance, a process full of pitfalls. New York was the most diligent city in the world in attacking the problem, but “fixing” the myriad systems wasn’t good enough. It was impossible to find every line of infected code, and as always with software debugging, every four defects found and corrected by programmers resulted in a new flaw injected into the code. Among millions of lines of binary machine code, one incidence of corrupted code could kill an entire system, and in tests that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Environmental Protection smugly declared it had no problems, but a preliminary test in 1999 shut down the water system in thirty seconds when embedded chips in the servo controllers froze the valves in the main Croton reservoir. The pumps were replaced and the system failed again. Twelve of the city’s fourteen sewage treatment plants failed their tests. Supposedly compliant systems in accounting departments failed constantly.
No one knew what was going to happen at midnight, and if all the city’s systems miraculously survived, they’d still be at the mercy of Con Edison’s ability to maintain power. New York had experienced major blackouts in 1965 and 1977, but this time the giant utility company had time to prepare and write press releases full of reassurance. On New Year’s Eve morning, business people and community groups who had little faith in the city or ConEd’s PR department began making final arrangements to protect their businesses and neighborhoods. Flyers were posted and handed out. Portable radios were tested and deployed and weapons cleaned and loaded.
Reacting to a flood of Y2K news and the August 22 GPS debacle, the city grudgingly had drawn up a plan for total breakdown, fetching bits and pieces from older plans for blackouts and civil unrest. Given a priority considerably below the New Year’s Eve fireworks and traditional celebration in Times Square, the plan was never completed, approved, or implemented, but the public relations department was authorized to say a plan existed. There were rumors that the mayor had built a secret bunker in the World Trade Center to serve as a command post if the city became a battleground. Its exact nature was a secret. The city fathers didn’t want to induce panic.
* * *
They might get wholesale panic anyway, thought Captain Ed Garcia as he walked along Broadway toward his daily breakfast date with Donald Copeland and the boys. He wished the planners and commissioners would spend an hour in his precinct so he could point out the lack of stockpiled food, water, and fuel, and ask where the city planned to erect emergency shelters. If the subways went down, the city would be overrun with stranded citizens, and if Con Edison collapsed … what the hell. Nothing was in readiness because no one believed anything was going to happen. Garcia understood politics and didn’t want to brand himself as an alarmist nut by shooting off his mouth. Not that it would do any good. Yesterday he’d uttered the phrase “Y2K” to a divisional commander who’d replied, “Why too what?”
At 6:30 in the morning Garcia walked into Bernie’s Deli at 85th and Broadway, ordered scrambled and toast, and poured himself a cup of coffee. Forty-five, an inch over six feet, heavy and imposing in his uniform with double rows of brass buttons, Garcia dropped his hat and briefcase on a rear table as he did every day. It was a Friday, prelude to a long New Year’s Eve weekend, and the good citizens of Manhattan were making earnest preparations to drink too much and wear funny hats as if this were an ordinary New Year’s Eve. He’d seen twenty-five New Year’s Eves as a cop, but this year, besides the usual boozy amateurs puking in his radio cars, he had to face millennium crazies, space invaders, and religious lunatics predicting the end of the world, all before midnight when the electronic shit was scheduled to hit the millennium fan.
He really loved being a cop, and long ago had learned that preventing a crime was far better than catching and punishing a criminal. In this case, the city, that anonymous bitch, was about to commit a sin of omission, a horrendous crime of neglect that he was unable to prevent.
Garcia’s old friend Bill Packard arrived at the same time as his eggs.
“Happy New Year, comandante,” said Packard, a staff cardiac surgeon at Bellevue hospital.
“Fuck you, too, Bill.”
“You don’t look happy.”
“I just want it over with,” Garcia said. “Walking over here I passed three liquor stores, all busy at six in the morning.”
“Well,” Packard said with a big smile as he sat down, “today’s the day. You ready?”
“Gimme a break. Nobody’s ready.”
“Copeland is.”
“He says he is,” Garcia retorted. “There’s a difference.”
“We’re gonna find out soon enough,” Packard said, looking at his watch. “In seventeen hours and fifteen minutes. Hey, Bernie!” he shouted. “Turn on the TV, will ya?”
“Why?”
“The new year will arrive in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a few minutes.”
“So what?”
“Just turn it on, Bernie.”
“You want some breakfast, Bill?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
The delicatessen owner grudgingly switched on CNN and scowled at a commercial for Budweiser, the official beer of millennium insanity.
“Expecting a big night?” the policeman asked the doctor.
“Are you kidding?” Packard replied. “I’m just glad I don’t work in the emergency room, but I got problems you wouldn’t believe. Do you know how many computers we have at Bellevue? Do you have any idea how many computers run every goddamn device in my ICU? Do you know how many have been checked out? None. N-O-N-E, that’s how many.”
“You’re supposed to work on the people, Bill, not the computers.”
Grimacing, shaking his head with frustration, Packard poured himself a cup of coffee and stared at the TV.
Jonathon Spillman, now the manager of the brand-new Safeway Store at 96th and Broadway, walked in and sat down.
“Don’t say it,” Garcia warned.
“Don’t say what?”
Packard winked and silently mouthed, Happy New Year.
“I’m Jewish, in case you forgot,” Spillman reminded them. “The New Year is in September, and the year is 5760, if you didn’t know. Where’s Copeland?”
“Not here yet,” the doctor replied. “Tonight he’ll find out if all his fancy software works. Will Donnie boy save Chase Manhattan from extinction? As if I give a shit.”
“Copeland won’t, but his guy Doc Downs will,” Spillman said. “Doc knows what he’s doing. I’m on top of this thing, guys. Safeway spent millions on this thing and Doc said we did everything right.”
“The horse’s mouth,” Garcia said. “That’s just great. The bank and the grocery store survive while everything else goes all to hell.”
“Nuclear reactors,” Packard said. “How many worldwide? Four hundred? Five?”
“More,” Spillman said. “Nobody really knows. There’s secret reactors all over the place.”
“You gonna eat?” Bernie hollered at Spillman.
“Gimme a poppy seed bagel with…”
“… with nothin’, I know, I know.”
They sat for a moment in comfortable silence, three guys from the neighborhood who’d all made good and done well. Intelligent men, success stories, and still primitive villagers. Being together made them a little less afraid.
“Hear from your wife?” Spillman asked Packard.
Leery of violence and looting in the event of a blackout, the doctor had dispatched his wife and children to the rural coast of Maine.
“Yeah. She’s at her sister’s place. They spent all day yesterday stacking firewood. Did Shirley leave?”
“No. That’s just not gonna happen.”
“Make her go,” Packard said, and Garcia added, “Put your foot down.”
“C’mon, Ed,” Spillman said. “You know my wife. Shirley thinks the millennium is the greatest thing since Princess Di’s wedding. Besides, you’ve never been married.”
Fanfare from the TV caused them to swivel their heads toward the screen. A smiling CNN anchorman in Atlanta faced the camera and said, “Only a few more minutes, ladies and gentlemen, until the first people on earth experience the millennium. We’re going live now to the Marshall Islands and Joanna Springer. Joanna?”
* * *
Old Blue now lived in the air-conditioned basement of Copeland’s brownstone on West 85th Street. In an instance of whimsical cybernetic overkill, the mainframe ran the house including an elaborate alarm and security system. Old Blue began its duties at 6:30 in the morning, turning on the heat, starting the coffee, collecting e-mail and feeding a Welsh terrier named Micro. The computer called up a program that dispensed exactly one and a half cups of lamb and rice meal into Micro’s bowl, and in perfect Pavlovian fashion the dog wolfed down his breakfast in forty seconds. Meanwhile, the coffeemaker brewed a cup of dark roast espresso, and at precisely 7:00 the computer turned on the TV in the master bedroom.
Copeland liked to jumpstart his day with a little hard news, and on this day of days he was awake long before the TV popped on. CNN was broadcasting live from Majuro, capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands near the International Date Line in the middle of Pacific Ocean, nine thousand miles and seventeen time zones west.
“The millennium has arrived, ladies and gentlemen!” gushed a breathless woman standing next to an airport runway with the lights of a terminal and a small town behind her. Fireworks were igniting above the town, the first pyrotechnics to welcome the new century. “We’re only a few miles from the International Date Line, and I can’t express just how thrilling this is. It’s 2000, ladies and gentlemen, the Twenty-First…”
Static punched out her voice and behind her the lights of the town flickered before the audio snapped back, “… in Micronesia which lies just west of the 180th meridian, the International … Line. We … eem to be have … me trouble wi … an aircraft is appr…”
In the background the lights of the town and terminal blinked out and seconds later the blue landing lights on the runway disappeared. Startled, the reporter turned around, then faced the camera again, her mouth working but producing no audible sound. Above her, the exploding rockets and bright star bursts of the fireworks created an eerie illumination.
“Something … happen…”
Copeland could hear the roar of aircraft engines approaching the runway over the voice of the journalist that continued to break up.
“… tourists who want … the first landing of … entury, but the run … lights … vintage DC3.”
And then he heard a crash and saw a wall of flame before the screen went black. The television director quickly cut to the studio in Atlanta and the talking head of the anchorman.
“We seem to have lost contact with Joanna Springer, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know exactly what happened. Just a moment. Do we have audio? Yes, I believe we have audio. Go ahead Joanna.”
Her disembodied voice echoed around the world, heard by millions in every nation. “Oh my God, a plane has crashed. The runway lights went out and all the lights went out except around our satellite truck because we’re running on a gener…”
Silence, black screen, and then the studio again.
“This is a somber moment, ladies and gentlemen. We’re trying to bring you live coverage from the Marshall Islands, as we expect to bring you live coverage of the arrival of the millennium throughout the next 24 hours, but we seem to have started off with a tragedy. Excuse me, can we restore audio, at least? No? Now they’re telling me the satellite connection has failed. I don’t know quite what to say, ladies and gentlemen, but it appears that what we feared the most and hoped would never happen has occurred. The predictions of computer failure at this moment seem to have come true, at least on the Marshall Islands. We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.”
One of the curious things about the moment the world started to fall apart was that the entire planet heard the news instantaneously. During that first hour CNN reported four more air disasters near the International Date Line, all aircraft charted by tourists who thought they were purchasing an exotic experience by being among the first to welcome the 21st Century. Power failures disrupted dozens of Pacific islands. The technical explanations were complex and varied from island to island—old computers in some power plants decided it was 1900 and all maintenance was seriously overdue; on some island-embedded chips in automated transmission and distribution systems failed—but the results were the same. The Pacific Ocean went
dark. The only exceptions were islands, like the two Midways, with virtually no computers in their electrical systems, or those with brand-new systems, like Guam, where the power company had installed year 2000 compliant software.
Copeland shouted at the TV, “I told you so, you fools! Everybody has been telling you for years, but no! Jesus fucking Christ.”
Then he smiled. Neither shocked nor surprised, he knew this was merely the opening salvo of what promised to be a most interesting day. His vision on the bridge nine years ago was coming true, but he didn’t need vindication. When you’re right, you’re right. What he did need was nonstop catastrophe to divert attention from the real Y2K event that would take place in seventeen hours, at midnight Eastern standard time.
As far as Copeland figured, the mighty Chase Manhattan Bank was going to suffer temporary cybernetic oblivion at midnight. He believed that when the last bits of Copeland 2000 software kicked into the bank’s electronic fund transfer system at the stroke of twelve, a hidden program buried by Doc in a larger diagnostic package would instantly transfer $72 million to accounts Copeland had established in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Panama. Seconds later, the program would temporarily destroy the bank’s ability to perform electronic fund transfers, scramble the records of thousands of accounts and then self-destruct. No known monies would be missing; the bank would recover within a day or two and go on to be profitable well into the next century. To the bank, the mess would look like a millennium bug flaw that had been overlooked. Sorry, we made a mistake.
