by Mark Joseph
“If they do that, we’re screwed,” Copeland said.
“You got that right, boss, unlesss…” Doc grinned, dragging out the ess and blowing smoke.
“Unless what?”
“Unless I trigger our little secret from here.”
“Could you do such a thing?”
“I could, but it would seriously increase the risk factor.”
“Would you do such a thing, Dr. Downs?”
“Just say the word, boss. Watch.”
Doc turned on a custom-built computer terminal running Windows NT, keyed a few strokes, and the screen filled with a large red circle against a blue background and a caption, “The Big Red Button.”
“All you have to do is touch the screen, Donnie boy, and Chase’s millions are zipping their way to Panama.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Try it, but be sure you want to do it.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the risk factor?”
“What about it?” Doc said. “There are five cutouts between this machine and a modem at the bank’s Tech Center. Each is supposed to self-destruct, but you never can be absolutely sure with delicate machinery and tricky little computer programs. If you don’t want to hit the button, wait for midnight and it’s all automatic.”
Copeland ground his teeth and stared at the Big Red Button glowing like a virtual mandala. He wanted to lunge for the screen, but instead he said, “You’re a diabolical bastard, Doc. You know that? Let’s wait and hear from the Fed.”
“You’re the boss, Donald,” Doc said with a grin. “You can make the decision whenever you like. Use the password ‘Red,’ go into DOCCM.EXE, enter ‘SCREEN’ and you’ll have the button on your monitor.”
Doc glanced again at the TV. The protesters at La Guardia continued to chant, cops were arriving at the airport, and hysterical people were mobbing taxis and busses.
“Donald,” Doc said, “don’t you think it’s odd that the world is unraveling like a cheap sweater and all you can think of is yourself? You have a company to run. Every one of our clients will be screaming for reassurance that the software you sold them will work.”
“They can all go to hell. I’m not taking any calls today. You take the calls.”
“Are you going to the press conference at the bank?”
“Yes, to keep up appearances.”
“Christ, now I’ve heard everything.”
“You’re a smart aleck,” Copeland said and headed for the elevator and his office on the first floor. Downstairs, the staff was coming in, prepared for a long day. The news from the Western Pacific was in the air, but people were making light of it, showing only a few traces of nervousness. Copeland saw several bottles of champagne and desks decorated with gift baskets of pricey delectables. Someone blew a horn and tossed a handful of confetti into the corridor.
“Happy New Year, Mr. Copeland.”
It was almost 8:00 in New York. It was midnight in Siberia.
5
Copeland’s obsession with Chase’s millions had made him oblivious to what the Midnight Club was doing right under his nose. Doc hoped the boss would spend the day staring at the red button, and he’d devised a few dirty tricks to keep Copeland out of his hair.
Doc thought of himself as an idealist in a culture where ideals were laughed at by most people over the age of eight. America at the end of the 20th Century was a cynical nation, but Doc didn’t care. He’d kept the faith, and if a terrible darkness followed in the wake of the millennium bug, he wanted to maintain a beacon of light on an island of hope. The nearest handy island was Manhattan.
He wasn’t sure why he was so fond of the overcrowded, bustling city. It was easy to badmouth New York, even hate the place, but next to New York, everywhere else was second city. New York had more money, power, influence, and extraordinary people who came from everywhere to be part of it, yet in spite of the grandiose architecture and the vastness of it all, New Yorkers managed to reduce the city to a comprehensible scale. The Big Apple was the most human of cities. People talked to one another, if not always politely. The natives turned their neighborhoods into villages and looked after one another. Doc had adapted. He loved the subway and the chess games in Washington Square. He thrived on the hustle of midtown and the hip milieu of Soho. He’d learned to order his coffee black because “regular” had milk in it. He hated the weather, but New York was a town of interiors, elegant refuges from the heat of summer and cold of winter. He often thought of the last few minutes of the Cold War nuclear nightmare movie Fail Safe, in which a lone United States Air Force B-52 banked over the Statue of Liberty, zeroed in on the Empire State Building and annihilated the city with a thermonuclear bomb. When America went for her own jugular, the pulsing vein was in New York.
Doc remembered a day not long after his arrival in the city when he was strolling through midtown, taking in the sights, when he saw, striding along with strong, leggy steps, a stunning six foot tall woman in a short Chanel skirt, Charles Jourdan shoes, Gucci bag, camera-ready makeup and hair, and an indefinable but oh-so-New York attitude as she flashed mini-gun bullets at a thousand rounds per minute from conquer-the-world eyes. Towering over the short, swarthy men who crowded Sixth Avenue, haughtily ignoring the attention she attracted, she stepped off the curb against the light directly in front of a taxi, causing the turbaned driver to hit his brakes and horn. Without deigning to glance his way, she flashed one elegant, manicured finger at his windshield and swept across 43rd Street, eyes ready to assassinate the next impediment in her path.
He’d seen mind-boggling sights like that every day in Manhattan, and perhaps that was why he loved the city and felt it was worth saving. New York was a mecca for people at the top of their game, and if they were lost, the world would lose. The millennium bug was already wreaking devastation on the far side of the globe, but if New York survived, it could lead the way to recovery.
The Midnight Club’s latest projections predicted that a small utility company in Vermont called Northern Lights Electric would fail, triggering a grid-wide failure that would take down ConEd. All the time and money he’d put into the Midnight Club would go down the drain unless Bo got his override codes and isolated New York from the grid. Doc had spent a million on salaries, five million on bonuses, six million on the IBM and other hardware, and a half million on bribes to reach this penultimate step, and he was stymied for lack of seven simple passwords. By now Deep Volt would have arrived at work as day shift operations manager at the command center, and he called as he did every day for no reason except pure neurosis. If the spy actually managed to get the passwords, Doc would be the first to know.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Things are heating up,” came Deep Volt’s reply. “We’re running disaster simulations.”
“And the overrides?”
“The supervisor will change them sometime today.”
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
He snapped on a bank of security monitors that presented views of different parts of the three story building on Nassau Street. On the first floor Donald’s accountants, analysts and sales people were filing into cubicles to work the phones and push virtual paper from one machine to another. On the second floor, where shifts worked around the clock, thirty Y2K customer-support people were connected to Chase Manhattan and twenty-seven other banks in eight countries, the company’s clients. On the third floor a dozen nerds were arriving for work in the regular computer lab where they developed new software for Copeland Solutions and Copeland’s other companies.
Doc entered a password, and a camera in the secure computer room presented a silent image of the five members of the Midnight Club watching their screens. Bo paced around his large cubicle as he watched a bank of screens that duplicated operator’s screens in the five Con Edison power plants, his face a grim map of despair. Next to him, dancing to music that never stopped, Carolyn watched a Bell Atlantic
display of the volume of calls at a dozen key interfaces to the outside world. In the back of the room, away from the stereo speakers, Ronnie was watching flow charts from the water department. As Doc watched, she got up from her seat and walked over to Adrian who was typing at his keyboard.
Doc snapped on the audio and heard her say, “Somebody just robbed a carload of passengers on the F Line and they have him trapped at 23rd Street.”
“How do you know?” Adrian asked.
“I’m listening to 911 dispatchers. Somebody got shot.”
Adrian shrugged and said, “It’s not my problem.”
“Just thought you’d like to know. The trains will back up.”
“Ronnie,” Adrian said, “I don’t give a fuck what happens to the subway until midnight.”
Doc commanded his screen to replicate Adrian’s. Adrian was logged on to a Y2K newsgroup, a chat room for Y2K freaks who were writing furious messages trying to best one another in predicting what was going to happen. All the programmers expected to get rich cleaning up the aftermath, and Adrian was no exception. He was writing:
Hello, Joe Dinosaur, welcome to the 21st Century, only geeks allowed. This is a technoworld of microns and angstroms, solid state physics, Boolean logic—everything that makes Joe run for his Budweiser. Joe doesn’t like computers. Flow charts, system analysis, COBOL, Java or diffusion furnaces have no place in his tiny mind. Here in technoland, you either understand everything and belong here, or you understand nothing, like Joe, who is wired whether he likes it or not. Joe thinks the Internet is a TV show with ten thousand channels of pornography. He doesn’t get it and never will. All power flows from control of a tiny electronic switch inside a minuscule transistor which is one of 100,000 transistors on an artificial rock the size of your fingernail. Put that in your Bud and chug it, Joe. Computers control everything, and geeks control computers. Geeks rule. Party hearty, Joe. Happy New Year. When all the champagne is gone, the big clock will roll over and then you’ll know what real power is.
Doc read a few more messages and sighed. Next Monday morning the status of technicians who could make things work again would be vaulted into the stratosphere, and they couldn’t wait to cash in. The attitude was downright unpleasant. Unable to stand the gloating, Doc sent Adrian an e-mail—“Go play with your trains!” Chargined, Adrian glanced up at the camera and wrinkled his nose.
* * *
At five minutes to eight Deep Volt called from ConEd.
“Doc? I’ll try for the passwords again around lunch time, but don’t hold your breath. I’ll call you later.”
He hung up, refusing to become discouraged. All he could do was wait, so he turned on the TV to watch the millennium bug push into the first of Russia’s eleven time zones.
After nine years of tracking old IBM mainframes, Doc knew the authorities in the Eastern Siberian city of Magadan controlled their local nuclear-powered electrical grid with two old IBM s/370 machines. The computers were running antique software that was definitely not Y2K compliant, which meant Magadan’s half million inhabitants were going to suffer a major blackout on a freezing winter’s night, if not a full-blown nuclear disaster. The Magadan reactor would be the first of hundreds waiting in the path of the millennium bug, and what happened there would set a precedent for the rest of the day.
Certain that calamity was careening toward an innocent city and equally certain the Russians knew it as well, Doc hoped the power plant engineers had enough sense to scram the reactor while they still had time. Nuclear engineers were among the most careful and practical humans on the planet. You don’t fool around with nuclear fission. Doc grew tense. He lit a Camel, watched the clock, and sent an e-mail to Judd, “Go online with the Russians.”
He surfed the networks, looking for Siberia. CBS was still broadcasting from New Zealand, ABC and CNN were in Moscow, Fox was talking to the space station, and NBC had a man in Vladivostok, a thousand miles west and two hours behind Magadan.
The NBC reporter in fur cap and trench coat was standing in front of Vladivostok’s nuclear power plant surrounded by six inches of snow.
“As you can see from the distinctive concrete towers behind me, this city and most Russian cities rely on nuclear energy to generate electricity. Worldwide, two billion people draw their ration of electricity from nuclear power plants, each with a unique computer system. The operators of this plant must be certain that each line of code in every application is free of Y2K problems, or they have to shut down the reactor. With an interior temperature of around 600°F, a reactor’s pressure vessel must cool down slowly, a process that can take three days.”
The camera panned over a small but growing crowd of local citizens assembling outside the chain-linked entrance to the facility.
“The people here know about the millennium bug; they know what happened in Micronesia and New Zealand, but we haven’t found anyone who speaks English. Just a moment…”
The reporter spoke rapid Russian to a stout young woman who was carrying a bulky radio.
“Yes,” she said, “some English. This radio, it is what you say? CB? Yes, citizen band, and short wave.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“My friend in Magadan. It is now there—” she paused to glance at her watch “—year two thousands.”
She turned up her radio and people nearby moved closer to listen. The reporter listened to the Russian commentary and offered a running translation.
“I’m listening to a short-wave broadcast from a private citizen in Magadan, Siberia, ladies and gentlemen, and he’s saying they just lost their power. Yes, yes, that’s right, the authorities just shut down the nuclear power plant, and it’s twenty below.”
A cry of despair rose from the crowd. Doc remained absolutely still as he watched the screen. The operators in Magadan had had no choice. The plant engineers had cut the steam flow from the reactor, stopped the turbines, and Magadan had blacked out along with Petropavlovsk and the entire Kamchatka Peninsula. Once the heartland of the Soviet military-industrial presence on the Pacific Rim, Eastern Siberia greeted the millennium in darkness and fear.
On screen the NBC camera captured the first few seconds of a riot in Vladivostok. Despite the danger of a computer malfunction causing an uncontrollable chain reaction, angry citizens demanding that the power remain on stormed the gates of the plant. A squad of white-helmeted militia swarmed out of nowhere and attacked the crowd with tear gas and batons. Blood flowed on the snowbanks. The audio carried the piercing sounds of shouts and screams, Russian agony, and freezing, whistling wind. Abruptly, the screen went cockeyed, then black. The bug had reached the mainland of Eurasia, and humanity had responded with repression and ignorance.
Doc flipped through the channels. All the networks were on the story right away. A shot by Fox from the space station caught a huge swath of Siberia as it went dark. The Russians aboard the spacecraft were somber, wondering aloud what was happening in their country far below and asking whether or not their ground control was going to survive the night. Doc was reminded of an incident at the Chernobyl reactor disaster in 1989. When the meltdown occurred, the power plant lost all communications with Kiev. The Soviets had had to lay a telephone line by hand from a caravan of trucks between the burning reactor and the responsible authorities, who, when finally connected, had nothing to say.
The world had made a huge mistake by relying on high technology without considering the full implications, and the millennium bug was simply a way of making it obvious to everyone. What interested Doc most was NBC’s picking up the Magadan story from Russian short-wave radio. Short-wave, old vacuum tube receivers, and manual typewriters would be operating in the morning when more modern equipment failed. If things went the way he expected, the Third World would thrive while the First World went to hell overnight. If that happened, a ’57 Chevy would be the vehicle of choice, a classic with no computers.
Doc called the Midnight Club and Judd answered by screaming into the phone, “Yo, D
oc.”
“You online with the Russians?” Doc asked.
“Got Serge online from Vladivostok,” Judd replied. “He says Eastern Siberia took it in the shorts big time. There’s bad news all across Russia, but Serge is no dummy. He has a generator and a dish, so he’ll be ready when it hits him in another couple of hours.”
“What does he know about the Magadan reactor?”
“They scrammed. They knew they had to.”
“Thank God,” Doc said. “How did Con Edison take the news?”
“They’re frantic,” Judd said. “They’re watching this riot in Vladivostok and cursing the media for reporting it. Right now they’re arguing over whether or not to shut down Indian Rock.”
Indian Rock was Con Edison’s nuclear plant in upstate New York, perhaps the world’s most thoroughly Y2K-tested nuclear generating system.
“Indian Rock isn’t the problem,” Doc said. “It’s all the equipment between there and here.”
“We’ll see about that,” Judd said. “Got Bo’s override codes yet?”
“Not yet,” Doc answered. “I’m dialing.”
He punched in the number of his spy inside Con Edison and she answered, “Operations.”
“Doc here.”
“Got nothing for you. Can’t talk. I’ll let you know.”
Damn. Two and a half years of work, twelve million dollars, and it came down to this: hope and luck. Doc’s stomach churned. He had to sweat it out. Like any good engineer, he had a backup plan, but he hoped he didn’t have to use it.
Doc turned back to the TV wondering how long the networks would stay on the air. How many microprocessors between Siberia and New York had to function perfectly to transmit a signal around the world? Thousands. How many had been tested? How many embedded chips had been overlooked, never located, or improperly fixed? One bad chip and the whole thing goes kablouie.
The employee line on Doc’s phone was blinking, causing him to start thinking about the phones. How many…? What if…? He could drive himself crazy like that. He picked up the handset and answered, “Copeland Solutions, Doc speaking.”
