by Mark Joseph
Someone had to take the blame. Many xenophobic Japanese were loathe to admit they’d caused their own problems. The complexities of Y2K didn’t matter. Government ineptitude and corporate greed didn’t matter. Since most software that failed was American in origin, a rumor swept through the city that the Y2K crisis was an American plot to destroy the Japanese economy. At 2:00 A.M. in the morning a crowd of angry demonstrators appeared in front of the American Embassy, throwing stones and chanting anti-American slogans. In the Ginza, sixty executives from IBM who’d rented a bar for New Year’s Eve were turned out by an angry proprietor who believed the rumors and blamed them for the crisis. It didn’t matter to him that IBM wasn’t responsible, but they were Americans who worked for the most recognizable computer company in the world, and that was enough. Thrust into the street, the men and women from IBM were attacked by gangs of yakuza thugs on an antiforeigner rampage. In the mêlée, four Americans and two Japanese died. Martial law was declared in the metropolis of Tokyo at 2:30 A.M. At 3:00, the Emperor opened the grounds of the Imperial Palace and instructed the army to provide tents for anyone stranded in the city, including foreigners. Only half the country heard his broadcast.
In Japan, like everywhere, though many disastrous consequences of malfunctioning computers were readily apparent, most effects didn’t show up immediately. Defective computers didn’t necessarily crash, as Old Blue had done; they generated inaccurate data that in turn caused unpredictable behavior in the systems they controlled. There was a ripple effect. The power outage in Tokyo was caused by one computer in a major substation sending messages to the grid to step up the power while an override computer demanded a cut in power. The system couldn’t handle the conflict and shut down power to most of the city and stepped it up to the rest.
A different malfunction halted rail traffic on the Japanese National Railways. Electric power to the railroad’s overhead catenaries was supplied by Y2K compliant nuclear power plants, but the railroad operators kept track of the trains with telemetry data radioed from the locomotives to a central control center. The telemetry computers lost track of the time and date, and engineers were ordered to stop their trains where they were, freezing the entire system. Eleven passenger trains were stopped in tunnels and the passengers had to walk out.
In many places where electric power faltered, redundant back-up systems kicked in and operated successfully. Phone traffic was rerouted, but the lines that remained open were swamped, first crippling military and diplomatic communications, then snarling normal domestic and commercial communications and heightening anxieties among people desperate for information. Data streaming, the life’s blood of the global economy, became a data trickle in the eastern hemisphere.
Japan suffered the most because it had the most computers, but the rest of Asia experienced monumental devastation as well. Weakened by dissident strife and political turmoil, Indonesia was swept away as before a typhoon. As the world’s fourth most populous nation, Indonesia represented a huge chunk of the global economy that abruptly was unable to produce or buy goods. In contrast, tiny Singapore survived intact, well-lit and uniformly compliant, having had compliance ordered by mandate, but the wealthy, thimble-sized nation was cut off from the rest of Asia when communications failed. In the Philippines the central computers at the bank of Manila survived the time rollover with the aid of Copeland Solutions software, but the bank lost contact with other banks throughout the country when the local phone system collapsed. By early afternoon in New York, the Koreas, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and three more time zones in Russia fell under the shadow of the deepening crisis. A railroad signaling system in Northern China failed and caused three terrible train wrecks. Air traffic control failure in Bangkok resulted in six fallen airplanes, the worst air disaster of all time. Under normal circumstances, this event alone would have dominated headlines for days; as it was, it would rate a small box on page three.
* * *
At 12:30 Jonathon Spillman closed the Safeway, sent the few remaining employees home and trudged down Broadway toward his apartment, a few blocks away. Numbed, momentarily unable to process any more disastrous information, all he had on his mind was his wife Shirley’s collection of Official Millennium Paraphernalia. Shirley thought the millennium was the greatest event of her lifetime, better than the 1976 Bicentennial or the wedding of Princess Diana. When Spillman had suggested she leave the city to avoid possible civil disturbances, she’d shrieked, “Are you outta your mind? You think I’m gonna miss this?”
Spillman came upon a crowd surrounding a street vendor selling battery-operated, walking, talking blond Jesus dolls at 86th and Broadway.
“Gitcher millemium doll quick now they goin’ fast. He walk. He talk. He say, ‘I’m a two-thousand-year-old man. I’m a two-thousand-year-old man.’ Thass right. Eighteen dollars. Listen up, ladies, only eighteen little ol’ dollars for a ton of millemium fun. He be walkin’ from here to e-ter-no-ty.”
The doll was manufactured from hard extruded plastic with stamped blue eyes, a golden halo, stiff nylon hair, a white robe with blue piping, a jerky, precarious walk and an oversized button on its chest that read, “2000 Years of Good News.” In a squeaky, distorted voice the loop of tape inside the doll actually said, “My name is Jesus. I love you.”
In the crowd two elderly black ladies were enthralled by the doll.
“My grandbaby is gonna love this,” Mrs. Gordon said to Mrs. Henderson. “Fedex can deliver it before her birthday, and I know she’ll send me the cutest e-mail.” She turned a withering smile on the merchant and asked, “How much you want for this?”
“Eighteen dollars, ma’am.”
“Go on. I’ll give you ten.”
“Ma’am, this here is a Jesus doll. You wouldn’t want to rob me just to get next to the Lord? This is a’ action figure. You gonna pay twenty-five at Toys-R-Us, plus you get yourself a 2000 Years of Good News button. This is a special, one-of-a-kind genuine millemium doll.”
“Hmmm,” Mrs. Gordon said. “It’s pronounced ‘mill-enn-ium.’ I bet you don’t know what the millennium is, fool.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Mrs. Henderson agreed, solemnly nodding her head.
“It New Year’s Eve, that’s what it is,” the vendor declared. “Got a new name fo’ New Year’s Eve. Damn. I ain’t ignorant.”
Mrs. Gordon wagged her finger at the vendor. “What you say, fool. Ha! Don’t you know that Jesus don’t have blue eyes and blond hair? Jesus was a Semitic man of the Jewish faith. He looked more like a A-rab than a Barbie. Didn’t you know that? The millennium is Our Lord’s two thousandth birthday.”
“You mean it’s Christmas?” The vendor squawked, surprised.
“No, it isn’t Christmas. It’s … it’s … I cain’t help it if you don’t understand.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about no millemium and I don’t care, neither. I got these here dolls to sell today and they look like Jesus to me. They cute. They make a little girl happy. That what matter to me.”
“Getting your money is what matters to you.”
“That, too. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.”
“When was the last time you were in church, young man?”
“I got church right here on this street every God damn minute. I don’t need no church. You gonna buy a doll or you gonna rag my ass?”
Laughing, Mrs. Gordon and the doll salesman settled on fifteen dollars, batteries included. Meanwhile the Official Millennium Clock ticked down a few more minutes toward the 21st Century, and commerce moved on, another sale racked up, charged to Y2K.
Spillman bought a doll, took it home and installed it in a place of honor in the Official Millennium Display Case in the living room. The plastic Jesus overlooked an Official Millennium Monopoly board. Opposite him was an Official Millennium Barbie who had one hand in a bowl of Official Millennium M&M’s. Barbie offered Jesus an Official Millennium Budweiser.
Spillman spent the next three hours
watching TV with a loaded shotgun across his knees. In a state of deep denial, Shirley puttered around the apartment and kvetched. She didn’t care much for the Official Millennium Jesus, but she believed the Official Millennium Display Case should be nonsectarian. She didn’t care about news from Japan, either. She wanted fireworks, not more tragedies. The world had suffered enough. Princess Di was dead, and nothing could be worse than that.
* * *
Downtown in Bellevue Hospital, Doc was on his back under a blood analysis machine when his pager went off. He struggled to extract it from his pocket and read the display with a pencil light: BUTTON ACTIVATED. He chuckled. Copeland would be half out of his mind by now and in a few minutes would be caught in traffic trying to fight his way to Brooklyn. Excellent. Keep the boy busy. Make him pay for his sins. This was Judgment Day, a day of redemption and salvation, and he, too, would have to pay.
The news hammering New York had created an epidemic of heart attacks, and the cardiology ward was full. Bill Packard was in the emergency room helping out with admissions. Always stressed to the max on New Year’s Eve, the emergency room was exceptionally busy much earlier than usual.
At 1:30 Doc sent Judd, Ronnie, and Carolyn back to Nassau Street in his Jeep. Y2K conditions in the ward were so bad, the programmers had been able to do little beyond test chips, locate the most defective devices and tell the nurses which machines presented life-threatening problems.
The cardiac unit was filling up. Heart attack was the disease of choice among those most affected by the economic crisis. Doc was reconfiguring the programmable chip in the blood analyzer when the two cops and the hospital director of information, Mrs. McCarthy, her nose heavily bandaged, burst into the room where he was working. He ignored them.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Where’s that bastard who hit me?”
Doc kept his eyes on his laptop and handed an integrated circuit board to one of the cops. “Hold this a second, would you please?”
“Oh, sure,” said the cop, taking the delicate device.
“That chip will cause this machine to mistake blood type O positive for O negative,” Doc said casually. “What blood type do you have?”
“Uh, O positive.”
“You wouldn’t want the machine to make a mistake, now, would you? This could be your blood in here if you needed a transfusion right away.”
“No, sir, no way.”
“Good,” Doc said. “You’re looking for Dr. Packard? He’s somewhere around here saving lives.”
“This lady has filed a complaint.”
“I’m not surprised,” Doc said. “Dr. Packard asked me to come in here and work on these machines. This lady objected. He let her have it. Have you guys been listening to the news? You understand what’s happening in the world today? It isn’t just New Year’s Eve.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Hear about the hospital in Shanghai where machines identical to this one killed nine people earlier today?”
“No. Didn’t hear that one.”
“Well, I think it’s a good idea that it doesn’t happen here. I’m going to try to fix this thing or take it out of service as Dr. Packard asked me to do. You can stop me if you like. You have badges and guns and you also have brains. Your choice.”
“Arrest this man,” Mrs. McCarthy demanded. “Get him out of my hospital.”
The two cops looked at one another, nodded their heads and walked out of the ward, leaving Mrs. McCarthy sputtering with rage.
“Excuse me,” Doc said, crawling back under the machine. “I’m busy.”
* * *
In the police station on 100th Street, Captain Garcia unfastened the top buttons on his tunic and drank coffee as he argued with his superiors downtown. No, he wouldn’t remove the barriers on Amsterdam Avenue. He had four thousand deliriously happy people dancing in the street to a Latin band playing on a flatbed truck. He had more soap boxes than Hyde Park and from each a preacher was delivering his version of the Book of Revelation. It was a revelation, all right, and the merchants weren’t complaining. He was sorry about diverting traffic over to Central Park West, but that was too damned bad.
The divisional commander was so busy with problems created by the closure of the airports that he had to leave the administration of his precincts to the commanders. When the airports closed, about fifteen thousand people returned to midtown and discovered there was no place to stay. It was New Year’s Eve and no hotel rooms were available at any price. New York found itself hosting an army of suddenly homeless visitors.
Hordes descended on the train and bus stations demanding instant transport to anywhere, USA, but all the trains and busses were sold out. Abandoned, stranded and unorganized, the bereft presented fifteen thousand unexpected problems for the city to absorb. Another thirty thousand innocent people with air tickets on planes that weren’t going to fly were forced to check out of hotel rooms to make room for other guests with reservations made months in advance. Since rooms in New York were commanding fabulous prices, the bidding started with money and quickly escalated to forced evictions, fights, disruptions and the police. An unseemly disturbance occurred in the lobby of the Plaza when the junior senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia was informed he had to vacate his suite. He took a roundhouse swing at the manager, missed, and was promptly twisted into a pretzel by a security guard. At the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, a visitor from New Orleans was asked to quit his room, which he did without removing his effects. An hour later he returned to collect his clothes and walked in on the new occupants in flagrante dilecto. The gentleman in bed with a lady who was not his wife thought the intruder was there for a very different reason, pulled out a pistol and shot the man from New Orleans dead, creating a passionate moment of naked, bloody chaos and a headache for the divisional commander.
At the same time the bridge and tunnel crowd of zesty youth was pouring into Manhattan for the big party. With the official celebration still twelve hours away, a river of booze was already flowing down the Great White Way to Times Square. New York was tanking up. It was New Year’s Eve.
* * *
En route to the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, Copeland and Jody joined the crowd pushing into the Wall Street subway station. The overheated platform was packed, stinking with stress radiating from people fleeing the financial district. Thirty TVs suspended from the ceiling bombarded the restless crowd with news from Asia, but things were happening at too dizzy a pace for most to comprehend, including the New York 1 reporters who were clearly shaken by the scope of events.
“In the People’s Republic of China, a huge millennium celebration at the Great Wall just outside Beijing turned to tragedy when two government helicopters crashed in midair and fell into the crowd of more than one million. The cause of the crash remains unknown, and the number of casualties is estimated in the hundreds.
“Here in New York, if you’re planning a trip to the bank today for some holiday cash, you can expect a wait. A spokesman for Citibank told us just a few minutes ago that all branches are well supplied with cash to meet the needs of customers; however, we have reports of depositors lining up at New York’s 3500 bank branches and 12,000 ATM machines. Unfortunately, armored cars delivering cash to the banks are stuck in traffic all over town.
“Now we turn to national news. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this morning, a branch of NationsBank was the scene of a fatal shooting when a man who was next in line when the branch ran out of money shot a teller and two security guards before being killed by police.”
The reporter paused, silently reading the teleprompter, looked away and then back at the camera. “I think we should take a break,” she said. As the camera cut away to the co-anchor, she said off-camera, “I don’t want to read that,” and the director went to a commercial.
“Ski Utah!” blared the TVs. “The holidays are here and you can be spending them in a winter paradise…”
On the opposite platform a cohort of dru
nken college students started a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”
“My God,” Jody said to Copeland. “I wonder what she—”
“They’re going to have to close the banks,” Copeland interjected. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“That will just make things worse,” Jody said. “Look at what happened down in Charlotte, and God knows what the next story was. I’ve never seen a reporter act like that.”
The rails began to vibrate and headlights appeared in the tunnel as the subway train approached. In defiance of the new, improved, graffiti-free New York, an artist had sprayed the front of the lead car with a flashy “2000.” The heavy train clanked into the station, wiping out all sound from the TVs. Copeland and Jody squeezed into the third car.
The passengers were more talkative with one another than usual. People exchanged worried but sympathetic glances. A middle-aged Hispanic woman tried to comfort a young mother sitting next to her with a baby on her lap.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” the elder woman said to the weeping stranger.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. The lines at the bank were so long, and I have to get home and feed my children, and my boss said he didn’t know if he could pay us next week or not.”
