by Mark Joseph
“Is the microwave circuit to Chase okay?” Doc asked.
“Yeah, communication is fine, and the 2000 software is cool,” said the techie, a kid in a Princeton sweatshirt, “but the Metro Tech building is like full of bugs. The swing shift is locked in and the night shift locked out.”
Doc grinned, amused.
“Did you do that on purpose?” Annie asked, playfully punching Doc in the shoulder.
Doc punched her back and said, “I’ll never tell.”
“I hear the lights went out in Boston,” the techie remarked.
“Yep.”
“And in Philly.”
“Yep.”
“Everywhere except here. Isn’t that like, strange?”
“Nope. How’re your phones?”
“It’s really weird. Our phones are good, but everyone we call is like really surprised because they can’t call out on their phones, and no one else can call them, either. It’s like the phone gods smiled on us. We can call some places and not others. There’s like no phones in Washington or Toronto. I knew this was going to be like, bizarre, but this is bizarre bizarre.”
Doc stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, causing the staff to glance up from their screens. Thirty heads sprouted like cabbages above the cubicle dividers.
“Annie tells me Chase and all our clients survived the millennium crunch,” Doc announced. “You’re veteran troopers, and you’ve earned an honest victory tonight. I’m not going to make a ridiculous speech. I just want to say that everyone in this room will receive a bonus of $20,000. Thank you.”
The whistles and cheers lasted only a moment before everyone went back to work.
As they walked toward the door, Doc said, “Your people are doing terrific work, Annie. They’re all great.”
“Now that the big moment has come and gone,” she said, “people are wondering about their jobs. The bonuses are nice, but they want to know if their jobs will be here next week.”
“Annie, tell them this isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning. Our people don’t have to worry about their jobs. We have to worry about paying them enough to keep them.”
“How bad is it, Doc?”
“Depends on your point of view. You might say the collapse of civilization is not a bad thing if you think civilization is on the wrong track.”
“Don’t be such a smart-ass.”
“Okay, let’s see,” he said, “Around town, Brooklyn Union Gas has lost control of pressure regulators in the natural gas pipes and shut down. All broadcast TV has gone belly up, and two cable stations are the only TV right now. I think three radio stations are broadcasting music. Only a few Bell Atlantic and AT&T telephone lines are working, including yours. Police radios are working. In the outer boroughs, emergency generators are providing electricity to some buildings and hospitals. The subway is running.”
“Is there looting?”
“Too soon to tell.”
“How do you know?”
“I have a good police scanner,” he answered with a shrug. “I like toys.”
* * *
Computer malfunctions were instantaneous, but effects required several nanoseconds to manifest. Inside billions of silicon wafers, the flow of electrons responded to binary instructions the only way possible, taking the path of least resistance. The machines peeled off trillions of calculations in those first slim fractions of a second, following instructions written by human beings, and many of those humans were defective units. Because of human error, complacency, poor management, bad fixes and inadequate testing, three million computers in New York malfunctioned before the century was one second old.
Not all malfunctions were fatal, and many were rapidly fixed once they became apparent. A somewhat lesser number of machines survived with no malfunctions, but wide area networks of compliant machines were inoperable because phone systems were down. The ratio between effort put into Y2K remediation and survival was direct and merciless. Solid, meticulous, grueling inspection of applications, function point by function point and thorough conversion to four-digit date fields paid off. Sloppy, hurried patches and kludges failed. Curiously, the little things people had worried about—household appliances, cars and elevators had only minor problems. People had been so concerned about elevators that they’d been fixed. VCRs that displayed a two-digit date worked fine anyway. In a few cars digital dash displays went crazy, but the motors ran and the antilock brakes worked. It was not the small, personal systems that failed but rather the large, complex, next-to-invisible and taken-for-granted systems that comprised the infrastructure not only of the city and nation but the global economy that failed. It was the Big Picture right in front of everybody’s eyes that disintegrated. All the major banks in New York survived but couldn’t communicate with one another. Supply lines were disrupted at every link. Warehouse inventory controls were screwed up. Ship and rail traffic was crippled. Every single manufacturing plant, refinery, chemical fabricator and automated assembly line had a problem somewhere.
On the East Coast, only in New York and in those places with emergency generators did people have an opportunity to learn if their systems were good or bad. In the three time zones to the west, after learning of the calamitous events in the east, people woke up from a thirty-year snooze and initiated frantic efforts to prepare for the coming disaster. All remaining power grids and cooperatives initiated disconnects, the companies separating from one another and standing alone. Every energy worker who could be found was pulled in and given a crash course in manual workarounds to keep the plants up and running when equipment failed. The governors of eighteen states called out the National Guard, and thousands of earnest young men and women, largely from rural areas, were sent to patrol cities to prevent rioting and looting. In Milwaukee and Little Rock, the sudden military presence provoked the very rioting it was supposed to prevent. All over the West, survivalists hunkered down in their fallout shelters, the idea of individualism taken to the extreme. In most places, however, faced with a foreseeable crisis, people acted like intelligent, sensible members of a community and figured out ways to help one another. In small towns, people rallied to organize disaster relief, setting up shelters in high school gyms and rigging generators for grocery stores. From Chicago west, city officials called off the millennium parties, and police started moving people off the streets. Plant managers rushed to their facilities and turned everything off. Desperate shoppers stripped urban groceries bare.
As the millennium bug began its journey across North America, it was a little after 5:00 in the morning in London, 8:00 in Moscow and just past noon in Beijing. After shrinking for five hundred years, the world had suddenly expanded. The fragile network of telecommunications that had once unified the planet collapsed. Factories in China that supplied half of America’s toys lost their computerized records. Chinese banks that handled the transactions were dead. The ship that carried the teddy bears was lost at sea. The oil refinery that produced the diesel fuel for the truck that carried the bears to Toys-R-Us was shut down. The teddy bears were okay. Neither they nor the workers who sewed them had chips.
The planet had a bad hangover, but the lights were on in New York.
* * *
On Jay Street in Brooklyn, in the command center of the most thoroughly Y2K compliant transit system in the world, where every computer application had been thoroughly checked, corrected and tested, where every embedded chip had been identified, tracked down, checked, tested, and replaced, where every dispatcher, operator, manager, yard boss, supervisor, motorman, and track sweeper had had Y2K drummed into his head until he was sick of it, the twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-high master screen of the entire system blinked out at 12:02. Two seconds later 187 subway trains stopped where they were.
When the screens went down, every signal in the system defaulted to red and stopped all the trains. The dispatchers at their terminals stared at the big screen in stunned silence. The terminals included new programmable logic processors that
time-stamped and recorded every keystroke and sent the data to twenty brand-new chips in the screen that were not supposed to be date sensitive. To save money the MTA had purchased generic chips with a subassembly that had two-digit date codes burned into a circuit in the chip-within-a chip. The chip vendor had not known the subassembly existed, and the screens had passed a full-blown rollover test under simulated conditions. Powering down after the test, something that never occurred under real conditions, and then powering back up had activated all the circuits in the subassemblies in the poorly manufactured chips. A second test would have caught the malfunction, but since the first was a success, a second test had never been performed.
The radios worked, giving the dispatchers and towermen contact with the motormen, all of whom started talking at once. The communal blood pressure of the entire subway system stepped up a notch. The lights flickered in the tunnels and in the command center. Deep within the subterranean bowels of the city, the bug had fired another salvo at the city.
* * *
“Where’s Adrian?” Doc asked when he returned from downstairs. He looked in the bathroom and kitchen and scratched his head. “Where’s Adrian?” he asked again.
“What?” Judd exclaimed.
“Where’s Adrian? He’s gone.”
Mesmerized by their screens, too busy to pay attention to anyone else, no one had seen him leave.
Jody had been all over the room with her video camera, and Doc had her flash through the last three minutes of tape.
“There,” he said, “you have Ronnie in the frame and there’s Adrian in the background opening a drawer and pulling out a bunch of circuit boards.”
“Chips?” Jody asked.
“Yeah.”
He studied the subway schematic on Adrian’s monitor and saw right away that none of the trains was moving.
“Bo,” he shouted. “Status of 59th Street.”
The Con Edison power plant on 59th was dedicated to the subway and provided power to the entire system.
“59th is online,” Bo reported.
“Then what the hell’s the matter with the subway?”
Carolyn got up from her seat and started pushing buttons on Adrian’s panels. “Gee, Doc, didn’t you ever learn how to run Adrian’s terminal?”
“I guess not.”
Carolyn brought up a live image from a security camera at the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s dispatch center on Jay Street. The big screen was down. Unable to see where the trains were or the status of the signals, the dispatchers were starting to move trains one by one by radio.
Since Adrian’s screen showed the locations of the trains, somewhere in his duplicate system was an operating circuit they didn’t have on Jay Street. Clearly, he’d taken a pile of circuit boards and was on his way to Brooklyn to repair their system himself.
“My God,” Doc said. “Oh, Christ. Poor sweet Adrian.”
“What can he do?” Jody asked.
“He can probably fix their system and get the trains running, but he’ll have a hell of a time convincing them of that. Imagine these hard-headed, no nonsense MTA guys confronted by Adrian with eyes like mandalas and waving a circuit board. They’ll think he’s out his mind. I have to go after him.”
Judd walked away from his station and pulled on a windbreaker.
“Doc,” he said, “you’ll never catch him. I’ll get him.”
Doc raised his eyebrows. “He’s my responsibility,” he insisted. “Christ. He’ll go through the A train tunnel from Fulton Street under the river and right to Jay Street. It’s the second stop in Brooklyn.”
“You think he’ll go through a subway tunnel?” Jody exclaimed, horrified.
“He does it all the time,” Judd said.
“I’ll find him and drag his ass back,” Judd declared, and went out the door without further argument.
“Peopleware,” Carolyn sneered and went back to her station. “The human factor.”
“Shit,” Doc swore. “This is crazy.”
He bolted for the door, ran down the stairs and raced toward the Fulton Street subway station three blocks away. Running at a marathoner’s pace, Judd was two blocks ahead, and Doc was in no shape for an heroic sprint to Brooklyn. After a block he slowed down and jogged along at a steady cadence, surprised to discover many anxious business people in winter Gore-Tex and down clothing who’d returned to the financial district to see what their computers would do. He could hear cheers and shrieks of delight from some offices, and groans of defeat and disaster from others. The cleansing of the technological gene pool was underway.
He ducked into the subway station and found a Brooklyn-bound train sitting motionless on the tracks, doors open. People milled around and watched the frenzied scene from Times Square on the TVs suspended over the platforms. At the front of the train, the motorman was talking to a transit cop who leaned over the tracks and pointed down the tunnel. Doc ran past them and jumped down onto the tracks as the cop shouted, “Not another one! What’s the matter with these people?”
“Aren’t you going after them?” the motorman asked.
“Hell, no. You think I’m nuts?”
“What do they say upstairs?”
“They’re workin’ on the screen. Fuckin’ computers.”
Doc pounded doggedly ahead, out of breath, stopping frequently to rest with hands on knees. Jogging through a subway tunnel with a live third rail was not his ideal way to spend New Year’s Eve. Footsteps echoed through the dimly lit tunnel, and red signal lights marched down the right of way. A few hundred yards ahead, Judd was gaining on his quarry. Almost to Brooklyn, Adrian looked back, heard Judd, and started running faster.
Adrian had short-circuited the moment he saw the MTA screens blow out. Suddenly, he was a man with a mission, convinced he was the only person alive who knew what was wrong with the subway and how to fix it. He’d slipped away from Nassau Street without saying anything because, in the hot furnace of his twisted mind, he believed the Midnight Club would try to stop him. They tolerated him, he believed, but didn’t really respect him and now were proving it by chasing him.
The tunnel passed under the river, bored into Brooklyn Heights, and curved south toward the High Street station. As Adrian rounded the bend, the station came into view where a Manhattan-bound train was stopped, headlights shining brightly. Pudgy and slow, Adrian knew the intricacies of the tunnels and had explored the A train route many times. Just around the curve, he ducked into a service passageway, and when Judd came around the bend, Adrian had disappeared.
“Adrian!” Judd called out.
Doc heard Judd’s shout and stopped.
“Adrian, come out,” Judd hollered. “We’ll take the circuit boards to the dispatchers together.”
Walking cautiously around the bend. Doc saw Judd and then Adrian in the shadows, out of Judd’s view, looking distraught.
Suddenly, the train in the station closed its doors and moved, the sound scaring Doc half to death. The roadbed vibrated, the train motors roared, the wheels screeched, and the air brakes hissed. Doc ran ahead, grabbed Judd, and pulled him into the passageway with Adrian just as the first Brooklyn train whooshed by from the other direction.
“You knucklehead,” Doc yelled at Adrian who couldn’t hear him. The trains moved on, and the three managed to get onto the platform without drawing attention.
Adrian said nothing, folded his arms across his chest, slouched down on the bench and stared at the ceiling. He’d honed his disdain for the MTA dispatchers and towermen since the day he’d arrived in New York, calling them idiots who didn’t know how to run a railroad, but the idiots had repaired their screens and put the system back into operation.
With a fair idea of Adrian’s thoughts, Judd pointed up the tracks toward Jay Street and said, “They were just lucky, that’s all.”
“You were trying to do the right thing,” Doc added. “It’s all right.”
Another Manhattan train pulled in, packed to the windows with pass
engers. The errant members of the Midnight Club squeezed through the doors and passed back under the river.
At Fulton Street, financial district types rushed toward the exits, in a hurry to find out if they were winners or losers in the computer lottery. When the train pulled out, Doc and Judd were on the platform but Adrian was still aboard, heading for Times Square. He smirked as he slipped away, and waved his fingers bye-bye.
* * *
Doc and Judd emerged from the station onto sidewalks littered with PCs that had failed the rollover. On Wall Street three men in a van were collecting discarded CPUs and monitors.
“Urban farming,” Doc commented. “It’ll become quite popular in the next few weeks.”
As they turned onto Nassau Street, the stars had disappeared, the sky had clouded over, and snow began to fall.
17
The unthinkable had occurred. From the skyscrapers of Manhattan one could see the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a panorama of darkness. Across the Hudson, the lightless Jersey shore was a wall of brick and stone dusted with snow; to the south Staten Island had become a black hole in the Upper Bay; to the east, beyond Brooklyn and Queens, Long Island stretched like a primeval prairie. Here and there automobile lights flickered like lost stars in the gloom, and a few ships’ lights dotted the harbor. On Governor’s Island a generator lighted the Coast Guard Station where technicians worked frantically on the radars’ computers.
A stillness fell over the world beyond the slim, illuminated island of Manhattan. At the moment the power stopped, the hum of transmission wires fell silent. TVs, radios, stereos, and machinery of all types stopped making noise. Drivers stopped in traffic to marvel at the transformation. Life was reduced to fundamental elements. Bugs. Wind. Snow.
Unable to look out, people had to search within themselves for the means of survival. It was a rude awakening, but an awakening nonetheless. Natural selection immediately came into play. The strong and intelligent survived; the weak and witless perished.
