Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "Sorry. It wasn't such a good idea." She didn't smile again. Her mouth, unsmiling, was pretty.

  "It wasn't a bad idea." He felt grubby, unshaven.

  The switch. He came alert. He had found nothing that could have caused the number five to crash. And then he had fallen asleep? "I... What time is it?" He looked to his watch. Six-thirty. "Oh, sh—" He cut himself off, grabbed for the phone.

  "Oh, shit," she offered.

  She moved back, as if to give him privacy in his own cubicle, but she watched him make the call. He got Helen and apologized. No time for him to get home and get Wayne ready for the school bus.

  He glanced at her. Her eyes, light brown, almost gold like wild grasses, seemed sympathetic. She was going to stand there and listen if he didn't ask her to leave.

  Helen was putting Wayne on. Andy switched to the TDD. This caught her interest and she craned forward.

  Andy typed in, "Good morning. Sorry didn't make it."

  "What time you home?"

  "Don't know." Distracted, he stopped.

  "Work-a-holick. Bye." The connection broke.

  Andy carefully replaced the handset. He stood, facing her. No dizziness, he noted; just confusion. "Who are you?" He cleared his throat. "I like to know who's waking me up."

  "Nell Colson." She stuck out her hand.

  He took it, and she waited for him to let go.

  "Colson? You're Ray Colson's ..."

  "Daughter."

  Andy hadn't known that Colson had a daughter. But then, nobody knew whether he'd ever had a wife.

  "That was your son on the phone?"

  "My son?"

  She smiled again. "I'm not a detective. Ray told me you had a deaf son."

  "Ray told you about my son?"

  "And then the TDD." She gestured at the phone. "We learn about all the equipment in training. So, clearly you were talking to a deaf person, and I made the obvious guess."

  "Good guess."

  "Is he totally deaf?"

  Andy choked back a word. "Ray didn't tell you that?"

  "He just said deaf." She gazed at him levelly. "I'm sorry. Did Ray tell me something he shouldn't have?"

  Andy shook his head.

  She was tall, like her father, and a lot more curious.

  So what was the big deal? "I'm just surprised, Miss Colson, that Ray told you anything about my son. Around here, he doesn't talk about personal things."

  "No, no one would call my father a gossip." She hooked her thumbs in the tool belt. "The way it works is, I ask Ray questions, and as long as I'm not asking about company security or something, he answers. I was interested in the people he worked with and he answered my questions. I'm sure he found the conversation.... pointless ... but he humored me." She had Ray's "pointless" down cold.

  "I see. But Ray doesn't work with my son."

  Her eyes narrowed, hooding the gold. "When he told me about you, there was something in his voice... respect maybe. Interest anyway. That's something, with Ray. He said you had some fire in your eyes. So I got interested, and I asked him a bunch of questions."

  Andy took a step backward and braced against his desk. "He doubtless meant bloodshot eyes. We work crazy hours."

  "No," she said, "fire."

  He could think of nothing to say.

  She glanced at the phone. "The woman you were talking to... Helen. She's…?"

  "No one Ray would know."

  She was finally embarrassed. He watched the blush spread down her throat, into the neck of her soiled workshirt. "I'm sorry, that's none of my business."

  It wasn't, but he realized his pulse was racing. "It's okay. I love being interrogated at dawn."

  She looked startled.

  "That was a joke," he said. Idiot, try again. "You can ask me anything you want."

  She shook her head.

  "Go ahead."

  "I just wondered if that was your wife on the phone."

  Thanks, Lloyd, real cute. Do me a favor, miss, go on in there and wake Mr. Faulkner. Nobody calls him Mr. Faulkner, but linemen who look like you don't usually wake him up. Just go on in there, like Venus rising from the half shell, and reduce him to gibberish. It'll be easy.

  "She helps out with my son," he said. "I'm not married."

  "Ray didn't tell me you were good-looking."

  Jesus, Colson's daughter. He wished she wouldn't look at his reddened, unshaven, grinning face. "Yeah, well, Ray didn't tell me he had a good-looking lineman for a daughter. You are a lineman? Line person."

  "Lineman," she said. "That's what we're called."

  "Okay."

  "Well," she said, "my father...."

  They moved to the door.

  He saw Lloyd and Speedy Lewison lounging outside Can-dace Fuentes's cubicle. Lloyd looked refreshed and shaved, Andy noticed, despite their long night. Speedy looked beat. Speedy always came in early, and he always looked as if it half killed him to do so. Andy could hear Candace's hoot from inside. Candace only came in early if there had been a night call that she missed. In her opinion, all male engineers were inferior and their work had to be checked.

  Reflexively, Andy checked the map on the wall. All lights white.

  "Colson's.... your father's usually not in till about seven-thirty." Andy gestured down the hall toward Colson's office.

  "I know. I couldn't wait."

  Clearly, she wanted him to ask why. "Why?"

  "I found a tap."

  Lloyd and Speedy turned to look; Candace came out.

  Nell grinned, letting them in on it, but addressed Andy. "I found a wiretap. I was checking out the lines, over in Cupertino. A piece of somebody's roof came off in the wind and took out a cable. Anyway, I'm checking the damage, and I find a tap."

  Candace moved closer. She glanced at Nell's tool belt, then turned her face up to Nell. Her dark pageboy flared.

  Lloyd had remarked once that Candace looked like a doll, like some prim little girl had patiently turned Candace's hair under in the pageboy and dressed her in an unending wardrobe of pleats.

  Candace did look like a doll next to Nell, but Nell could hardly have been the prim little girl.

  "So what did you do about this tap?" Candace asked.

  "Reported it. We're not in the business of tapping phones."

  "We?" Candace said.

  "You know." Andy patted Candace's shoulder. "We who labor in the public interest."

  "He really buys that," Candace told Nell. "That's why he's such a nerd."

  Lloyd shrugged. "He's fucking brain-damaged."

  "He's a romantic," Speedy said. "We're all romantics. Our phone system's an engineered miracle. We'll cross swords with anybody who messes with it." Lloyd, in his cataloging of the group, had once called Speedy a romantic, because of the dark hollows beneath his eyes, blacker than his skin, because of his gaunt frame, and because he wore satiny shirts that billowed. Any shirt on Speedy would billow, Candace had added.

  Speedy saluted Nell. "Find some more taps."

  "Are you joking with me?"

  "We've got a phreak," Andy told Nell. "You know about phreaks?"

  She nodded. "They're into free phone calls."

  "This one's into our E-mail," Candace said. "He leaves cute little messages."

  "He does more than that," Andy said, "he snoops. He knows a lot of stuff he shouldn't know...."

  "He'll leave a message about a failure somewhere," Candace cut in, "and then challenge us to get it fixed. I left a message for him once. I told him he's a strange, pitiable creature who hasn't got the balls to interact with people face-to-face. I signed it 'Lady.' He tried to initiate a dialog with me."

  "He?" Nell asked.

  "Acts like a he. Can you see a woman playing games like that?"

  Nell shrugged. "How does he get in?"

  Andy said quickly, "We don't know. Telco bulletin board, maybe. If you know the code you can log on and gossip." He realized he was competing with Candace for Nell's attention.

  "Your wireta
p," Lloyd told Nell, "is some guy who thinks his wife's cheating."

  Ray Colson came into the room.

  "Morning."

  "Hey, boss man."

  "Morning, Ray."

  "Nice day. Storm's over."

  "Good morning," Colson said.

  Nell smiled.

  Andy wanted to talk to Colson about the five-E, but he didn't want to do it in front of Nell.

  Colson surveyed them one by one, precise, like an oscilloscope registering electrical variations. Lloyd had said about Colson that he didn't see the human form when he looked at you, he saw electrical waveforms instead. Waveforms could be calibrated on a scope, and could be triggered at different points by proper adjustment of the control knobs.

  Andy looked at Colson more closely than he ever had before. Nell's father. She didn't get her sunny hair from him; Colson's thinning hair was dark. He had a strong, angular face, with shadowed eyes and a sharp nose. Only around the mouth did he resemble Nell, and his finely rounded lips, almost always compressed, were at odds with the rest of his face.

  Nell hooked her thumbs in her tool belt. "Hi, Ray."

  "Nell." Colson nodded.

  Andy waited for Colson to hustle her off to his office. Surprisingly, Colson didn't seem to mind standing in front of the group with his daughter, whose existence he had never bothered to mention. Neither did he act as if he knew what to do with her.

  "I found a wiretap."

  Colson's face displayed interest.

  Nell described the line damage, the tap, how she reported it, what Pacific Bell was going to do about it.

  "Whose tap was it?" Colson had his full oscilloscope focus on her.

  She said, cool, "Probably some guy listening in on his wife."

  "That's a bullshit theory." Colson's lips compressed, and he looked away.

  Nell strode across the room, the tools on her belt clattering. She stopped at the double glass doors and looked back at them. Her lips compressed, but her mouth twitched up at the corners. Andy couldn't tell whether she was angry or amused. She was Colson's daughter, all right.

  She waved to Andy. "Sorry I woke you."

  Someone snickered. Speedy. Andy felt the heat rise in his face, the second time in one morning.

  Colson was focusing on him. Nothing was more vital to Colson now than Andy. Jesus, Andy thought, Colson wasn't suddenly going to become the vigilant father. Andy looked levelly at Colson. It could have lasted minutes, or nanoseconds. Then Nell pulled open the door and Colson reoriented himself toward his daughter.

  "Nell."

  She paused, holding open the door.

  "That Pacific Bell van in the back parking lot, the one with the 'E.T. Phone Home' bumper sticker. Is that yours?"

  "Yeah."

  "Next time, park it in the visitors' lot."

  Her lips formed a tight, straight line. This time, Andy thought, there was no question. She was angry. She released the door, and it closed with the sound of a sharply indrawn breath.

  Colson turned back to the group, unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, and folded his sleeves in neat segments up his forearms. "In my office, people, I want to hear about that five-E."

  * * *

  Colson's office, in the telco hierarchy, was midlevel. It had a wooden desk and table and two visitor chairs, whereas the engineers' and programmers' cubicles each had a metal desk and no visitor chairs. Colson never conferenced in the cubicles.

  The 5ESS group crowded Colson's office. Candace and Lloyd took the chairs; Andy and Speedy settled on the table.

  Colson folded the trouble report and creased it with a thumbnail. He pointed at Andy, "Good work."

  "I didn't find anything, Ray."

  "You followed procedure."

  Colson was being honest in his praise, Andy knew, but it was low-level praise. The only thing Colson truly admired was brilliance, and when somebody on the team showed it, Colson rewarded it with a look of startled appreciation.

  Outside Colson's office, there were sounds of more R-TAC people coming through the glass doors. Power supply people, specialists on other switches. But the 5ESS group considered themselves the R-TAC elite: trained to the apex in both hardware and software, high priests of the five-E.

  "So, does anybody know what happened last night?"

  The five-E team was silent.

  "Candace?"

  "I checked out the reports this morning, Ray. I haven't found anything yet."

  "Well, if Candace can't find it—" Speedy began.

  "Speedy?" Colson said.

  "—then why ask me? I'm mortal."

  "Distressingly," Candace said.

  "Lloyd?"

  "I've been on it the whole night, Ray. It went down, it went up."

  "Andy?"

  "I don't like it. A total switch failure, out of left field. Then it fixes itself."

  "So we don't know anything," Colson said.

  "What about a virus?" Speedy put in.

  "Not likely," said Andy. "The program boots normally, no flaky error messages...."

  "If it's a virus, I'll eat it," said Lloyd. "We're not talking about a P.C. here, we've got a mainframe processor with the best data integrity in the business."

  "There's no such animal as one hundred percent data integrity," Speedy said.

  "It's not a virus, it's a garden-variety bug," Lloyd said. "Somebody forgot to reenable the memory protect and we ended up with a stack overflow. Whatever. It'll either pop up again and we'll trap it or it'll bury itself and we can forget it."

  "I tend to agree," Colson said.

  "So do I," said Andy, "but it's a bug that took down the whole five-E. Let's pursue it now."

  Speedy groaned. "Do we really want to waste our precious bodily fluids sweating over this?"

  "The fucker's fixed. It's processing calls," Lloyd said. "Andy's so fucking dumb he couldn't figure out why it went down, and he hasn't noticed that it's back on-line."

  "You're jealous," Candace told Lloyd. "Andy's so compulsive he can't give up and admit defeat. I'll cover for him. I'll find the problem."

  "No, no, I'll find it," said Speedy. "I got up early for this."

  Andy suddenly yawned, bone-weary. He rubbed his hands across his face and flinched when he touched his sore temple.

  The team stared. "You feel all right, Andy?" Colson finally asked.

  "Fine."

  Lloyd stroked his tie. "Hard work always gives him a headache."

  "Okay," Colson said. "Anybody want to punt this up to PECC?"

  Nobody on the five-E team wanted to punt it up to PECC, AT&T's Product Engineering Control Center. If PECC punted, the problem went all the way back to Bell Labs, where the engineers who had designed the problematic piece of equipment could scratch their heads over it. Andy had put in a spell at Bell Labs, wrestling with speaker verification algorithms. The work had been sexy, fun, but he found himself putting in seventy-hour weeks and feeling guilty as hell if he took a weekend off. Then one day in the halls he had run into a research engineer walking backward. The guy always walked backward, someone said, because he had a problem with balance. Andy had decided that it was time to take a break from research.

  Nobody, including Colson, wanted to admit defeat and punt the five-E failure up to PECC or back to Bell Labs.

  Colson laced his fingers. "Speedy, you're on it. Candace, take the new alarms. Andy and Lloyd, nice work last night, now go home and sleep."

  The phone rang. Andy was always amazed watching Colson on the phone because Colson's features would soften, his mouth would relax. With the handset at his ear and the switch-hook under his fingers, he was interfacing with a piece of equipment and he was happy.

  Colson hung up. "That was Pac Bell. They're cutting over to a number five in Palo Alto tomorrow night. They want someone from R-TAC to hold their hand." Colson's gaze registered the team, one by one. "You, Andy."

  Candace flicked up a hand. "I'll go too. I love cutovers."

  CHAPTER 4

  Across the
street, people hurried through the dark to the nondescript door in the huge brick building, knocked, and were admitted. Like some secret society.

  The switch office did not have windows. One reason was that people who worked there cared more about computer monitors than a view of the sidewalk. A more important reason—vastly more important, Interrupt thought—was security. If a switch office had windows, a terrorist could throw a bomb through the glass and cripple a community's ability to communicate.

  Interrupt did not need windows.

  "Andy Faulkner, AT&T," Andy told the woman with the clipboard. "From the Regional Technical Assistance Center."

  She found his name, crossed it off, and rummaged through a box full of badges to find his ID.

  A cutover always drew a crowd. A cutover was like a road test on a new car, like a presidential election—an event that dozens of people had worked toward for months and in some cases years, a climax of effort and guesswork and hope and risk, a moment of truth when there could be only success or failure.

  Andy walked into the cavernous switch room. For a moment, he stayed back in the shadows and watched. If Joe Faulkner had been alive, Andy would have brought him here, would have dragged him along the way that Joe had dragged Andy to his bridge openings.

  When they knock out the last scaffold on your bridge, Dad. You know what it's like. You're up for two days and nights, you're a bastard half the time and a prince half the time. You poured your guts into it and now it's out of your hands. Some guy in a hard hat is going to pull out the last piece of timber and all you can do is wait and watch and see if it stands on its own. So look at this, engineers built this. They don't know shit about lift spans because they're electrical engineers, but you look at this switch and tell me it's not a damn fine piece of engineering.

  Tall blue and white steel cabinets filled about a third of the room. Shoulder-to-shoulder in row after row, a silent army in blue and white.

  Okay, Andy thought, a bridge is prettier. But look at the boards, Dad.

  The cabinets held racks of circuit boards, thousands of them. Each board, studded with components, was a miniature city with power and life and purpose.