Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  His skin crawled under Feferman's heavy hand. "Let go of me, Mr. Feferman."

  Feferman removed his hand. "Go build the machine. We'll notify you the moment we have something on your son."

  "You can notify me at home." Wayne's room, he thought, where it had started, about this time yesterday. Just a day since Wayne disappeared, but those hours belonged to Colson.

  Feferman said quietly, "I'd like you to work with us. This is a request, not an order." The gentled bear. "You're good. And it will keep your mind occupied while you wait."

  Andy stood aside for Feferman to pass. It doesn't work now, he thought dispassionately, game's over. "Occupy your fucking tiger team. I'm going home."

  CHAPTER 23

  She lay in darkness, wrapped in white.

  Andy sat bolt upright, heart slamming. The bedroom lights blazed and he was surprised that he had fallen asleep with the lights on, had fallen asleep at all. A sheet covered him, nothing else. The sheet was old, abraded times without number by granules of soap to a thinned chalky textile that clung to his limbs.

  He had just dreamed of that sheet, only in his dream it was a shroud wrapped around Candace Fuentes.

  He collapsed back flat on the bed. All in white. Like the Lady in the Snow.

  It had been before Wayne, when he and Sandra were still kids playing at marriage. Up in the snow at Bear Valley. On a lunch break outside the ski lodge Sandra had started to build a snowman. Somehow, it became a contest. He had scraped up his own pile of snow and started to carve. As her snowman rose in classic great humps, he roughed out a snow body lying on its side. Quickly, it took the shape of a woman. Skiers clumped over in their unbuckled boots to watch, heating up the contest. Only by now it was no contest, because the onlookers were openly admiring as Andy sculpted the arms and shaved away snow crystals between the curled fingers. Sandra suddenly stopped, leaving her snowman headless. "Where'd you learn to do that?" she'd said. "From my mother and sister," he'd answered. It was a half-truth. Art in the snow in the harsh Adirondack winters, his snow sculptures ornamenting the whitened lawn to impress Elaine and Tammy. When he finished, the watching skiers applauded. "The Lady in the Snow," somebody said. Andy straightened, stretching, and looked down on his work. It was good; the lady could have been real, fallen asleep and dusted with snow, a true Snow White. "She looks dead," Sandra had said. He got angry, childishly angry, and stalked up the wooden stairs to the lodge and found the counter where condiments and utensils were laid out. When he returned she was smiling tightly, arms crossed, her familiar irritation that stopped short of real anger. He knelt beside the snow woman, ripped open a packet of catsup, squirted it onto her chest, and stabbed a plastic knife between her breasts. Behind him, Sandra gasped. "You're right," he'd said, twisting away from his Lady in the Snow, "she's dead."

  He flung off the sheet and shoved out of the bed. He had to move.

  He went into Wayne's room and checked the computer screen for messages, not really expecting any, but it was a habit by now, stop in Wayne's room and check the screen every time he passed down the hall. He had left the computer on, connected to the phone lines through a communications board, ever since he had found Interrupts message on the TDD printer.

  He sat on Wayne's bed, then got up to turn up the ringer on Wayne's phone, so that he could hear it when Feferman called again. Feferman had called once and said that Colson was "stonewalling," and Feferman had never seen anyone do it better.

  He went back to Wayne's bed and stretched out. He had never been so wide awake. He had never been so tired. He pulled the pillow out from under the bedspread, dragging something along with it. Wayne's pajamas. Star Trek pajamas with the U.S.S. Enterprise blazing across the chest.

  Nothing to do but wait for Feferman to call.

  Suddenly, he broke out in a sweat. What if Colson wasn't stonewalling?

  Call Feferman.

  No. Let the FBI do their job, he'd only screw it up.

  What if Colson wasn't Interrupt?

  Call. He was dialing, but the phone went dead. No sound but Colson's rare laughter, a dry deep-toned laugh, coming over the wire. Andy yanked the wire out of the wall but he couldn't silence Colson. Colson was broadcasting on an infinity transmitter but Andy couldn't find it.

  Someone was flashing a light in his eyes. He froze, listening. Colson's laugh had stopped. Just the light, on and off, on and off. He opened his eyes.

  The lamp on Wayne's desk was flashing.

  He stumbled out of the bed. He'd been sleeping again, he'd been dreaming, Colson had been laughing in a dream.

  The lamp went on and off. It was Wayne's Signalman control unit, flashing the lamp to signal an incoming telephone call.

  Feferman.

  Andy lunged around to Wayne's desk. It wasn't the telephone, it was the computer alarm that Andy had rigged up to work the Signalman, a visual alarm clock for his son.

  Someone had set the alarm.

  Andy focused on the screen. The time flashed back at him, in unison with the lamp. 4:10 a.m. He'd been asleep for hours. He felt as if he could sleep for days.

  The alarm. He hit the enter key and the lamp stopped flashing, the time disappeared from the screen and was replaced by two words.

  Call Mommy.

  Call Mommy?

  He rubbed his forehead, trying to rub out the fuzziness. Wayne must have set the alarm before he disappeared. But why would he set the alarm that far in advance to call his mother? At four-ten in the morning?

  Not Sandra's birthday. Sandra's birthday was in November, he thought sourly, and he had helped Wayne buy her a TDD for her birthday so she could take calls from her son.

  Call Mommy? What was the date? He'd been talking dates and times with Feferman and he didn't know the date. May something. He found the calendar in Wayne's drawer and then he understood. Today was Mother's Day.

  And 4:10 a.m. in California would be 7:10 a.m. in New York. Wayne was planning to call early, before the telephone lines got tied up with sons and daughters calling mothers in every town and city and state in the nation.

  Mother's Day was the busiest calling day of the entire year, busier than Christmas. So busy that nearly a quarter of the calls got blocked at some point during that day.

  Andy's head cleared.

  Ten years ago, Colson had to choose a trigger, a date ten years in the future that would unleash his Trojan horses in a massive attack on the telephone network. If he had wanted a date that would cause maximum disruption, he couldn't have done better than to choose Mother's Day.

  If Feferman's tiger team had the virtual machine up yet, they could confirm the Mother's Day trigger. If the machine wasn't ready, they would have to take his word for it.

  Within an hour, he suspected, they would have a real-time confirmation on real switches.

  Andy grabbed the telephone handset, thinking, maybe it's already started. But he got dial tone and punched in the number Feferman had given him.

  This year, Mother's Day was going to be a real bitch.

  CHAPTER 24

  The United States, with a thin slice of Canada above and Mexico below, floated in a sea of phosphorescent blue.

  The rear-projection screen covered the entire back wall. The blue shimmering down from the wall and the glow from workstation screens cast a haze over the room, giving Andy the sensation that he was underwater.

  Feferman, beside him, stared up at the screen. Bathed in blue, doused more liberally than usual with after-shave, the chief special agent complained that he had not slept well.

  But they'd let Colson sleep.

  "Mr. Colson's got a lawyer, we had to let him sleep." Feferman yawned. "He's awake now. Your wake-up call got everybody up and going. Mr. Colson and his lawyer and the FBI and my agents are having a very serious talk."

  On the wall, the United States pulsed with neon-green dots and crisscrossing green lines, real-time data on the state of the AT&T communications network transmitted from the Network Operations Center in Bedmi
nster, New Jersey.

  Andy closed his eyes and the United States went black as night. Systems crashing, switches failing, the network dying. Would that buy Wayne back? He opened his eyes and the United States was still on-line. What if the system didn't crash, what if they bypassed the trigger? How would a guy like Colson react to a ten-year failure? They could break him; he would crash. Would that buy Wayne back?

  "Does your blood run cold?" Andy said, glancing at Feferman.

  Feferman's expression was unreadable in the blue glare.

  "Colson's will," Andy said. He moved away from the chief special agent, but the whole room was Feferman's territory. It was the conference room where Andy had been interrogated and suspended, converted to the tiger team headquarters, and now cobbled into the "situation room." That's what the guy on the security comm lines was calling it, the situation room in Sunnyvale talking to Network Operations in Bedminster and corporate headquarters in New York. Four forty-five in the morning, in a controlled-atmosphere room, and people were already sweating. Agents, tiger team members, third-line managers, all pressed into the situation room and most of them staring up at the wall.

  The neon green flickered; every twelve seconds the circuits were sampled and updated; more green now.

  "We're still alive," someone said.

  The heaviest concentration of green was along the eastern seaboard, where it was 7:46 a.m. and people were up and calling. Happy Mother's Day, Mom, transmitting over thousands of wires. The midwest was darker, it was only 6:46 and traffic was just beginning to pick up. The mountain states were darker still, at 5:46, and the west coast at 4:46 was still sleeping off Saturday night; only the intrepid few were on the lines.

  Sunnyvale at 4:46. Wayne had been gone thirty-eight hours. But the hours no longer belonged to Colson.

  Andy found a place against the opposite wall and stared at the map along with everybody else. Heads were angled to the right, watching the east coast because if the network was going to go down it would start there. If the trigger was 8:00 a.m., it would fire first on the east coast, then again and again across the nation as each time zone struck 8:00 a.m. Of course, if it did fire on the east coast, they would have the exact trigger time and they would know when to stop the processor clocks in the other time zones. But it would be a costly victory: the entire east coast lost, and the rest of the country saved only by shutting down the clocks.

  At the Palo Alto switch office, tiger team leaders were trying to boot the virtual machine. If they could get it running in time, they could find the trigger before it fired, and they could save the east coast. But the word from the Palo Alto switch office was "wait."

  Feferman was straddling a chair in the middle of the room: a great hulk with its head turned toward the east coast.

  Voices, low and vibrant, transmitted tension around the room like the high-speed telephone signals flashing around the map.

  A strained voice. "East is gonna have to TORC."

  "Par for Mother's Day."

  Already, the Mother's Day traffic was overloading on the east coast. The Network Operations Center would be doing a traffic-overload reroute control, hustling to divert calls from the overloaded area to open circuits. A call from New Jersey to New York, blocked by busy circuits, might be shot from New Jersey all the way out to Sunnyvale, where the circuits were free, then back across the country to reach New York. Detouring through the time zones.

  Andy scanned the east coast. Green lights flowered up and down the seaboard, traffic going toward maximum. In New York, was Sandra expecting a call from Wayne? She would be up, she never slept late, not even on Sunday, because "life's too short." He wasn't sure anymore what she'd be doing on a Sunday morning, but he wouldn't be surprised if it involved the telephone. Sandra was an arranger, she didn't like surprises, she liked to plan for the day to go the way she wanted, and she usually did it on the telephone. "Keeps you in business," she used to tell him. Sunday mornings, they would have bagels and cream cheese with the Sunday paper, and she would not let him go for the bagels until she'd called to be sure the deli hadn't run out of onion bagels, and if they had she'd keep calling until she found a place that had not.

  He tasted the old anger; it wouldn't be a tragedy if Sandra's line were cut.

  But this wasn't any Sunday morning, this was Mother's Day, a day when love, duty, guilt, or habit drove nearly every mother's son or daughter to the phone. If she didn't get a call from her son, she just might pick up the TDD and try to call him. She might, Andy thought coldly, because she didn't know that Wayne was missing. If Andy had called to tell her, she would have been shocked, she might even have volunteered to catch a flight out to California, but he had thought that she would prefer not to be shocked.

  The east coast was bright green, Sandra and several million other callers burning up the lines.

  Andy followed the green lights up the coast through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, up to the far edge of Maine. The map turned dark as he followed it across the Maine border into New Brunswick. No neon-green dots or crisscrosses lit up the slices of Canada and Mexico that showed on the map, because Mexico and Canada were not part of the AT&T communications network.

  "Oh, my God," Andy said, louder than he'd thought, for all the heads in the room snapped around in his direction.

  Feferman was up, knocking over his chair. "What, Faulkner?"

  "Time zones."

  "Yeah?"

  "Atlantic time hits first...."

  "That's Canada," a tech said.

  People turned to the screen again, to the time zone divisions, to the blacked-out hunk of the map that jutted into the Atlantic Ocean: Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Labrador, and the far eastern slice of Quebec, where it was 8:47 a.m. Atlantic daylight time. The Island of Newfoundland had its own time zone, half an hour ahead of Atlantic.

  Objections flew.

  "What's Canada to do with it?"

  "Atlantic's off the monitor, Network's not even tracking the Atlantic zone. What the....?"

  "Canada switches with Northern Telecom."

  "Some GTE there too."

  "Are we in Canada? What's Canada....?"

  "Northern Telecom is Canada."

  Feferman's voice cut through the crosstalk. "Faulkner, what are you saying? Are you saying that he got to the Canadian network too?"

  "No!" one of the managers broke in. "It's marketing. We've had a joint venture with GTE for years comarketing equipment, their small switches and our big ones." She swept a hand up high from right to left, from the Atlantic to the Pacific zones. "Ask any product manager. Been trying to crack the Canadian market for years."

  Andy nodded. "That's what I'm saying."

  Feferman was on point, heavy head swinging between the manager and Andy. "Do we have switches in Canada?"

  The manager shook her head; she didn't know.

  Canada was touchy about the United States, about domination by its southern neighbor. Northern Telecom built good switches, and if the Canadians could buy good homegrown equipment, they would. But AT&T built good switches too, and if it could sell to the Canadians, it would.

  "Faulkner!" Feferman said.

  "I don't know, but I think you better find out."

  Feferman was already across the room, commandeering the line to New York.

  Andy was counting on the chief special agent. Right now, Feferman owned AT&T, he was the telco, and he would charge through bureaucracies, across touchy international borders like a maddened bear.

  "Number five ESS, number four ESS, anything that uses the 3B20D or 20E processor," Feferman was growling into the phone.

  "No, just the Atlantic time zone—and that Newfoundland zone—I don't give a rat's ass about the rest."

  Andy watched the map, framing Feferman's huge silhouette. 4:57 a.m., 5:57, 6:57, 7:57 across the time zones. Coming up on the hour. Green lights multiplying like bacteria in a petri dish. 8:57 a.m. Atlantic time, 9:27 Newfoundland time; if they'd been sa
mpling Canadian circuits, the darkened eastern provinces would be pulsing green.

  Did they have Mother's Day in Canada?

  8:58 a.m. Atlantic time. 8:59, coming up hard on the hour.

  Feferman was sputtering into the phone.

  Nine o'clock, Atlantic time.

  "Ha!" Feferman shouted, stiffening every body in the room. He muffled the mouthpiece with one big hand and grinned fiercely at Andy, showing teeth stained blue by the light from the wail. "Couple of cities in Nova Scotia, been running our number fives over a year. And one of our broadbands that switches their trans-Atlantic TV traffic. They're all down, Faulkner. The poor Canucks were still running diagnostics when we got through on our emergency lines."

  This was it, Andy thought coolly, this was the trigger. The minute, the second, the time that Ray Colson had been waiting ten years for. "What time did they fail?" he said, his throat tight, not cool at all.

  "Eight-thirteen, on the nose."

  Eight-thirteen. The day, the hour, the precise minute had arrived, the Trojan horses had finally received their orders of attack. Go. Seize control of the operating system and take the switches down.

  The room fell quiet as techs, tiger team members, managers, security agents, and the chief special agent himself looked silently up at the darkened patches of land jutting out beyond Maine.

  "Which one is Nova Scotia?" someone asked.

  "Forget Nova Scotia," Feferman boomed out. "In ten minutes our whole east coast is going high and dry. Nobody'll be able to call their shrink, and we're going to catch hell for it." He glared around the room. "And rightly so." His glare caught on Andy. "Unless Mr. Faulkner's bypass surgery works." Feferman snatched up the comm line again.

  Andy wanted to get his hands on the machines, get to the closest switching control center and do it himself. Here in the situation room they could do nothing but wait. Now it was up to the maintenance engineers, good solid people who handled the switches with the fond discipline of seasoned parents. In control centers for every superprocessor on the map, they were ready to stop the clocks just shy of 8:13 a.m. Piece of cake, just tap in a couple of instructions and take a bite out of time.