Deadline Y2K

by Mark Joseph

  “What kind of talent?” she asked.

  “Ever seen the machine code for the programmable logic processor in a DESS-5?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Doc asked a few more technical questions and liked her answers enough to ask, “How would you like a phone company of your very own?”

  “Ooo,” she said. “That would be fun. What can I do with it?”

  “Anything you want as long as you can keep it working.”

  “Who are you anyway?” she asked

  “The Lone Ranger,” Doc said. “Captain America, Yojimbo the samurai warrior, the man with no name. You can call me Doc. Will you meet me for a drink?”

  “I don’t have much to do with men,” she said.

  “Consider me a fellow geek and nothing more,” he declared. “I have real money, a legitimate company, and a job for the right person. I need someone who’s interested in computers that run telephone systems.”

  “This sounds like industrial espionage,” she said.

  “It’s much better than that.”

  They met at the Connection, a warehouse saloon for the adventurous. Carolyn turned out to be a leather-girl motorcycle dyke with a butch haircut and braces on her teeth.

  “You Doc?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Y2K.”

  “Ooo. I like it already. You can buy me a drink.”

  “Communications will be vital on the big day,” Doc explained as they sat in a corner away from the music. “We’ll need working phone lines, and T-4 lines direct to the power company’s control center and power plants and to the subway’s central dispatch center. We’ll also need an in-house router hub, telcom center and interconnect. Think you can handle all of that?”

  “Are you rich?” she asked.

  “Got it covered. You’ll have to trace the lines and physically check every switch.”

  “I’ll need a phone company truck.”

  “Okay.”

  “Logic probes, a lot of stuff.”

  “Anything you need.”

  “This could be the biggest phone goof of all time. Wow.”

  “Yes, but you can’t talk about it with your buddies. No bragging rights.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  “That’s part of the package. For two and a half years this will be your life, and the rest of the world will cease to exist.”

  Doc offered her the same money and bonus as Bo, a considerably better deal than her job as a lowly programmer for Bell South. The next day he took her to New York and introduced her to Bo.

  “I’m Con Edison,” Bo said. “Who are you?”

  “I guess I’m Bell Atlantic,” Carolyn answered.

  * * *

  Ronnie Fong was a fatally cute young Chinese woman from San Francisco with four nose rings, each of which represented a triumphant computer break-in at the Department of Defense. DOD hadn’t exactly proved she’d done it, but they’d offered her a job hacking into computers at the Chinese Ministry of Defense. She’d laughed at them. When Doc called, she naturally believed he was a missionary from her nemesis in the Pentagon. He asked her to meet him at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store, a North Beach café.

  “The only reason I came,” she said when she walked into the café, “is because otherwise you DOD people won’t leave me alone.”

  “I’m not one of them,” Doc protested.

  “Then how did you find me? How do you even know about me?” Angry and defiant, she refused a menu, folded her arms across her chest and dared him to speak.

  “You know about Y2K?” he asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Where are you planning on greeting the millennium?”

  “At a friend’s place with its own generators and solar panels.”

  “So you get the picture.”

  She shrugged.

  “How would you like to spend New Year’s Eve in New York?”

  “Are you out of your mind? That’s the last place I’d want to be.”

  “How would you like to be in New York and running computers for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection? That’s their fancy name for the water department.” She looked at him like he was out of his mind. “You could add another ring to your collection,” he added.

  “This is a con job,” she said. “You’re DOD.”

  “How can I prove I’m not? If I was, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you. I’d be taking you away in handcuffs.” He handed her a plane ticket and cash. “Come to New York and decide for yourself. You’ll be the water department, and just to keep you interested, we need to be kept up-to-date on Space Command in Colorado Springs. Your familiarity with military computers will come in handy.”

  “For real?”

  “For money.”

  “How much money?”

  Doc scribbled a number on a napkin and Ronnie counted the zeros.

  “That make it worth it?”

  * * *

  Ronnie arrived on Nassau Street skeptical and suspicious until Doc helped her hack into a database at one of New York’s fourteen sewage treatment plants. Inside the water department’s computer, he took her behind the data to the machine language, a tiny portion of which he’d reverse compiled into source code written in a mishmash of seventeen different computer languages. It was a Y2K problem of the worst order containing hidden date fields, programmer errors, kludges, and previous bad fixes.

  “If this isn’t fixed, the city of New York will be buried in human fecal matter,” Doc said. “There’s no problem getting water into the city. New York has a fabulous water supply system that’s almost entirely gravity-driven. The problem will be getting the dirty water out.”

  “What are they doing about it?” Ronnie asked.

  “They?” he hooted. “There is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ is a myth. In this case, ‘they’ will be you. And even if you duplicate all this software and make it work, the water system has thousands of embedded chips in pumps and valves and all over the place.” Doc grinned and unrolled a huge map. “This is a detailed diagram of all the pipes, tunnels, and treatment plants, the entire sewer system of Manhattan. I’ve traced the critical paths and marked the pumps. You can visit every one.”

  “Good Lord, this is a shitty job.”

  “You have to get your hands dirty to earn your million bucks, Ronnie.”

  “And when I’m not down in the sewers, I get to play with Space Command, right?”

  “Right. We need to track communication and radio-navigation satellites. There’s no code work involved, only monitoring. When the big night comes, we’ll need to know what’s working and what isn’t.”

  “You’re asking for a lot,” Ronnie said.

  “Yes. I’m asking for the impossible. Are you in?”

  “We’re close to Chinatown, right?”

  “Yeah. Just a few blocks.”

  “There has to be a catch.”

  “There is,” Doc said. “For two and a half years, you’ll have no other life.”

  “This is making me thirsty,” Ronnie said. “Can I make some tea?”

  When Ronnie came out of the kitchen, Doc was gone and Bo and Carolyn were in the lounge.

  “What kind of music do you like?” Carolyn asked. “I like anything loud.”

  “That’s cool,” Ronnie said. “You know, what I would like is some way to make this pot of tea more interesting.”

  * * *

  Adrian Hoffman was a tubby little Florida nerd who got a thrill from bringing railroad traffic control systems to a screeching halt. Adrian’s favorite trick was hacking into a railroad’s signaling systems, setting all signals to red, and shutting down dozens of trains at once.

  “You don’t care for trains?” Doc asked via e-mail.

  “I love trains. I have the world’s biggest train set, Amtrak.”

  “Do you ever set the signals to green?”

  “I don’t want to kill any
one,” Adrian replied.

  “How old are you?” Doc asked.

  “Eighteen.”

  “How do you feel about metropolitan transportation systems?”

  “They’re cool.”

  “Do you think you could run the New York City subway system?”

  “Lots of trains. Lots of signals. Yeah, sure.”

  “The idea is to keep the trains running, not shut them down.”

  “Turnabout is fair play,” Adrian wrote.

  “I’ll send you a plane ticket and a thousand bucks.”

  “No. Make it a train ticket. This is way cool. I’ve never been to New York.”

  * * *

  Four days later Doc sat with Adrian in Penn Station thinking: problem child, basketcase, wacko, borderline psychotic, but Jesus, does he know his stuff. Adrian looked like a classic nerd with his thick glasses and grungy long hair. He almost never spoke and brought with him a detailed compilation of every computer system used by America’s six largest railroads.

  “Wanna see New York?” Doc asked.

  Doc didn’t take him to the Empire State Building or Central Park. Instead, they spent twelve hours on the subway. Adrian stood in the front car with a view of the track ahead, and in this manner they criss-crossed the city from Far Rockaway to Riverdale, underground, aboveground, through bridges and tunnels, the trains roaring down the tracks, the signals stretched out in the darkness, green and red, an ever-beckoning stream of lights. They stopped at Grand Central and a subway yard in Queens where the platform overlooked a fleet of trains. Adrian soaked it up like a sponge, saying little, and after a couple of hours was directing the tour himself.

  “This is your new train set, Adrian. That cool with you?”

  “I dig it,” Adrian said. “Okay.”

  * * *

  To round out his team Doc needed an overall hardware specialist who could keep the computers and communication equipment in tip-top shape. Bo knew of a hacker from San Jose who’d stolen advanced microprocessor designs from Intel and attempted to sell them to an Indonesian cartel. His name was Judd Fernandez and he wasn’t hard to locate. Doc was waiting when he walked out of San Quentin dressed in a three-piece suit that complemented his shaved head and trim goatee.

  “Need a job?” Doc asked him outside the prison gate.

  “I need a drink. Who the fuck are you?”

  “A guy offering you a job, a real job, not one that will send you back to the joint.”

  “Take me to the No Name Bar in Sausalito and buy me a Bud first.”

  During his three-year sojourn in prison, Judd had managed San Quentin’s computer system and had earned a reputation on the Net as a hardware guru.

  “How much did the Indonesians offer you?” Doc asked over a beer in Sausalito.

  “Not enough.”

  “How much is enough?”

  “I’m not interested in money.”

  “What then?”

  “Time,” Judd replied. “I want time. I just gave away three years that I’ll never get back.”

  “Okay,” Doc said. “Give me two years and you’ll have the rest of your life.”

  “I have other offers,” he said.

  “I know,” Doc said. “You’re famous.”

  “What’s the job?”

  After Doc outlined his project, Judd looked around the bar, then said, “I could go for a little New York, but you’ll have to clear it with my parole officer.”

  * * *

  A couple of days later Judd walked slowly around the IBM s/390, a vertical box of burnished metal six feet six inches tall, five feet wide and four feet deep. The mainframe. The big, bad ’puter that was going to power up New York. Inside the box were 120 central processing units, seven operating systems, and more memory than all the elephants in Africa. Lying next to the computer on the floor, an imposing stack of paper three feet high was waiting: the operating manual. Instruction one: plug it in. Instruction two: this is the “on” button. Christ almighty, he thought. He grabbed the top four inches and started to read.

  3

  “You are soldiers now and must conduct yourselves with military discipline,” Doc said to his assembled team. “It may seem overstated and melodramatic, but it’s the only way to get this project done on time.”

  “Do we have to salute?” Bo asked sarcastically.

  “No.”

  “Wear uniforms?”

  “No.”

  “I like uniforms,” Ronnie declared. “Let’s have uniforms.”

  “Uniforms would draw attention, and that’s not allowed. There’s only going to be one rule,” Doc said. “You can’t talk about what you do here. No one outside the project can ever get the slightest whiff of what we’re doing. No one.” Doc watched their faces as the implications of his rule seeped in. “You have friends, family, lovers, even enemies,” he went on, “and you can’t tell them what you’re doing. It’s like doing classified work for the CIA. It’s secret, and secret means secret. No exceptions.”

  “What should we tell people, then?” Bo asked. “I talk to my mother almost every day. If I don’t call her, she’ll track me down and show up here.”

  “Tell your mother you’re employed by a software company in New York and you’re working on Y2K. Don’t tell them anything if you can avoid it. Anyone have a problem with this?”

  “What happens if we break the rule?” Adrian asked.

  “You’re on your honor not to,” Doc said. “I’m not going to follow you around or tap your phone.”

  “But what if we do?” Adrian persisted.

  “Then you’re gone, adios, good-bye. No money, no fun and games, no million-dollar bonus.”

  “How will you know?”

  Doc glared at Adrian and thought he’d made a mistake. He never should have let the kid get past Penn Station. He should’ve bought him a return ticket and sent him back to Florida, but here he was on Nassau Street with his spacey eyes and Grateful Dead hair and, “I don’t wanna follow no rules, nya nana na na.” To hell with that.

  “Are you going to be a pain in the ass, Adrian?” Doc snapped.

  “I just don’t like rules, anybody’s rules.”

  “We can argue about anything else, and I’m sure we will, but not about this. If you don’t get it, Adrian, I’m sorry. The end. You can go home right now.”

  Doc grabbed a phone, dialed directory assistance, and said, “Amtrak, please.”

  “Wait a minute,” Judd said. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Please do.”

  Judd put his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and drew him off into a corner.

  “What’s your problem?” Judd asked quietly.

  “I can’t stand rules.”

  “We’re only going to have one. A hacker should understand that if you talk, you get caught and they take your toys away. Down in Florida you had one old PC. Here, you have a huge fucking mainframe and anything else you want. You don’t want to lose that, do you?”

  Adrian folded his arms across his chest and fumed.

  “This isn’t school,” Judd said. “I know what kind of a guy you are, Adrian. You’re the kid nobody likes, the kid people make fun of because you’re so fucking smart. You use your intelligence as a weapon and tear into them, don’t you. You laugh at their mistakes in school and they hate you and you hate them. Am I right? I can see it in your eyes. You screw around with the trains because it gives you a sense of power, and every time you do it and don’t get caught, you feel even more powerful. But listen to this, you little shit. Doc found you, and that means sooner or later you would’ve been caught, and if you caused a train wreck, you’d be sent to the slammer, like me. Doc saved your ass from getting into real trouble, and you owe him. We all do. All of us have gone through what you’ve experienced. Bo, Carolyn, Ronnie, and me, too, we’re all smart, and we’ve all been laughed at and teased and we’ve all thought of revenge. Revenge put me in prison. Doc wants us to do something important, and if you can’t handle that, if you
can’t put away your bullshit and nerdy little thoughts of revenge and getting even, well, forget it. Are you too selfish to understand that? Are you just a little asshole? We don’t have time to fuck around here. Get with the program now, or go back to Orlando.”

  A little wheel turned over in Adrian’s mind, and he understood he was being treated like an adult for the first time. Or the last time.

  “No talking, no bragging,” he said. “I get it.”

  “I don’t want to have to babysit you. Now, are you in or out?”

  “I don’t want to go back to Florida.”

  “Doc!”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s gonna be okay.”

  * * *

  They all came from places deep in the American soul, the black middle class, the barrio, Chinatown, the dispossessed working class, and had used their brains to enter the world of technology. Each had taken an unorthodox route to cybernetics and computers, and Doc had chosen them because he knew mavericks often had the keenest, most creative minds.

  Ronnie Fong was the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who’d rejected her because she’d rejected the restrictions of their traditions. At the same time she clung to her culture. In New York she shopped and ate in Chinatown and delighted in speaking Cantonese with the fishmonger. In her heart she believed a million dollars would go a long way toward a reconciliation with her family in San Francisco.

  Carolyn Harvey had been ostracized by her family because she was flamboyantly gay. Technology was her release from a world of prejudice and fear, and she’d created an identity based on defiance. Coming to New York was an act of liberation. There, in the crush of people of every possible description, she didn’t have to explain or defend herself. She could just be, and she turned her back on Nashville without a second thought.

  Bo Daniels’ father was an accountant and his mother owned a fashionable boutique. He spoke middle-class English with a Boston accent, went to all the right schools, and had learned early on that computers didn’t care if he was black or white. Chase had hired him right out of Boston College, put him in the back room of the Boston branch and left him alone. As he watched the drones in the bank being moved around like chess pieces by higher management, he’d decided he didn’t want a career at Chase. Corporate culture didn’t interest him unless he created it, and that wouldn’t happen at Chase or any other bank. He wanted to jump right to the top and be the boss. Less of an outlaw than the others, he had an entrepreneurial spirit and saw in his new work an opportunity to go into business for himself. In the months after the millennium bug struck, he figured electric utilities would need new software to get up and running again. Bo and Doc agreed that the software they were developing for ConEd could be repackaged and sold after January 1, 2000.