Deadline Y2K

by Mark Joseph

  “Dr. Downs? This is George Kirosawa from the Chase account. I’d hoped you’d be in early this morning.”

  “Good morning, George. Everything all right?”

  “Well, no, actually. I’ve been watching the news, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to ride the train this morning. I hope you understand.”

  “The subway will be all right, George. They won’t have any problems until late tonight, if then.”

  “I know, but my wife is terrified and my kids are upset. These reports from New Zealand and Russia have her shaking. I have to stay here with her.”

  “Well, I understand,” Doc said. “It’s all right. Happy New Year.”

  “You, too, Dr. Downs. Thanks.”

  It was starting.

  As the day progressed, fear and tension among knowledgeable, rational people could be unbearable by noon, let alone midnight. Staying home was a good idea for anyone with a family.

  He heard a burst of noise in the corridor and peeked out to see the public relations director Jody Maxwell slumped against the wall and uttering sighs and growls of irritation.

  Jody had dressed her plump, expressive body in pale green Armani for her press conference with the bank’s chief financial officer. In her late twenties, she was the rare geek who’d crossed the line to conventional businesshood. She knew the ins and outs of successful public relations as well as she understood computers, and she had a nongeeky earthiness that Doc liked.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, concerned to see her disheveled.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “First, my neighbor stood on his balcony and threw his laptop down three stories into the street. I heard the crash and a scream and went out on my balcony, and he was right there looking like Jack Nicholson in The Shining with wild eyes staring down at the sidewalk. He almost hit a woman walking her dog.”

  “Wow,” Doc said. “What did he say?”

  “That’s what was so weird. He didn’t say anything. And then on the subway this group of about twenty lunatics crowded on and started handing out pamphlets, and when people refused their shitty little booklets, they threw them in their faces. I’m telling you, it was completely insane. Renounce your sins, it said. Judgment Day is here. They were all Asians, Koreans I think, and people got pissed off. One guy punched this woman and broke her glasses. I got off a stop early and walked. It’s crazy out there. People are dressed up in paper hats and blowing horns. I saw a naked woman with ‘2000’ painted across her tits. I swear to God.”

  “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “How about a shot of Scotch.”

  “Vodka.”

  “Even better. Donald in?”

  “His Donaldness is downstairs and waiting for you.”

  “We’re supposed to have a news conference with the bank this morning, but I don’t know…” she said, her voice trailing off.

  On TV CNN was reporting from Moscow where a very shaken Russian Minister of Information was announcing the imposition of martial law in Siberia.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Doc.

  “The Russians just paid for a bad mistake,” he said. “Siberia doesn’t have many computers except the oil and gas pipelines and the reactors, but Russian infrastructure is a mixed bag. The telephone system is an antique with old-fashioned mechanical relays that should have no problems. Moscow and Petersburg are going to get slammed, but most of rural Russia is still in the 19th Century. The bug can’t stop a horse from pulling a plow.”

  “Fascinating,” she said, sitting down and making herself comfortable. “Horrifying but fascinating.”

  Doc poured her a double shot of vodka. A noisy crowd of employees came into the office, laughing and picking bits of paper from their hair and clothing. Greetings of “Happy New Year” rattled down the corridor and someone blew a horn.

  “Don’t you want to join the party?” Doc asked.

  “Give me a break,” she said. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.”

  “Hail, Caesar,” Doc added. “Don’t worry, things aren’t as bad as they look.”

  On TV CNN reported three spontaneous antinuclear demonstrations at power plants in Oregon, California and Pennsylvania.

  “No nukes, no nukes, no nukes,” the people shouted. Unlike their Russian counterparts, the American police for once looked like they believed the demonstrators had a point.

  * * *

  At 8:45 Copeland was in his office with one computer screen showing the red button and another displaying a chart of Y2K stock symbols and data. VIAS, TPRO, ZITL, and DDIM were companies like his that sold Y2K software and services, but unlike his they were publicly traded. These stocks had risen steadily during the last three years, but in the month of December had leveled off. With more business than they could handle, Y2K companies were unable to take on new clients because the world had run out of programmers. Copeland didn’t care. In the last year he’d doubled programmers’ salaries in order to keep them, and passed the cost on to his clients. Today he was merely curious. In the past week he’d liquidated every stock and bond he owned, cashed out everything, and reduced his portfolio to zero. Tomorrow, if his scheme worked out the way it was supposed to, he wouldn’t need equity.

  Copeland tried to distract himself by watching the stock exchanges gear up for the opening bell. Since June every major corporation in America had been put on the spot and forced to declare itself Year 2000 compliant or not. Corporations unable to prove their computers were ready for the 21st Century had seen their stocks tumble to all-time lows. Some companies threatened with Y2K liability suits had tossed in the towel, declared bankruptcy and gone out of business. The corporate landscape was being recontoured in surprising ways. IBM was stronger than ever, but General Motors was dead in the water, a ship without a rudder. Like many large companies, GM had so many computers in so many divisions and was such a bureaucratic mess that the company simply didn’t know how many systems it had. One of its subsidiaries, GM Electronics, which manufactured computer chips for GM vehicles, had cranked out millions of chips infected with the millennium bug, and instead of dealing with the problem with engineers and technicians, GM had turned the fiasco over to lawyers and spin doctors. Meanwhile, computer-driven robots in GM assembly plants were poised to quit at midnight, although even if they functioned properly, they wouldn’t have much to do because only a fraction of the company’s 1300 suppliers were Year 2000 compliant. In the last few weeks GM had frantically tried to install new systems, but had run up against one of the harsher truths of the cybernetic world: any new system will be 100% over budget and take twice as long to install and test as any projection. The entire supply chain and sophisticated just-in-time delivery systems were going to break.

  So what, Copeland thought. I drive a Porsche. GM deserves to die.

  At 8:46, fourteen minutes before the stock markets were to open, America’s stockbrokers, day traders, and millions of ordinary citizens who owned shares in the global economy were in their hot seats. Their computers were humming and telephone headsets chattering away with the peculiar jargon that drives the world’s biggest pile of money and paper. The Internet and the floor of the New York Stock Exchanges were abuzz with the usual mix of fact and rumor, though the facts had more impact and the rumors were more intense than anyone could remember. The key fact, of course, was the reality of the millennium bug, a topic that had been debated for years. Virtually everyone in the financial marketplace was tracking the bug’s progress and trying to second-guess its effects on the portfolios they managed. Players were holding their breath, waiting to see what would happen next.

  They didn’t have to wait long. At 8:47 all the European exchanges simultaneously cut short trading and closed. At 8:49 the Federal Republic of Germany declared a bank holiday and closed all German banks. Like dominoes, the rest of Europe followed suit. During the previous year, much of the continent, particularly Germany, had persisted in belittling the millennium bug as a concoction of
hysterical alarmists. They’d ignored the bug, and thousands of their mission-critical computers were not Year 2000 compliant. After all, they were Europeans, older and wiser than the rest of the planet, and they knew better. Nothing would happen. A few computers would break down, that’s all. Computers failed all the time, didn’t they? As the chain reaction of events steamed across Siberia, the implications of their delusions hit them like a comet: the bug was real. With the shutdown of the nuclear plant in Magadan, the Europeans suddenly woke up and started to worry frantically about the hundreds of nuclear reactors between Moscow and Lisbon. Closing the stock exchanges and banks was easy but wasn’t life-threatening. Shutting down waves of power plants in the middle of winter was another matter entirely.

  Copeland’s phone was blinking nonstop, but he ignored it. Someone knocked on his door and he ignored that, too. His European clients were probably demanding his august telephonic presence, but he no longer cared what happened to them. On cable television’s New York 1, a United Nations representative from the European Union was explaining that the introduction of the new Euro currency had created massive software problems, and that countries and companies had had to decide whether to concentrate on the Euro conversion or deal with their Y2K problems. They chose the currency because that was hard cash and something they understood. Too bad for them, Copeland thought with sage nods of his head. Now their pig-headedness had caught up with them, and he wondered why the dumbbell Europeans had taken so long to close their markets. In any event, they did close them, and the ripple effect would be a complete shutting down of the global economy until the crisis had passed. How long that took depended to a great extent on what happened to the European nuclear reactors later in the day.

  In New York, the consensus was that the exchanges wouldn’t open. It was obvious and not unprecedented. On days when the markets were imbued with extreme anxiety, the exchanges remained closed. The Russian declaration of martial law in Siberia had been the first indication that the markets wouldn’t open. To keep things interesting, traders were betting for and against military rule being expended to the entire country. The air crashes in Micronesia provoked considerable interest as well, because wrecks always affected the market; however, a few airplanes falling out of the sky wouldn’t have a long-term impact on the global economy, and neither would any event in Russia which had become an economic cesspool. Japan, however, was a linchpin of the world economic order.

  At 8:52 a rumor flashed across millions of screens that declared the core computers at the Central Bank of Japan were at risk of crashing when the millennium bug hit Tokyo at ten o’clock, New York time. If Japan collapsed, economic chaos would be unleashed. With the European markets already shut down, there was no way the American markets would open.

  Chaos, meltdown, and no electronic fund transfers—the key to the heist. Seething, Copeland typed in Doc’s password and brought the Big Red Button up on his screen again. Should he wait until midnight and see what happened, or touch the screen? He fidgeted, pacing back and forth across the carpet, turning off the TV and then the computers. He was sick of looking at screens and hearing bad news, but he couldn’t help himself. He flipped on the TV again just in time to hear the announcement that neither the NYSE nor NASDAQ would open. As far as the stock markets were concerned, 1999 was over and had ended with a giant bust.

  Wall Street was stunned. Members of the financial community of Lower New York usually felt immune from distant events, but not this time. Buffered by the most powerful economy in the world and isolated in their private lives from the hand-to-mouth, daily struggles of ordinary people, they shared a peculiarly insular mentality fostered by a decade of nonstop prosperity. Many young brokers had never seen a down market. When the exchanges didn’t open, they closed their laptops and said “Happy New Year” to one another, hoping against hope that everything would return to normal on Tuesday morning. Somehow they knew it wouldn’t. Like most Americans, the brokers and bankers were abysmally ignorant of science and technology and had no real understanding of the millennium bug or the computers it was attacking. Nevertheless, however dimly, they could comprehend the effects. The global economy, absolutely dependent on computers, was vanishing before their eyes.

  * * *

  Jody and Doc sat quietly smoking and watching the rolling catastrophe now heading for Japan. Doc shook his head in despair. Misbehaving computers weren’t to blame—ignorance was the culprit, the ignorance he encountered every day from sales clerks who knew nothing about the products they sold and couldn’t make change without a calculator. The clerks were mere symbols who represented an empty, alienated, neurotic national existence, the talk shows that substituted for company, the telephone psychics, the thousands of hours of screaming advertising for products no one needed, the bad blockbuster movies with silly special effects, and the idiotic how-to-get-rich-lose-weight-and-find-your-inner-self T-shirts disguised as books. Deluged with lies and propaganda, few people knew how to distinguish truth from bullshit. The responsibility lay with corporations who hired minimum wage mental cripples and exploited them for profit. The ruling class had sold the nation’s soul to a binary devil. Three and a half million people worked in the American computer industry, and they were near the top of the food chain. The rest of the two hundred seventy-five million zombies walking around were the food, and they didn’t deserve what they were going to get: rampant fear and hysteria bred by ignorance. Doc hoped the millennium bug would wake them up, but he didn’t believe it would.

  The newspapers and TV had been full of news about the bug for weeks, and idiots who didn’t know a CRT from a CPU were running around saying all the computers in the world were going to crash at midnight. They should have spent their energy fixing the damned things. Months of nonstop hype and predictions of horrendous doom and destruction had the entire planet in a state of steroidal frenzy. The cover of every magazine in America had featured the coming millennium disaster. Bank failures were predicted. Billion-dollar liability suits had already been filed against software companies and chip manufacturers, sending high-tech and financial stocks on a roller-coaster ride.

  Dozens of government agencies from Social Security to the Department of Defense to the city welfare department had been issuing reassuring statements every day. Nobody in his right mind believed these agencies were staffed by competent people. While the government was mouthing platitudes that failed to inspire confidence, millennium cults were running amok. Doc had no idea what they believed and didn’t care, but they scared the hell out of people by constantly screaming at the top of their lungs that the world was going to end. A huge gathering of alienists was assembled in Roswell, New Mexico, and forty thousand people were expecting imminent mass deplanetization. A much larger assembly of two million fervent Christians were waiting for Christ to appear at midnight in Hermosillo, Mexico. All over the planet people were expecting miracles, the apocalypse, redemption, salvation and the destruction of their enemies, as if the cosmos knew or cared about our faulty and arbitrary way of measuring time.

  A half million people were freezing in Siberia, and that news would spread terror around the world, heralding the arrival of the bug. The citizens of New York had been advised to prepare for the millennium the way they’d prepare for a massive blackout like those of 1965 and 1977. Stock up on candles, batteries, canned goods, and bottled water and locate your gas shut-off valve. At the same time, as though the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing, the city was gearing up for the biggest, blow-out New Year’s Eve party of all time. The police had published plans to ban vehicles from several areas of the city and turn those streets over to revelers. Hotels had been sold out for months. Fireworks dispatched from barges in the rivers were going to light up the night, and if airplanes were going to fall out of the sky, everyone wanted to be in a tall building with a good view of the spectacle. Twenty-four giant video screens were already up and running in Times Square. Sometimes it seemed as though half the people in New
York wanted the millennium bug to strike all the computers dead. They thought having everything fall apart would be amusing. Christ Almighty. New York was always crazy, but if this town went really nuts—he shuddered to think of what would happen if the ball started its descent in Times Square and then stopped halfway down.

  “Doc?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re talking to yourself,” Jody said. “You’re mumbling.”

  “Sorry. Just thinking.”

  “Can I have another vodka?”

  “Sure. You okay, Jody?”

  “Well, the stock markets aren’t going to open. I suppose everyone around Wall Street will start partying this morning.”

  “They should,” Doc said. “They may not get another chance for a long time. Huge parties are planned from Beijing to Washington to greet the 21st Century. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t that make you feel warm and fuzzy? Astronauts in the space station are hoping to see the fireworks from their aerie in the sky, and they’ve promised to watch out for alien spaceships as well. The world is primed for the weird, the bizarre, the wonderful and the totally insane. In New York City, dear lady, we’re sure to get it. After all, this isn’t Vladivostok, is it.”

  6

  Copeland charged off the elevator and into Doc’s office. “There you are,” he snapped at Jody. “Let’s go kiss the ass of the venerable Chase Manhattan Bank. Are you ready, Ms. Maxwell? They called. We’re on. Let’s go. What are you doing? Having a drink?”

  “Yes, boss,” Jody replied. “I’m having a drink.”

  “Jesus, it’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “Happy New Year,” she said and swallowed her second vodka in one gulp. “I’m all business.”

  “I hate holidays,” Copeland said. “Nobody gets any work done.”