by Mark Joseph
“You know exactly how much money there is, to the penny, don’t you? You keep a running account. An accurate account.”
“Shut up, Donald. You’re spoiling my high. I want to watch TV. Go rattle around your own office, or go play with your customer support people. They’re the ones making all this money for you. You should take a few calls.”
“Did the bank…?”
Copeland stopped in midsentence, gave up and went downstairs to his office. He could scream and throw a tantrum, but Doc wouldn’t say anything he didn’t want to say. The man would play mind games on his death bed.
He turned on the red button again, but he couldn’t stand sitting in his office any longer. He grabbed his coat and decided to take a walk. In moments of stress, he always visited the massage parlors in Chinatown, not far away. He glanced once more at the button that stared back like a bloodshot Cyclops. He turned it off. Shoulders slumped, the jounce gone from his step, he slinked out the door and headed toward Madam Wo’s perfumed fleshpot on Mott Street.
* * *
On TV, a reporter announced a press conference with the director of the Federal Reserve tentatively scheduled for two o’clock. Doc switched channels, rocking on his heels as he stood in front of the screen. On PBS two impassioned academics were debating whether the 21st Century would begin in 2000 or 2001.
“We have no birth certificate for Jesus of Nazareth,” declared a bearded pundit, “but the blessed event probably took place in the 23rd year of the reign of Augustus, and near the end of the reign of King Herod who died in 4 B.C. The crucifixion occurred in the 16th year of the reign of Tiberius, but Roman records are inconclusive and whatever Jewish records that may have existed were destroyed in 70 A.D. In any case, by the Sixth Century, Imperial Rome had fallen and the Christians wanted a new way to count years. In 525 Pope John I asked the papal archivist Dionysius Exigiuus, known to history as Denis the Little, to recalculate the calendar from the date of the Nativity, and Denis got it wrong. Alas, for fifteen centuries the world has lived with Denis’ bad math. The third millennium actually commenced no later than Christmas day, 1996.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said his opponent.
“With all due respect,” Doc said to the TV, “who cares?” He turned it off.
The phone rang.
“Doc? This is Bill Packard. I’m looking for Donald.”
“Bill Packard? Dr. Packard?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you need, Bill?”
“Advice. We’re having trouble with some of our equipment in intensive care, and I thought Donnie might be able to help out.”
Chips, Doc thought, embedded chips. Every hospital in America was a depository for computer chips infected with the millennium bug. Everything from kidney dialysis machines to digital thermometers had deadly little computers inside.
“Bill, I’ll tell you the truth. Donnie couldn’t help you if his life depended on it, but I can.”
“Do you really think you can help us?”
“You’re at Bellevue, right? I’ll be there in half an hour. I’ll call you when I’m in front.”
Doc went into his office and stuffed a bag full of logic probes and a laptop. The phones were ringing nonstop, but he ignored them and walked back through the lab, passed through two sets of locked security doors and into the nerve center of the Midnight Club.
As a joke, everyone called it the clean room because it was filthy. In place of microfilters and bunny suits, nicotine stained the walls, and junk food wrappers carpeted the floor. When Doc opened the door, thundering rock and roll hit him like a heat wave.
The five members of the club were hunched over their terminals, sweating through their T-shirts and shouting at one another as they monitored the efforts of their counterparts in control rooms all over the city.
“Bell Atlantic is running diagnostics,” Carolyn shouted. “They might make it.”
“Yeah, but GTE is gonna bite the dust,” Judd shouted back from across the room. “Count them out. AT&T is shaky.”
“Holy shit,” Ronnie yelled. “My guy at the Water Department just smashed his monitor. Look at this.”
“What!?”
“Yeah, no shit. Can you believe that?”
Doc walked over to the stereo, couldn’t find the Off button, so he pulled the plug. The sudden silence got their attention. The Midnight Club stared at him as though he’d cut off their air.
“I need volunteers,” he said. “Who can leave?”
“Nobody can leave, man, not now, not today. We’re gonna be here all night,” they all said at once.
“There is nothing any of you can do during the next few hours, especially since everything depends on Bo getting his passwords,” Doc declared. “If you don’t have it together by now, it’s too late. Boys and girls, we have a mission of mercy that can help a lot of people who need it.” He quickly explained the problem at the hospital and told them to turn off their terminals and grab every chip and piece of testing equipment they could locate in their piles of rubbish. “If the hospital goes down and you get run over by a drunk tonight, how will you feel? You won’t feel anything. You’ll be dead. Come with me and you’ll be heroes. Your mothers will be proud.”
Adrian refused, declaring a morbid fear of hospitals, and Bo had to stay in touch with ConEd, but Ronnie, Judd and Carolyn agreed.
“If Deep Volt calls, I’ll come right back,” Doc said to Bo on the way out.
“Get me my passwords, Doc,” Bo said. “Or we’re dead meat.”
* * *
As Doc’s Jeep inched across town toward the hospital on First Avenue, the streets were clogged with thousands leaving town for the long weekend, and more thousands driving in for New Year’s Eve. Manhattan was turning into a 23-square-mile party in a madhouse, and it wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning.
As soon as they hit the streets, they saw eight-inch headlines in the Post screaming, “STOCK MARKETS CLOSED. JAPAN THREATENED BY BUG!” The news had money people reeling on Wall Street. Men and women in expensive suits wandered around looking several steps beyond dazed and confused, their lives ruined, their electronic fortunes gone in a blaze of disintegrating pixels as the global economy collapsed in front of their eyes. Discarded cellphones and laptops littered the sidewalks as people dropped the devices where they stood and walked into the nearest bar. The saloons were overflowing, fights were breaking out, and people were tearing off their clothes and running naked through the streets to the delight of those with no fortune to lose.
Confronted by the real world, the geeks were nervous and excited.
“Whoa, dude, check it out. Dude’s sitting on the curb crying like a baby.”
Horns honked everywhere. Car stereos blared a dizzying array of musical styles that collided in dissonance in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Reggae, hip-hop, techno, Garth Brooks and Beethoven all got air time on East 14th Street. Carloads of shirtless young men leaned out car windows yelling “Happy New Year!” and “Fuck you!” with the same lusty enthusiasm. From the radio they heard, “The millennium bug has reached Australia with devastating effects. Melbourne is blacked out, and Sydney suffered a momentary blackout, but power returned within the hour. Millennium festivities continued without interruption. Now this from Chase Manhattan. Are you ready for Year 2000? Here at Chase Manhattan Bank you can be sure that your funds will be safe and secure in the 21st Century. We’re ready!”
Doc snapped it off. Ronnie and Carolyn were giggling at the commercial and pleaded for him to turn it back on, but he refused. On First Avenue, as they neared the hospital, sirens added to the racket, and the Jeep followed a train of ambulances into the hospital grounds. Doc called Bill Packard from a cellphone and the doctor came out with a parking permit.
“Don’t want your Jeep towed while you’re inside.”
Packard led them to the department of information services and ushered them into an office crowded with a staff on the verge of panic. The hospital’s programm
ers were lowlifes by geek standards, but they knew what the bug could do and were fuming with frustration over the administration’s hopelessly inadequate measures. The paltry Y2K money in the city budget had gone into billing and accounting computers, not medical equipment or staff PCs.
The geeks looked around, and Judd quietly asked one of the programmers, “Don’t you people have Windows NT?”
“Are you nuts? These are antique 386 machines.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I weren’t.”
Packard found the director of information services, a stern and uptight woman named Mrs. McCarthy who looked the geeks up and down and said, “Who’s this? The band?”
“These people are programmers who are going to try to repair the computers in intensive care,” Packard replied.
“Let me see the work orders.”
“There are no work orders,” Packard snarled, about to lose his temper. “This is an emergency and these people are willing to help us out of the goodness of their hearts.”
“No work orders, no work,” she said.
“You’re out of your mind,” the doctor said.
“We go by the rules here, Dr.…” She paused to read his nameplate. “Packard, whoever the hell you are. Now, get out of my office and take these people back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”
He hit her. With one punch, he knocked her cold. The other people in the room snapped their heads around, saw Mrs. McCarthy lying unconscious on the floor, and cheered.
“Aw right!”
“Let’s go,” Packard said to Doc. “I don’t know why I bothered to stop by here anyway.”
He led them across a courtyard and into another building, and within ten minutes they were tearing apart respirators and EKG machines.
“The easiest thing to do for a lot of them,” Doc told Packard, “is to set the dates back four years if we can. We’ll go after the BIOS chips first. If it’s a flash BIOS, maybe we can reprogram it. If not, hope to God we have chips we can substitute.”
“Just do what you can,” Packard said, “and I’ll try to keep the administrative types away. The nurses will cooperate, I’ll see to that. Good luck. Need anything?”
“Coffee, boys and girls?” Doc asked.
“A no-fat decaf latte,” said Carolyn.
Doc cracked up, shook his head and popped open a panel in the back of a heart stimulator. “Coffee,” he said. “Just plain old-fashioned American joe, black.”
7
A few minutes after 10:00, fourteen hours before its anticipated arrival, the millennium bug took a circuitous route from an unexpected direction and struck down Safeway Corporation’s nationwide chain of supermarkets. The sudden infection affected 1450 stores in 37 states, including the new Safeway on Broadway at 96th, pride and joy of manager Jonathon Spillman. Safeway had wanted to move into Manhattan with a big splash, and Spillman’s shiny new store was a showplace for advanced technology. Every operation from inventory control to the automatic sprinklers in the produce department was managed by computer.
Spillman had started bagging groceries as a kid and worked as a checker while earning degrees in computer science and business administration. Perfectly suited for his job, he had great empathy for ordinary people as well as a passion for computers, valuable qualities for a man who spent half of his twelve-hour workday punching a keyboard, and the other half straightening out the constant crises that were a normal part of supermarket life.
Spillman had been in his office since 7:30 wrestling with a new inventory program. Over his objections the system had been installed without thorough testing and was still full of glitches, one of which was annoying him now. He needed a hundred cases of Ruffles potato chips, and the system was telling him the warehouse in New Jersey had no Ruffles. Smarter than the computer, Spillman knew the warehouse had Ruffles because he was talking to the manager of the Jersey facility who was standing before a mountain of potato chips.
“Put them on the truck anyway, will you, Maurice?”
“Sure, Jon, can do. Busy today?”
“Are you kidding? It’s a blitz,” Spillman said. “I don’t know about you, but all my machines are running slow this morning. Must be the heavy load. Everybody wants everything, I suppose. New Year’s Eve and all that.”
“It’s Y2K, Jonathon,” said the warehouse boss. “Today’s the day.”
“Don’t say that,” Spillman said, a hint of alarm in his voice. “You’ll jinx it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re superstitious, Jonathon.”
“We’re supposed to have all this Y2K business worked out,” Spillman declared. “Safeway spent fifty million dollars on these new systems. We’re on top of it.”
“You wish,” said the warehouseman, unable to contain his sarcasm. “Tell that to my seven hundred suppliers, if you please. Half the invoices coming in here are scrambled. We may have our act together, but when I told this farmer in Maryland he should go out and buy twenty-five thousand dollars worth of new computers, he laughed at me. Now his five tons of hot-house tomatoes don’t match his invoices. According to him, he shipped his goods in 1980. That’s crazy. Things are screwed up, and they’re only gonna get worse. You watching the news?”
“Who has time for that?”
“You may think we have our problems worked out, but the rest of the world doesn’t. They just closed all three airports.”
“Oh, boy,” Spillman said. “Don’t worry. Gotta go. Don’t forget my Ruffles.”
Spillman walked into the assistant manager’s office and found her watching TV.
“Amanda?”
Startled, she looked up and peered at him through her glasses.
“We have a store to run,” he said gently.
“Half of Japan is blacked out,” she said. “It’s truly shocking.”
“What?”
“Their central banking system crashed.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
“People are lining up outside banks all over Tokyo to get their money out, and it’s the middle of the night there and they say the banks won’t open for three or four days, but they’re getting on line anyway.”
“Well, it won’t happen here.”
“People are scared, Jon. Have you been on the floor this morning?”
“No, I’ve been trying to work inventory.”
“I think you’d better get your head out of that computer and have a look,” she said. “I’ve already called the police once. A shoplifter, but a crazy shoplifter.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You were busy.”
Amanda opened her shades. Below, the 80,000-square-foot store was jammed with shoppers buying New Year’s Eve supplies. Spillman could see long lines of anxious customers tailing away from all 24 registers, carts overflowing. The store was the focal point of an ethnically diverse neighborhood that included gays, blacks, Hispanics, and whites; rich, poor, and middle-class. Everyone shopped more or less peacefully together every day, but when the store was busy, tensions that lay just beneath the surface began to rise. Some days Spillman called it the Psychodrama Safeway, and he had four security guards on duty at all times.
This morning, with no school, the store was full of roving crowds of teenagers blowing horns and throwing confetti, and the guards had their hands full. He could see why Amanda had summoned the police to arrest a young shoplifter who’d boosted a six-pack of beer.
Shoplifters weren’t the only problem. The checkout lines were slow, held up by sluggish credit card and ATM verifiers that were overburdened by busy lines at Safeway’s hundreds of stores. Thousands of Safeway customers around the country were trying to clear their credit purchases at the same time, stressing the computers trying to process their requests. To make things worse, for the last two weeks the machines were rejecting more than the usual number of cards because some banks and financial institutions had issued cards that were not Year 2000 compliant. Several times a day Spillman had t
o go down to the checkout stands and explain to some poor soul why her credit card was rejected. Instead of babbling techno-bullshit about computer incompatibility, he told local customers to take their groceries home, don’t worry about it, come in tomorrow with a check. That made him feel good, like he was a mom-and-pop corner grocery run by human beings, not a corporate monolith run by computers.
What he saw that morning in his store chilled his heart. Though the mezzanine offices were sound-proofed, he could feel the rumble of carts on the linoleum floor and the noise made by the kids; behind him, the TV droned out a litany of horror from Japan. He recalled his long conversations during the last year with Donald Copeland and Doc Downs. “Even if the computers don’t fail,” Doc had predicted, “people will panic anyway because of all the hysterical hype. Truth doesn’t matter. Only perception matters.”
As Spillman was returning to his office, trouble started in one of the express lines. A middle-aged woman clearly in a hurry to exit with her basket of fruit flashed her ATM card at the checker and slipped it through the verifier.
“Can’t take that card, ma’am,” the checker said as politely as she could.
“What do you mean you can’t take my card?”
The checker, whose smiley-face name tag read, “Hi! I’m Denise,” had come in on her day off because she knew the store would be busy. The head checker, Denise was one of Spillman’s most devoted workers, but at that moment she wished she’d stayed home.
“It’s not your card,” she said. “It’s your bank. The machine won’t take any of their cards.”
“Let me just punch in my PIN number,” the customer snapped and furiously keyed the pad.
Denise stared at the cash register, the customer watched the digital display on the verifier and the crowd behind shifted on its collective feet. Time hung heavy as the two women slyly traded smirks. The checker was right; the card was rejected.
“I can take a check or cash,” Denise said, but the humiliated customer wordlessly abandoned her groceries and walked out in a huff. With a shrug Denise punched in the code to clear the machine for the next order, but her entries into the keyboard had no effect on the register. The machine froze. The display flashed, “System error, system error.”