Deadline Y2K

by Mark Joseph

  “We have more breaking news, this time from Julie Carpenter in Hong Kong. Come in Julie.”

  “Bob, it’s forty-five minutes past midnight here in Hong Kong, the former British colony on China’s south coast, and I’m sure you can see fireworks still exploding over the harbor behind me. We’ve had a magnificent parade of boats and much excitement, but Bob, I have to tell you, the millennium bug is ravaging China. Astronauts on the space station are reporting a rolling power blackout across this vast nation. Only Shanghai and Hong Kong remain illuminated. The Chinese government has ordered a news blackout, but we’re getting reports via the Internet and from ham radio operators.”

  Madam Wo and her girls burst into a flurry of excited Cantonese, pointing at the TV and looking distraught. “You go, you go,” Madam Wo insisted, pushing Copeland toward the door. “We close now.”

  Copeland stepped into Mott Street where he was greeted by a tremendous racket rising from every building. As the news from the old country reached the heart of New York’s Chinese community, a million firecrackers seemed to go off at once. He felt his chest constrict. A noisy crowd had gathered in front of an electronics store to watch TVs in the windows.

  The millennium bug was shutting down the global economy, a virtual entity entirely dependent on computers and rapid communication. The Federal Reserve had to close the electronic fund transfer system without delay. He should have seen it coming and stayed in his office, and he chastised himself for thinking with his dick instead of his brain. He might be too late.

  He started running, forcing his way through hordes of humanity pouring from buildings, raising a clamorous din in all the languages of earth. From Chinatown to the Battery, Lower Manhattan had become a microcosm of a planet in distress, convulsing in the shock of the first planetwide financial collapse caused by the failure of technology.

  * * *

  If the global economy had a spiritual center, it was Wall Street. At 11:45 A.M., with Asia crumbling in the wake of the millennium bug, the short, crooked street lined with magnificent buildings was a psychic wasteland, teeming with ghosts, chalk-faced men and women sunken into mere wisps of themselves. The illusion was deepened by half of them being intoxicated, whether with whiskey or shock didn’t matter. Chaos theory had come home to roost.

  Copeland had no intention of being a ghost. He tried to pump himself up and restore his confidence by telling himself that amidst the ruins, he would flourish. He would pull off the greatest bank robbery in history and get away with it. After all the mayhem was accounted for, he was going to come out a winner.

  The only thing standing between him and his ultimate triumph was the Big Red Button. Hurrying along, a vision of the button began to taunt him, drawing him into its deep magenta orbit. He started to hallucinate, seeing Doc inside the red circle, then the bank’s logo, then his wife and son. It was as though his entire life was surging across the screen and mocking him.

  He had no idea what would happen if he launched the programs hidden behind the button. Doc could have wired the button into anything. The circuit was supposed to run through five cutouts, but where were they? He should have asked. He wasn’t himself, wasn’t sharp, wasn’t in control. He was losing it. He was the one man in New York who should have been immune to the millennium bug, but right now as he struggled through the crowded streets, it was boring right through his heart. On the other hand, if he didn’t touch the button, and the Federal Reserve shut down the banking system, the heist program would lie idle until the system was brought back on line. After waiting so long, couldn’t he wait until next Tuesday or even Wednesday? But waiting might give the bank’s programmers at the Tech Center a few more days to recheck the code, thereby increasing the chance, no matter how infinitesimally small, of their stumbling across the program. As Doc often said, “There is no such thing as absolute security. A foolproof system doesn’t exist. There are only probabilities.” Perhaps the surprise waiting in Doc’s computer was that nothing would happen because Doc had guessed the Fed would close down the system. Maybe the Big Red Button was no more than a prank to torment the boss. The real trigger, if it existed, was probably locked inside Doc’s laptop.

  This multitude of possibilities and probabilities were enough to drive a clear-thinking businessman out of his mind. He had to stay focused, be patient, and play out all Doc’s games. In the end, they’d fleece the bank and have a few laughs.

  Inflamed with desire to confront the button, he burst through the front door of his building and found Jody Maxwell sitting at the receptionist’s desk. A miniature TV was quietly reporting the latest millennium news.

  “I thought you went home,” he said.

  “I couldn’t even get into the subway station,” she said, “and every cab was taken, so I came back to wait it out.”

  “Where’s the receptionist?”

  “She left. She’s scared to death, Donald. A lot of people are.”

  He hadn’t expected to find her there, and she was looking at him with a brazen curiosity that he found unsettling. She was appraising him, her eyes tracking him like radar, but for what purpose he couldn’t tell.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  “You should see yourself,” she said. “You look like a wild man.”

  She handed him her compact mirror and he saw bulging eyes, a sweat-soaked collar, and rumpled suit. For a moment he was terrified he’d become one of the ghosts.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “It’s crazy outside,” he answered, smoothing his hair and blinking his eyes, hoping to shrink them through sheer will.

  “I know,” she said, “but you haven’t been yourself since the meeting in Edward’s office. What happened this morning?”

  “You were there. Nothing happened.”

  “Something did. Edwards gave you Doc’s accounting of the lost funds and you looked like you’d been slapped in the face.”

  “Naturally. The sum is huge. It’s a lot of money.”

  “Jesus, Donald. You smell like a Chinese whorehouse.”

  Not skipping a beat, he said, “I was in Chinatown when they announced that China was going down the millennium tube. There’s a TV in every store.”

  “Who cares about China?” she said. “What’s happening in New York is enough. Two people jumped off the Staten Island ferry, and another three went off the World Trade Center. It’s enough to make you wonder.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “There’ll be more.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, you could have fooled me,” she said. “Today is make it or break it day for our clients and for us, easily the most important day in our company’s history. What’s going on, Donald? Is Copeland 2000 going to fail? Are we going to crash and burn?”

  “Our clients are going to be okay,” Copeland said. “All the banks will be fine, and we’ll be fine. The software has been thoroughly tested, and there isn’t anything more we can do for them now.”

  He started down the corridor, saying over his shoulder, “I’m not taking any calls. I’ll be in my office.”

  She came around from behind the desk and followed. “You haven’t answered my question,” she said to his back. “What happened at the bank this morning?”

  “You’re asking questions that are none of your business,” he snapped.

  “For God’s sake, Donald, I’m worried about you. For once in your life, stop being such a jerk.”

  “You think I’m a jerk?”

  “Give me a break. You’re upset, and not because the world is falling apart because you knew it was going to happen. You drummed it into our heads around here a zillion times.”

  “It was all theoretical then,” he said. “Now it’s real.”

  “You mean something actually touched you, Donald? I’m amazed.”

  “Listen, Jody, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but I need to get in here and
get on-line. The Federal Reserve system is about to close down, and I have to stay on top of the situation.”

  He could feel the walls closing in, suffocating him. He pushed through the door and shut it, leaving Jody standing in the corridor.

  His monitor was blinking, the red circle pulsing like a heartbeat. He didn’t know what to do, whether to touch it or not. He forced himself to calm down and think rationally and decided he had to ascertain the status of the Fed. He quickly booted up another computer and accessed the Fed’s web site. Within seconds he learned the Fed was shutting down all transfers at noon, in three minutes. He felt sick. His lip twitched. He groaned.

  Jody knocked on the door. “Donald,” she shouted, “are you all right?”

  As he reached out to touch the screen, his hand froze inches from the glass. He could feel the electromagnetic vibrations of the cathode ray tube, and through them Doc’s invisible hand. What the hell. He leaned forward and with great trepidation pressed his finger against the screen just as the door burst open. The monitor fizzled and popped and exhaled a cloud of pungent yellow smoke. The room’s overhead lights flashed off and on and the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth blared from hidden speakers. Jody choked off a scream, staring at the machine and her boss who looked ready to explode.

  The music abruptly cut off, and a curl of smoke rose from behind the monitor, the result of a smoke bomb. Numbers and symbols that both Copeland and Jody recognized as source code from Copeland 2000 were scrolling down the screen.

  The scrolling code stopped after a few seconds and was replaced with a list of eighteen Copeland 2000 programs that would launch at midnight in different places in the bank’s vast computer system. Each program was listed with the number of lines of machine code, the binary instructions that tell the computer what to do, followed by the number of lines of code in each program cross-checked by programmers at the bank. In the first seventeen programs, the numbers matched, but in the last one there was a discrepancy.

  Copeland 2000 diagnostics—electronic fund transfers

  Diagnostic 18B

  File 437

  Lines of machine code 3201

  Lines of code checked by CMB 2118

  Memo from Doc: Dearest Donald, can you get over to Metro Tech and find it before they do? Happy hunting.

  “What the hell is this?” Jody blurted.

  Copeland’s heart dropped. Doc was telling him the theft program was buried in 82 lines of hidden code, and also telling him he had to go to the Metro Tech Center, but he wouldn’t know why until he got there. It was a code slinger’s scavenger hunt.

  “It’s a classic Doc Downs trick,” Copeland said. “If the bank finds this code, they’ll suspend the new contract and sue the living shit out of this company. Everyone who works here will be out of a job. I’ve been had. I have to go to over to Metro Tech now.”

  “Take me with you,” Jody said. “I’m as good at code as you. Maybe better.”

  Copeland didn’t object, but was wondering what else could go wrong on this mangled, convoluted day. Why was Doc doing this to him?

  As the clock struck noon, the millennium bug struck India and Southeast Asia. Buddha winked. Time did not exist.

  9

  The flood of international news affected the media like the outbreak of war, and by noon word of the approaching millennium bug had reached every corner of the city. New York was not a quiet place, and New Yorkers eagerly expressed views and exchanged opinions. By midday, millions of ordinary citizens had gathered over lunch to yak about the electronic plague advancing across Asia. The computer meltdown in the Far East had hit Lower Manhattan like a tornado, but farther uptown the note was more upbeat. A lack of understanding of the technological nature of the infection didn’t stop anyone from repeating the latest sound bite gleaned from the media. The news was the news. It was TV. It was far away.

  During the late morning the temperature rose to an unseasonable 45° Fahrenheit, the warmest New Year’s Eve in New York anyone could remember. Some blamed the unusual weather on El Niño; others faulted global warming precipitated by excessive methane from bovine dung and the burning of fossil fuels; still others claimed that Jesus had heated the city in preparation for his imminent Second Coming; the more scientifically minded—anyone with a TV and the Discovery Channel—blamed the millennium bug.

  * * *

  At Bernie’s Delicatessen on Upper Broadway, Bernie’s lunchtime customers didn’t want to talk about anything but the bug.

  “Hey, Bernie,” said Vince, a butcher who ate lunch there every day. “You hear about this thing? This whatchamacallit?”

  “The bug, yeah. I heard about it. Guys come in here in the morning talk about it all the time.”

  “Whaddaya think?”

  “I think I’m gonna go home tonight and watch the fireworks from my roof. That’s what I think.”

  “People are takin’ their money outta the bank.”

  “They’ll get mugged.”

  To a lot of people, the advancing threat seemed about as interesting as the latest fashion trend or the chances of the Jets in the NFL playoffs. On Staten Island and deep in Queens, events in Manhattan were as remote as happenings in China. People heard about a riot at some grocery store, but nothing had happened at the store in their neighborhood; the stock exchange didn’t open, but they didn’t own stocks; the airports had closed, but they weren’t going anywhere; some loony cop let a bunch of religious nuts block off a street on the Upper West Side, but those people were crazy anyway.

  “Bernie, you own any stocks?” Vince asked.

  “Nah. Wait a minute. I got a pension plan, and I think those guys buy stocks.”

  “No, that ain’t right. They buy that other thing, mutual something.”

  “Mutual funds.”

  “Yeah, and that ain’t stocks, that’s something else, otherwise it would be called mutual stocks, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You think the lights are gonna go out? I heard they went out in China or some damn place.”

  “Nah.”

  In reality, Bernie’s pension plan owned thousands of shares in a multitude of high-tech companies whose profitability depended on selling goods in lucrative Asian markets. The American economic resurgence in the late 1990s had been led by software companies who sold ninety percent of the software purchased worldwide. In the last few hours their Asian markets had evaporated. The plan also owned shares in blue chip companies who were absolutely dependent on automated international communications. An American clothing company with plants in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong could no longer communicate with its Asian factories. Oil companies that sold crude in Yokohama couldn’t collect payment. Neither could IBM, Virgin Records, or anyone else. Bernie’s pension plan was in for a bumpy ride, but he wouldn’t know about it for several weeks.

  Until that day, many Americans thought of the “global economy” as a buzzword, a term that was little more than a figure of speech. Their Hondas burned gas from the Persian Gulf; their champagne was French; they ate Israeli oranges and Peruvian mangoes, wrote documents on computers assembled in Mexico with parts from Korea and China, and wore clothing manufactured from cotton spun and woven in India and sewn together by illegal immigrants in sweat shops in New York, yet they rarely thought about the electronic web that knitted all the pieces together. The planetary fabric that connected everybody to everybody else was being shredded.

  On TVs, radios, newspapers and the Internet, New Yorkers tracked the bug’s advance across Asia as it attacked computers and devastated systems already weakened by recession. The economic downturn in the Far East that had started in 1998 had slashed Y2K budgets to the bone, and many companies and governments that were fully aware of the problem had been unable to afford a fix. The priorities were correct, but the money wasn’t there. In Asia, the problems were concentrated in cities subject to infrastructure failure while vast rural areas remained untouched. With few computers in rice paddies, an
cient agrarian economies continued to function as they had for centuries, while the technology-dependent corporations that had spearheaded the emerging Asian economies were transformed into unwieldy beasts.

  * * *

  By noon Eastern standard time, Japan was two hours into the new year, and Tokyo’s fifteen million residents were in the throes of agony. On a night when the weather in Tokyo was just below freezing, the western two-thirds of the city was without power, and all of Tokyo was drunk.

  The Japanese government had planned a huge millennium celebration in order to boost the confidence of a nation wracked by economic insecurity. A grateful nation had poured into the streets to participate in a showing of national face. At midnight, in spite of the recession and oblivious to the night chill, three million people were enjoying a rip-roaring party when a sea of lights stretching from Tokyo Bay forty-five miles into the Kanto Plain went dark. Japanese nuclear plants were fully Y2K compliant, but computer malfunctions in the electrical grid blacked out everything west of the Imperial Palace. The city was stunned. The people had heard about Magadan and Vladivostok, but this was Japan. This was Tokyo, the most technically advanced city in the world. This was impossible.

  When the lights went out, millions of citizens jumped in their cars and drove like moths toward the illuminated eastern part of the city, site of the Imperial Palace and the heart of the modern capital. Inside half an hour the entire metropolis was in gridlock. Sitting in their cars, the Japanese heard the news broadcast by radio. The National Railway had stopped all rail traffic. Water was suddenly in short supply. The airports closed. The Central Bank declared a “national bank holiday of undetermined length” that provoked a wail from millions of tinny, high-pitched automobile horns adding a final, mournful note to the New Year festivity.

  Credit cards and ATM machines were useless. Checks couldn’t be cleared. As microwave transmitters went down with the power outages, phone service became erratic. Cellphones went lifeless. In post offices throughout the country, mail-processing machines started stamping everything with the date “January 6, 1980.” Gas pumps rolled over to the wrong date and locked. In a Honda Motors factory, robots in the paint shop began painting all the cars blue. Two of the city’s four primary water mains closed down when embedded chips in a series of critical pumps decided the pumps were 100 years overdue for maintenance and turned them off. The replacement pumps had the same chip, and the chip manufacturer had gone out of business. The head of the municipal water district promptly killed himself. At one in the morning, three of the five zaihatsu, the huge industrial conglomerates known to the world as Japan, Inc., unofficially declared bankruptcy and their chief executive officers committed suicide.