Deadline Y2K

by Mark Joseph

  “Whatever you say, Doc.”

  Doc unplugged his headset, took it off, and nodded to Bo. “It’s all yours. Drive carefully.”

  “Sarah?” Bo said. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Bo. You nervous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Okay,” Bo said. “We’re both nervous, but can we get acquainted later? I have the overrides installed for the five plants, the command center, and the interconnect at East River, and I need to run the them right now.”

  Sarah punched keys on her terminal and said, “You’re in command.”

  “Ravenswood,” Bo said crisply.

  “Check. She’s yours.”

  “Waterside.”

  “Check.”

  “East River.”

  “Check.”

  “59th Street Station.”

  “Check.”

  “74th Street Station.”

  “Check.”

  “West End.”

  “Check.”

  “Interconnects.”

  “Check.”

  “Going to the interconnects now. We’re going to disconnect ConEd from the grid.”

  “Thank God,” Sarah exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I believed we should’ve done two hours ago. The chief thought I was nuts.”

  “So we’re on the same page?” Bo asked.

  “Same page, same paragraph. Let’s do it,” Sarah said. “Show me what you got, Bo. Every other company on the grid is going to scream bloody murder, but that’s too damned bad. Let’s knock ’em down.”

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Pleasant Valley.”

  “Disconnect. Check.”

  “Ramapo–Landentown.”

  “Disconnect. Check.”

  “Farragut.”

  “Disconnect. Check.”

  “Goethals.”

  “Disconnect. Check.”

  “Jamaica.”

  “Disconnect. Okay.”

  Bo took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “That’s all of them. I don’t see any leakage, do you?”

  “No, sir. We’re on our own now. We just violated every rule the public utilities commission ever wrote. I’m popping circuit breakers all over the place,” Sarah announced. “Hold on. Rerouting all 345kV lines. All right. We’re isolated. My phones are ringing. I think a lot of pissed off people upstate are already calling me.”

  “Don’t answer,” Bo replied, turning up both thumbs and winking at Doc.

  “Wait a minute. I’m trying to reroute the 345s, and, and, they’re already rerouted.”

  “That’s right,” Bo said. “I don’t trust your distribution controls.”

  “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks,” Bo said, “but I’m going to need a lot of help before this night is over.”

  Bo began firing technical questions at Sarah, and Doc went into the lounge to watch a little Barbra Streisand. It was 11:55. If the day were to end now, he thought it would pass muster. He had a new lady-friend whom he liked a lot. He’d made fifty million bucks for his little band of outlaws. He’d found a way to get the damned overrides, and Bo was in command of Con Edison with a shot at finding out if his system could run the plants and generate enough juice to keep the lights on.

  The members of the Midnight Club were glued to their stations. Jody moved among them, recording these last minutes. She crouched down beside Ronnie, catching a close-up of a sweaty temple, then stood and panned the room, taking in all the clocks.

  Doc lit a cigarette and noticed his hands were trembling.

  * * *

  After building toward a crescendo all day and night, during the last five minutes the city’s frenzy launched into a cosmic realm. The bands played louder, people danced harder, the religious prayed more fervently and an enormous tintinnabulation radiated from Manhattan like the swelling rise of a long drum solo. It was a cold night and yet people were in a sweat because no one could keep still. The tension forced everyone into motion, into acts of sexual passion, wanton destruction, into confessing their sins at the top of their lungs. People smashed their clocks and turned up their stereos to ear-shattering volume. Thousands fired gunshots into the air to mark the passing of the 20th Century.

  In the still air of a surgical theater Bill Packard opened Rudy Giuliani’s chest and saved his life.

  At 11:58 the frenzy suddenly stopped and the city turned eerily quiet, as though the entire population understood the moment. It was here.

  At 11:59 the ecumenical council of the Millennium Religious Sanctuary of the 24th Precinct led their flock in prayer.

  “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

  The ball began to drop in Times Square. In silence the crowd watched the descent.

  On Nassau Street Bo had installed the overrides. Con Edison was isolated from the grid whose other members were screaming foul. The screens were live with real feeds from the command center, and Bo and Sarah were rapidly reconfiguring their five precious power plants to shoulder the load.

  “I’m holding my breath,” Ronnie shouted.

  Wilson Picket blew out the last bars of “The Midnight Hour.” Doc threw open a window and looked up at the World Trade Center whose twin towers framed the moon. He kissed Jody, this time without prompting.

  The last seconds of the 20th Century were counted down like a rocket launch. Five, four, three, two, one.

  Midnight.

  PART THREE

  January 1, 2000

  16

  The ball in Times Square descended halfway and stopped, as if time itself were suspended. Twelve thousand rhinestones and 180 halogen lights glistened and sparkled, but the sphere was immobilized. The crowd gasped. The twenty-four giant video screens went blank and the crowd gasped again. Then, with no preamble, the screens suddenly came alive with film of a monstrous subway train rushing headlong at the camera, coming closer and closer, blue sparks flying, the thundering roar of steel wheels on steel rails exploding through the sound system. The unexpected terror of the film slammed the crowd like a howitzer. A half million people were screaming when the hurtling train suddenly stopped in a blurry freeze-frame. In giant script, splashed in crimson across the front of the cab were the words, “Adrian 2000.”

  The screens faded to black. A pair of dumbstruck operators in the main video truck thrashed at their controls, shrieking their astonishment, when images from live cameras around 42nd Street popped back onto the screens as they’d been programmed to do. Scheduled events moved resolutely on. Bands played “Auld Lang Syne,” fireworks erupted from the Hudson River and Central Park, the world did not end, Christ did not appear in the 24th Precinct or anywhere else, and the ball completed its descent in stately fashion.

  The crowd uttered a huge sigh of relief, thinking the moment had passed with nothing more than a trick. If that was the worst the dread millennium bug could do, party on!

  The 21st Century commenced in the Eastern time zone. People in Manhattan danced and laughed away their fears and trepidations. To them, Y2K had been a hoax. It was all a big nonevent.

  On the edge of the crowd, a five-year-old, bundled up against the cold and perched on his father’s shoulders, pointed up at Mickey Mouse’s big digital clock.

  “Look, Daddy!”

  The display read, “8:01 A.M. January 5, 1980.”

  * * *

  On Nassau Street, Doc had watched the finale of Barbra’s show from the Garden. After Barbra blew kisses and gushed, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year everybody!” New York 1 had switched coverage to Times Square, and Doc had witnessed Adrian’s prank.

  Laughing so hard he fell out of his chair, he lay on the floor and shouted across the room, “Adrian, you’re beautiful!”

  The kid was irrepressible, God bless him. Doc picked himself up, crossed the room, and gave the boy a pat on the back.

  “Way to go, Adrian. Nice hack.”

  Adrian shrugged, fixated on
his monitor that displayed a duplicate of the big screen in the MTA dispatch center. Red and green lights twinkled and jumped from one electrical block to the next, showing the movement of trains in 238 miles of tunnels.

  Doc glanced at the clocks. 12:02. The Eastern time zone was toast but didn’t know it yet. He went from station to station, offering murmurs of encouragement. He’d done his part, preparing the Midnight Club for their moment of glory, but this was like nuclear war. There was no way to practice.

  “Ronnie? How’s the water supply?”

  “Okay coming in. Going out not so good. Six of fourteen treatment plants are down, and three more are on the brink.”

  “Carolyn? Phones?”

  “MCI and GTE are down. Bell and AT&T are up. Military hardened land lines are up. State police dedicated lines are down. All our lines are up.”

  “Judd? The Web?”

  “Internet is dead. There is no Web. DARPA is still up, but spotty.”

  “Bo?”

  “I’m going to lose two plants in Queens and one in the Bronx.”

  Bo’s fingers trembled above his keyboard and sweat poured down his temples.

  “How’s Sarah?” Doc asked.

  “Terrified.”

  Doc lit a Camel. On Bo’s main screen, the flow of electricity through the grid of which Con Edison was no longer a part was measured by a flickering chart. The grid had been under heavy load since nuclear-fueled plants were taken off-line earlier in the day, and all the plants were straining to provide extra power for all the cities illuminated for millennium celebrations.

  An array of smaller screens displayed the output from each of ConEd’s ten remaining power plants, three of which were faltering.

  “Steady as she goes,” Bo said into his headset. “Steady, steady, oh shit.”

  Spikes appeared on several of the smaller screens, and a huge downward spike flashed on the big monitor.

  “It’s coming! It’s coming! Hold onto your hat, Sarah.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “You’re going to lose Astoria, Hudson Avenue and Narrows right now,” Bo said rapidly, naming the three failing Con Edison power plants. “I’m initiating the isolation of Manhattan. We can’t wait. Astoria has lost all boiler controls in number three and she’s about to blow sky high.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Well, shut the damned plant down!” Bo demanded. “Do it!”

  “I’m trying,” Sarah answered, her stress radiating from Bo’s headset. “I’m losing my phones to the six outer plants.”

  “Shit,” Bo shouted. “Carolyn! Her phones are going down.”

  “I can’t do a damned thing about their dedicated lines, Bo. I’ve been telling them for months to check their telcom switches, but they didn’t. They’re toast.”

  “We’re all toast,” Sarah said dejectedly.

  “Not yet,” Bo said as he launched a program that reconfigured the transmission and distribution of electricity from the five plants he hoped were compliant through 53 substations to Manhattan and thin slices of Brooklyn and Queens along the East River waterfront. The isolation of the island was complete. The rest of New York had to stand or fall on its own.

  Ten seconds later a high-pressure boiler exploded in Astoria Generator Three, killing four workers instantly and wounding five more. Astoria tripped and went off-line. In the Hudson Avenue plant, supposedly Y2K compliant voltage controls had been remediated by a programmer asleep at the compiler. He’d missed thousands of date-fields because they’d been named “Zorro” by the original programmer. When Zorro met the 21st Century, the devilish swordsman corrupted the compliant code and sent false readings to the operators’ screens. Well-trained and prepared for false readings that fell outside the parameters of possibility, the plant operator disconnected the sensors and shifted voltage control to a backup system. The last thing he saw on his screen was the infected backup system tripping the plant and shutting down everything, including his monitor.

  At the Narrows plant, a bizarre reading from emission controls immediately tripped the plant, shut down the generators, and took it off-line. Staten Island and the southern half of Brooklyn suffered a brownout. Twenty seconds later, the first jolt of weird voltages rippled over the grid. The Northeast grid experienced failures and anomalies every day, but it had never endured hundreds of simultaneous malfunctions. When twenty-seven power plants north and west of the city failed immediately, all for different reasons, voltage across the grid suddenly dropped, causing widespread brownouts that lasted a few seconds. The remaining plants struggled to pick up the slack, but the failure of defective high-voltage regulators two hundred miles north in Vermont sent an uncontrollable power surge over the transmission lines that swept across the grid like a hurricane. To protect hardware from the surge, circuit breakers tripped power plants, transmission lines, and distribution substations, and in a minute and forty-three seconds, five hundred thousand square miles from Maine to the District of Columbia and east to Ohio blacked out. The Northeast grid crashed.

  * * *

  Three minutes later the Southeast grid flamed out along with Eastern Canada, the Yucatan peninsula and the islands of the Caribbean. The race with the most implacable of deadlines was lost. It was as though the Atlantic Ocean had overflowed its shores and swallowed North America.

  In Washington, where 750,000 millennium celebrants had gathered in the Mall, the city turned as dark as the granite facade of the Vietnam memorial. Emergency generators popped on in the White House, but the millennium bug had decapitated the nation. Deep underground, the President was in a communications bunker talking to the military and the CIA, but he couldn’t talk to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, or Mobile. He couldn’t call across town, for that matter.

  America’s long night of darkness began with sirens screaming down Pennsylvania Avenue. From Maine to Florida, the leaderless, disorganized nation entered the 21st Century in a state of total disarray.

  The millennium bug had come home.

  * * *

  Unique and dazzling, New York was ablaze with light. The party continued in Times Square where the delirious crowd, oblivious to events elsewhere, celebrated the glorious arrival of the new millennium. The news that the entire world was dark beyond the Hudson passed quickly by word of mouth. Many dismissed it as a rumor. “And if it’s true,” one drunk bellowed to another, “who cares?”

  In the 24th Precinct, the prayer that ended the 20th Century greeted the new millennium with a rousing, “Hallelujah.”

  At Bellevue, Packard sewed up the mayor’s chest and took a straw poll of the nurses. “So,” he asked, “will you guys vote for Rudy again?”

  On 85th Street, Donald Copeland heard a knock on his door. When he twisted the knob, to his surprise the door swung open and revealed Ed Garcia standing on the porch.

  “I thought you guys were locked in,” the captain said, and when Copeland didn’t respond, he added, “We got lights. How ’bout that.”

  Copeland blinked. A cash register was jingling between his ears and he appeared more than a little bewildered. He blinked a few more times before he said, “Come in. Let’s have a drink. Happy New Year.”

  On Nassau Street, cool, unflappable Bo rushed to the bathroom and puked, leaving his seat vacant and headset dangling.

  Three miles north, Sarah McFadden had closed her eyes, clasped her hands together, hurriedly mumbled a prayer, and listened for the hum of emergency generators that never came. All she heard was the buzz of excited people in the command center. She opened her eyes. The lights were on.

  “Bo?” she said anxiously.

  Doc turned on a speaker phone and said, “This is Doc. Bo will be right back.”

  “Oh my God,” she uttered. “Whatever that young man did, it worked.”

  “I’m going to reserve judgment on that,” Doc replied, reading Bo’s screens. “You have problems at Ravenswood. Big Allis is not happy.”

  “I’m on to that. Just let me catch my breath.�
��

  Sheepishly, Bo emerged from the bathroom wiping his mouth.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  Doc wrapped him in a bear hug. Ronnie, Carolyn and Jody took turns hugging and kissing the embarrassed young man. Adrian, naturally, didn’t move from his station. Judd added a hug and handshake and declared, “We’re the only place within a thousand miles that has lights, Bo. You did it, man. All right.”

  Bo broke free and plugged in his headset.

  “Sarah?”

  “We have trouble at Ravenswood.”

  “Let’s get on it. I have a set of diagnostics configured for each of the five plants. If they don’t work, we’ll try something else.”

  The Midnight Club returned to their stations, astonished at Bo’s success. With no way to test the system under battlefield conditions, Doc’s plan and Bo’s code had had a one in a million chance to succeed. Even if the code were perfect, the plan still should have failed because of embedded chips in the vast tangle of systems. As it was, Bo’s applications kept the lights on in Manhattan. Across the East River, downtown Brooklyn remained brightly lit because power had to reach Jay Street to keep the subway running. A strip of Queens around the Ravenswood power plant near the Queensboro Bridge had lights thanks to proximity to Big Allis. The rest of New York was as dark as Moscow.

  Let there be light, Doc thought, as he ran downstairs to the second floor where Annie and the customer support staff were working with the banks.

  “Did Chase make it?” he demanded. “They should have power at the Tech Center.”

  “They do,” Annie said. “They’re okay.”

  “The credit unions?”

  “Everyone is okay, Doc. Relax.”

  Annie pulled him over to one of the staff screens where a techie in a headset was in multimedia communication with the Chase Y2K team at the Tech Center. Doc could see that the bank’s core computers had survived the century rollover and were performing, if not flawlessly, at least as well as they ever did.