Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  The kid's noise receded into the depths of the house, and it fell quiet in Faulkner's backyard. The wind was gone, Interrupt noticed that now, and the roof gutters no longer clattered with rainwater. Interrupt came out into the open, padding on the spongy grass. Like insulating foam. The yard was soundproofed.

  Faulkner lay quiet. The kid had probably gone for help.

  Interrupt circled to the front yard. No one there, no one on the street, no alarms raised.

  Not gone for help, called for help. Interrupt spun toward the front window. The blinds were open there, and Interrupt found an angle to see inside without having to wade through the damned oleanders.

  Inside, the boy was at the TDD, shoulders hunched, stabbing the keyboard. Then he went after the telephone.

  Serendipity. Interrupt had not planned it this way, the mess out back, but things worked out. Engineers had a saying for the unexpected: if you can't fix it, feature it.

  The boy was banging on the switchhook.

  The phone is dead, Interrupt itched to say. Sorry, boy, but you can't call whoever it is you're trying to call. Let's see, the doctor? An ambulance? 911? You typed in the number on your TDD, didn't you, and you got an answer, somebody to help, and then you were cut off. Couldn't believe it, could you? You keep on trying to call for help, boy, but the phone's dead.

  Bingo.

  The boy wouldn't give up. He picked up the phone, turned it over and over, even shook it. Silly kid.

  Interrupt let out a long, slow breath. The headache was gone. And then, no point in pressing serendipity too far, Interrupt wheeled and strolled out to the sidewalk. Just someone in uniform going about the night's business.

  Joe Faulkner stood like Paul Bunyan, bigger than life, straddle-legged, one foot resting at either end of the bridge span. Andy looked up at his giant of a father and shouted; he had to shout to be heard. Joe's voice rumbled down at him. Look at my bridge, boy, here's a piece of engineering for you. Why don't you build something like this? And Andy shouted up, I can build a bridge that moves your voice around the world in an instant. And Joe laughed, thunder splitting the sky.

  Splitting his head.

  His head hurt.

  Hands on his head, clumsy strokes. Andy opened his eyes. Wayne's face was inches from his.

  "Andy?"

  Andy turned his head. Helen, too, knelt beside him. He saw her hair piled up in its topknot and smelled the peppermint on her breath.

  They were outside, in the backyard, on the wet lawn. His shirt and jeans were wet, soaking his skin. He groaned and shoved up onto an elbow.

  "You okay? You all right?" Wayne's hands stopped in midair.

  "Are you dizzy?" Helen's professional voice. "Nauseated?"

  Dizzy, and his right temple was sore. "Let me get up."

  "Andy."

  He struggled up, Helen grabbing him under one arm and Wayne taking the other. Dizzy, he looked down at the ground where he had lain and saw the garden hose. "I tripped," he said.

  They led him inside and released him on the couch.

  "I tried to call," Wayne was signing, "911, but the..."

  Helen brought the lantern over and held it close. Andy blinked. "You called 911?"

  "No," Helen said, "he couldn't." She stared into his eyes. "Your pupils are equal."

  Wayne came closer, hands flying. "You wouldn't wake up, so I ran in and called, but the line went dead, and I ran back out and you were still..."

  "So he came and got me." Helen prodded his neck. "Hurt?"

  "No," Andy said. "I thought you were retired."

  She tightened the belt of her bathrobe. "You take what you can get."

  "Thanks."

  "Thank your son."

  Wayne stiffened. Wayne, Andy saw, was a mess. Dirt on his hands, dirt and grass stains on his sleeves. Wet patches on the knees of his jeans. Dirt streaked across his face. Red eyes. "Nice work, Spock," Andy said gently. He stood, for Wayne, and braced for dizziness. His head stayed clear.

  "Andy," Helen said, "take it easy."

  "Am I all right?"

  "How do you feel?"

  "Wet." He needed to change clothes. What about the phone? "What about 911?" he said. They stared at him; he was out of synch.

  "Phone is dead," Wayne signed.

  "Phone dead?" Andy turned to look at the instrument. "Not in this house. It's not allowed." He walked over to the phone gingerly, the wet jeans worse than his sore temple. The TDD was switched on, but the screen was blank. He typed in a few letters, but got nothing on-screen. He took the telephone handset from its TDD cradle and put it to his ear. Silence. The one thing a telecom engineer did not want to hear when he picked up a phone. He hung up the phone, waited a few moments, then took it off-hook again. Still silence. He depressed the switchhook but could not get dial tone.

  "Mine's out too," Helen said.

  Andy turned to face them. "The storm must have knocked out a line somewhere." He switched to signing. He wanted to be sure Wayne understood. "Maybe a tree blew over and snapped a cable. Or rainwater soaked through a ..." How to sign splice? He fingerspelled.

  "When fixed?"

  "Soon."

  "Tonight?"

  It depended. A big storm like this, surprising in late April, could cause havoc. "I don't know."

  Wayne half turned, lowering his hands, making a sign. "Shit."

  The nice thing about sign, Andy thought, was that you could pretend you hadn't been looking. He excused himself and went to change clothes.

  He dressed in the dark; he had left the lantern in the living room for Wayne and Helen. There was a beeping and he thought, the phones are dead, and anyway he didn't have a phone in the bedroom and then his head cleared once more and he turned to his bedside table and picked up the pager. Here, in the dark, reading the flashing green numerals on his pager, he shivered. He didn't know whether he was shivering because he felt cold and sore, or because he was being paged to come into the office when he wasn't on call.

  CHAPTER 2

  The streets were dark as far as Andy could see. He drove past the shadowy houses, every one of them cut off. His stomach tightened. He couldn't do a thing about the power, but he thought of every dead phone in each dark house and he softly cursed.

  Impatient, he sped into Sunnyvale. The border between Mountain View and Sunnyvale was unnoticeable, even in daylight. One town simply bumped up against another in this crowded valley, and to the hundreds of newcomers arriving every day, to the dozens of scrappy high-tech start-up companies hustling for venture capital, to the dozens of little high-tech companies going under, one town was much like another in Silicon Valley. But Andy knew the boundaries. In the office, mounted high on a wide wall, was a map of California, Nevada, and Hawaii. Studding the map were white lights, each one representing a local telephone switch office. When there was trouble, a light would corrupt to yellow to orange and then to red. If the alarm was local, Andy would check the boundaries to find whose phone service was at risk.

  There were around a couple of dozen cities in the entire country that had more phones than people, and three of them—San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale—were in Andy's territory.

  The huge AT&T building loomed up ahead, the only thing lighted in a dark neighborhood, thanks to its standby power system.

  There was just enough light in the parking lot so that he could make it to the door without tripping, Andy thought sourly.

  He slapped his ID badge against the security pad and buzzed inside the building. The joke went that the color scheme—orange and brown stripes along the wall, dull red carpet, yellow signs—intentionally mimicked the colors of the alarm lights.

  Light blazed out through the double glass doors of the Regional Technical Assistance Center. Andy buzzed inside.

  The R-TAC reception desk was empty. Colson's office, door open, was empty.

  Andy glanced up at the wall map. One light had corrupted to red. Local. Andy scanned the boundaries: Sunnyvale, Mountain View, part of Santa
Clara. A central office.

  He found Lloyd Narver in his cubicle, rigid, staring at his monitor, hands flat on his thighs.

  "Good evening, Mr. Narver. What did you do to my phone?"

  Lloyd swiveled his chair to face Andy. "You didn't pay your fucking phone bill so we cut off your fucking service." He continued, tone mild, "It's a central office. I couldn't think of anyone else to call in, so I called you." Lloyd was the only one to wear a tie to work, even on night calls, and the joke was that it was the tie that kept Lloyd cool. Tonight, the tie was mustard yellow and avocado green, in thin vertical stripes. Awful, Andy thought, but not awful enough to be intentional.

  "All right, I'm on it." Andy started for his cubicle.

  "Andy-man."

  Lloyd's tone stopped Andy. He turned, looked down the hall at the unwavering red light.

  "We lost the whole office." Lloyd sounded calm.

  "The whole office." Andy's pulse raced. You just didn't lose a whole office. Lloyd was joking. He couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think of a comeback, because it was such a damn stupid joke.

  "Five-E, Andy."

  "Thank you, Lloyd. I know they run one of our five-E switches. What I don't understand..."

  "Listen to me closely. The only switch in that office is our baby. AT&T electronic switching system numero five-E. And our baby croaked. That office ain't switching even one telephone call."

  "How many lines out of that office?"

  "Forty thou, I think."

  Andy thought he saw a tic at the corner of Lloyd's eye. "The power is...."

  'The power is on. The cables are live. But the switch is not processing calls." Lloyd held up a fist, thumb stabbing downward.

  "Both switch processors? Primary and backup?"

  "The juice is on, but they're not processing calls. They loaded the backup tape. Nothing."

  "Jesus."

  "Yeah."

  "What have you come up with?"

  "Nothing. Remote diagnostics comes up with zilch. I get called in, I do the whole routine, but I'm coming up dry. So I call you. You and I don't get it fixed, Andy-man, we're gonna have to call Colson."

  "All right, give me a crack at it."

  "Pac Bell is screaming," Lloyd said softly. "Fucking screaming."

  Andy didn't blame them.

  The central office was operated by Pacific Bell, one of the seven local telephone companies cut loose in the 1982 breakup of AT&T. The Balkanization of the phone system, telco people called it. Pac Bell handled the local calls in California, but they bought their switches and the software that ran the switch processors from AT&T, Northern Telecom, and a few other companies.

  The switch processors were powerful computers, and inevitably there were glitches. But half of the computer system's memory was devoted to self-maintenance, and it usually fixed its own problems.

  If a problem was thorny enough, it was turned over to the company that had provided the offending piece of equipment. R-TAC took about twenty calls a month on problems with AT&T's 5ESS switch. Still, the customer wouldn't be aware of the problem, because the switch processors worked in tandem. The telco believed above all else in redundancy. It ran the biggest computer system in the world, and every critical component of the vast system had a twin, so that if a piece on the front lines faltered, its place would instantaneously be taken by the backup. And the customer's phone would continue to work.

  Except When an entire office went down, an entire switching system that took over forty thousand individual telephones down with it.

  Andy could think of only a few instances of total switch failure, and those were due to major fires.

  Switches just did not die. There was the story of a maintenance tech who had been canned and gotten angry and had come back with a gun and shot a switch. The guy had fired right into the central control unit, like shooting someone in the brain. But the switch, unlike the human, had a duplicate brain. The backup central control unit had taken over and the switch had not gone down.

  Now, somehow, they had lost one of AT&T's most sophisticated electronic switching systems, the 5ESS.

  "When?" Andy said.

  "Eight fifty-nine."

  Just about when Wayne's TDD had gone down. Andy checked his watch. The switch had been down well over an hour.

  "I know, Andy." Lloyd shrugged. "It doesn't happen."

  "Do you have the trouble reports?"

  "They're on your workstation."

  "Then let's go," Andy said, more sharply than he intended.

  "Don't get a feather up your ass. Just get the switch up." Lloyd straightened his tie. "You're the genius, Andy-man. Lead on."

  Never panic. That was the rule.

  Andy strode into his cubicle and put his portable TDD beside the phone. For the first time, he couldn't call Wayne and he didn't like it. And if there was a problem, Helen couldn't call him.

  The screen on his workstation was crammed with numbers and symbols. The alarm box on the screen held one word: CRITICAL. He couldn't help feeling a thrill. The highest alarm level he'd ever worked on was a MAJOR.

  He studied the trouble reports. From the central office on up the line, they had run every conceivable diagnostic on the five-E. And they had all punted.

  Andy slapped down the trouble reports and tapped in a command on the keyboard. The screen slowly scrolled a picture of the five-E system. He always found it elegant, and he always found himself sucked whole into it the way Wayne was sucked into Nintendo.

  His pulse beat harder, but steady, as he followed the scroll. He would find the glitch, wherever it had intruded—into the circuits, into the software, wherever. He suddenly stopped the scroll, tapped a key, and the screen responded to his query with an enlarged diagram. He shook his head, let it scroll again. His fingertips just brushed the keys.

  "All right, I'm with you now, I'm there."

  Everything looked right, there was no sign of a glitch, there was no problem, certainly nothing that could take down the whole switch.

  The back of his throat constricted, and he swallowed.

  Keep looking.

  As he touched the keyboard, pulling away one layer of the switch to reveal another, he relaxed. If something was there, he would find it. Right now, he owned the five-E.

  He flicked a key and probed into the central control permanent memory. He was into the software, millions of lines of code. He would find the glitch and trap it in one of the error legs.

  "I'm talking to you," he whispered to the five-E. "Come on, show me."

  It was as if the current were flowing from the five-E over the lines and into him, and from him back into the five-E. A circuit.

  His shoulder muscles burned as he worked the keyboard, and his temple throbbed, but his eyes kept skimming code, smooth, not missing a loop. He was speaking the language, he was fluent. Whomever had written the high-level language for the processors had written poetry.

  "Andy!"

  He whirled around.

  Lloyd stood at the door, staring.

  Andy caught his breath. "What the...."

  "What the fuck did you do, Andy-man?"

  "What?"

  Lloyd thrust a fist in the air. "Score one for R-TAC."

  "What happened?"

  Lloyd let his arm fall. "Don't you know?"

  "What happened?"

  "The switch is up." Lloyd leaned over, looked at Andy's screen. He reached around Andy, typed in a command. A window appeared on the screen, a status report. Inside the alarm box, the words now read: CRITICAL RETIRED.

  Andy was still high on the five-E, and he tried to clear his thoughts. "Who retired the alarm?"

  "Then you didn't do the fix?" Lloyd's tone was flat.

  "No. I was working on it."

  They stared at each other. Lloyd finally said, "Fairy godmother." He tugged at his regrettable tie and eased out the door.

  Andy shoved back in his chair. He clenched and unclenched his hands, releasing the keyboard tension from hi
s fingers.

  The switch was up. The phones were working.

  On-screen, the alarm box was now blank.

  A 5ESS had failed and then come back to life. Why?

  One thing was certain: it wasn't a fairy godmother. The obvious answer was a bug in the software. It took a long, intricate program to tell ESS what to do—millions of lines of computer code. Bugs were inevitable. The more code, the more bugs. The best a programmer could do was to track and crush the more formidable bugs and then apply defensive programming techniques to try to neutralize the rest. But bugs were hardy; some always survived. Checking out this one would take a long, ugly D&D session. Well, he had lost plenty of nights to debugging and donuts.

  It must be a bug.

  But... a bug that fixed itself?

  He had to get back in control here. This was something new. He felt like a stranger to the five-E and he didn't like it. Maybe the fall had dulled his senses. Whatever. He keyed his workstation back into the guts of the switch.

  What the hell was in that machine?

  CHAPTER 3

  A hand was on his shoulder.

  "Mr. Faulkner?" Someone lightly shook him, then withdrew the hand.

  Andy jerked upright. His head ached. - He stared.

  A woman stood over him. She wore jeans, heavy boots, a blue workshirt. A slash of grease marred the Pacific Bell logo on her shirt. Slung low on her hips was a wide leather belt, dangling wire strippers, duckbill pliers, screwdriver, voltmeter.

  "Who are you?" His voice was thick. Lord, he must have been asleep for hours.

  She held up her hands and flashed him a smile. "He told me to wake you. The guy out there. Lloyd."

  "You're a friend of Lloyd's?"

  "Nope."

  "Uh ... this is a security area. You're not supposed...."

  "It's okay." She pulled a key from her pocket, showed him. "Look, Mr. Faulkner. Andy, right? Lloyd was really busy when I came in, and he asked me to do him a favor and wake you."

  This was a joke. Lloyd, you jerk. He suddenly hoped she wasn't one of those strippers that people hired and sent to some guy's office to rattle him. Dressed as a lineman? Her hair was red-blond, in a braid. Wavy strands had come loose around her ears.