Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

At the front of the steel rows was a giant cabinet, eight feet tall and ten feet wide. Fan vents slitted its top and bottom. On its face was a control panel with rows of lights like duplicate eyes. The administrative module, the general of the army. At its side stood another cabinet, the communications module, the colonel, passing messages to and from the rows of switching modules, the troops.

  Thick packets of cables wound up from each of the cabinets to a catwalk that arched over the entire switch, a line of communication from general to army.

  Each module was driven by a processor, and each processor had a duplicate, a standby waiting to leap into service should its active counterpart falter. A ghost army.

  It was the 5ESS switch, state-of-the-art, AT&T's finest, standing tall and proud in its brand-spanking-new coat of blue and white.

  Already, people milled around the switch. Drinking coffee, holding plates from the celebratory buffet, joking, checking their watches. Looking at the switch, grinning, telling each other it was going to crash and they'd all be out of jobs.

  It was nearly midnight, an hour and a half to go, and already they were wired. Middle of the night and nobody yawned. It was the coffee, it was the cutover adrenaline.

  Andy made his way to the control center, a glassed-in corner of the room. Techs in swivel chairs monitored workstations, minor alarms flashed red, printouts littered the floor unread. Andy flagged the supervisor as he put down one phone and started to pick up another.

  "Andy Faulkner from R-TAC."

  The man paused, stared at Andy's badge. "Oh, hey, great. Get some food."

  "Everything normal?"

  "Yeah, normal. You know, last-minute stuff. Glad to see you here, but I sure in the hell hope we don't give you anything to do."

  "Right," said Andy, "I'm just insurance. Mind if I stash this in a corner?" He held up his portable TDD.

  "Sure thing. I'll page if I need you. Go get some coffee."

  The phone rang and the supervisor snatched up the handset.

  Andy went back out to stare at the silent switch. It was not yet on-line, it had yet to process a single customer call. But there was energy in the room, and the source was the number five.

  He stopped a passing tech. "Where's the crossbar?"

  He followed the tech's instructions, out a door, down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, into another hangar-like room.

  The crossbar switch was like some old, old friend—reliable, plain, chattering amiably. Nothing fancy, simply rack upon rack of electromechanical relays opening and closing with a tinny clacking as the switch processed calls. The crossbar sprawled over twice as much floor space as the new ESS and took thousandths of a second to perform the same switching operation that the ESS could polish off in millionths of a second. The crossbar wasn't sexy, it couldn't deliver call forwarding, call waiting, speed calling, three-way calls, voice-bridges, 800 numbers, or any of the other services supplied by ESS.

  What drove the final nail into the crossbar's coffin was its inability to interface with the superhighway. One corner of the room held the modules of the GCNS-2000, the broadband multimedia switch that was, year by year, shouldering more of the nation's communication traffic. The broadband transported not only voice but also data and video, and any telephone switch that wanted to hold onto its place in the network had better be able to feed its voice traffic into the broadband. ESS, of course, connected. The crossbar did not. The crossbar, in the acronymous vocabulary of telephone people, was known as POTS. Plain old telephone service. And it was doomed. Andy glanced from the skeletal racks of the crossbar to the sleek modular units of the broadband. The past and the future, cheek by jowl.

  "Andy, Andy," a voice behind him said, "what a pleasure."

  Andy turned, grinning. "Amin!"

  Amin al-Masri took Andy's hand and shook it vigorously. Amin had the lean small build and whipcord strength of a boy, and hair that had begun graying prematurely but had never completely turned.

  "You are here officially," asked Amin, "or just because you love telephones?"

  "Both."

  "Very nice. I take a certain credit for that."

  "Credit freely given."

  "I am an invited guest."

  "Of course. They wouldn't dare cut a switch next door to Stanford without inviting you."

  "Yes, but I am also here watching one of my chicks. One year out of the nest and he's updating his professor's phone service." Amin smiled sweetly up at Andy. "Now two of my chicks."

  Andy nodded, pleased.

  "You haven't called me in, let's see, is it eight months? Since you came back to California."

  "You're busy."

  "I think you're busier than I am. You're happy at R-TAC?"

  "I like it. It's good work."

  "You don't miss working in speech recognition?"

  "I'll get back to it someday. You still consulting with it?"

  "Dabbling," Amin said. "But there are other tidbits to acquire. I am easily seduced."

  More like enthralled, Andy thought. Amin had grown up in an underdeveloped country, Jordan. He had conceived a passion at an early age: that good communication, telecommunication, was vital for his people's development. He had come to the United States because the technical education he needed to fulfill his passion was not available in Jordan. He was the best kind of engineer, in Andy's opinion, a romantic. He understood that an engineer can create what never has been. Someday, Andy was certain, Amin would take his technical skills, all his tidbits, back to Jordan.

  Amin waved his hands. "Listen. The crossbar is coming to a close."

  Indeed, the clacking of the old electromechanical switch was quieter. As the hour turned later, the telephone traffic slowed to insomniacs, teenagers calling in pizzas, lonely elderly calling each other, night businesses, graveyard shifts, emergencies. By 1:30 a.m., traffic would be at its lowest level and the crossbar could be killed with the fewest disruptions. The only thing that would stop the cutover then would be a caller to a suicide hot line.

  People were funneling through the crossbar, squeezing up and down the aisles that separated the racks, having a last look.

  Andy saw Candace coming down the aisle toward them, waving, and behind her, Nell. "One last look at the dinosaur," Candace said, patting the metal rack.

  Nell smiled.

  "And who are these ladies?" Amin held out both hands, palms up.

  "Candace Fuentes. From R-TAC. Nell Colson...." Andy stared at the red-gold braid, the blue workshirt. He focused on the logo. "....from Pac Bell. This is Amin al-Masri."

  "I am Andy's former professor," Amin explained.

  "Stanford," Candace said. "Not a bad school."

  "Candace went to Berkeley," Andy explained.

  "Aha. Our rival. But top-rate." Amin turned graciously to Nell. "And you, Miss Colson?"

  "University of California. At Irvine. It's not Stanford, Professor. It's not even U.C. Berkeley."

  "It is the student who makes the difference," Amin said smoothly, "not the school."

  Andy had never before caught Amin in an open lie. Amin didn't believe that. Obviously, neither did Nell. Her mouth pulled taut as Ray's.

  Candace broke the silence. "So what kind of student was our boy here?"

  "He was one of my stars." Amin smiled sweetly. "This embarrasses him, but it reflects well on me, as his professor."

  "Yes," Candace said, straight, "we all call Andy a genius."

  Andy groaned.

  "I'm afraid I'm not," Nell said. She hooked her thumbs into her belt. Only one tool hung from the belt tonight: a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters. "I'm smarter than average, not particularly intellectual, but very quick to learn."

  "I will tell you a story of genius." Amin waited for their attention. "Have you heard of Mr. Strowger?"

  "Was he a genius?" Nell looked to Andy.

  Andy knew the story about Strowger; it was one of Amin's favorite classroom anecdotes with a moral. Amin knew that Andy knew. Andy said nothing.

&nbs
p; "Back around the turn of the century, there was an undertaker named Mr. Strowger. Business was bad, because a rival undertaker was getting all the calls from the bereaved. You see, the rival undertaker was married to the town switchboard operator. Whenever someone called the operator, distressed, looking for a professional to take charge of a body, the operator would connect the caller to her husband's telephone."

  Nell's mouth twitched. Candace listened intently.

  "Mr. Strowger, understandably, thought that this was quite unfair. It was at this point that Mr. Strowger developed his revolutionary theory of telephone service." Amin paused.

  Amin always paused at this point. Neither Nell nor Candace spoke.

  "So what was the theory?" Andy finally supplied.

  "Mr. Strowger concluded that the telephone system should be totally unbiased."

  Candace hooted. "Unbiased. Professor, you're mixing up philosophy and technology. I thought we only did that at Berkeley."

  Amin's eyebrows raised slightly: disapproval. Then he glanced at Nell. Like a small boy, Andy thought.

  Amin continued. "And so, Mr. Strowger invented an automatic dialing system. The caller dials a series of digits, which activates a motor, which moves an electrical contact point to positions correlating with the digits, which finally connects with the proper wire to signal the called party. The call goes through automatically." He eyed Candace. "There are no biased operators to appease. The system welcomes everyone on an equal footing. It is called...."

  "The Strowger step-by-step switching system," Nell said.

  Amin stopped cold. "You do know about Mr. Strowger."

  "They tell the story in training."

  Candace hooted again.

  Smarter than average, Andy thought, very quick to learn.

  "After the step-by-step came the panel switch," Nell was saying, "and that was improved on by the crossbar. And then of course, the electronic switch."

  She was Colson's daughter, Andy reminded himself. She probably learned it all at his knee.

  Amin had recovered. "Yes. This is how technology advances. First there is the human need. We build something to satisfy that need. And then we build it better, faster, cheaper, more elaborately to satisfy the creative need. What are the limits? We begin by sending voices through the air and now we send pictures and data as well. What next? What shall we send next?"

  "Philosophy," Candace said.

  They fell silent. The chattering of the crossbar had slowed, even as the noise around them was building, the hubbub of a crowd eager for the event.

  "You know what I like?" Nell suddenly said.

  "What?" Andy and Amin responded as one.

  Nell held up her wire cutters. "The human touch."

  Amin started, as if she had wielded a chain saw.

  "ESS is advanced electronics, right? Leading edge stuff. Everything is done by computer, everybody sits at a keyboard and tells it what to do. Well, I like the fact that a cutover still means people like me cutting."

  "The human touch designed ESS," Candace said.

  Nell bolstered her cutters. "I meant the common human touch. Telecommunications isn't just... advances in technology ..." she intoned it, dead on for Amin, "it's wires and cables and duct tape. Real people can look at a cable and say, oh, that's a telephone line. They look at ESS and they don't know what the hell it is."

  Andy jammed his hands in his pockets. "Sure. Who could love a switch? Never mind that it does the job, that you can call the deli whenever you're hungry. Real people know whether or not their phones are working. In fact, the guys who engineered ESS are damn close to being real people themselves."

  "The guys," Nell said. "What about women? Candace is an engineer."

  "He's noticed," Candace said.

  Amin watched attentively, as if they were arguing a point in his class.

  "Look," said Andy, "it's just a figure of speech. Hey, guys, check out this board."

  "In school," Nell said, "in engineering classes, I always felt that guys who used the term 'guys' were talking about guys. Men."

  "Engineering?" Andy let the surprise show. "But you're not..."

  "I took some engineering. Ray's genes."

  "Pity you didn't finish," Candace said. "The profession could use more women."

  Nell fingered her belt. "Why?"

  "Women engineers see the big picture. Men get bogged down in details."

  Over the din in the room, a voice yelled, "Cutters to their stations, ten minutes to cutover." A cheer erupted, and people pressed toward the back of the room.

  "That's me," Nell said. She smiled formally at them and edged into the tool-carrying crowd.

  Amin regarded Candace. "I think you overstate...."

  "Excuse me, Professor, Andy. I have to find a bathroom." Candace threw Andy a quick grin, then strolled away.

  Amin turned to Andy, helpless as a freshman in one of his own classes. Andy shrugged. "We have a real way with women."

  Amin recovered himself and patted Andy's arm. "Well. I must abandon you also. I must find how my other chick is doing." He slipped into the crowd.

  Colson's daughter, Andy thought. Bad idea.

  He moved through the lines of cabinets. He should be at the ESS for the cutover. It was his specialty, it was why he was here. But he had no real line job in the cut, nothing to do.

  People were moving toward the far wall, toward the terminus of the crossbar cables, staking out a place to watch.

  He decided to watch the crossbar cut.

  The cutting site was a long aisle that ran the length of the room. The floor was marked off by strips of duct tape into segments; in each segment a bundle of cables spilled out of the switch. The cables were bunched, tied, flagged, stretched out like chicken necks awaiting the axe. Cutters were in position, one to a segment, one to a cable bunch. They shifted, joked, checked their watches, worked the jaws of their wire cutters open and shut. Some were maintenance, old friends of the crossbar; some were installers and linemen, invited by Pac Bell to take part in the ceremony.

  Andy found a place at the end of the aisle, sighting down the long line of cutters. He saw Nell, coming in and out of view as the line shifted. She was talking to the cutter on her left, a hefty white-haired man who nodded and grinned and wiped his hand across his forehead. It was bright under the high-wattage lighting, getting warm in the crowded line of cutters. Nell looked like some beach lifeguard, blond and tanned and gleaming, standing lanky and at ease. She put one hand to the nape of her neck and twisted up her braid, and with the other hand pushed down the collar of her workshirt. A bit of strap flashed stark white against her skin.

  "Sixty seconds to cutover," someone bawled out.

  The cutters straightened, planted their feet wide apart, and nuzzled their blades against the thick necks of bundled cables. A cutter near Andy let loose a rebel yell.

  Andy craned, saw Nell with the jaws of her wire cutters in place.

  The crossbar clacked in tired intervals, processing the dead-of-night calls.

  "Ten, nine...." shouted the voice, and the cutters and watchers picked up the count.

  "Eight, seven, six ..." Andy yelled it with the crowd.

  The roar rode over the sound of the crossbar.

  "Ready... and.... cut!" the voice screamed.

  Metal snapped against metal as cutters chewed through the cables.

  Suddenly, the crossbar, like a dying beast, began a frenzied clacking. It sputtered and chattered crazily, drowning out the final sounds of the cables being severed.

  The cutters, finishing, let their arms fall to their sides and gaped at the machine. Someone said, "It's shorting out."

  The crossbar mistook the electrical shorts laying waste to its components for telephone calls. It thought that thousands of callers had picked up their phones all at once, and its relays were stuttering open and shut in a desperate attempt to process what seemed to be an onslaught of calls.

  Someone ran into the room and yelled, "ESS is up!"


  The crowd cheered, and Andy was surprised to find himself relieved.

  People moved toward the stairs, anxious to get down and see the ESS. Andy looked for Nell, but she was nowhere in sight. He followed the crowd to the stairs, feeling a quiet pride in the new number five. Behind him, the clacking was dying out as the final shorts shut down the crossbar and the fuses on the frames were pulled.

  Downstairs, an admiring crowd surged around the ESS. At the moment of cutover, while the crossbar had howled out, the ESS had come to life and taken over the thirty thousand lines cut off from the old crossbar switch. Quietly and efficiently, the new switch began processing telephone calls.

  Andy went into the control room and offered his hand to the supervisor. "Congratulations!"

  "Hey, thanks. Thanks for coming, but looks like we don't need you. Your ATT box is slick as snail snot."

  Andy grinned. "I'm supposed to stick around for the post-cut diagnostics."

  "Good enough. You get anything to eat yet? I'll page if we get any interesting glitches."

  Even in the smoothest of cutovers, there were glitches.

  Just down the block from the switch building was the hotel. Shabby, dating from another era, still clinging to its street corner in upscale Palo Alto.

  Interrupt went inside. The brown and red plaid carpet rasped underfoot, caked stiff with scum. The red-flocked wallpaper had peeled. Although it was the middle of the night, a television in the lobby played to ageless men parked in deep chairs. No one at the front desk, no bellboys to help the lame up the stairs.

  Interrupt wore a baseball cap with the bill pulled low and a coat with the collar turned up, but here it hardly seemed necessary.

  Beyond the lobby was an alcove that housed the door to the men's room and the pay telephone. It was a black touch-tone, greasy with fingerprints. Not having a handkerchief, Interrupt-tore a page out of the telephone book and used that to grasp the handset.

  The time was one-fifty. Twenty minutes after cutover.

  Interrupt lifted the handset off the hook, deposited coins, and received dial tone. The new ESS, working beautifully. From memory, Interrupt dialed the number. The connection was made, and a recorded voice said, "You have reached 725-6652. Leave your name and message at the tone."