by Larry Bond
He put the portable away, a scowl on his face. The bum phone meant another long explanation to Linda, he thought irritably. He enjoyed her company and her conversation, but she was not a patient woman. The dangerous aspects of his job also worried her, and she often needed to hear that he was still okay.
“All units on this frequency, all units,” the radio crackled as he settled himself and started the engine. “Repeat, all units. Landline phone service is out. No incoming or outgoing calls from Dispatch can be made. The problem may be citywide.”
“Wonderful,” Calvin muttered sarcastically. The city was on the verge of blowing up, and now the utilities were on the blink. At least that explained his problem.
He often missed having a partner—not for backup, but just someone to keep him company and bitch to at times like this. He could share his worries with another cop, but not with Linda.
The nationwide, tit-for-tat wave of white racist and black supremacist terrorism was threatening to tear Detroit apart. He’d seen some of the confidential memos circulating through the department. Many in high places were increasingly worried by the prospect of major trouble between the city’s poor, black inner-city neighborhoods and its affluent, white suburban neighborhoods. Far too many of Detroit’s people were already choosing up sides. Plenty of “black spokesmen,” radicalized by the violence or radical to begin with, spoke of “taking the war back to the whites.” And too many of their white counterparts were talking the same kind of garbage. The ugly reality of a race war seemed to lie just around the corner.
Calvin shook his head. He’d broken up a lot of interracial arguments lately. Vandalism and other low-level crimes were way up, and gang activity was at an all-time high. He saw the murderous punks all the time now, in packs on the streets, just hanging or cruising from somewhere to nowhere, just looking for trouble. All they needed was a spark to set them off.
Even as he worried, a small corner of his mind relaxed, imagining the tack he could take with Linda. “I tried to call you, honey, but the phones were out.” Best excuse in the world.
But he knew that the solution for his small problem with his girlfriend had created a much bigger problem for the city as a whole. Well, with luck, the phone company would uncross their wires in short order and bring everything back online.
Resolving to cover as much ground as possible, Officer Bob Calvin pulled out of the hamburger restaurant’s trash-littered parking lot and started his patrol. He still had half his shift to go.
1:10 P.M., EST
Midwest Telephone’s primary operations center, near Fort Wayne, Indiana
Maggie Kosinski pulled a printout out of the printer so that she could see the data for herself. The traffic counters all read fine. The links to the other Baby Bells throughout the rest of the country were busy too. It was just that no calls were getting through anywhere in the company’s service area.
She temporarily ignored the shift operators clustered around her as they all tried to suggest possible courses of action at once. She was the boss, the person in charge of operations at the center. She’d been summoned only moments after the outage began. Unfortunately, ten minutes of analysis told her nothing.
Kosinski had worked for the phone company for almost twelve years, starting after a tour in the Air Force as a communications technician. She’d paid her dues as a technician and operator before becoming a supervisor and then operations manager.
She was pretty, a little over average height, and had short blond hair. She kept her hair short and dressed down at the office so she wouldn’t be accused of using her looks to get promoted. Today, for instance, she wore a plain black sweater and cream-colored pants, little makeup, and small, gold hoop earrings. Hopefully, they’d pay more attention to her brains than her outfit.
Her second-in-command looked up from his desk. “Maggie, it’s Jim Johnston on the E-phone.”
Jim Johnston was Kosinski’s boss, the man in charge of company operations. She ran to pick up the special line. Midwest Telephone had its own backup system for maintenance and for emergencies like this.
“What have we got, Maggie?” asked Johnston matter-of-factly.
She started spelling out the symptoms, using the same straightforward tone. “The whole system’s locked up tight. We’re getting traffic readings, but nothing’s really being passed.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end as Johnston tried to digest news that was worse than anything he’d anticipated. “What have you tried so far?”
“We aren’t getting any hardware faults. So first we tried isolating each of the switching computers from the others. That didn’t help. So we’ve stripped as much of the load as we can. But that still isn’t making any difference.”
Because Johnston had once held her job, she only needed to give him a shorthand picture of the system’s condition and their first attempts to fix it. Kosinski was more worried than she wanted to admit. She’d seen a lot of different problems in her time, but all the standard fixes, plus a few imaginative ones, hadn’t done a thing. There were only a few options left. And none of them were very palatable.
“All the switching computers are down?” Johnston asked.
“All within a minute of each other, all over the region,” she replied. It was hard to believe. This had never happened before, in her experience or in the experience of anyone in the operations center. Still, working with computers, you learned to expect the impossible.
“The system may be corrupted,” Kosinski ventured reluctantly. “Either by a bug or by damage to the code.”
“Meaning a virus,” Johnston said flatly. The chance of a bug in mature software was very remote.
“It’s possible,” she admitted. “The code’s clearly been corrupted somehow. I recommend that we shut everything down and reboot from the master backups.”
That wasn’t her decision to make, thank goodness. Shutting the system down and restarting it from scratch would guarantee that all telecommunications services in the Midwest would be off-line for at least another thirty minutes. The company’s own losses and financial liability were probably already running somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. Another half an hour out of commission might increase that by an order of magnitude.
There was silence on the other end of the E-phone for several seconds.
“Can you salvage the accounting data?” Johnston asked finally. The system’s RAM held a significant fraction of the day’s billing records in temporary storage. Shutting the machines down would wipe all of that information, adding millions more to the company’s losses.
“I don’t know, Jim. We’ve already dumped all that we can, but it looks pretty bad.”
Another silence. This one lasted longer.
“Well, go ahead. The quicker we start, the quicker we’ll be back in business. I’ll call public relations.” She could hear the frustration in his voice. “Christ, they’re gonna love this.”
Maggie hung up, turned back to the shift crew, and started snapping out orders. She was determined to bring the system back on-line in record time, if only to shorten Jim Johnston’s discomfort.
12:15 P.M., CST
Chicago
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange sat quiet, almost as silent as a tomb.
Jill Kastner, one of the hundreds of commodities traders milling around in confusion, wished they’d kill the power as well and make the effect complete. She had never seen the brightly lit trading floor so still. It made the whole vast room seem alien and utterly unfamiliar.
Ordinarily, the exchange handled millions of dollars of business a minute. Pork bellies, gold, stock market indices, foreign currencies, and hundreds of other commodities. They all moved from seller to buyer amid the shouting, yelling, and waving chaos of the separate pits. Ultimately, though, the traders and their customers relied on near-instantaneous communications and information retrieval. The exchange’s computer terminals were linked by phone lines to a sophisticated net that spanned
the globe. Without those phone lines, the exchange was just another large, paper-littered room.
Jill Kastner frowned. They had been out of business for fifteen minutes so far. Fifteen minutes that had cost her and her partners tens of thousands of dollars of potential profit.
Some of the traders scattered around her were trying to catch up on their paperwork. Others read the paper or tried the telephones over and over, hoping to be the first back on the electronic web that made their business possible. A few had already left the building for a quick drink or a walk to blow off steam.
Jill was too competitive to walk away from a problem like that. She simply tapped a pencil on the counter in front of her, tried to clear her mind, and waited. Whenever the phone company fixed the problem, she’d get back to work. The problem was, with the phones out, she couldn’t even prepare for the god-awful mess she knew would appear when they came back on.
1:20 P.M., EST
Detroit
The Napoli was a small Italian restaurant on Detroit’s West Side. It wasn’t a four-star or even a three-star restaurant, but it served a good lunch and had a regular dinner clientele.
Joe Millunzi, the owner, spotted trouble as soon as it came in off the street. Three black kids in their teens, dressed in dark, dirty, loose-fitting clothes. They all wore Detroit Pistons hats or shirts—gang colors, probably. They glided in the front door in a carefully studied strut, hard looks on their faces. He knew his customers, and these people were not here to buy lunch.
One hung back by the door while the others headed for the cash register and his daughter, Carla. Millunzi shivered. Carla was busy with a customer. She hadn’t noticed the boys.
He had been standing a few yards away at the entrance to the dining room, going over the reservations book. Moving as quickly as he could without running outright, he managed to get to the register before the two gangbangers. Whispering “Get Mama and everyone out the back!” he shooed her toward the kitchen.
They saw Millunzi come up and watched the girl leave, but they didn’t seem to care. They just stopped in front of the register, coldly regarding him. He was a big man, over six feet and a little overweight. The two teenagers were both shorter, possibly not even fully grown.
Millunzi felt like a slab of meat being inspected.
His hands were hidden as he desperately pressed a small button on the underside of the register stand. The alarm system was linked via a dedicated phone line to an alarm service and from there to the police. In a few minutes the cops would know there was a robbery in progress. And Millunzi knew there were usually two police cars in this area at this time of day. He’d made it his business to know. With luck, the police could be outside in five minutes. Ten tops. Just keep cool, Joe, he thought nervously.
The two teens looked around to make sure no one else was paying much attention. The shortest pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket, showing Millunzi a silver-gray automatic pistol. It looked immense in the boy’s hand.
“Give us the money, man,” the teenager demanded in a small, even voice. Having shown his weapon, he then folded his other hand over it and stood quietly, waiting arrogantly for his chosen victim to comply.
Millunzi nodded hastily, swallowed hard, and rang up “No Sale” on the register. It beeped and spat the cash drawer out at him. He carefully scooped up the twenties, tens, and fives, and offered the wad of cash to the one with the gun.
“All of it, fool!” the taller, older teen said in a harsh voice. He savagely grabbed the bills out of Millunzi’s hand and stabbed a hand down at the register again.
The restaurant owner nervously gathered up the ones and rolls of coins and started to offer it to them, but the trigger-man snarled, and showed him the gun again. “Not that shit! Give us what’s under the drawer!”
Millunzi sighed and lifted the cash drawer, showing three bundles of twenties in bank wrappers. He pulled them out, fighting the urge to look at the clock or check his watch. It had been at least a minute. Maybe two. Probably not three. Were Carla and Rosa out the back? His brain seemed to be spinning, overheated with fear. Where were the police?
The two robbers smiled triumphantly as the older one took the bundled cash. They both turned away toward the door, but the one holding the gun suddenly swung around, whipped the gun up to point at Millunzi, and fired.
The first round caught him in the stomach and slammed him back against the wall. He instinctively clutched at his belly and groaned aloud—gasping as a wave of sharp, piercing agony struck him.
The triggerman fired twice more, this time into Millunzi’s chest. As the restaurant owner’s consciousness faded, he noticed that the teenager still wore the same, small, triumphant smile.
The patrons in the restaurant reacted to the noise by turning startled faces toward the cash register. They saw Joe Millunzi sliding down the blood-smeared wall behind the cash register and the young black men in dark-colored Pistons jackets walking quickly outside.
Three blocks away, Officer Bob Calvin continued his patrol. He never saw the three robbers, who escaped without a trace. There would be many clean getaways that afternoon.
1:25 P.M., EST
Detroit
Bob Calvin’s radio pulled his attention away from the heavy traffic building up on the neighborhood streets.
“All units, this is the watch commander. This phone outage is a big one. We’re getting radio calls from neighboring jurisdictions. Their land links are out too.
“Latest word from the phone company is that it’s going to be some time before they fix the problem, so the commissioner has decided to mobilize the force. We’re also coordinating with the hospitals and the fire department. Ambulances and fire engines will be dispersed throughout the city. Everyone look sharp, and we’ll let you know when things get back to normal.”
Calvin whistled sharply. This situation must be even more serious than he’d first thought. Mobilizing the force meant pulling all shifts in and keeping everyone on duty until the emergency was declared over. It also meant calling up the city’s police reserves. The reserves had only limited arrest powers, but they were armed.
Mobilizing the force and its reserves would put a lot more needed manpower on the streets—although at the cost of overtime pay. On the other hand, Calvin realized, under the present circumstances, ordering a mobilization was a lot simpler than carrying it out. Without phone service the department would have to send someone to knock on the door of every officer or reservist being summoned to duty.
Still, that was the smart move to make, even if it meant he had to stay on for a second shift. The city was ready to blow, and it was their job to keep the lid on.
Of course, Calvin thought to himself with a tinge of regret, his date with Linda for tonight was now in jeopardy. A citywide emergency was not an excuse, not in her eyes, and she’d be worried sick. He was scheduled to get off at four, and their date was set for eight. Surely, Midwest Telephone would have its technical glitches sorted out by then.
1:30 P.M., EST
CNN Headline News
The piece was third, after an update on the continuing and fruitless FBI counterterrorist investigation and the equally fruitless Balkan negotiations.
“Midwest Telephone technicians are scrambling to deal with a major telecommunications outage affecting the company’s entire service area.”
A map flashed into view behind the anchorman’s head showing the six affected states. Together they formed an irregularly shaped red blob in the heart of the country.
“For more than half an hour, the outage has paralyzed industries, businesses, stock markets, and commodities exchanges across a vast area. Phone company spokesmen reached by emergency satellite downlink are unable to explain the cause or offer a firm estimate for the resumption of service …”
1:45 P.M., EST
Midwest Telephone’s primary operations center
“You’re sure the masters were clean?”
It was a stupid question, even if Jo
hnston did have to ask it, and Maggie Kosinski shot him a hard look. “They’re only three months old, Jim. We made a new set after the last software revision.”
Johnston had come down from his upper-floor office to watch them bring the system back on-line. First the switching computers were powered down and all the operating disks and tapes were removed. When the computers were brought back up, Kosinski’s technicians reloaded master copies of the system software and rebooted.
It was an exacting, step-by-step procedure, one as carefully planned as a satellite launch. It also hadn’t worked. No calls came in, no connections were made.
The two of them stood intently studying the operations center’s main control console. Banks of CRT screens offered them a visual representation of the telephone system’s cybernetic organism. They shook their heads simultaneously, utterly baffled. By rights, the machines should be fine.
“Taylor’s gonna be pissed,” was Kosinski’s only comment.
John F. Taylor was the president and CEO of Midwest Telephone. He was not an easy man to bring bad news to.
“It’s gotta be hardware, then,” Johnston insisted.
There were only two things that could go wrong with a computer. The complex set of instructions, the software, could be bad in any one of a hundred different ways. Alternatively, the hardware, made up of thousands of complex components, could fail. It had to be one or the other. There was no third alternative.
“We isolated and tested each of the CPUs, remember?” Kosinski was adamant. “The equipment is fine. Besides, what conceivable fault could create this kind of problem?”
Johnston spread his hands. “If it’s not the CPUs, then the problem has to be in the hookup somewhere in the system—how they interact.”
“Could be.” Kosinski frowned. “Geez, that could be either a hardware or a software screwup … or some weird combination of both.” Part of her mind groaned at the thought. Debugging the intricate interactions of the machines and code as they communicated with each other would be a brain-burning exertion.