01-01-00

by R. J. Pineiro

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One: 000001

  Chapter Two: 000010

  Chapter Three: 000011

  Chapter Four: 000100

  Chapter Five: 000101

  Chapter Six: 000110

  Chapter Seven: 000111

  Chapter Eight: 001000

  Chapter Nine: 001001

  Chapter Ten: 001010

  Chapter Eleven: 001011

  Chapter Twelve: 001100

  Chapter Thirteen: 001101

  Chapter Fourteen: 001110

  Chapter Fifteen: 001111

  Chapter Sixteen: 010000

  Chapter Seventeen: 010001

  Chapter Eighteen: 010010

  Chapter Nineteen: 010011

  Chapter Twenty: 01-01-00

  Epilogue

  Books by R. J. Pineiro

  Copyright

  FOR LORY ANNE,

  loving wife,

  doting mother,

  loyal friend,

  soulmate.

  Thank you for your unconditional love, yesterday, today, and all tomorrows.

  And,

  IN MEMORY OF DR. LUIS VIDAURRETA AND MARI TELLERIA.

  Vayan con Dios.

  Acknowledgments

  This book came about in a most interesting way. Ken Walker, president of WalkerGroup/Designs and creator of the 01-01-00 licensing program, thought it would be a great idea to tie in a millennium novel with his highly successful merchandising program. With the assistance of our mutual friend and agent at William Morris, Matt Bialer, plus the invaluable help of Marty Greenberg from Tekno Books, a dialogue began among the four of us. Once we settled on an outline, we sought and received the publishing support of Tom Doherty, president and publisher of Tor and Forge Books. As with all my previous projects, I received much help during the writing and rewriting of this story. Credit goes to a lot of very talented people whose dedicated efforts helped turn this book from a mere concept to reality. It’s now up to the readers to decide how successful we have been. Any remaining mistakes are mine and only mine.

  Special thanks go to:

  St. Jude, saint of the impossible. You have my eternal gratitude for continuing to make it possible.

  My wife and compassionate critic, Lory Anne, for your honest feedback on this and previous outlines and rough drafts (and for your endless patience while I hammered out the story on nights and weekends). You are my first line of defense against embarrassing myself.

  My son, Cameron, age nine, for continuing to let me rediscover the world through your innocent and unbiased eyes, and for making me so proud with your good heart, excellent grades, and awesome karate kicks.

  Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, and the rest of the staff at Tor, including Steve de las Heras, Jennifer Marcus, and Karen Lovell. Thanks for treating me like one of the family during my visits to New York City. I’m really grateful that you not only publish my stories, but also put in a tremendous effort to promote my work, including that unforgettable light show on the side of the Flatiron building. The neon lights were surely bright on Broadway that evening!

  Bob Gleason, my editor and friend, for your clever feedback and support, and also for all the good times in Austin and New York.

  Ken Walker, architect and visionary, for your confidence and ideas, and also for turning a simple sequence of numbers into a dazzling, worldwide millennium campaign, with the 01-01-00 logo appearing everywhere, in numerous categories of merchandise.

  Matt Bialer, my astute agent at William Morris, for your support during this and other projects. It’s certainly been a pleasure working with you all these years, my friend. Looking forward to many more.

  Marty Greenberg and Larry Segriff from Tekno Books, for your encouragement, confidence, and excellent feedback during all stages of this project. It’s always a pleasure working with such professionals.

  My good friend, Dave, for your technical assistance on weapons and other subjects, and also for turning me into a gun buff.

  Andy Zack, who, although not directly involved in this project, did teach me more than a thing or two about writing thrillers during all of my previous novels.

  My parents, Dora and Rogelio, for your love and guidance. I couldn’t ask for better moral, professional, and spiritual role models. Su hijo los quiere mucho y nunca los olvida.

  My sisters, Irene and Dora, and your wonderful families, for always being a source of support and inspiration. Bienvenido a este mundo, Lorenzito! Que Dios te bendiga.

  Mike and Linda Wiltz, my awesome in-laws, for your love as well as for so many wonderful memories. Places like Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas will never be the same again. Look out, Europe!

  Michael, Bobby, and Kevin, my teenage brothers-in-law. May the Good Lord grant you the courage and wisdom to fulfill your dreams, whatever they may be.

  And last, but certainly not least, a very special thanks to all my buddies and colleagues at Advanced Micro Devices, including John H., Jerry V., Lisa L., Doug R., Lee R., Terry M., Bob T., Allan O., Dave B., and so many others. Also, a long-distance hello to my friends at AMD Singapore, particularly Balan, Alan T., and Bobby K. for their hospitality during my 1998 trip. By the time this book gets published, I will be celebrating my sixteenth anniversary at AMD (and what an incredible ride it’s been). Together we have shared (and survived) the many ups and downs of this unstoppable roller coaster we call the high-tech industry. I’m looking forward to the challenges and triumphs waiting for us in the new millennium as we take our products to the next level of excellence.

  Thank you.

  R. J. Pineiro

  Austin, Texas

  February, 1999

  Prologue

  In the year of our Lord 1998, the Earth rotated along its axis relative to the Sun, just as it had done for the past 4.5 billion years, after interstellar material in a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy condensed and collapsed, flattening into a counterclockwise rotating disk under the influence of gravity, triggering the birth of the Sun, followed by turbulence in the solar nebula that led to the formation of the planets.

  The Earth rotated along its axis while also traveling at a speed of sixty thousand mph on an elliptical orbit around the Sun, completing each journey in just over 365 days, and repeating the cycle over and over, through the seasons, across centuries, millennium after millennium. On the surface of this blue planet, protected by a thin layer of nitrogen and oxygen, the land bustled with the activity of billions of people across all continents. Entire metropolises came alive at night, the sheen from millions upon millions of lights visible in space as the globe continued to rotate, continued its perennial, tireless journey, from sunrise to sunset, from blue skies to star-filled nights, slowing down at the rate of two milliseconds every century from its interaction with the moon. Where 900 million years ago there had been 481 eighteen-hour days in a year, now, as the Earth came close to completing a new millennium, its rotation had slowed to twenty-four hours per revolution—the length of time experienced by mankind.

  The end of the millennium, the first to be witnessed by
the modern world, triggered feelings of accomplishment and hope, of intrigue and fear, of renewal and celebration, touching people from every land, every race, bringing unity to an eclectic planet. The countdown to this transcendental event was displayed across the globe, from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Times Square in New York, from Ginza in Tokyo to Piccadilly Circus in London. In Moscow and Sydney, in Rome and Singapore, in Baghdad and Beijing, massive digital clocks counted down to the most significant and unifying event in the past one thousand years. Days, hours, minutes, seconds, and hundredths of seconds, displayed high above the world’s most famous boulevards and squares, reminded humanity of this nearing and remarkable moment in time. And as the planet spun, carrying along the world’s metropolises, turning the present into the past, the towering clocks continued to count down, their digital displays washing the heavens with crimson light, always changing, always decreasing, always symbolizing the end of an era and the dawn of a new world. Many people lived or worked near these monumental icons, oftentimes stopping to dream, to wonder, to be reminded of the passage of time, of their own mortality, before continuing on their daily routines, as dictated by their societies, by their laws, by their personal ambitions.

  In downtown Washington, one of those people worked the dark keyboard of an IBM ThinkPad notebook computer with practiced ease. The scarlet glow of the large millennium clock across the street fought the early-morning light diffusing through his eleventh-floor living-room window, splashing hues of orange and yellow-gold across the small apartment, dimming the images on the plasma color display. He adjusted the brightness on the screen and resumed his work.

  He was a hacker, but more than that, he was the last surviving member of Masters of Deception, the rogue hacker group that splintered from the infamous teen hacker gang Legion of Doom during the early nineties. He was born as David Canek, a name he’d stopped using after his induction into the LOD as Hans Bloodaxe. He had eventually left the trade after the FBI cracked down both LOD and MOD operations nationwide, sending most of his colleagues to jail. Only his unmatched skills had prevented his capture. Bloodaxe vanished overnight from the Internet and joined the respectable high-tech workforce in Washington, D.C.

  Now I’m back, you bastards.

  He’d been up most the the night working on his masterpiece, finally collapsing from exhaustion on the living-room sofa, where he’d slept until his alarm clock woke him up minutes ago.

  Two hours is enough rest, he thought, convinced that true genius did not need much sleep.

  Images flashed on his screen as he launched a set of programs that retrieved a thousand lines of assembly language code from a directory buried deep in the ThinkPad’s hard drive, protected by a triple layer of software shields. The hacker wasn’t worried about an illegal user breaking into his system and accessing his coveted file. He feared the virulent code in the file breaking out of the nested software cocoons he had designed to keep it contained. The fatal sequence of instructions and data, improperly handled, could easily neutralize his system in seconds, gobbling up millions of bytes of data.

  His software retrievers performed just as he had designed them, accessing the malignant strain with the caution of a biologist handling a vial of Ebola, moving it to a customized editing screen. He spent the next hour touching up the code, adjusting the virus’s target address, rate of replication, and the subroutine that defined its mutation sequence.

  A feeling of omnipotence descended on Hans Bloodaxe as he yawned, momentarily regarding the huge millennium clock across the street, counting down with a near-hypnotizing rhythm. He glanced at the folded edition of yesterday’s Washington Post. The city planned additional layoffs this week. More of his friends would lose their jobs, just as the master hacker had lost his two weeks earlier, when the city no longer required his computer services.

  After I spent five years working overtime to modernize their traffic-light system.

  Bloodaxe clenched his teeth in anger. Although it had not taken him long to secure a position with a private firm in Portland, Oregon, he still resented the city for the way it had discarded him and a dozen other programmers the moment the new system went on-line, without even having the decency of offering a severance package to tide him over while he looked for another job.

  And now it’s time for the bastards to feel a little pain.

  The hacker reviewed the code once more, making certain that it would act just as he had programmed it. He wanted to punish city officials, not the general population of Washington, D.C. He wanted to attack the tumor without hurting the patient. And he felt convinced he possessed the skills and determination to do it, just as he had done it so many times in his not-so-distant past, a past he had worked very hard to keep buried. The authorities no longer looked for him, giving up after two years of unsuccessful high-tech tracking. Bloodaxe knew that today’s strike would renew their search. Although he didn’t plan to leave a personal signature with his work, he knew that once authorities captured a copy of the mutating virus, they would be able to compare this masterpiece with his previous work and make the connection, like matching high-tech fingerprints. But that was a risk Bloodaxe was more than willing to take to teach these city officials a lesson.

  Satisfied, he enclosed a copy of the string in a software cocoon, designed to keep the virus contained until it reached its target system.

  The next step was finding a way to pierce the city’s software defense system—designed to keep hackers like Bloodaxe out of the nonpublic directories—and deliver his deadly software packet.

  Logging on to the Internet, Bloodaxe dialed into one of several modems he suspected still existed at the city’s central traffic-controlling branch. These modems were used exclusively by employees who wanted to log in from home to follow up on their work. Bloodaxe had owned one of these modem accounts once, but the system administrator had canceled it upon his termination. The sys admin, however, had only canceled Bloodaxe’s account. He had not removed the modem’s dial-in number from the system. Paranoid that someone might suspect him if he used his old dial-in number, Bloodaxe chose a different one, belonging to Bloodaxe’s former boss, the manager of technical services.

  Poetic justice. The hacker smiled at the irony of using his former superior’s system as the launching platform for his virus.

  The beauty of modems was that a hacker could bypass the initial software firewall designed to protect a network from illegal Internet users trying to gain access through the system’s “front door.” Modems accessed a network through a phone line connected directly to one of the computers of the network, not through the Ethernet server used by most users.

  As the log-on screen for the city’s traffic-controlling network greeted him, Bloodaxe typed in a shadow password, which he had left behind in all workstations as a “back door” in case he ever had to go in unannounced, gaining access to the Unix workstation. He knew that getting to this point was only half of the battle. He could easily fire his torpedo and its enclosed deadly packet of software into this system and kill it, along with probably dozens of other workstations linked to his old boss’s system. But that would not accomplish his primary goal. Beyond the network’s firewall was a software vault, or second firewall, accessible only to those users with the root password, where the large servers resided. The hacker so far had entered the building, roaming its hallways, inspecting the decor, but he could not yet penetrate the inner rooms, where the computers that controlled traffic hummed along protected from the intruder by this second firewall.

  Aside from the system administrator, only two other people in the building had root privilege, the chief of security, and his former boss.

  Adrenaline searing his veins, Bloodaxe breathed deeply to control his growing excitement. It’d been years since he had done this, and in a way he missed the thrill of it. With a few keystrokes, the hacker tricked his boss’s system into crashing, forcing the Unix workstation to perform a core dump, the flushing of its random-access memory. C
ore dumps were designed to enable programmers to perform an electronic autopsy of the system’s digital remains to learn why the system had crashed.

  Bloodaxe read this core dump and transferred it to a file in his own home directory. Mixed with thousands of bytes of diagnostics and system logs were the passwords that his boss had last entered to gain access not just to his workstation, but also to the servers beyond the second firewall, the root password. Using a custom program appropriately named Extractor, the hacker gained root privilege in a few minutes. By then his boss’s workstation had rebooted, allowing Bloodaxe to log in once more using the shadow password. This time, however, he also entered his newly acquired root privilege, opening the door to the servers for a direct torpedo shot. Before firing, however, he also changed the root password, locking out the system administrator and anyone who might try to attempt to stop his attack—at least for a little while.

  With a single click of the mouse, he released the cocoon, which passed cleanly through the multiple layers of security, reaching the inner room, spilling its virulent contents into the network servers, following its directive to seek out the hard drives housing the complex programs that kept the nation’s capital’s rush-hour morning traffic from turning into havoc.

  The virus quickly began to replicate across the hundreds of thousands of files in the drive, disabling the automatic backup systems, which he himself had designed to enable the local traffic-light controllers in the event of a network failure. Next, the alien code struck the primary program of the control system, instantly forcing all traffic lights within a two-mile radius into a flashing-red pattern.

  Now let’s see you bastards try to figure this one out without the help of the programmers you laid off!

  Bloodaxe’s gaze returned to the digital display across the street, which he had grown accustomed to use as a counter while cooking or exercising. Today he used it to mark the time it took before the effects of his virus brought the city to its knees.