Deadline Y2K (22 page)

Copeland ran into the street and shouted at the driver, “What's going on?”

“Drunks. College students. And what, Marty?” the driver asked his passenger. “Oh, yeah. Russians. Was it Russians or Russian Jews, I dunno. Anyway, Moscow went dark a little while ago and all these Russian immigrants showed up at Borough Hall. There was some kind of demonstration, and at the same time about how many, Marty? Maybe three hundred college kids from all these colleges around here start having a New Year's Eve party in the plaza with kegs of beer and probably Ecstasy and you know what that's like, right? Then the news comes in about Bombay, India, and some peabrain sets a trash can on fire and then a car on fire, and then the demonstrators mix it up with the drunks and somebody called in the riot squad. That answer your question?”

At the sound of a whistle, the line broke into a trot, swept past the Tech Center and plunged into the free-for-all in the plaza. The van speeded up to follow the police, and Copeland ran a few steps alongside before giving up. “Happy New Year,” he muttered, standing alone in the middle of the street. He asked himself, “What about Bombay?” and shrugged. When he turned around, Jody was gone.

He returned to the Tech Center entrance, thinking she might have sought shelter inside, but she'd vanished. Another deserter, he thought, like his wife and son. Like Doc. Donald the moneymaker was like a glowing fire. Get close, get warm. Get too close, get burned. In the end they all ran away. He felt miserable.

The subway station was closed. The ticket agent told him no trains were stopping because of the riot in the plaza. He didn't want to ride the subway anyway. Old Blue and more of Doc's torment were waiting in his house, and he had to go there, but he didn't have to be in a hurry. He buttoned his overcoat and began the long trek across the Brooklyn Bridge to the fabled isle of Manhattan.

*   *   *

On Nassau Street, the members of the Midnight Club sat in a circle on the floor and held hands.

“Did Doc get the codes?” Ronnie asked.

“I don't think so,” Bo answered. “He would have called.”

“Can we divert the subway generators to the metro feeds?”

Adrian shook his head. “Even if we could, there isn't enough power. No.”

A beeping alarm sounded on Bo's monitor. He detached himself from the circle and checked out his screen that duplicated the main ConEd system operator's screen. The operator was receiving a priority message from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Here we go,” Bo announced. “The fun and games begin.”

The NRC had just ordered ConEd and every other utility company in America to shut down all 108 nuclear power plants across the country.

11

BROWN-OUT IN CHICAGO AFTER NRC ORDERS

REACTOR SHUT DOWN

MOSCOW FREEZES AT TWENTY BELOW

NAVY ORDERS ALL SHIPS TO PORT

LIGHTS ON, WATER OFF, IN HOLY LAND

PRESIDENT TO ADDRESS NATION AT NINE TONIGHT

 

The headlines on the final afternoon editions were enough, Doc thought, stopping at a busy newsstand. People lined up to buy papers as soon as they were dropped off, and he wondered how the truck drivers got through the impossible traffic. That would remain a mystery forever. Just for fun he bought a copy of
Wooden Boat,
a journal that made as much sense as the
Daily News.
Perhaps, after this was over, he'd get a retro life with a girlfriend, a dog, and a nice old Chris Craft runabout.

“Busy?” he queried the vendor.

“Biggest day ever.”

“What do you think of all this?” Doc asked, gesturing toward the headlines blaring disaster.

“Sells papers, pal. Next.”

He ambled slowly toward Nassau Street, reluctant to deliver the bad news. No passwords, no overrides, no juice. If Manhattan fizzled, what the hell, he'd tried. Programmers all over the world had battled the bug, tediously scrutinizing computer code, sweating artillery shells over an impossible deadline, and receiving in return neither glamour nor recognition. There would be no ticker tape parade for heroic nerds, although the calamity would be much worse without their efforts. It was Murphy's Law. Maybe the whole damned millennium bug was Murphy's Law.

At 4:15 in the afternoon, the bug was ravaging a swath of the industrialized portion of the planet from Murmansk above the arctic circle, through St. Petersburg and Moscow to the Black Sea and Turkey, the ruins of Troy, the Mediterranean, the cauldron of the Middle East, the Sphinx and Pyramids, and down the East Coast of Africa to the wild winds of the Southern Ocean and the ice sheets of Antarctica.

In the Holy Land, the cradle of Western civilization was under assault by the tiniest of Frankenstein monsters, a handful of missing binary code. In Israel, as Y2K compliant as a tiny nation with many computers could be, nuclear-generated power performed flawlessly, but the water mains to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv shut down. The religious significance of the millennium had overwhelmed the country with a million Christian pilgrims, half the resident population, and the hordes had presented crowd control problems for a week. New Year's Eve fell on the Jewish Sabbath, and on the Sabbath no work was done. No busses, taxis, hotel services, restaurants. Most of the Christian pilgrims were American fundamentalists, and a few inadvertently trod upon local customs, provoking Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists into a three-cornered exchange of holy writ and medieval theology. Radical sects used the crowds and confusion as cover for endless provocations, and when the water failed, panic broke out. Disturbances inside Israel were compounded when the infrastructures of neighboring Syria, Jordan and Lebanon collapsed, and Israel was instantly faced with a host of refugees at her borders for whom there was no room and no water. It would take a Second Coming to prevent chaos in the Levant, but Doc didn't think divine intervention would alleviate the problem. It didn't the first time. Computers didn't know about God. Computers understood binary machine code and were only as smart as the people who wrote their programming. Less than perfect humans wrote less than perfect code, and the deepest errors didn't reveal themselves until put to the test. The century rollover was the test.

At 5:00, Eastern Europe would be crushed, and at six, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Madrid would go down the millennium tube. The shining stars of the West would face their collective folly, not for the first time. Europe had faced invaders from the East before, Vandal and Moor, Visigoth and Persian. Yet Europe was the heart and soul of technology, having given birth to the compass and the voyages of discovery, the invention of the corporation in the coffeehouses of London, the Industrial Revolution, Madam Curie, Signor Marconi, and the man who defined the 20th Century, Albert Einstein. Europe in the 20th Century had been marked by stunningly sudden and radical changes that caught millions by surprise: the mass slaughter of World War One, the Russian Revolution, the blitzkrieg of the Nazis, the Holocaust, the rise of America and Japan, and the fall of the Soviet Union. Another surprise was one time zone away.

The main European event was scheduled for seven
P.M
., when the enemy would strike Greenwich, England, a pastoral suburb of London that sat astride the prime meridian, zero degrees longitude. Since the establishment of the Royal Observatory in 1757, local time in Greenwich had been the standard for the world. The atomic clocks in the observatory established GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, formally known as UTC, Universal Time Coordinates, and universally recognized by radio and military people as Zulu time. Every satellite and satellite control station on the planet ran on Zulu time, and when the bug reached the prime meridian, all hell would break loose in the skies as well as on earth.

In New York, the sun turned red over New Jersey and the temperature started to drop. The day was dying and with it the 20th Century, whacked by a techno-plague that was rising like a malevolent strain of bacteria to attack the machines. Doc had no doubt the machines would win. The bug would kill the rotten software and bad chips and shake out the deadwood in the technology industries. Old, inefficient companies would die, and younger, smarter entrepreneurs would win. The survivors would be stronger, leaner, more savvy and perhaps too powerful. Ineffective governments would be replaced by more responsive political bodies, and in the end, a handful of megacorporations would rule the world. Welcome to the 21st Century.

He walked on, watching people as they emptied the buildings. From Harlem to the Battery, the homeward bound jostled in the subway enduring the crush one more time. The meatware, Doc mused, as he moseyed along lower Broadway. That's what geeks called humans who operated computers they knew nothing about: meatware. Da people. At the moment, a half million were beneath his feet, singing the subterranean homesick blues.

Hell of a day and hell of a century. People would be talking about this one for a long time. Where were you on New Year's Eve 1999? What happened? Let me tell you, it was the damnedest thing.… Walking along, eavesdropping on people telling each other zany tales, Doc realized everyone had a story, and together they painted a portrait of the city as the day came to a close.

After the banks closed, stores stopped taking checks, uncertain when they would clear. An hour later retailers stopped taking credit cards. Macy's and Saks closed early, and by midafternoon only businesses accustomed to cash were open. Lines at ATMs stretched for blocks, and when the machines ran out of money, people were just out of luck.

At Grand Central Station, where an old-fashioned swing band was setting up for a New Year's Eve of elegant ballroom dancing, the main concourse was packed with harried commuters trying to escape the city. Just as the band was striking up the first Duke Ellington tune, the Metro North reservations computer crashed when it attempted to book seats on trains after midnight. The resulting confusion caused the nearest thing to a riot that 25,000 well-bred, polite, affluent Americans can evoke. To the mellow rhythm of “Tuxedo Junction,” commuters stormed the platforms and crowded like cattle onto trains. Ten minutes later, the same thing happened at Penn Station, without the music, and in a spirit of charity and grace, the railroad put on extra trains and stopped checking tickets.

The phones had been screwed up since early morning. Each time the bug hit a new country, every immigrant or visitor from that nation tried to call home. Since New York contained ethnic pockets from every country on earth, long-distance lines were jammed all day. When Bombay went up in flames, wails of agony wafted over the Indian community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as twenty thousand Indians tried to phone their relatives. While Malaysians, Laotians, Koreans and Pakistanis fretted about their homelands and waited for calls to get through, they formed vigilante committees to protect their families and businesses when the devastation reached New York. Early in the day, Brooklyn's huge Russian enclaves had lost their collective minds when the bug hit the Rodina, Mother Russia, and thousands besieged the consulate in Manhattan and filled Orthodox churches, praying for the salvation of the homeland. Many more Russians, Russian Jews, and natives of former Soviet republics began a wild celebration as martial law was extended to all of Russia. Fueled by vodka, a thousand deranged Russians acted out their mad passions at Coney Island by fighting with the police.

The reality of the bug had sent thousands of businesses careening toward full-blown panic. The constant chatter about Y2K in the preceding months had gone right over many people's heads, and then wham! Suddenly, on the last day, with television reporting malfunctioning computers from the Bronx to Katmandu, meatware types decided to find out for themselves if they had a problem with their machines. Y2K tests for personal computers were readily available on the Internet, and several TV stations broadcast instructions on how to find them. Inexperienced operators followed the instructions, downloaded the programs and ran them. Snap, crackle, pop. Thousands of machines failed BIOS tests, often because of operator error, turbocharging the panic level. In a real estate office on East 37th Street, a salesman went from cubicle to cubicle methodically smashing the monitors because he believed they were the computers. People shot their machines, incinerated them, threw them out of windows, and ran over them with Ford Explorers. In traditional New York style, hundreds of disgruntled computer owners hauled their machines onto the sidewalks and abandoned them, creating an instant industry as enterprising souls promptly collected the discarded hardware, all of it perfectly good since the problems were in the software, the BIOS chips, or the internal clocks.

Minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers fared no better than the smaller machines. In the physics department at Columbia University, a last-minute check of an eight-million-dollar Cray used for nuclear research turned up a flaw in the embedded chip that ran the built-in-air-conditioners. The test killed the heat exchangers and fried the processors. Other computers died more conventional deaths. Someone pulled the plug, walked away and had a stiff drink.

*   *   *

A hellish mob of commuters packed the tunnels and bridges, but suburbanites pouring into the city for New Year's Eve still outnumbered those trying to leave. The party was definitely on. In a metropolitan region of twenty-five million, you could throw a millennium party in a firestorm and a half million would show up. Manhattan was expecting four million to be in the streets at midnight, and the city was doing nothing to encourage people to stay home.

In preparation for the official fireworks, the city had erected grandstands and VIP tents in Battery Park, a waterfront patch of green near the World Trade Center and Nassau Street. By sundown revelers occupied every seat. In one of the tents a caterer turned on a big 35-inch Sony TV, which immediately blasted out the latest news, presented by a bemused reporter in a bush-jacket broadcasting from Africa.