Deadline Y2K (25 page)

“Donald. And you.”

Doc raised his eyebrows and waited. She sighed and fidgeted, biting her lip and swirling her drink, ritually enacting the physical clichés of one compelled to say something unpleasant. Finally she blurted. “Are you trying to rob Chase Manhattan?”

He cracked up, laughing long and loud, the hilarity giving him a moment of welcome relief.

“What makes you ask that?” he asked.

Jody recounted her adventures with Copeland in Brooklyn, and Doc listened with a twinkle in his eye. When she finished, he asked, “Do you really think I'd rob the bank?”

“No, but you're kind of a mystery, Doc. You've got your secret room and those weird people—everybody knows about it, but nobody knows what you do in there. Donald thinks you're robbing the bank, and this morning I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I swear.”

He liked her. It occurred to him that he might like her a lot, but he'd had no time for lust, let alone romance. She sipped her drink, and he hesitated before deciding not to have one with her.

“To answer your question, there is no robbery,” he said. “It was all a game I played with Donnie, only he took it seriously. I tricked him, and I've been doing it for years.” He told her how the idea of robbing the bank had evolved, and how Copeland had been fooled into believing the robbery was actually going to come off.

“So it's only a game?” Jody said, wanting to believe him. “A mind fuck?”

“Correctamento. It's payback for Donnie's greed, that's all. There is no robbery and never was.”

“You mean you set it up so His Donaldness would get his comeuppance?”

“Yep. It's all in fun and harmless, a practical joke.”

“You dog.”

“Yep.”

“I love it.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I rather like it myself. Today I sent him on a wild goose chase just to keep him out of my hair. He should be home any time now.”

“You're sure he'll go there?”

“Oh, yes. No doubt.”

“Then where will you send him?”

“That's a secret,” Doc answered with another chuckle, and she laughed with him.

He stopped laughing and decided to have one vodka after all. He poured himself a shot over ice and looked at her. Her fancy business suit was stained and wrinkled. The stress of living through a calamitous day showed all over her round and pretty face with the nose straightened by expensive cosmetic surgery and big eyes a little red. She was exhausted and running on adrenaline.

“Do you have somewhere to go tonight? A party?” he asked.

“I'm not going. My sister's having a party, but I'm not in a party mood.”

“Where's that?”

“Long Island. Garden City.”

“Hard to get there, anyway,” Doc said.

“I couldn't even get through on the phone.”

He leaned closer to her and quietly asked, “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Of what?”

“I don't know. The world's a mess and our turn is coming.”

“If you stay here, you'll be safe. We have a generator in the basement.”

“I know. That's why I came back here. Do you think we'll need it?”

Doc shrugged. “Nobody can say. Good engineers always plan for failure, you know. Nobody knows more about electric power than the people who make it work. They're doing the best they can.”

“Come off it, Doc. I know bullshit when I hear it.”

“It's not bullshit, it's true. They're trying—people all over the world are trying, but no one has ever experienced anything like this. This is a unique event.”

“Donald said he knew this was coming.”

“He did, and since you work here and you're smart, you did, too. You just didn't want to believe it. The entire world has been living in a state of denial.”

“There just isn't anything anyone can do about it. I feel so helpless and I hate that.”

Helpless. Doc could understand that. People often felt helpless when confronted with computers because the complexity was beyond their ken. The individual machines were complex and the way they were connected was more complex, and that made people feel impotent and defenseless.

Doc had established the Midnight Club in order to show the world that people were not helpless, that fighting even in a losing cause can raise the spirit and proclaim hope as a viable alternative to surrender. Sooner or later the world had to know about the attempt, win or lose. Someone had to know the truth. At least one person outside the Midnight Club had to see and believe that not everyone was helpless. Right there and then he elected Jody.

“Well,” he said, “maybe something can be done about it.”

“What? Wave a magic wand? I wish.”

“Suppose,” he said, “suppose I told you that a few minutes after midnight, New York was going to black out along with the rest of the Northeast grid. Everything from Virginia to Maine and east to Ohio was going down, without a doubt.”

“After everything else that's happened today, I'd believe you.”

“It might happen, it might not, nobody really knows, but some of it is certain to happen. Now, suppose there was a way to keep the lights on in Manhattan no matter what happens anywhere else.”

“That would be a miracle.”

“No miracles, but people sometimes try to do the impossible just for the hell of it. How'd you like to visit the mysterious secret room?”

“No,” she said. “Really?”

“C'mon.”

He led her toward the rear of the building, through the conventional computer lab, and stopped between the two sets of security doors to call Bo on an intercom.

“I'm bringing in a visitor.”

“You're what? Are you out of your mind?”

“Don't get excited. We need a witness.”

“For what?”

“Posterity, Bo. Mere Posterity.”

“We have cameras and recorders all over the place. Who is this person?”

“A Copeland employee, Jody Maxwell. Relax. We're coming in now.”

Doc unlocked the last door and ushered Jody into the lounge. With no idea what to expect, she stood inside the entrance, slack-jawed, wide-eyed and blinking at a 42-inch TV surrounded by comfortable chairs and sofas resting on Persian carpets. On one side, doors led to a bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, and low partitions separated the lounge from the work space. Clocks were everywhere, old clocks, new clocks, digital and analog, large and small. It was 6:30. High on one wall a series of 24 digital clocks displayed every time zone, and beneath them the IBM, air conditioner and telephone switching station were connected to the workstations by color-coded cables and conduit pipes suspended from the ceiling.

The Midnight Club assembled nervously in the lounge, unused to strangers in their midst. Bo folded his arms across his chest in a posture of distaste, but the others didn't appear upset, just surprised.

Doc provided the introductions. “This is Bo, this is Carolyn, that's Ronnie in the hardhat, and Judd is the guy in the Midnight Club T-shirt. That's Adrian over there in the motorman's uniform. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jody Maxwell. I'm sure you've seen her around. Jody is going to operate the video cameras and record what happens here tonight. We'll be too busy, and I thought we could use some help.”

“Hello,” Jody squeaked, trying to maintain her composure. “My God, I had no idea.”

“You weren't supposed to,” Doc said. “We've maintained tight security for a long time.”

An awkward silence persisted until Ronnie said, “We've never had a visitor before. It's weird.”

Carolyn got over her shock at the intrusion and offered her hand. “Hi, Jody. I guess we're as surprised as you are. Looks like you've had a hard day.”

Dazed, Jody shook Carolyn's hand, her head swiveling as she tried to understand the meaning of dozens of screens, the big computer, and the industrial-strength pile of technology she recognized as a telephone installation.

“You're the public relations director, aren't you?” Bo asked.

“That's right.”

“Oh, that's just great. Real good, Doc. How the hell is she going to even understand what we're going to do?”

“I can write COBOL,” Jody blurted. “I'm an ex-nerd.”

“You're shitting me,” Bo sputtered.

“Do I have to prove it?”

Watching this exchange, Doc applauded silently as Jody held her own, and loudly clapped his hands when Bo shrugged and relented.

“You're the chief geek, Doc,” Bo said, offering his hand to Jody. “Welcome to the Midnight Club.”

“Thanks.”

“I haven't told her anything yet,” Doc explained. “What we're going to try to do, Jody, is maintain Manhattan as a viable dwelling place, just in case a total breakdown threatens the city.”

“My God,” was all Jody could mumble.

“I must emphasize try,” Doc continued, “because we have no idea if our system is gonna work. All we've done is replace hardware and software with other hardware and software. We can't replace embedded chips. At best, we have a bare-bones system to maintain a minimum of electric power, water, telephone service, and transport, but there are vulnerabilities and weaknesses beyond our control. In some cases, we've alerted the responsible authorities as to where the vulnerable systems are, and they've made the corrections without knowing the source of their information. On a few occasions, we broke into facilities and made the fixes ourselves, but we didn't do too much of that. We didn't want to get caught, as you can understand.”

Jody stared wide-eyed at him and at everything in the room. “This is incredible,” she stammered. “I don't know what to say.”

“Carolyn, why don't you give Jody a tour and make her feel comfortable?”

Jody shook hands with Ronnie and Judd, and then, awestruck, moved from cubicle to cubicle and listened to Carolyn's description of the system.

Adrian grunted when introduced and kept his eyes on his screens.

“Adrian's workstation is a replica of an operations control station at the MTA's dispatch command center on Jay Street in Brooklyn,” Carolyn said. “The center is supposed to be certified Y2K compliant, but Adrian has his doubts. Don't you, Adrian?”

Another grunt. Over the last couple of years Jody had caught glimpses of Adrian in the neighborhood and thought he was a bicycle messenger. His motorman's cap covered his hair, which this week was bright red.

“We love Adrian,” Carolyn said, rolling her eyes and continuing her explanation. “Adrian is going to keep the subway running if the MTA can't. It's a very difficult situation to assess, you see. Railroads are leery of computers, with good reason, but events in Asia and Europe have proved they're vulnerable. On the other hand, the MTA has been onto Y2K since early in the game. If any system anywhere has a chance of making it, it's the New York City subway.”

Carolyn moved on to Judd's station, a neat workbench laden with tools, equipment for testing and monitoring hardware, short-wave radios, ham receivers and transmitters, police scanners and a battery of TVs and computer monitors. Oscilloscopes and displays flashed from dozens of screens.

“Judd keeps all our gear in tiptop shape and he's also our webmaster,” Carolyn said. “He's been keeping abreast of the situation all day on the Net.”

Carolyn pointed to a bank of eight PCs logged on to dedicated Usenets where frantic engineers were exchanging information as rapidly as possible.

“Information is a little spotty right now because a lot of phones aren't working,” Carolyn explained. “Some are, some aren't, and communications will get much worse at Zulu time.”

“Zulu time, what's that?” Jody asked.

“Midnight, GMT. In about seventeen minutes. That's when we expect the European Internet to go down, but for now some of it is working.”

Judd pointed to one of the screens. “This group is all railroad managers and it's weird because the guys all write in their native languages or terrible English. It seems that in Italy, the trains stopped because computers date- and time-stamped every activity by the train controllers, and when the stamping application failed, the operations centers went down. In Germany and France, they lost electric power. In the Netherlands, computers in the locomotive cabs failed, stopping the engines. In Austria, radio communications with the train engineers failed when the transmitters went down. None of this was supposed to happen, but all of it did. They've been very lucky everywhere except China, where they had some bad accidents. Everywhere else, the trains just stopped, and that's bad enough. No trains, no coal, no grain shipments, no parts to assembly plants. It's gonna be a mess.”

He gestured toward the screens and ticked them off, “Water supply systems, nuclear power, telecommunications, air traffic control, NATO—Ronnie hacked into their net, that was fun. Let's see, this one is already logged onto mission control at Space Command, another of Ronnie's masterpieces, and this last one is dedicated to our own Northeast power grid. Welcome to Y2K central.”

“This is incredible,” Jody said. “All this time and nobody had a clue what was going on in here.”

“Doc has been a fanatic about security, until now.”

“Oh, shit,” Judd groaned.

“What happened now?”

“Look at this,” Judd said, tapping the monitor for nuclear power. “One of the networks reported that Russian troops broke into a nuclear power plant and are forcing the engineers to keep it running, but they don't know the half of it. A bunch of Russian marines broke into the power plant, Kola 2 in Murmansk, killed the security guards, and now one engineer has locked himself into a security room where he can see what's happening on security monitors. He has a computer and he's on the Net writing broken English. He's got a direct satellite connection so he's not dependent on local phones, which are out. He doesn't know what's going on, really, except the marines have killed everyone in the control room and the plant is starting to malfunction. They have sensors that monitor the heat in heat exchangers and pumps and pipes, and the computer application compares the temperatures with other temperatures from specific times and dates, like five minutes ago, but it can't read the dates and has nothing to compare to. Therefore, it assumes a failure and is trying to shut the plant down. The reactor wants to scram, which is to say, control rods are inserted into the pressure vessel to stop the chain reaction in the fuel rods. No chain reaction, no heat, no steam, no turbines, no power. Only thing is, the control rods stopped halfway down because the computer that controls their motion is confused and receiving contradictory orders. Radioactive steam is building up in the pipes under tremendous pressure. It's gonna blow. This is why virtually every other reactor on the planet has been shut down under controlled conditions. At least I hope so. There are a lot of uncounted military reactors.”