Deadline Y2K (34 page)

The planet had a bad hangover, but the lights were on in New York.

*   *   *

On Jay Street in Brooklyn, in the command center of the most thoroughly Y2K compliant transit system in the world, where every computer application had been thoroughly checked, corrected and tested, where every embedded chip had been identified, tracked down, checked, tested, and replaced, where every dispatcher, operator, manager, yard boss, supervisor, motorman, and track sweeper had had Y2K drummed into his head until he was sick of it, the twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-high master screen of the entire system blinked out at 12:02. Two seconds later 187 subway trains stopped where they were.

When the screens went down, every signal in the system defaulted to red and stopped all the trains. The dispatchers at their terminals stared at the big screen in stunned silence. The terminals included new programmable logic processors that time-stamped and recorded every keystroke and sent the data to twenty brand-new chips in the screen that were not supposed to be date sensitive. To save money the MTA had purchased generic chips with a subassembly that had two-digit date codes burned into a circuit in the chip-within-a chip. The chip vendor had not known the subassembly existed, and the screens had passed a full-blown rollover test under simulated conditions. Powering down after the test, something that never occurred under real conditions, and then powering back up had activated all the circuits in the subassemblies in the poorly manufactured chips. A second test would have caught the malfunction, but since the first was a success, a second test had never been performed.

The radios worked, giving the dispatchers and towermen contact with the motormen, all of whom started talking at once. The communal blood pressure of the entire subway system stepped up a notch. The lights flickered in the tunnels and in the command center. Deep within the subterranean bowels of the city, the bug had fired another salvo at the city.

*   *   *

“Where's Adrian?” Doc asked when he returned from downstairs. He looked in the bathroom and kitchen and scratched his head. “Where's Adrian?” he asked again.

“What?” Judd exclaimed.

“Where's Adrian? He's gone.”

Mesmerized by their screens, too busy to pay attention to anyone else, no one had seen him leave.

Jody had been all over the room with her video camera, and Doc had her flash through the last three minutes of tape.

“There,” he said, “you have Ronnie in the frame and there's Adrian in the background opening a drawer and pulling out a bunch of circuit boards.”

“Chips?” Jody asked.

“Yeah.”

He studied the subway schematic on Adrian's monitor and saw right away that none of the trains was moving.

“Bo,” he shouted. “Status of 59th Street.”

The Con Edison power plant on 59th was dedicated to the subway and provided power to the entire system.

“59th is online,” Bo reported.

“Then what the hell's the matter with the subway?”

Carolyn got up from her seat and started pushing buttons on Adrian's panels. “Gee, Doc, didn't you ever learn how to run Adrian's terminal?”

“I guess not.”

Carolyn brought up a live image from a security camera at the Metropolitan Transit Authority's dispatch center on Jay Street. The big screen was down. Unable to see where the trains were or the status of the signals, the dispatchers were starting to move trains one by one by radio.

Since Adrian's screen showed the locations of the trains, somewhere in his duplicate system was an operating circuit they didn't have on Jay Street. Clearly, he'd taken a pile of circuit boards and was on his way to Brooklyn to repair their system himself.

“My God,” Doc said. “Oh, Christ. Poor sweet Adrian.”

“What can he do?” Jody asked.

“He can probably fix their system and get the trains running, but he'll have a hell of a time convincing them of that. Imagine these hard-headed, no nonsense MTA guys confronted by Adrian with eyes like mandalas and waving a circuit board. They'll think he's out his mind. I have to go after him.”

Judd walked away from his station and pulled on a windbreaker.

“Doc,” he said, “you'll never catch him. I'll get him.”

Doc raised his eyebrows. “He's my responsibility,” he insisted. “Christ. He'll go through the A train tunnel from Fulton Street under the river and right to Jay Street. It's the second stop in Brooklyn.”

“You think he'll go through a subway tunnel?” Jody exclaimed, horrified.

“He does it all the time,” Judd said.

“I'll find him and drag his ass back,” Judd declared, and went out the door without further argument.

“Peopleware,” Carolyn sneered and went back to her station. “The human factor.”

“Shit,” Doc swore. “This is crazy.”

He bolted for the door, ran down the stairs and raced toward the Fulton Street subway station three blocks away. Running at a marathoner's pace, Judd was two blocks ahead, and Doc was in no shape for an heroic sprint to Brooklyn. After a block he slowed down and jogged along at a steady cadence, surprised to discover many anxious business people in winter Gore-Tex and down clothing who'd returned to the financial district to see what their computers would do. He could hear cheers and shrieks of delight from some offices, and groans of defeat and disaster from others. The cleansing of the technological gene pool was underway.

He ducked into the subway station and found a Brooklyn-bound train sitting motionless on the tracks, doors open. People milled around and watched the frenzied scene from Times Square on the TVs suspended over the platforms. At the front of the train, the motorman was talking to a transit cop who leaned over the tracks and pointed down the tunnel. Doc ran past them and jumped down onto the tracks as the cop shouted, “Not another one! What's the matter with these people?”

“Aren't you going after them?” the motorman asked.

“Hell, no. You think I'm nuts?”

“What do they say upstairs?”

“They're workin' on the screen. Fuckin' computers.”

Doc pounded doggedly ahead, out of breath, stopping frequently to rest with hands on knees. Jogging through a subway tunnel with a live third rail was not his ideal way to spend New Year's Eve. Footsteps echoed through the dimly lit tunnel, and red signal lights marched down the right of way. A few hundred yards ahead, Judd was gaining on his quarry. Almost to Brooklyn, Adrian looked back, heard Judd, and started running faster.

Adrian had short-circuited the moment he saw the MTA screens blow out. Suddenly, he was a man with a mission, convinced he was the only person alive who knew what was wrong with the subway and how to fix it. He'd slipped away from Nassau Street without saying anything because, in the hot furnace of his twisted mind, he believed the Midnight Club would try to stop him. They tolerated him, he believed, but didn't really respect him and now were proving it by chasing him.

The tunnel passed under the river, bored into Brooklyn Heights, and curved south toward the High Street station. As Adrian rounded the bend, the station came into view where a Manhattan-bound train was stopped, headlights shining brightly. Pudgy and slow, Adrian knew the intricacies of the tunnels and had explored the A train route many times. Just around the curve, he ducked into a service passageway, and when Judd came around the bend, Adrian had disappeared.

“Adrian!” Judd called out.

Doc heard Judd's shout and stopped.

“Adrian, come out,” Judd hollered. “We'll take the circuit boards to the dispatchers together.”

Walking cautiously around the bend. Doc saw Judd and then Adrian in the shadows, out of Judd's view, looking distraught.

Suddenly, the train in the station closed its doors and moved, the sound scaring Doc half to death. The roadbed vibrated, the train motors roared, the wheels screeched, and the air brakes hissed. Doc ran ahead, grabbed Judd, and pulled him into the passageway with Adrian just as the first Brooklyn train whooshed by from the other direction.

“You knucklehead,” Doc yelled at Adrian who couldn't hear him. The trains moved on, and the three managed to get onto the platform without drawing attention.

Adrian said nothing, folded his arms across his chest, slouched down on the bench and stared at the ceiling. He'd honed his disdain for the MTA dispatchers and towermen since the day he'd arrived in New York, calling them idiots who didn't know how to run a railroad, but the idiots had repaired their screens and put the system back into operation.

With a fair idea of Adrian's thoughts, Judd pointed up the tracks toward Jay Street and said, “They were just lucky, that's all.”

“You were trying to do the right thing,” Doc added. “It's all right.”

Another Manhattan train pulled in, packed to the windows with passengers. The errant members of the Midnight Club squeezed through the doors and passed back under the river.

At Fulton Street, financial district types rushed toward the exits, in a hurry to find out if they were winners or losers in the computer lottery. When the train pulled out, Doc and Judd were on the platform but Adrian was still aboard, heading for Times Square. He smirked as he slipped away, and waved his fingers bye-bye.

*   *   *

Doc and Judd emerged from the station onto sidewalks littered with PCs that had failed the rollover. On Wall Street three men in a van were collecting discarded CPUs and monitors.

“Urban farming,” Doc commented. “It'll become quite popular in the next few weeks.”

As they turned onto Nassau Street, the stars had disappeared, the sky had clouded over, and snow began to fall.

17

The unthinkable had occurred. From the skyscrapers of Manhattan one could see the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a panorama of darkness. Across the Hudson, the lightless Jersey shore was a wall of brick and stone dusted with snow; to the south Staten Island had become a black hole in the Upper Bay; to the east, beyond Brooklyn and Queens, Long Island stretched like a primeval prairie. Here and there automobile lights flickered like lost stars in the gloom, and a few ships' lights dotted the harbor. On Governor's Island a generator lighted the Coast Guard Station where technicians worked frantically on the radars' computers.

A stillness fell over the world beyond the slim, illuminated island of Manhattan. At the moment the power stopped, the hum of transmission wires fell silent. TVs, radios, stereos, and machinery of all types stopped making noise. Drivers stopped in traffic to marvel at the transformation. Life was reduced to fundamental elements. Bugs. Wind. Snow.

Unable to look out, people had to search within themselves for the means of survival. It was a rude awakening, but an awakening nonetheless. Natural selection immediately came into play. The strong and intelligent survived; the weak and witless perished.

Despite millions of hours and billions of dollars spent in preparation for Y2K, the USA had proved as vulnerable to the millennium bug as the rest of the world. All airports were closed. Rail traffic slowed to a crawl. Food supplies were disrupted. People panicked, drove into the woods, ran out of gas and froze. In some cities New Year's Eve parties and millennium celebrations dissolved into local chaos. Riots erupted in Washington and Tampa, but not in Boston or Philadelphia. Even in the District of Columbia, which suffered the most, the pointless violence petered out after a few hours. Everywhere, the deranged used the cover of darkness to steal and pillage and commit crimes of personal vengeance, but the vast majority of Americans were neither criminals nor anarchists. They neither panicked nor huddled terrified in their homes. They responded as they did to storm, earthquake, flood or attack by hostile aliens. In standard American fashion, they'd ignored the coming disaster until it was too late, but once it happened, they galvanized into action and fought back.

If the morning of December 31, 1999 had resembled Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and precipitated the Great Depression, then the first hours of January 1, 2000 resembled December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. In 1941 the USA had not been prepared to go to war, but when war came to them, the American people put aside their squabbles and differences and brought their enormous energy to bear on one concerted effort. Millions had volunteered immediately and risked their lives for the communal good.

In January 2000, America was divided over dozens of political, social and religious issues, and partisans argued across wide chasms with deep historical roots. It was difficult to sustain a republic founded on the belief that all had equal rights when in practice the opposite was true. People disagreed, sometimes violently, on race, abortion, drugs, sex, religion, campaign contributions and industrial deregulation. The political process and the Constitution itself were under attack from the left, the right and even the center. Millions hadn't believed a word uttered by the government since Vietnam and Watergate destroyed all credibility. America was far from perfect, and would never be perfect, fair or just; nevertheless, striving toward the ideal, even if it was ultimately unobtainable, was preferable to surrendering to tyranny or chaos. When the lights went out, priorities were suddenly thrown into proper perspective. Ideological and religious dogma didn't solve immediate problems. Agendas were worthless. It was neighbors helping neighbors that did the trick.

The Y2K work already completed gave the nation a head start and a great advantage over the rest of the world, but if the American people wanted a resolution to the crisis, the only option was to knuckle down and do the work. They didn't hesitate.

Blasted by the millennium bug, this was a chance to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and strike back. When the phones went down, a half-million phone workers showed up, ready to go. In mines and factories, railroad yards, fuel depots and laboratories, people arrived in the middle of the night to get things working again. They didn't have much success at first, but they didn't give up. Every power plant swarmed with engineers searching out problems, jerry-rigging repairs, plotting workarounds and solutions. The problems were immense, the damage seemingly unfathomable, but piece by piece, chip by chip, the process of recovery was started.