Deadline Y2K

1

Venture capitalist Donald Copeland was a true believer in the power of money. During the 1980s and early ’90s, his firm had financed and nurtured high-tech companies the way agribusiness husbanded livestock. Commerce was his daily bread and the global economy his steady diet.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in August of 1991 ended the Cold War, leaving capitalism to reign unchecked, a boon to Copeland’s home town, New York, the undisputed center of the global economy. In New York everything was a commodity, including people, and anyone with a vision and the mental toughness to pursue it was especially valuable. Copeland drew his toughness from the granite underpinnings of the city, his bastion against the uncertain world beyond the rivers; his vision — he didn’t know where his vision came from, but he never questioned it. He merely opened his eyes and saw ways to make money.

From time to time he drove to Brooklyn to admire Manhattan from across the East River. The sight of New York always inspired him, revealing ever greater possibilities of wealth and power. New York was in constant flux, the view never the same. Noticing the changes and staying one step ahead of the rate of change was the path to real riches. In the late 20th Century, change meant micro-technology.

When Copeland gazed at New York, he saw a vast network of wire and microprocessors that formed an invisible web among the high-rises. The infrastructure of the city had been completely rebuilt, automated and computerized during his lifetime. By 1991 computers ran everything from the subways to the red beacons atop the skyscrapers. Two million people and at least as many computers occupied Manhattan, and the thread that connected the machines to the people was spun of pure gold. New York was an ocean of money that people wanted to spend on computers, and Copeland excelled at finding ways to make the financial tide flow his way. His company, Copeland Investments, had managed the financing of companies that earned millions supplying database management, systems, CD jukeboxes, business software, LED displays, code compilers, electronic games, routers and switches for telecommunications, and programmable logic processors for automated control systems. Technology in and of itself meant nothing to Donald Copeland who lusted only after the thrill of the deal. Signing papers that concluded a transaction for millions was like sticking his finger into an electric socket. It charged his batteries.

One afternoon in the summer of 1991, as he was returning to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge, soaking in the city, the radio babbling traffic and stock reports, a talk show host announced, “Next up, a report from the American Academy of Sciences that predicts that in eight and a half years, on January 1st, 2000, all our computers are gonna die. You heard me right, folks. Computers are going to malfunction on that date because of a nasty little programming glitch the academy has labeled the ‘millennium bug.’”

Copeland took his eyes off the snarled traffic and stared at the radio dial. Twelve speakers in the Mercedes enhanced the spoken word with unnatural robustness, and the phrase “millennium bug” hung inside the computer-controlled interior like a trapped insect.

“The millennium bug is deceptively simple,” the host continued. “Most computer programs store dates with only the last two digits of the year rather than four digits. In the year 2000, computers running those programs will read ‘00’ as 1900, and that’s all she wrote, folks. Error! Error! Error! Crash!

“In the 1960s programmers started writing dates with two digits in order to save memory, and it became the convention. All programmers did it, and are still doing it, and none of these guys believed their programs would still be operating at the end of the century.

“They were wrong, folks. Those old programs are everywhere, and programmers are still spreading the millennium bug like wildfire. This killer computer flaw has wormed into our lives, residing patiently inside the control mechanisms of power plants, telephone systems, air and rail traffic control systems, accounting and billing programs, electronic fund transfer systems, and satellite control systems. And if that isn’t enough, the bug has been burned into hundreds of millions of embedded computer chips in cars, airplanes, elevators, appliances, machine tools, and personal computers. When the year 2000 arrives, these computers are going to become confused and malfunction. We’re looking at zero hour, people, the end of civilization as we know it.

“Folks, I gotta ask. Are all our computers gonna die? And if they do, then what happens? Will airplanes fall out of the sky? Do you believe it, or is it nonsense?” the host demanded of his radio audience. “Call and tell me what you think.”

Only a few techno-freaks called the talk show that day, and half said the millennium bug was no big deal and easily fixed. Besides, 2000 was a long way off, and long-term planning in America meant thinking about next week. No one in radioland seemed to be paying attention except Donald Copeland who experienced a vision that appeared to him like a giant equation written in fire across the skyline of Manhattan.

He could see the future. He knew exactly what was going to happen, when it would happen, and most importantly, how to profit from his prescience. The idea of a simple programming flaw bringing the entire world to its knees was so devastating that it rocked him like an earthquake. His mind leaped from one logical step to the next at lightning speed until the entire idea unfolded like a flower at dawn.

On January 1, 2000, chaos and disaster would sweep over the land, and only those organizations that had discovered and corrected their problems prior to that date would survive. Knowing who would survive, and perhaps deciding who would survive and who would fail, would be an unassailable business advantage.

Copeland had the means and the will to pursue his vision. The means included Michael “Doc” Downs, Ph.D., a young computer engineer from California who ran Copeland Investments’ department of research and development.

Copeland sped to his office, an old three-story red brick building on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan, only a few steps from Wall Street. Bursting with his vision, he skipped the elevator, ran up to Doc’s third-floor office, and knocked on the door.

He heard banging and clanging from inside. “Doc!” he shouted. “Doc, I gotta talk to you right now!”

More knocking, more banging, and then from inside a shouted, “Come in!”

Excited, Copeland ran into Doc’s workspace, a computer junkyard with spidery integrated circuits, CPUs and monitors scattered around like rubbish. As Copeland stepped in, Doc clobbered a balky monitor with the butt of a heavy screwdriver. The screen popped on and the engineer grinned. “When all else fails,” he declared, “I resort to the big bang theory of component repair. Hit the son of a bitch and see what happens.”

A big, bearded lumberjack of a man, twenty-three-year-old Doc smoked two packs of Camels and three joints of primo marijuana per day, lived on pizza and coffee, and wore flannel shirts, blue jeans, engineer’s boots and a hunting cap with pull-down ear flaps. With an IQ running on afterburners, Doc had become a hacker at the age of eight by stealing his father’s password and ogling Dad’s computerized pornography collection. Known as “Doc” long before earning a doctorate from Stanford at twenty-one, he was a compleat computer geek. For the last two years he’d worked for Copeland and had become his captive wizard, turning Copeland’s ideas into practical, profitable products.

“The millennium bug,” Copeland said. “I just heard about it.”

“You’re a little slow on the uptake there, boss,” Doc said, tossing the screwdriver aside. “We call it Y2K. That’s geek jargon for Year 2000.”

Copeland repeated the acronym like a mantra, “Y2K, Y2K.”

Doc looked his boss up and down, sneering at his perfectly coifed hair, impeccable grooming, Savile Row suit and Italian wingtips.

“You have that look in your eye, Donald. You smell money.”

“The best smell there is,” Copeland said. “What do you know about this bug?”

“Plenty. Every programmer worth his salt knows about it.”

“Educate me.”

“It’s going to be a catastrophe,” Doc said, sitting down, leaning back and resting his boots on the workbench. “People won’t understand it and aren’t going to believe it.”

“That’s what this guy on the radio said. He scared the hell out of me.”

“Well, that’s good,” Doc drawled, lighting a cigarette. “Just for starters, take Russia, for example. A few Russian nuclear reactors will probably melt down causing massive power failures that leave millions without heat in midwinter and nothing to eat but radiation. Then things will get really interesting.” Eyes twinkling, he smiled and added, “It’s going to cause the kind of mischief that makes a hacker’s heart go pitty-pat.”

“So what can we do about it?”

“For the Russians, nothing. But for the rest of us, well—” he paused “—it depends.”

Doc patiently explained that to a programmer the millennium bug was a trivial problem to correct once the flawed computer code was located. However, the bug was replicated endlessly in date-sensitive programs, and finding each instance in systems with millions of lines of code and thousands of applications was a problem of massive proportions. Furthermore, old computer programs were often improperly documented and written in older computer languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN, making the flaws even more difficult to find. Most younger programmers never learned those languages.

“Can you devise a solution?” Copeland asked.

“Sure, but I’d have to specialize. Every application is different.”

“Who has the most old applications?”

“Banks,” Doc replied instantly.

“No shit,” Copeland said, pleased with Doc’s answer. “Do the banks know that?”

“They should, but they probably don’t. I mean, programmers who work for banks know, they’ve known for a long time, but who listens to programmers? CEO types never turn on a computer, and they sure as shit don’t know anything about their mainframes or their antique COBOL programs.”

“How much would a fix be worth?” Copeland asked.

Doc grinned. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“How much, Doc?”

“A fortune. Hundreds of billions, maybe more. Incomprehensible numbers.”

“You like the idea?” Copeland asked.

“Do you mean, do I like the idea of writing programs to kill the bug?”

“Exactly.”

“It has a certain appeal,” Doc said, stroking his beard. “But on the other hand, we could let all these insane corporations die when their computers fail. That appeals as well.”

“Be serious, Doc. What do you think of this as a business venture? Can we make money?”

“It’s a winner, Donald. It’s a license to print money.”

“What do you need?” Copeland asked. “Just name it.”

“Well, let’s see. How about a big old IBM mainframe to play with, a few hundred applications and two or three engineers.”

“That’s it?”

“I suppose you could buy me a bank, Donnie boy, but why bother?”

The following day they visited a warehouse in Queens and bought a fifteen-year-old IBM s/370 mainframe. Doc tore out a wall on the third floor on Nassau Street, reinforced the floor, hired a crane, installed the machine, and named it Old Blue. He spent a month testing the software that came with it, and then called Copeland in for a demonstration.

“This is what the world is going to look like on the first of January in the year 2000,” Doc announced to his audience of one. “What I’m about to show you is what will happen if things are simply left alone.”

Old Blue had spent its working life performing accounting services for an insurance company. The computer wasn’t that old, but like many firms the insurance company had upgraded its hardware while continuing to run the same old, flawed software. Doc booted up an accounting program based on actuarial tables, reset the time and date to one minute before midnight, December 31, 1999, and gave the program a simple problem to solve, a schedule of premium payments for twenty years. Lines of orderly green numbers scrolled across the screen for sixty seconds until the clock rolled over to midnight. The machine seemed to sputter and hiccup. Old Blue recognized the date “00” as 1900, not 2000, and assumed that numbers representing the near future belonged in the distant past. Simple arithmetical calculations were no longer simple. The machine tried to divide and multiply by negative numbers. Within seconds, Old Blue tried to calculate an infinite regression, and the numbers on the screen went haywire. The random access memory quickly overloaded and the accounting program crashed. The computer was dead.

“Voilà,” said Doc, lighting a Camel.

At 6:30 every morning Copeland ate breakfast in the same Upper West Side delicatessen with three old friends he’d grown up with: a cop, a grocery store manager and a heart surgeon. Copeland was excited, bubbling over with enthusiasm for his Y2K venture, and within a week his pals had banned Y2K as a subject of conversation.

“The phones are gonna go down, the Internet will die, the military will be paralyzed, no one will get a welfare check, the IRS will be all screwed up, your microwave oven won’t work, but that won’t matter because there’ll be no electricity.”

“Enough already,” pleaded Jonathon Spillman, the grocery store manager. “For God’s sake.”

“You’re obsessive-compulsive, Donnie,” said Bill Packard, the doctor. “You should get your head shrunk.”

“Fuck you, Bill. This is gonna make me rich.”

“You’re already rich,” said Ed Garcia, the cop. “Maybe you don’t remember that you got rich financing computer companies that created this problem. If it’s as bad as you say, maybe you should fix it for free.”

“I didn’t create the millennium bug,” Copeland protested. “I discovered it.”

“Like a gold mine,” added Spillman. “You sound like a claim jumper to me. Should we hang him, boys, or just run him out of town?”

As friends who’d known each other since childhood will do, they teased Copeland without mercy to demonstrate their wish for his success. Intelligent men, they took his predictions of doom and destruction with a healthy ration of salt, but each filed away his knowledge of the millennium bug and wondered how it might affect his life at the turn of the century.

Copeland had a hunch that Y2K would generate the biggest return of any of his ideas, so rather than create a new company with his customary financial partners, he established a wholly-owned subsidiary called Copeland Solutions and financed the software development himself.

He was patient. He understood the realities of software development, the endless trial and error and testing and out-of-the-blue insight that led to success. Doc occasionally locked himself in the computer lab, got crazy, and burned a few million brain cells with amphetamines while thrashing away at his objective. Copeland left him alone, keeping busy with his other companies that made more than enough to support his Y2K project. Sometimes he didn’t see Doc for weeks.

The ’90s marched on. Copeland ate breakfast with his buddies every morning, took his wife Marie to dinner at the Four Seasons and his little boy Eddie to Yankee Stadium, but these were perfunctory activities that had nothing to do with his overweening passion for making money. He grew estranged from Marie and scarcely noticed as she drifted away. Eddie was raised by nannies. Copeland traded his Mercedes for a Cadillac and then the Caddy for a Porsche. Life got faster. He could speed across the East River, catch a glimpse of the skyline and be back in his office in minutes flat. It gave him an expensive thrill. For cheap thrills, he went to massage parlors in Chinatown and on autumn weekends visited a bookie in the fish market on Broadway at 83rd to lay a hundred bucks on the Jets.

Finally, two years after Copeland’s epiphany on the bridge, Doc created a software package called “Copeland 2000” that targeted the millennium bug in old legacy systems used by banks. Dependent on mainframes like Old Blue running old applications, banks and other financial institutions with millions of lines of date-sensitive computer code were extremely vulnerable to the millennium bug. Copeland 2000 went to market in late 1993 and had few takers at first, credit unions and small savings and loan companies. Then, over the next two years, as other firms began offering Y2K software and sounding the alarm, more and more major companies began to realize that the millennium bug was serious. The big boys began to line up, and in 1995 Copeland Solutions scored its biggest coup: the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Chase had been among the first major banks to assess the Y2K problem and arrive at the correct conclusion. With 200 million lines of infected code spread among 1,500 different computer systems running thousands of applications, Chase had to eliminate the millennium bug from its systems or go out of business. It was that simple. There was no choice. The result was a $160 million contract with Copeland Solutions.

Others banks around the world quickly followed Chase into Copeland’s stable of clients. Money poured into the company, yet, having achieved success, Copeland discovered he wasn’t satisfied. The high wore off within a few weeks and he found himself feeling flat and bored. He wanted a new, more difficult challenge. Without realizing it, he was a crime waiting to happen.

Despite his reputation as a bold and ruthless businessman, even his old breakfast pals believed he was honest. The truth, however, was that Copeland was primed to consider criminal activity as the next step in business. After all, the line between venture capitalism and white-collar crime was fuzzy at best. All he needed was an opportunity, and one soon presented itself.

The Chase contract gave Copeland Solutions’ programmers access to the bank’s most sensitive data. Every account, record, and program had to be examined for millennium bug flaws and corrected. As this process began, it was only a matter of days before Doc started noticing discrepancies.

The bank was so big it didn’t know how much money it had or where it was. The first interesting account Doc stumbled across dated from 1985. In that year a programmer working for the bank had managed to pull off what later was to become one of the most common forms of computer fraud in the banking business. Every time one of the bank’s computers completed a foreign exchange transaction, it converted foreign currency to dollars and rounded off the number to the nearest mill. The anonymous programmer had written a tiny program that dumped each minuscule fraction of a mill into an account that didn’t show up on regular records. As it happened, the programmer was hit by a truck and died the next year, but his program continued to function flawlessly without attracting the attention of any other Chase official. By 1995, when Doc got to the account, it held more than four million dollars the bank didn’t know existed.

Doc mentioned the orphaned account to Copeland, recounting the tale as hacker’s lore.

“If we left that account alone,” Copeland mused, “how much would it be worth by the end of 1999?”

“Seven or eight million, and I’m sure I’ll find more accounts like this.”

“Adding up to how much, would you guess?”

“No way to tell, but maybe as much as a hundred mil.”

“That could be a lot of free money,” Copeland observed.

“Hell of a joke to play on the bank,” Doc said.

“If the world goes all to hell in January 2000, it would be interesting to have that much cash when everyone else was going bankrupt.”

“What are you suggesting, Donald?”

“Grand larceny.”

“Oh, you wicked man,” Doc observed.

“Just an idea,” Copeland said. “Think about it.”

“The bank has auditors checking our work,” Doc cautioned. “They’re not idiots. Chase expects us to find these accounts and report them.”

“You’re smarter than they are, Doc.”

“We’re already filthy rich, Donnie. Chase and all these other banks are going to make us even richer.”

“So what? You’ve been saying for years what the millennium bug will do: disaster, utter disaster. The world is going to come apart at the seams, and something like this will give us a comfortable nest egg when others will have nothing.”

“You’re calling a hundred million dollars a nice little nest egg? Jesus.”

“Well?” Copeland said. “You have a hacker’s heart. You’ll do it because you can.”

“That’s the problem, Donald. I have to do it. You can’t.”

“It’ll be the biggest bank robbery in history,” Copeland declared, “and the bank will never know it’d been robbed. With all the other disasters at the turn of the century, who’s going to care?”

“Chase, for one.”

“But they’ll never know, Doc.”

“You’re a greedhead, Donald.”

“Yeah. Like the man said, greed is good.”

“Are you serious?” Doc asked.

“Yes, I’m serious. I’ve never been more serious. What the hell, the bank doesn’t even know it has this money. It’s there for the taking.”

“You’re a scumbag,” Doc stated with barely disguised contempt. “We’re selling software like crazy. This company is worth hundreds of millions. And you want to…?”

“It’d be criminal not to do it if we can,” Copeland said, grinning broadly. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

2

Doc’s first inclination was to quit on the spot, but he enjoyed his work and didn’t want to turn his life upside down quite yet. To keep Copeland happy, he agreed to play along with no real intention of robbing the bank. Twisted by dreams of immense wealth, Copeland believed the ability to steal the money gave him the right to take it. That was the mindset of the economic engine running the global economy, it seemed to Doc. Situational ethics run amok. Grab what you can and why not; everybody else does. In theory, the heist was possible because no computer security system was foolproof, but in practical terms it was a less-than-perfect crime. The bank had 200 Y2K drudges working full time at the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, and more than a few were good enough to detect a theft of such magnitude. Who would take the blame? The chief programmer. But fear wasn’t the reason Doc wanted no part of Copeland’s scheme. Humble in his way, Doc was an honest man, a species of humanity unknown to Donald Copeland who believed every intelligent person shared his ethos of callous selfishness. Doc liked money as much as the next guy, yet he clung to the old-fashioned idea that capital could be used for purposes beyond self-aggrandizement.

Having decided to play along, he convinced Copeland that taking the money all at once during the millennium crisis was safer than milking it a little at a time. To placate the boss, he wrote a bogus program that kept a running account of mythical funds for Copeland to check every day, sometimes several times a day.

As the numbers escalated, the company’s legitimate earnings skyrocketed even more quickly. Copeland Solutions expanded rapidly, selling their Y2K software packages to commercial banks in the Philippines, Japan, Latvia, Sweden, Germany and Spain. In 1996 Doc earned six million dollars in bonuses alone — not much by Wall Street standards, but enough for him to do something meaningful.

Doc had taken on the Y2K challenge because it gave him a chance to save a small part of the world from imploding. He could write source code in his sleep and truly loved computers, but deep in his heart he believed the wanton application of computers to all aspects of daily life was often reckless and misguided.

Cybernetics had caused a radical change in global demographics, dividing populations into two camps: the technologically aware and everyone else. Each technological advance pushed the two camps farther apart. Y2K was going to be a watershed event that would transform the dividing line into a perilously deep chasm. Small companies and individuals who couldn’t afford to revamp their computer systems were going to perish while powerful companies who bought Copeland 2000 or similar programs would emerge stronger than ever. It was going to be a war of attrition, and ordinary people, the millions who went to work every day and trusted the systems that made their lives possible — electricity, phones, the subway, water — were going to be caught in the crossfire.

Ethical and compassionate, Doc thought the little guys should have a fighting chance. He’d done his bit to save the big boys by creating programs to save Chase Manhattan and the other banks, but $160 million worth of Copeland 2000 software wouldn’t help Chase if basic services shut down and New York collapsed. Doc felt the least he could do was try to save the city from itself. He would use his money to fund a project Copeland knew nothing about. Even if it failed, it would be an amusing antidote to Copeland’s wild Hollywood scheme to rob the bank.

Posing the problem was easy: How do you keep the power on, the phones working, the water flowing and the subway running in New York City when the computers that controlled those systems failed? Answer: Build an alternate control center for every system, hardwire each to its original, and at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, seize control of the systems and run them with a computer that hadn’t been corrupted by the millennium bug.

Vital control systems always had redundant backup systems that kicked in if the primaries failed. The problem was that the backup systems contained the same Y2K flaws as the primaries. Nevertheless, it was the concept of redundancy that made Doc’s project feasible. In the first few seconds of the 21st Century, all the key computers in the city’s vital systems had to be tricked into switching over to secret alternates instead of their own flawed backups. Was that possible? It was a large and expensive undertaking, and to do it Doc needed to buy the hardware, steal the software, and find a handful of people he could trust.

“I’m building a new computer lab for a special project at my own expense,” he said to Copeland. “I’m paying, so don’t worry about it. I don’t want internal audits or anything like that, and I want you to keep out.”

“What’re you gonna do in there?”

“The world will be a mess after the century rollover. Maybe I can develop some software to put it back together.”

Copeland pursed his lips and his mind clicked over. “Telecommunications, operating systems of all kinds, things like that?”

“I’m just gonna play around with a few things.”

“I want a piece of that action,” Copeland said.

“Talk to me in January 2000, but for now, can it, Donnie.”

Reluctantly, Copeland agreed, and took off on a long tour around the world visiting clients and drumming up business. When he returned, he looked in once, asked no questions, and honored Doc’s request to keep away.

First, Doc sealed off the rear sixty feet of the third floor in the building on Nassau Street and bought a brand new IBM s/390 mainframe. He divided 9000 square feet into space for the computer, a huge air-conditioner, a half dozen large workstations with dozens of terminals and monitors, a telephone switching station, a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and lounge with TVs, a high-end audio system, and old leather couches. When everything was in order, he started to search for people.

He didn’t have to look far to find his first recruit. Late one night he was working alone on a Chase terminal at the Metro Tech Center, scanning an electronic fund transfer program for flawed code. A window on his screen told him how many authorized users were using the system at that moment, which was zero. Around three in the morning someone logged on, but instead of transferring money between accounts, the user attempted to unlock the protocol files Doc was working on. It was an eerie moment in cyberspace. Doc promptly traced the call to a Chase commercial branch in Boston.

The next afternoon he hopped a shuttle to Boston, showed the branch manager his legitimate credentials as the bank’s chief Y2K consultant, and asked to be introduced to the back office staff.

One of the people the manager introduced him to was a thin, relaxed, 24-year-old African-American programmer named Bo Daniels. Dressed in tidy banker’s clothes, Bo stood up from his terminal to shake hands with Doc, who said, “Innumber 437 hop 22 halt bang path.”

Bo’s hand froze in mid-handshake. Doc had uttered the UNIX commands that had led Bo on his illicit mission inside the fund transfer protocol.

“Well, you lost me,” said the manager, who excused himself and left them alone.

“May I?” Doc gestured toward a chair.

They sat in silence. Bo studied his fingernails and wondered if he could crawl into his computer and disappear.

Doc turned a beatific smile on the young man, stroked his beard, and waited. He finally said, “It was you, wasn’t it?”

The programmer offered a sly smile and asked, “You gonna turn me in?”

“I don’t know yet,” Doc replied. “If I were going to commit computer theft, I’d go right to Innumber 437, just like you did.”

“I just wanted to see if I could do it,” Bo said. “If I can, then someone else can. The bank is vulnerable.”

“Did you file a breach of security report?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Bo shrugged and didn’t answer. “Tell me what else you can do,” Doc asked.

“You want to see my resumé?”

“I don’t think you’d put what I want to know in a resumé,” Doc said. “How good are you? Can you write COBOL?”

They spoke geek for twenty minutes. Doc thought Bo was more than competent. He was a wickedly bright but frustrated artist hiding behind a starched shirt and suspenders. When Doc was satisfied that Bo knew enough and could learn what he didn’t know, he offered him a job.

“Doing what? Y2K?”

“Something like that.” Doc leaned forward and quietly said, “Here’s the deal: four times the salary you’re making now, a nice bonus down the line, long hours, no sleep, no dress requirements, and whatever you need to keep you going. Sex, drugs or rock and roll, I don’t care. I’m leaving you a ticket to New York and a thousand dollars. You can show or not. It’s up to you.”

A week later Bo arrived at Nassau Street dressed like Jimi Hendrix. Doc discovered he could play a computer the way Jimi played guitar, and he was willing to play for Doc. A virtuoso, Bo could write twelve computer languages from COBOL to Java, and analyze a database management system faster than a Cray supercomputer. More than anything else, he understood how a complex series of systems worked together.

“What do you know about the generation and distribution of electric power?” Doc asked.

“Nothing.”

“That’s a good place to start because you won’t have to unlearn anything. How long do you think you’d need to understand a power plant?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A couple of years, at least.”

“How about six weeks.”

“Impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible to a willing heart. Disraeli said that. Sit down and look at this,” Doc said, ushering Bo into a chair. He turned on a terminal, and the screen came up bright blue with simple text:

“This simulator is where the company trains advanced operators to deal with breakdowns and blackouts,” Doc explained. “Lesson one: Bringing the power back on after a failure is called ‘restoration.’”

“How’d you get this?” Bo asked, incredulous.

“There’s only one way,” Doc replied. “I hacked it from the ConEd command center. The simulator isn’t nearly as secure as the system itself, but it contains an excellent model of the entire Northeast power grid that’s updated weekly. Once you’re familiar with the simulator and the model, we can go after the real thing because the model tells us where everything is.”

Bo blinked rapidly, his mind whirring away. “You mean you want to hack into ConEd and steal their entire operating system?”

“More or less. Maybe a hundred or so applications. Only the parts we need.”

“Need to do what?”

“Keep the power on in Manhattan,” Doc answered with a wide grin, “from here.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Correctamento, I’m crazy, but that’s a given. The question is, are you crazy enough to become Con Edison, Bo? You have two and a half years to learn every system, every application, the location of every embedded chip. You can learn to reconfigure the system, make all the Y2K corrections, and, yes, keep the lights on in Manhattan at the moment of the century rollover. That’s the idea. If ConEd can’t do it, you will.”

“Mamma mia. I don’t know.” Bo whistled and played a little air guitar. “Plus data, I suppose.”

“Correct. Plus data which we check for Y2K and fix, the long, hard way. First we learn how to isolate ConEd from the grid, and then how to isolate Manhattan and the four power plants on the island plus one in Queens from the rest of ConEd. We need the operating systems of each of the five plants, plus the system operation that ties them together.”

“And we’re supposed to do this by ourselves, just the two of us?”

“No. We need phones, so I’m looking for a phone freak to keep the lines open, and I’m looking for a train freak to run the subway. Maybe a few more. If you make it to January 1st, 2000, there will be a bonus of a million dollars for each of you.”

Bo didn’t need to think about that for long. “You have that kind of money?” he asked.

“It’s already in escrow. The money’s there.”

“What do you get out of it?” Bo asked.

“Sanity,” Doc replied, reaching across Bo to the simulator keyboard. He punched “Choose Incident” from the simulator menu and selected “Total System Failure.”

The screen began to flash and beep a noisy alarm.

“Just do it,” Doc said and handed Bo a Nike cap.

Over the next month Doc interviewed four more hackers who failed to meet his standards. They either didn’t know enough, took too many bad drugs, or were so anarchic and downright criminal that he’d never be able to keep them in line. Then he discovered Carolyn Harvey.

Carolyn’s idea of fun was breaking into telephone companies’ computers, stealing the phone records of prominent individuals, and posting them on the Web. Doc studied her website, “FoneFreek.com,” and followed her electronic trail to a little house in Nashville, Tennessee. A big Harley was parked out front, and Doc left a note on the motorcycle.

“FoneFreek. In town searching for talent,” he wrote, and added the number of his hotel. She called.

“What kind of talent?” she asked.

“Ever seen the machine code for the programmable logic processor in a DESS-5?”

“Yeah. So?”

Doc asked a few more technical questions and liked her answers enough to ask, “How would you like a phone company of your very own?”

“Ooo,” she said. “That would be fun. What can I do with it?”

“Anything you want as long as you can keep it working.”

“Who are you anyway?” she asked

“The Lone Ranger,” Doc said. “Captain America, Yojimbo the samurai warrior, the man with no name. You can call me Doc. Will you meet me for a drink?”

“I don’t have much to do with men,” she said.

“Consider me a fellow geek and nothing more,” he declared. “I have real money, a legitimate company, and a job for the right person. I need someone who’s interested in computers that run telephone systems.”

“This sounds like industrial espionage,” she said.

“It’s much better than that.”

They met at the Connection, a warehouse saloon for the adventurous. Carolyn turned out to be a leather-girl motorcycle dyke with a butch haircut and braces on her teeth.

“You Doc?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s this about?”

“Y2K.”

“Ooo. I like it already. You can buy me a drink.”

“Communications will be vital on the big day,” Doc explained as they sat in a corner away from the music. “We’ll need working phone lines, and T-4 lines direct to the power company’s control center and power plants and to the subway’s central dispatch center. We’ll also need an in-house router hub, telcom center and interconnect. Think you can handle all of that?”

“Are you rich?” she asked.

“Got it covered. You’ll have to trace the lines and physically check every switch.”

“I’ll need a phone company truck.”

“Okay.”

“Logic probes, a lot of stuff.”

“Anything you need.”

“This could be the biggest phone goof of all time. Wow.”

“Yes, but you can’t talk about it with your buddies. No bragging rights.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said.

“That’s part of the package. For two and a half years this will be your life, and the rest of the world will cease to exist.”

Doc offered her the same money and bonus as Bo, a considerably better deal than her job as a lowly programmer for Bell South. The next day he took her to New York and introduced her to Bo.

“I’m Con Edison,” Bo said. “Who are you?”

“I guess I’m Bell Atlantic,” Carolyn answered.

Ronnie Fong was a fatally cute young Chinese woman from San Francisco with four nose rings, each of which represented a triumphant computer break-in at the Department of Defense. DOD hadn’t exactly proved she’d done it, but they’d offered her a job hacking into computers at the Chinese Ministry of Defense. She’d laughed at them. When Doc called, she naturally believed he was a missionary from her nemesis in the Pentagon. He asked her to meet him at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store, a North Beach café.

“The only reason I came,” she said when she walked into the café, “is because otherwise you DOD people won’t leave me alone.”

“I’m not one of them,” Doc protested.

“Then how did you find me? How do you even know about me?” Angry and defiant, she refused a menu, folded her arms across her chest and dared him to speak.

“You know about Y2K?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“Where are you planning on greeting the millennium?”

“At a friend’s place with its own generators and solar panels.”

“So you get the picture.”

She shrugged.

“How would you like to spend New Year’s Eve in New York?”

“Are you out of your mind? That’s the last place I’d want to be.”

“How would you like to be in New York and running computers for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection? That’s their fancy name for the water department.” She looked at him like he was out of his mind. “You could add another ring to your collection,” he added.

“This is a con job,” she said. “You’re DOD.”

“How can I prove I’m not? If I was, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you. I’d be taking you away in handcuffs.” He handed her a plane ticket and cash. “Come to New York and decide for yourself. You’ll be the water department, and just to keep you interested, we need to be kept up-to-date on Space Command in Colorado Springs. Your familiarity with military computers will come in handy.”

“For real?”

“For money.”

“How much money?”

Doc scribbled a number on a napkin and Ronnie counted the zeros.

“That make it worth it?”

Ronnie arrived on Nassau Street skeptical and suspicious until Doc helped her hack into a database at one of New York’s fourteen sewage treatment plants. Inside the water department’s computer, he took her behind the data to the machine language, a tiny portion of which he’d reverse compiled into source code written in a mishmash of seventeen different computer languages. It was a Y2K problem of the worst order containing hidden date fields, programmer errors, kludges, and previous bad fixes.

“If this isn’t fixed, the city of New York will be buried in human fecal matter,” Doc said. “There’s no problem getting water into the city. New York has a fabulous water supply system that’s almost entirely gravity-driven. The problem will be getting the dirty water out.”

“What are they doing about it?” Ronnie asked.

“They?” he hooted. “There is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ is a myth. In this case, ‘they’ will be you. And even if you duplicate all this software and make it work, the water system has thousands of embedded chips in pumps and valves and all over the place.” Doc grinned and unrolled a huge map. “This is a detailed diagram of all the pipes, tunnels, and treatment plants, the entire sewer system of Manhattan. I’ve traced the critical paths and marked the pumps. You can visit every one.”

“Good Lord, this is a shitty job.”

“You have to get your hands dirty to earn your million bucks, Ronnie.”

“And when I’m not down in the sewers, I get to play with Space Command, right?”

“Right. We need to track communication and radio-navigation satellites. There’s no code work involved, only monitoring. When the big night comes, we’ll need to know what’s working and what isn’t.”

“You’re asking for a lot,” Ronnie said.

“Yes. I’m asking for the impossible. Are you in?”

“We’re close to Chinatown, right?”

“Yeah. Just a few blocks.”

“There has to be a catch.”

“There is,” Doc said. “For two and a half years, you’ll have no other life.”

“This is making me thirsty,” Ronnie said. “Can I make some tea?”

When Ronnie came out of the kitchen, Doc was gone and Bo and Carolyn were in the lounge.

“What kind of music do you like?” Carolyn asked. “I like anything loud.”

“That’s cool,” Ronnie said. “You know, what I would like is some way to make this pot of tea more interesting.”

Adrian Hoffman was a tubby little Florida nerd who got a thrill from bringing railroad traffic control systems to a screeching halt. Adrian’s favorite trick was hacking into a railroad’s signaling systems, setting all signals to red, and shutting down dozens of trains at once.

“You don’t care for trains?” Doc asked via e-mail.

“I love trains. I have the world’s biggest train set, Amtrak.”

“Do you ever set the signals to green?”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Adrian replied.

“How old are you?” Doc asked.

“Eighteen.”

“How do you feel about metropolitan transportation systems?”

“They’re cool.”

“Do you think you could run the New York City subway system?”

“Lots of trains. Lots of signals. Yeah, sure.”

“The idea is to keep the trains running, not shut them down.”

“Turnabout is fair play,” Adrian wrote.

“I’ll send you a plane ticket and a thousand bucks.”

“No. Make it a train ticket. This is way cool. I’ve never been to New York.”

Four days later Doc sat with Adrian in Penn Station thinking: problem child, basketcase, wacko, borderline psychotic, but Jesus, does he know his stuff. Adrian looked like a classic nerd with his thick glasses and grungy long hair. He almost never spoke and brought with him a detailed compilation of every computer system used by America’s six largest railroads.

“Wanna see New York?” Doc asked.

Doc didn’t take him to the Empire State Building or Central Park. Instead, they spent twelve hours on the subway. Adrian stood in the front car with a view of the track ahead, and in this manner they criss-crossed the city from Far Rockaway to Riverdale, underground, aboveground, through bridges and tunnels, the trains roaring down the tracks, the signals stretched out in the darkness, green and red, an ever-beckoning stream of lights. They stopped at Grand Central and a subway yard in Queens where the platform overlooked a fleet of trains. Adrian soaked it up like a sponge, saying little, and after a couple of hours was directing the tour himself.

“This is your new train set, Adrian. That cool with you?”

“I dig it,” Adrian said. “Okay.”

To round out his team Doc needed an overall hardware specialist who could keep the computers and communication equipment in tip-top shape. Bo knew of a hacker from San Jose who’d stolen advanced microprocessor designs from Intel and attempted to sell them to an Indonesian cartel. His name was Judd Fernandez and he wasn’t hard to locate. Doc was waiting when he walked out of San Quentin dressed in a three-piece suit that complemented his shaved head and trim goatee.

“Need a job?” Doc asked him outside the prison gate.

“I need a drink. Who the fuck are you?”

“A guy offering you a job, a real job, not one that will send you back to the joint.”

“Take me to the No Name Bar in Sausalito and buy me a Bud first.”

During his three-year sojourn in prison, Judd had managed San Quentin’s computer system and had earned a reputation on the Net as a hardware guru.

“How much did the Indonesians offer you?” Doc asked over a beer in Sausalito.

“Not enough.”

“How much is enough?”

“I’m not interested in money.”

“What then?”

“Time,” Judd replied. “I want time. I just gave away three years that I’ll never get back.”

“Okay,” Doc said. “Give me two years and you’ll have the rest of your life.”

“I have other offers,” he said.

“I know,” Doc said. “You’re famous.”

“What’s the job?”

After Doc outlined his project, Judd looked around the bar, then said, “I could go for a little New York, but you’ll have to clear it with my parole officer.”

A couple of days later Judd walked slowly around the IBM s/390, a vertical box of burnished metal six feet six inches tall, five feet wide and four feet deep. The mainframe. The big, bad ’puter that was going to power up New York. Inside the box were 120 central processing units, seven operating systems, and more memory than all the elephants in Africa. Lying next to the computer on the floor, an imposing stack of paper three feet high was waiting: the operating manual. Instruction one: plug it in. Instruction two: this is the “on” button. Christ almighty, he thought. He grabbed the top four inches and started to read.

3

“You are soldiers now and must conduct yourselves with military discipline,” Doc said to his assembled team. “It may seem overstated and melodramatic, but it’s the only way to get this project done on time.”

“Do we have to salute?” Bo asked sarcastically.

“No.”

“Wear uniforms?”

“No.”

“I like uniforms,” Ronnie declared. “Let’s have uniforms.”

“Uniforms would draw attention, and that’s not allowed. There’s only going to be one rule,” Doc said. “You can’t talk about what you do here. No one outside the project can ever get the slightest whiff of what we’re doing. No one.” Doc watched their faces as the implications of his rule seeped in. “You have friends, family, lovers, even enemies,” he went on, “and you can’t tell them what you’re doing. It’s like doing classified work for the CIA. It’s secret, and secret means secret. No exceptions.”

“What should we tell people, then?” Bo asked. “I talk to my mother almost every day. If I don’t call her, she’ll track me down and show up here.”

“Tell your mother you’re employed by a software company in New York and you’re working on Y2K. Don’t tell them anything if you can avoid it. Anyone have a problem with this?”

“What happens if we break the rule?” Adrian asked.

“You’re on your honor not to,” Doc said. “I’m not going to follow you around or tap your phone.”

“But what if we do?” Adrian persisted.

“Then you’re gone, adios, good-bye. No money, no fun and games, no million-dollar bonus.”

“How will you know?”

Doc glared at Adrian and thought he’d made a mistake. He never should have let the kid get past Penn Station. He should’ve bought him a return ticket and sent him back to Florida, but here he was on Nassau Street with his spacey eyes and Grateful Dead hair and, “I don’t wanna follow no rules, nya nana na na.” To hell with that.

“Are you going to be a pain in the ass, Adrian?” Doc snapped.

“I just don’t like rules, anybody’s rules.”

“We can argue about anything else, and I’m sure we will, but not about this. If you don’t get it, Adrian, I’m sorry. The end. You can go home right now.”

Doc grabbed a phone, dialed directory assistance, and said, “Amtrak, please.”

“Wait a minute,” Judd said. “Let me talk to him.”

“Please do.”

Judd put his arm around Adrian’s shoulders and drew him off into a corner.

“What’s your problem?” Judd asked quietly.

“I can’t stand rules.”

“We’re only going to have one. A hacker should understand that if you talk, you get caught and they take your toys away. Down in Florida you had one old PC. Here, you have a huge fucking mainframe and anything else you want. You don’t want to lose that, do you?”

Adrian folded his arms across his chest and fumed.

“This isn’t school,” Judd said. “I know what kind of a guy you are, Adrian. You’re the kid nobody likes, the kid people make fun of because you’re so fucking smart. You use your intelligence as a weapon and tear into them, don’t you. You laugh at their mistakes in school and they hate you and you hate them. Am I right? I can see it in your eyes. You screw around with the trains because it gives you a sense of power, and every time you do it and don’t get caught, you feel even more powerful. But listen to this, you little shit. Doc found you, and that means sooner or later you would’ve been caught, and if you caused a train wreck, you’d be sent to the slammer, like me. Doc saved your ass from getting into real trouble, and you owe him. We all do. All of us have gone through what you’ve experienced. Bo, Carolyn, Ronnie, and me, too, we’re all smart, and we’ve all been laughed at and teased and we’ve all thought of revenge. Revenge put me in prison. Doc wants us to do something important, and if you can’t handle that, if you can’t put away your bullshit and nerdy little thoughts of revenge and getting even, well, forget it. Are you too selfish to understand that? Are you just a little asshole? We don’t have time to fuck around here. Get with the program now, or go back to Orlando.”

A little wheel turned over in Adrian’s mind, and he understood he was being treated like an adult for the first time. Or the last time.

“No talking, no bragging,” he said. “I get it.”

“I don’t want to have to babysit you. Now, are you in or out?”

“I don’t want to go back to Florida.”

“Doc!”

“Yeah.”

“He’s gonna be okay.”

They all came from places deep in the American soul, the black middle class, the barrio, Chinatown, the dispossessed working class, and had used their brains to enter the world of technology. Each had taken an unorthodox route to cybernetics and computers, and Doc had chosen them because he knew mavericks often had the keenest, most creative minds.

Ronnie Fong was the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who’d rejected her because she’d rejected the restrictions of their traditions. At the same time she clung to her culture. In New York she shopped and ate in Chinatown and delighted in speaking Cantonese with the fishmonger. In her heart she believed a million dollars would go a long way toward a reconciliation with her family in San Francisco.

Carolyn Harvey had been ostracized by her family because she was flamboyantly gay. Technology was her release from a world of prejudice and fear, and she’d created an identity based on defiance. Coming to New York was an act of liberation. There, in the crush of people of every possible description, she didn’t have to explain or defend herself. She could just be, and she turned her back on Nashville without a second thought.

Bo Daniels’ father was an accountant and his mother owned a fashionable boutique. He spoke middle-class English with a Boston accent, went to all the right schools, and had learned early on that computers didn’t care if he was black or white. Chase had hired him right out of Boston College, put him in the back room of the Boston branch and left him alone. As he watched the drones in the bank being moved around like chess pieces by higher management, he’d decided he didn’t want a career at Chase. Corporate culture didn’t interest him unless he created it, and that wouldn’t happen at Chase or any other bank. He wanted to jump right to the top and be the boss. Less of an outlaw than the others, he had an entrepreneurial spirit and saw in his new work an opportunity to go into business for himself. In the months after the millennium bug struck, he figured electric utilities would need new software to get up and running again. Bo and Doc agreed that the software they were developing for ConEd could be repackaged and sold after January 1, 2000.

Judd Fernandez’s Mexican mother had raised him alone in the barrios of San Jose. Surrounded by poverty and gangs, he had enough sense to look beyond the low-rider life around him to the neatly trimmed industrial parks that sprouted like mushrooms right next door in Silicon Valley. He wanted a job as a programmer, and there were jobs galore, but not for him. He was a punk from the barrio, self-taught, with no recognized merit badges and unskilled at writing sophisticated resumés. His talents went unrecognized. Rebuffed when he applied for work as a programmer at Intel, he decided to get even. He hacked into Intel’s most secure systems and stole schematics for a dozen new chips. Then, full of himself, he took his stolen goods to Los Angeles and was snared in a sting by the LAPD. Tried in superior court, he was sent to state prison for three years. Getting caught selling the goods in no way diminished his achievement of hacking into Intel and downloading their most precious files. In hackerland, that was extreme, perhaps beyond belief, and no one would have believed it if it hadn’t been proven in court.

And finally there was Adrian Hoffman whose life might have been a sequel to Natural Born Killers. He grew up in seven different trailer parks in Central Florida. His mom was a ticket seller at Disneyworld, and his dad drank himself to death when Adrian was twelve. Adrian was a totally dysfunctional human being from K-Mart America with one saving grace. He understood the relationship between trains and computers better than anyone on the planet.

The day after Judd dressed him down, Adrian disappeared for three days. Doc was ready to replace him when he realized the kid was riding subway trains and exploring the city’s private railroad.

“For God’s sake, Adrian,” Doc pleaded when the prodigal returned, “just tell somebody where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

To keep him around Nassau Street, Doc bought HO scale models of the subway trains and let Adrian build a layout in the computer lab. With gentle coaxing, Doc got him to model the subway’s signal system and use the toy trains to test his software patches.

Doc bought a huge condo a few blocks from Nassau Street in Battery Park City for them, and they had no choice but to learn to live and work together. Their constant proximity produced countless squabbles, two relationships and one breakup, but ultimately, using gentle persuasion, sensitive guidance and the discipline of an implacable deadline, Doc forged them into a unified team with a mission. By the end of 1997 the mission had taken possession of their psyches, and they gradually began to withdraw from the world. Outside relationships became difficult as the constraints of secrecy and silence made anything beyond small-talk impossible.

Judd helped by recounting how he’d learned to live in prison. “Just keep yourself to yourself and live in your heads,” he told them, and their heads became a collective head as their ethnic and personal identifications faded away. It wasn’t long before they were swept up in the urgency of their task. Two and a half years seemed like a long time, but it grew shorter every day. Nothing could be put aside or left undone.

Ronnie quickly became an expert in the city’s water supply that flowed from the Catskills through hundreds of miles of tunnels, aqueducts and reservoirs. Adrian played with his model trains and took sight-seeing trips through the tunnels and into the yards. Carolyn walked the streets of Manhattan, following phone lines from junction box to building to Bell Atlantic router. Doc bought her a truck, a hard hat and genuine Bell Atlantic ID, and she went into the tunnels beneath the streets, inspected the lines foot by foot and tested every chip with a logic probe. In a year she worked her way a hundred blocks from Nassau Street to the ConEd Systems Command Center at 65th and West End Avenue, and from there to the four power plants on the island and the huge Ravenswood plant across the East River in Queens. When she finished hardwiring the lines to the power plants, she started on the lines from Nassau Street to the Department of Environmental Protection offices in the Bronx and the subway’s central dispatch office in Brooklyn.

Bo visited the bookstores around Columbia University and bought himself an education in electrical engineering for a few hundred dollars. An ordinary computer nerd would have hacked into ConEd and stolen applications without knowing or caring about the physical systems they controlled. That wasn’t good enough. Bo had to know how and why and where, and in the end, who.

Six months after he started, Bo knew more about Con Edison than the CEO, Mr. Peter Wilcox, whose e-mail he could read although he didn’t have time. He knew where the different subsystems worked together efficiently and where they didn’t, and which sub-stations between Manhattan and the power plants were likely to blow like weak links in a chain. He’d figured out how to correct the Y2K problems and build a system that would keep the power on in Manhattan, but he had no way to trick the power company into switching over to the computer on Nassau Street. He needed secret override passwords to put his knowledge to work.

“Well,” Doc asked him one day in 1998, “can we save New York?”

“Not without help,” Bo answered. “I need someone inside who can give me passwords. Without the override codes, at the moment of the century rollover, I’m dead in the water. Find me a spy.”

“No problem,” Doc replied. “They’re all over the Internet.”

Finding an insider who occupied a key position in the power company’s control rooms was less difficult than finding competent hackers. No one had a better understanding of Y2K problems than the hardcore professionals who sat at the controls. These men and women communicated extensively via the Internet, often using pseudonyms to hide their identities. Power plant engineers, telephone system programmers, transit system authorities, and dozens more exchanged ideas and technical information in cyberspace.

Doc logged on to the Usenet and within a month had found an engineer who posted messages under the name “Deep Volt.” A senior operator at ConEd’s system operations command center, Deep Volt was convinced the power grid was going to fail. Doc started sending the anonymous engineer the locations of Y2K bugs Bo had found that were missed by the company’s own Y2K programmers. In exchange, Deep Volt provided secret documents, applications and system schematics. They had their insider, and from that moment on, the work progressed much more quickly.

As they got into it, they started to call themselves the Midnight Club. Ronnie had T-shirts printed with the skyline of Manhattan at night. They worked like dogs, and by the end of 1998 they’d ascertained the city’s true state of readiness for the coming assault. The prospects were dismal.

After spending several hundred million on Y2K, Con Edison had the most advanced remediation program of any power company in the world, but the giant utility was at the mercy of malfunctions anywhere on the Northeast electrical grid. The interconnected systems were so complex that the chances of every company on the grid making each fix exactly right were nil. Probability studies predicted failure. If the power went down, nothing else would matter.

The telephone system had the best chance of survival because Bell Atlantic had done everything they could think of at a companywide level to correct their Y2K problems, replacing embedded chips in routers and switches and checking every application for flaws. At the local level the work was uneven and inconsistent. Like every other system, Bell Atlantic was part of a wider network of interconnected systems, and the interconnects were extremely vulnerable and subject to failure.

The Department of Environmental Protection had one of the oldest, most decrepit computer systems the Midnight Club had ever seen. Like many city departments, the DEP was the private bailiwick of senior managers who dwelled in their own hermetically sealed universe. Their system had worked efficiently for decades and they saw no reason to change.

“We’ll just have to do it for them,” Doc said.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority had recognized the Y2K problem early, and the overall compliance was remarkably advanced, but the subway’s train control system was ancient, having been hardly touched since the 1950s. The advantage of running an antique was that the electrical relays were mechanical devices without embedded chips. The trains would be safe, but the problems lay in the automated train boards at the MTA’s traffic control center on Jay Street in Brooklyn. Adrian found undetected millennium bug flaws that would shut down the screens, and the system operators wouldn’t be able to see where the trains were. They’d have to rely on the MTA’s radio communication system, which was dependent on flawed chips in the radio transmitters. When the screens and communications failed, the system would come to an immediate halt.

Left alone, New York’s most vital systems would break down. In midwinter, the technological overlay that made the city work would be stripped away like bad varnish, reducing New York to medieval conditions. Projecting what would happen after that depended on one’s view of human nature. If people were evil and wicked, then looting and pillaging would be the order of the day. On the other hand, if the citizens of New York were concerned with their mutual benefit and survival, people would adapt and help one another. Doc believed he’d see plenty of both.

After two years, the Midnight Club had hardened into dedicated, militant soldiers of cyberspace. They were ready to take over and operate the deep infrastructure of the island of Manhattan, but they needed the essential Con Edison override passwords for the final switchover. With them, they had a chance to wrest control from the ConEd computers and save the island from a massive power failure. Without them, New York was kaput.

With six months left, they had almost everything they needed, but not quite. Deep Volt was unable to obtain an essential set of ConEd passwords that unlocked the override controls that switched the primary system to the backup. Without those passwords, Bo’s work would go for naught. Instead of switching to Nassau Street, the ConEd computers would switch to their own backup systems that contained the same flaws as the primary, and power would be lost. The passwords were kept on a locked PC with no connection to the outside world, and there was no way to hack in and get them.

“Your spy isn’t worth a damn,” Bo complained.

“She’s doing the best she can,” Doc said in her defense. “She’s risking her job. If she breaks in and steals the passwords, she’ll be caught and they’ll change the passwords.”

“There must be a way,” Bo insisted. “Find a thief.”

“Thieves don’t advertise on the Net.”

The Midnight Club was isolated from the rest of the city, but they weren’t operating in a vacuum. By March of 1999 news of the coming millennium bug was beginning to reach the general public. In that month companies whose fiscal year began in March started encountering problems they hadn’t expected. If no man is an island, neither is a company. The world was learning that virtually all the computers on the planet were part of one huge network that was as vulnerable as the weakest link. Firms who believed their systems were Y2K compliant suddenly found their expensive new software was corrupted by files imported from suppliers and customers who were not compliant. The technical difficulties of finding corrupted code in a maze of computer languages, lost documentation and shoddy programming became apparent. Bankruptcies mounted and panic began to creep into the financial community. Companies that had delayed the allocation of funds for Y2K because they believed the return on investment was zero realized they’d made a mistake. To their horror they discovered that no programmers were available to sort out their problems. It was too late. Every month as another round of firms began their fiscal year, the problems intensified. Billing and accounting programs went haywire, exactly the way Doc had demonstrated on Old Blue.

People looked to the federal government for leadership, but none was forthcoming. The Senate and House held hearings and experts repeated what they’d been saying for years, and the result was to call more panels of experts and create bureaucracies that argued over definitions. Every day, as the inevitable deadline crept closer, the responsible authorities argued and debated and discussed, and another day was lost. Unclear on the concept, the government foundered. Agencies such as the Social Security Administration that had been working on Y2K since 1989 learned that inadequate measures in other agencies thwarted their meeting objectives. When 2000 arrived, Social Security would be able to distribute funds, but the Treasury Department would be unprepared to cut checks. Faced with impending paralysis within its own systems, the government was revealed as powerless and irrelevant, reduced to nothing more than an obstacle and a nuisance.

Millennia, years, days, and nanoseconds are convenient ways of measuring time, and accurately measuring time is important to computers. Units of time are finite objects a computer can recognize and count, and it is the counting that allows a computer to compute. Computers count time as a way of sequencing processes. One of the first things a computer does when it is turned on is tell itself the time and date.

The millennium bug was not the only date-related problem confronted by computers in 1999. Many systems were based entirely on date and time, including the Global Positioning System, GPS, a satellite-based system of radio-navigation used world-wide by American and allied military units, civilian ships at sea, aircraft, motor vehicles and geophysical researchers. Every telephone company in America used GPS to set the clocks that ran their switching stations, billing procedures and maintenance schedules.

GPS was operated by the United States Air Force Space Command who maintained a fleet of 24 satellites, and a radio fix from three birds was sufficient to locate a position anywhere on the globe. Anyone could buy a GPS receiver, tune in the satellites and use the system. Long before the night of August 21–22, 1999, the Air Force widely disseminated the news that on that date the nature of the data beamed down from the satellites was going to change. Older GPS receivers required a new chip in order to correctly interpret the data and determine an accurate position. So many millions of craft depended on the system that failure in only one percent amounted to thousands of receivers that hadn’t been upgraded.

Despite the warnings, on August 22 the world was surprised by a wave of disastrous accidents caused by simultaneous computer malfunctions all over the globe. In foggy San Francisco Bay two oil tankers collided, polluting the harbor with millions of gallons of crude. In Rotterdam a liquid petroleum gas ship rammed a pier and the ensuing explosion destroyed the pier, a railroad yard and killed 327 people. Small boats were especially vulnerable, and dozens of inexperienced sailors who depended on the system and had never learned the basics of navigation without instruments were lost at sea.

The GPS rollover was not a millennium bug problem, per se, but it was similar and came at a time when Y2K was in the news every day. People began to look at computers as Trojan horses, and all the old fears from the early days of computing were brought back to life. In the ’50s and ’60s the huge, cumbersome machines of that era had inspired dread. Workers had believed they would be replaced by automated machines, and they were. Students had rebelled against being treated like computer punch cards, and movies like 2001 had envisioned menacing machines making war on humanity. Cartoon characters had stalked the pages of The New Yorker with signs that read, “The end is near, computers are here.” Computers were strange, threatening, and misunderstood, but over time they’d been accepted, embraced, and ultimately ignored, if never properly understood. As Y2K loomed nearer, the cartoons reappeared depicting a life-and-death struggle between Man and Machine. In late 1999 pundits began asking the question: What have we wrought? No one had answers that made sense. Newsweek and Time featured articles on cybernetically isolated colonies of computer scientists that had sprung up in Arizona and New Mexico. These knowledgeable men and women believed a disaster was on its way, and they’d sold their securities, withdrawn their money from banks and built fortresses to protect themselves and their families. As experts continued to contradict one another and wild predictions of an apocalypse crowded the headlines, people became confused and frightened. Every error on a bank statement was blamed on the millennium bug.

On October 1 a severe round of fiscal year computer meltdowns delivered yet another blow to the economy. On that day the federal fiscal year began, and inadequate remediation inside dozens of federal agencies became apparent. Projections failed. Planning became impossible. Government procurement agencies suddenly couldn’t buy anything because they’d lost track of purchase orders and invoices. Military logistics systems lost control of entire supply chains, and the ripple effect sent a shock wave through the economy. Companies who depended on government orders saw the bottom fall out of their stock value. Technology stocks tumbled, and lawsuits, long predicted as the most expensive part of the Y2K problem, began to clog the courts as the real debate began on the issue of who was responsible for the millennium bug, and who was going to pay for the losses. The answer: everybody.

Despite all the publicity, opinion surveys in late December 1999 revealed that a third of the American people had never heard of Y2K or the millennium bug. People knew that many government computers were not working properly without understanding why. Millions of New Yorkers carried on with their lives, not completely unaware of what was coming, but uncertain as to its exact nature and what it meant. People who understood Y2K tried to explain it to those who didn’t, and you either got it or you didn’t. It didn’t matter. It was coming, ready or not.

Those who did get it took it seriously. A New Yorker didn’t need a degree in computer science to understand that a technological breakdown that started with a power blackout had severe social consequences. Previous blackouts had come as a surprise and prompted spontaneous looting. This time people were forewarned. Steel doors, window grates and security guards commanded premium prices. When guards became too expensive, small business owners bought shotguns and planned to sit in their stores themselves. In every borough, neighborhoods created community patrols and made plans for mutual protection on New Year’s Eve. The police didn’t object. On New Year’s Eve, the department would be stressed to maximum capability even without Y2K. In the most squalid ghettos of the South Bronx, the Colombian district of Queens, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Spanish Harlem in Manhattan, community leaders spread the word: Don’t burn down your own house.

With one week to go, the Midnight Club had assembled a software package of 112 applications on Judd’s mainframe that effectively duplicated Con Edison’s system for supplying power to Manhattan. To ensure communications they’d built a state-of-the-art telephone switching station and accessed an island-wide network of wire and microwave links, every inch inspected and brought up to snuff by Carolyn. To run the subway, they’d constructed a complete train control center for seven subway lines that traversed the island and parts of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. They had confidence in all their work except the sewage system. The system was simply too old, too complex, and had too many embedded chips in places Ronnie couldn’t get into.

They didn’t sleep much the last week. As the big day approached, they still didn’t have the crucial passwords from ConEd. Doc called Deep Volt every day, but to no avail. The spy was able to supply Y2K upgrades the company had developed, but no override passwords.

On December 30 no one left the third floor of the building on Nassau Street, an old red brick structure with black iron railings and fire escapes, a piece of old New York that lay just outside the palisade wall that had given Wall Street its name. The wall had been build by the Dutch to keep the British out of New Amsterdam, but this time nothing could defend against the hostile aliens except a tiny band of outlaws. The countdown began. The war between the millennium bug and its Y2K antidotes was about to start in earnest.