Deadline Y2K

16

The ball in Times Square descended halfway and stopped, as if time itself were suspended. Twelve thousand rhinestones and 180 halogen lights glistened and sparkled, but the sphere was immobilized. The crowd gasped. The twenty-four giant video screens went blank and the crowd gasped again. Then, with no preamble, the screens suddenly came alive with film of a monstrous subway train rushing headlong at the camera, coming closer and closer, blue sparks flying, the thundering roar of steel wheels on steel rails exploding through the sound system. The unexpected terror of the film slammed the crowd like a howitzer. A half million people were screaming when the hurtling train suddenly stopped in a blurry freeze-frame. In giant script, splashed in crimson across the front of the cab were the words, “Adrian 2000.”

The screens faded to black. A pair of dumbstruck operators in the main video truck thrashed at their controls, shrieking their astonishment, when images from live cameras around 42nd Street popped back onto the screens as they’d been programmed to do. Scheduled events moved resolutely on. Bands played “Auld Lang Syne,” fireworks erupted from the Hudson River and Central Park, the world did not end, Christ did not appear in the 24th Precinct or anywhere else, and the ball completed its descent in stately fashion.

The crowd uttered a huge sigh of relief, thinking the moment had passed with nothing more than a trick. If that was the worst the dread millennium bug could do, party on!

The 21st Century commenced in the Eastern time zone. People in Manhattan danced and laughed away their fears and trepidations. To them, Y2K had been a hoax. It was all a big nonevent.

On the edge of the crowd, a five-year-old, bundled up against the cold and perched on his father’s shoulders, pointed up at Mickey Mouse’s big digital clock.

“Look, Daddy!”

The display read, “8:01 A.M. January 5, 1980.”

On Nassau Street, Doc had watched the finale of Barbra’s show from the Garden. After Barbra blew kisses and gushed, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year everybody!” New York 1 had switched coverage to Times Square, and Doc had witnessed Adrian’s prank.

Laughing so hard he fell out of his chair, he lay on the floor and shouted across the room, “Adrian, you’re beautiful!”

The kid was irrepressible, God bless him. Doc picked himself up, crossed the room, and gave the boy a pat on the back.

“Way to go, Adrian. Nice hack.”

Adrian shrugged, fixated on his monitor that displayed a duplicate of the big screen in the MTA dispatch center. Red and green lights twinkled and jumped from one electrical block to the next, showing the movement of trains in 238 miles of tunnels.

Doc glanced at the clocks. 12:02. The Eastern time zone was toast but didn’t know it yet. He went from station to station, offering murmurs of encouragement. He’d done his part, preparing the Midnight Club for their moment of glory, but this was like nuclear war. There was no way to practice.

“Ronnie? How’s the water supply?”

“Okay coming in. Going out not so good. Six of fourteen treatment plants are down, and three more are on the brink.”

“Carolyn? Phones?”

“MCI and GTE are down. Bell and AT&T are up. Military hardened land lines are up. State police dedicated lines are down. All our lines are up.”

“Judd? The Web?”

“Internet is dead. There is no Web. DARPA is still up, but spotty.”

“Bo?”

“I’m going to lose two plants in Queens and one in the Bronx.”

Bo’s fingers trembled above his keyboard and sweat poured down his temples.

“How’s Sarah?” Doc asked.

“Terrified.”

Doc lit a Camel. On Bo’s main screen, the flow of electricity through the grid of which Con Edison was no longer a part was measured by a flickering chart. The grid had been under heavy load since nuclear-fueled plants were taken off-line earlier in the day, and all the plants were straining to provide extra power for all the cities illuminated for millennium celebrations.

An array of smaller screens displayed the output from each of ConEd’s ten remaining power plants, three of which were faltering.

“Steady as she goes,” Bo said into his headset. “Steady, steady, oh shit.”

Spikes appeared on several of the smaller screens, and a huge downward spike flashed on the big monitor.

“It’s coming! It’s coming! Hold onto your hat, Sarah.”

“Oh my God.”

“You’re going to lose Astoria, Hudson Avenue and Narrows right now,” Bo said rapidly, naming the three failing Con Edison power plants. “I’m initiating the isolation of Manhattan. We can’t wait. Astoria has lost all boiler controls in number three and she’s about to blow sky high.”

“I can see that.”

“Well, shut the damned plant down!” Bo demanded. “Do it!”

“I’m trying,” Sarah answered, her stress radiating from Bo’s headset. “I’m losing my phones to the six outer plants.”

“Shit,” Bo shouted. “Carolyn! Her phones are going down.”

“I can’t do a damned thing about their dedicated lines, Bo. I’ve been telling them for months to check their telcom switches, but they didn’t. They’re toast.”

“We’re all toast,” Sarah said dejectedly.

“Not yet,” Bo said as he launched a program that reconfigured the transmission and distribution of electricity from the five plants he hoped were compliant through 53 substations to Manhattan and thin slices of Brooklyn and Queens along the East River waterfront. The isolation of the island was complete. The rest of New York had to stand or fall on its own.

Ten seconds later a high-pressure boiler exploded in Astoria Generator Three, killing four workers instantly and wounding five more. Astoria tripped and went off-line. In the Hudson Avenue plant, supposedly Y2K compliant voltage controls had been remediated by a programmer asleep at the compiler. He’d missed thousands of date-fields because they’d been named “Zorro” by the original programmer. When Zorro met the 21st Century, the devilish swordsman corrupted the compliant code and sent false readings to the operators’ screens. Well-trained and prepared for false readings that fell outside the parameters of possibility, the plant operator disconnected the sensors and shifted voltage control to a backup system. The last thing he saw on his screen was the infected backup system tripping the plant and shutting down everything, including his monitor.

At the Narrows plant, a bizarre reading from emission controls immediately tripped the plant, shut down the generators, and took it off-line. Staten Island and the southern half of Brooklyn suffered a brownout. Twenty seconds later, the first jolt of weird voltages rippled over the grid. The Northeast grid experienced failures and anomalies every day, but it had never endured hundreds of simultaneous malfunctions. When twenty-seven power plants north and west of the city failed immediately, all for different reasons, voltage across the grid suddenly dropped, causing widespread brownouts that lasted a few seconds. The remaining plants struggled to pick up the slack, but the failure of defective high-voltage regulators two hundred miles north in Vermont sent an uncontrollable power surge over the transmission lines that swept across the grid like a hurricane. To protect hardware from the surge, circuit breakers tripped power plants, transmission lines, and distribution substations, and in a minute and forty-three seconds, five hundred thousand square miles from Maine to the District of Columbia and east to Ohio blacked out. The Northeast grid crashed.

Three minutes later the Southeast grid flamed out along with Eastern Canada, the Yucatan peninsula and the islands of the Caribbean. The race with the most implacable of deadlines was lost. It was as though the Atlantic Ocean had overflowed its shores and swallowed North America.

In Washington, where 750,000 millennium celebrants had gathered in the Mall, the city turned as dark as the granite facade of the Vietnam memorial. Emergency generators popped on in the White House, but the millennium bug had decapitated the nation. Deep underground, the President was in a communications bunker talking to the military and the CIA, but he couldn’t talk to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, or Mobile. He couldn’t call across town, for that matter.

America’s long night of darkness began with sirens screaming down Pennsylvania Avenue. From Maine to Florida, the leaderless, disorganized nation entered the 21st Century in a state of total disarray.

The millennium bug had come home.

Unique and dazzling, New York was ablaze with light. The party continued in Times Square where the delirious crowd, oblivious to events elsewhere, celebrated the glorious arrival of the new millennium. The news that the entire world was dark beyond the Hudson passed quickly by word of mouth. Many dismissed it as a rumor. “And if it’s true,” one drunk bellowed to another, “who cares?”

In the 24th Precinct, the prayer that ended the 20th Century greeted the new millennium with a rousing, “Hallelujah.”

At Bellevue, Packard sewed up the mayor’s chest and took a straw poll of the nurses. “So,” he asked, “will you guys vote for Rudy again?”

On 85th Street, Donald Copeland heard a knock on his door. When he twisted the knob, to his surprise the door swung open and revealed Ed Garcia standing on the porch.

“I thought you guys were locked in,” the captain said, and when Copeland didn’t respond, he added, “We got lights. How ’bout that.”

Copeland blinked. A cash register was jingling between his ears and he appeared more than a little bewildered. He blinked a few more times before he said, “Come in. Let’s have a drink. Happy New Year.”

On Nassau Street, cool, unflappable Bo rushed to the bathroom and puked, leaving his seat vacant and headset dangling.

Three miles north, Sarah McFadden had closed her eyes, clasped her hands together, hurriedly mumbled a prayer, and listened for the hum of emergency generators that never came. All she heard was the buzz of excited people in the command center. She opened her eyes. The lights were on.

“Bo?” she said anxiously.

Doc turned on a speaker phone and said, “This is Doc. Bo will be right back.”

“Oh my God,” she uttered. “Whatever that young man did, it worked.”

“I’m going to reserve judgment on that,” Doc replied, reading Bo’s screens. “You have problems at Ravenswood. Big Allis is not happy.”

“I’m on to that. Just let me catch my breath.”

Sheepishly, Bo emerged from the bathroom wiping his mouth.

“Sorry,” he apologized.

Doc wrapped him in a bear hug. Ronnie, Carolyn and Jody took turns hugging and kissing the embarrassed young man. Adrian, naturally, didn’t move from his station. Judd added a hug and handshake and declared, “We’re the only place within a thousand miles that has lights, Bo. You did it, man. All right.”

Bo broke free and plugged in his headset.

“Sarah?”

“We have trouble at Ravenswood.”

“Let’s get on it. I have a set of diagnostics configured for each of the five plants. If they don’t work, we’ll try something else.”

The Midnight Club returned to their stations, astonished at Bo’s success. With no way to test the system under battlefield conditions, Doc’s plan and Bo’s code had had a one in a million chance to succeed. Even if the code were perfect, the plan still should have failed because of embedded chips in the vast tangle of systems. As it was, Bo’s applications kept the lights on in Manhattan. Across the East River, downtown Brooklyn remained brightly lit because power had to reach Jay Street to keep the subway running. A strip of Queens around the Ravenswood power plant near the Queensboro Bridge had lights thanks to proximity to Big Allis. The rest of New York was as dark as Moscow.

Let there be light, Doc thought, as he ran downstairs to the second floor where Annie and the customer support staff were working with the banks.

“Did Chase make it?” he demanded. “They should have power at the Tech Center.”

“They do,” Annie said. “They’re okay.”

“The credit unions?”

“Everyone is okay, Doc. Relax.”

Annie pulled him over to one of the staff screens where a techie in a headset was in multimedia communication with the Chase Y2K team at the Tech Center. Doc could see that the bank’s core computers had survived the century rollover and were performing, if not flawlessly, at least as well as they ever did.

“Is the microwave circuit to Chase okay?” Doc asked.

“Yeah, communication is fine, and the 2000 software is cool,” said the techie, a kid in a Princeton sweatshirt, “but the Metro Tech building is like full of bugs. The swing shift is locked in and the night shift locked out.”

Doc grinned, amused.

“Did you do that on purpose?” Annie asked, playfully punching Doc in the shoulder.

Doc punched her back and said, “I’ll never tell.”

“I hear the lights went out in Boston,” the techie remarked.

“Yep.”

“And in Philly.”

“Yep.”

“Everywhere except here. Isn’t that like, strange?”

“Nope. How’re your phones?”

“It’s really weird. Our phones are good, but everyone we call is like really surprised because they can’t call out on their phones, and no one else can call them, either. It’s like the phone gods smiled on us. We can call some places and not others. There’s like no phones in Washington or Toronto. I knew this was going to be like, bizarre, but this is bizarre bizarre.”

Doc stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, causing the staff to glance up from their screens. Thirty heads sprouted like cabbages above the cubicle dividers.

“Annie tells me Chase and all our clients survived the millennium crunch,” Doc announced. “You’re veteran troopers, and you’ve earned an honest victory tonight. I’m not going to make a ridiculous speech. I just want to say that everyone in this room will receive a bonus of $20,000. Thank you.”

The whistles and cheers lasted only a moment before everyone went back to work.

As they walked toward the door, Doc said, “Your people are doing terrific work, Annie. They’re all great.”

“Now that the big moment has come and gone,” she said, “people are wondering about their jobs. The bonuses are nice, but they want to know if their jobs will be here next week.”

“Annie, tell them this isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning. Our people don’t have to worry about their jobs. We have to worry about paying them enough to keep them.”

“How bad is it, Doc?”

“Depends on your point of view. You might say the collapse of civilization is not a bad thing if you think civilization is on the wrong track.”

“Don’t be such a smart-ass.”

“Okay, let’s see,” he said, “Around town, Brooklyn Union Gas has lost control of pressure regulators in the natural gas pipes and shut down. All broadcast TV has gone belly up, and two cable stations are the only TV right now. I think three radio stations are broadcasting music. Only a few Bell Atlantic and AT&T telephone lines are working, including yours. Police radios are working. In the outer boroughs, emergency generators are providing electricity to some buildings and hospitals. The subway is running.”

“Is there looting?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“How do you know?”

“I have a good police scanner,” he answered with a shrug. “I like toys.”

Computer malfunctions were instantaneous, but effects required several nanoseconds to manifest. Inside billions of silicon wafers, the flow of electrons responded to binary instructions the only way possible, taking the path of least resistance. The machines peeled off trillions of calculations in those first slim fractions of a second, following instructions written by human beings, and many of those humans were defective units. Because of human error, complacency, poor management, bad fixes and inadequate testing, three million computers in New York malfunctioned before the century was one second old.

Not all malfunctions were fatal, and many were rapidly fixed once they became apparent. A somewhat lesser number of machines survived with no malfunctions, but wide area networks of compliant machines were inoperable because phone systems were down. The ratio between effort put into Y2K remediation and survival was direct and merciless. Solid, meticulous, grueling inspection of applications, function point by function point and thorough conversion to four-digit date fields paid off. Sloppy, hurried patches and kludges failed. Curiously, the little things people had worried about — household appliances, cars and elevators had only minor problems. People had been so concerned about elevators that they’d been fixed. VCRs that displayed a two-digit date worked fine anyway. In a few cars digital dash displays went crazy, but the motors ran and the antilock brakes worked. It was not the small, personal systems that failed but rather the large, complex, next-to-invisible and taken-for-granted systems that comprised the infrastructure not only of the city and nation but the global economy that failed. It was the Big Picture right in front of everybody’s eyes that disintegrated. All the major banks in New York survived but couldn’t communicate with one another. Supply lines were disrupted at every link. Warehouse inventory controls were screwed up. Ship and rail traffic was crippled. Every single manufacturing plant, refinery, chemical fabricator and automated assembly line had a problem somewhere.

On the East Coast, only in New York and in those places with emergency generators did people have an opportunity to learn if their systems were good or bad. In the three time zones to the west, after learning of the calamitous events in the east, people woke up from a thirty-year snooze and initiated frantic efforts to prepare for the coming disaster. All remaining power grids and cooperatives initiated disconnects, the companies separating from one another and standing alone. Every energy worker who could be found was pulled in and given a crash course in manual workarounds to keep the plants up and running when equipment failed. The governors of eighteen states called out the National Guard, and thousands of earnest young men and women, largely from rural areas, were sent to patrol cities to prevent rioting and looting. In Milwaukee and Little Rock, the sudden military presence provoked the very rioting it was supposed to prevent. All over the West, survivalists hunkered down in their fallout shelters, the idea of individualism taken to the extreme. In most places, however, faced with a foreseeable crisis, people acted like intelligent, sensible members of a community and figured out ways to help one another. In small towns, people rallied to organize disaster relief, setting up shelters in high school gyms and rigging generators for grocery stores. From Chicago west, city officials called off the millennium parties, and police started moving people off the streets. Plant managers rushed to their facilities and turned everything off. Desperate shoppers stripped urban groceries bare.

As the millennium bug began its journey across North America, it was a little after 5:00 in the morning in London, 8:00 in Moscow and just past noon in Beijing. After shrinking for five hundred years, the world had suddenly expanded. The fragile network of telecommunications that had once unified the planet collapsed. Factories in China that supplied half of America’s toys lost their computerized records. Chinese banks that handled the transactions were dead. The ship that carried the teddy bears was lost at sea. The oil refinery that produced the diesel fuel for the truck that carried the bears to Toys-R-Us was shut down. The teddy bears were okay. Neither they nor the workers who sewed them had chips.

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.

New York had endured major blackouts in 1965 and 1977. After the 1965 episode, people told fond stories of how many babies were born nine months later. People had been afraid but not terrified, and the city had survived with good humor and high spirits. By 1977 the city had changed dramatically. In twelve short years New York had become grim and dangerous, reeking of poverty and crime, boiling with anger and frustration, and the blackout spawned stories of violence and urban chaos. Urban legend held that looting had started within ten minutes. The 1977 incident had occurred on a hot summer day when the city was already close to exploding with racial tension. Most of the looting was nothing more than a massive crime of opportunity. Squalor, poverty and racial oppression add up to a lot of angry, hotheaded young men, and it was they who looted in a spasm of rage.

Now, in 2000, massive immigration had changed the demographics once again. In the last quarter of the 20th Century so many new faces had arrived that no ethnic group had a majority. Everyone belonged to a minority. Except for the homeless and most desperate immigrants, New York’s poor didn’t look poor. Fed at McDonald’s and dressed by K-Mart, they had TVs and cars and minimum wage jobs that kept their heads one inch above water. The urban poor were the legacy of an economy that had evolved from labor-intensive manufacturing to a service economy and automated high technology, leaving huge segments of the population without the skills needed to thrive in a techno-world. The prosperity from high technology and the global economy was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, creating the most inequitable distribution of wealth since the Second World War. Economic conditions and three centuries of vicious racism had set the stage for riots and looting of epic proportions, and America expected the ghettos to explode if the lights went out.

Unlike previous power failures, the great American blackout of January 1, 2000 didn’t come as a surprise. Millions celebrating in the street were caught unprepared, and hundreds of thousands already had panicked and left the city, but many more millions had considered the possibility of a blackout and taken elementary precautions against chaos and anarchy. The long campaign by community leaders to prepare the most squalid ghettos had convinced the populace that burning down the place where they lived was not effective urban renewal. Smashing windows and looting TVs didn’t exact revenge against real oppressors. In 2000, hoodlums had cellphones and computers and knew Y2K was coming, and they understood that looting would bring heat they didn’t need. The word had spread through the ghettos and barrios: don’t take that TV. If the power goes out, it won’t work anyway.

Perhaps the most prepared organization in New York was the Mafia, who’d seized on Y2K like a mongoose on a python. The advantages of surviving a crisis was never lost on them. Every business remotely connected to the well-being of the Cosa Nostra had an expensive, well-managed Y2K compliance program, and on New Year’s Eve enjoyed the protection of armed security guards.

Despite the preparations and warnings not everyone got the message. After a day of watching blackouts around the globe, opportunistic looters in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx had picked their targets, electronics being the most popular followed by jewelry and apparel. When the lights went out, dedicated criminals were joined by mobs of drunken New Year’s Eve revelers who smashed into the first electronics stores within fifteen seconds. The crazed, disorganized looters were caught in the act by the police, deterred by armed merchants and confronted by angry and determined community patrols. Inevitably, fear and itchy trigger fingers resulted in dozens of looters being blown away, the violent percussions lost in the din of firecrackers and the traditional New Year’s Eve blasting away with firearms. Looting in the boroughs was brutally snuffed out within an hour.

Armies of frightened people had been fleeing New York all day. By one in the morning almost three hundred thousand were scattered in all directions and lost in the dark. When they learned that the lights had remained on in Manhattan, the exodus reversed and people streamed back toward the light, as they had in Tokyo. The already overcrowded island was inundated again from all directions. The subways were jammed. People walked across the bridges and arrived from New Jersey and Staten Island in fleets of boats. At that moment, the citizens of Manhattan confounded every stereotype of New York as a cold and heartless city.

New York threw open its doors. Starting in midtown, hotels graciously opened their lobbies and banquet rooms to shelter the stranded. When Macy’s unlocked the doors and let five thousand freezing visitors in out of the cold, Saks and Bloomingdale’s followed. Countless churches and office buildings, National Guard armories, subway stations, theaters and schools were turned into impromptu shelters.

Starting in the Millennium Religious Sanctuary of the 24th Precinct, citizens began taking strangers into their homes. They made coffee, sat in over-crowded living rooms, and exchanged stories from an extraordinary day. From Morningside Heights to Battery Park, people surprised themselves as much as their guests with their generosity and hospitality. For many, these acts of kindness were difficult and not without trepidation, yet the people of New York opened their hearts and somehow made it through the night.

At 1:00 the global blackout reached the Central time zone. In Chicago, Dallas, and Mexico City, the muscle and sinew of North America succumbed to the millennium bug with, by now, predictable results. Fortunately, the disassembly of the western grids meant Biloxi, Wichita Falls, Green Bay, Duluth and the entire state of Nebraska had power. Along the entire length of the Mississippi River, only steamboats had lights. In New Orleans, the antique craft chugged along the riverfront without a care, rip-roaring New Year’s Eve parties in full swing.

At 2:00 A.M., midnight Mountain standard time, Jesus did not appear in Hermosillo, Mexico. Electric power, however, disappeared. Several hundred miles north, the lights blinked out in Denver but stayed on in Colorado Springs. Space Command was well lit all night as information technicians tried to restore control to the GPS satellites. Around 7:00 in the morning, Zulu time, the GPS backup system that broadcast the time signal through a series of ground level transmitters was restored. The few phone companies with compliant equipment were able to reconnect and begin the slow rebuilding of their vast networks.

By 2:30 A.M. Sarah had disaster recovery teams in each of the three failed power plants. Line engineers had inspected every substation, tested hardware and made repairs, and by 3:00, power was restored to Brooklyn and Queens. The influx of refugees to Manhattan slackened, and the newly lit areas began to absorb the flow from Long Island.

On Nassau Street the Midnight Club was exhausted and running on sheer exhilaration. Judd tinkered with the radios, tuning into shortwave and ham broadcasts and recording everything. On military frequencies, National Guard units were generating a great deal of radio traffic as the militia tried to prepare for any contingency. Civil disorder had clocked in at much lower levels than expected, but anything could happen over the next few days.

Across the room Bo was running diagnostics on Big Allis, Number Three at Ravenswood, trying to bring the system’s most powerful generator back on-line. Ronnie had the Department of Environmental Protection on the phone and was explaining where to look for faulty chips in the sewage treatment plants. Jody had put aside her camera and was sitting with Doc on the couch, drinking champagne, holding hands and watching the last few minutes of Breathless on videotape. When the movie ended, Doc flipped through the channels and discovered ABC had resumed local broadcasting from the studio on West 65th Street.

“Be careful if you’re driving in Queens,” the anchorman was saying. “Traffic lights are performing erratically.”

“Too bad they don’t have a satellite link,” Judd said. “They could tell us about all the National Guardsmen who reported to Fort Dix that nobody knows what to do with.”

“I can give them a satellite,” Carolyn said. “I happen to have one right here.”

“Hmmm,” Doc said. “Jody, get your camera.”

“I am the Phone Goddess,” Carolyn said. “Watch this.”

She called ABC, got the newsroom producer on the line, impressed him with the fact that his phones were working, explained that she was with the company that had saved Con Edison and Chase Manhattan and asked, “How’d you like to be connected to functioning satellites? I can give you links to your trucks in the city and a link to Europe as a bonus.”

The ABC producer almost choked on his bagel. “Oh, God, yes yes yes. How much?”

“Ten million for the rights and two hundred grand a day for ten days minimum.”

“Oh, Jesus. That’s a lot of money. I’ll have to get that cleared.”

“I have phones. I have a satellite. You have zilch. Welcome to the new order.”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

“Who’s your bank?”

“Chase.”

“How convenient,” Carolyn said. “I’ll give you a nice phone line and a useful number at Chase. If you actually have ten million dollars, you can have it transferred to the account number I’m going to give you. When I hear from them, I’ll get right back to you.”

Next, Carolyn called AT&T and asked the system manager if she were willing to lease transponders to ABC for a nice premium, say five million in advance and a hundred thousand a day for a minimum of ten days. Negotiations. Callbacks. Finally ABC said yes, the bank called and said the money was transferred and Carolyn winked at Doc who winked back.

“You planned this,” Jody stated.

“I worked out a few scenarios in advance, just in case. ABC is across the street from the ConEd command center. I had to have clean phone lines into ConEd, and since Carolyn was right there, she did a little work on ABC’s phones. Better than Bell Atlantic. Better than their own people.”

“What other little surprises do you have?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”

A few minutes later ABC had a live link to a truck at Bellevue Hospital where the crew had tracked the mayor with police scanners.

Bill Packard stood inside the emergency room doors watching the ABC video truck. At first the crew was hanging around gazing longingly at the sky, and then something got them excited. They huddled inside the truck, started the generator and rotated the dish. Then they fired up lights, camera, sound and a reporter who stood in front of the emergency entrance and delivered a piece on the mayor.

Rudy was asleep in a private room, diligently attended by a bevy of doctors and nurses and guarded by guys with headsets. Having negotiated the traffic, ABC was on the job, and Packard had no desire to be part of their show. He walked through the hospital to the entrance on First Avenue, hit the streets and caught the subway.

When he changed trains at Penn Station, the pedestrian tunnels were packed with people camping out. Somewhere in the maze of tunnels an enchanting flamenco guitar turned the air to froth. New Year’s Eve litter collected in corners: gold glitter, silver stars, crumpled funny hats. The parties continued in tight clusters of stranded suburbanites staking out concrete and tile turf. At three in the morning the food kiosks enjoyed a brisk trade, but the newsstands had no papers. Packard asked a vendor what was up.

“I dunno. I got no papers. That’s all I know.”

“Right.”

Packard started to walk away when a blind guitarist called out, “Hey, mister.”

“Yeah?”

“The presses at all the papers went down behind Y2K, and I heard the trucks are stuck in the garages because their dispatch computers are spewing out gibberish.”

He played a flourish of Spanish chords and smiled.

“You’re a fountain of information,” Packard said, giving him five dollars. “Play on.”

As Bill Packard was riding the train up the West Side, the millennium bug reached the West Coast. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Jose and Los Angeles bit the millennium dust. Miraculously, Oakland remained alight. In California, years of earthquake education helped families and individuals to prepare, but communities, cities and governments were devastated by computer malfunctions. Silicon Valley imploded. The heart and soul of American technology was left to reap what it had sown.

Thirty minutes after leaving the hospital, Packard stepped into the 24th Precinct on West 100th Street, a loony bin sideshow movie set police station full of millennium crazies and exasperated cops.

Ed Garcia was asleep at his desk, head cradled in the crook of his elbow.

“Ed!”

“Wha…? Oh, Christ, Bill.”

“Sentries found asleep at their posts will be shot.”

The captain chuckled. “So shoot me. You do the mayor?”

“Yeah.”

“He gonna live?”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna vote for him?”

“You know, I asked the nurses that,” Packard said, turning his thumb down. “How many people are still in the park?”

“I don’t know. A few thousand. The drunks will freeze. They moved a lot of them into the armory over on the East Side, but some just refuse to leave.”

“You gonna stay here all night?”

Garcia nodded his head, yawned and rubbed his eyes. “I got Jesus downstairs with a broken arm. You wanna look at him?”

“You bastard.”

“Yeah? Why’d you come over here? To drink champagne? I got your champagne. I got three cases of Mumms looted from Spillman’s store this afternoon. How d’ya like that? I’m takin’ it home. Fuckin’ all right. Hahahahaha.”

“How’d Jesus break his arm?”

“Nailing himself to a cross. He missed. Hey, man, I got Jesus three times over, I got Mary, I think I got Pontius Pilate. I don’t know what I got. Mohammed, I got him. I definitely got Buddha. I may have a bunch of Krishnas, but I think we let them go. I got the Irish Republican Army, the Jewish Defense League and Free Puerto Rico. It’s real ecumenical around here right now. Mostly, though, I got drunks. We’d toss them out, but they’d freeze.”

“Sounds like just another Friday night in the Big Apple. Happy New Year.”

“You gonna check out my broken Jesus?”

“Okay. You got any tetanus vaccine around here?”

Jonathon Spillman finally walked across 85th Street to see if Shirley was all right. Unlocking his apartment, he heard voices, peeked into the living room and saw two Jehovah’s Witnesses asleep in chairs and three huddled in prayer.

Shirley was in the kitchen making coffee. At first Spillman wasn’t sure he recognized her. He’d left an hysterical, sobbing woman who’d locked herself in the bedroom, and now his kitchen was occupied by a blissed-out millennium hostess.

“Hi,” he said, picking up a copy of The Watchtower. “Who are these people?”

“The trains aren’t running.”

“The trains?”

“To Philadelphia. It’s too far to walk so I asked them in. Mrs. Finklestein has Baptists.”

“Don’t you want to know where I was?”

“No. Yes. Where were you?”

“Across the street.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“Shirley, have you been into the Prozac?”

“Mm hmm. You know, Jon, you have a store full of food you can’t sell. Have you thought of giving it away?”

Spillman could hardly believe his ears. Shirley’s idea of charity was sending five dollars to Israel to plant a tree. She’d never given a homeless beggar a second glance, let alone a quarter.

“Are you serious?”

“Are you going to let it rot?”

It was a strange night that turned spouses into strangers and strangers into best friends. If the world was upside down, Spillman thought, you had to stand on your head.

“I’ll need help,” he said.

“I’m sure the Witnesses would be delighted. And Mrs. Finklestein’s Baptists.”

While Shirley roused the millennium faithful from the entire building and explained to them the Jewish concept of mitzvah, or doing good, Spillman ran back across the street and made Copeland come along to the grocery store.

“C’mon. You don’t want to sit in your house all night, anyway.”

“Yes, I do. I’m happy to sit here with my dog and watch TV. ABC is back on the air.”

“Come on, Donnie. We’re gonna give away the store.”

“You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that?”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Baptists, some Methodists from Newark, a half dozen Upper West Side Jews and a couple of Buddhists marched up Broadway to the Safeway. Spillman found aprons for everybody. Cans and boxes from the riot still lay in the aisles. The Baptists immediately began straightening everything out.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Spillman announced. “Open up two bags and put them in a cart. They can fill the bags and carry them away. Don’t let too many in the store at one time. And don’t let anybody go to sleep and block the aisles.”

“How much is your inventory worth?” Copeland asked.

“A couple of million, maybe. Safeway can afford it.”

The lines formed quickly, and by four in the morning they wrapped around the block.

For once it was quiet on the third floor of the old building on Nassau Street. No music, no police scanners, no blaring TV.

Ronnie was curled up asleep on one of the couches. Carolyn walked over and methodically shut down Adrian’s terminal. She sang softly, “I … bin working … on the raaaailroad … all … the livelong … daaaay.”

Bo stood up and stretched. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.

“I’m too damn tired to eat,” Judd said, heading toward the kitchen. “Besides, all we got are some Pop Tarts.”

“I could go for some pizza,” Bo said.

“Hey!” Judd shouted from the kitchen. “Look at this.”

He came out with a bucket of caviar in one hand and a bottle of Mumms in the other.

“Where’d this come from? Doc?”

“I think they went back in the bedroom,” Carolyn said.

Judd knocked on the bedroom door and it swung open. The room was empty. On the bed were five briefcases labeled “Bo,” “Ronnie,” “Adrian,” “Carolyn” and “Judd.”

Judd went in, picked up the briefcase with his name and opened it.

“Holy shit,” he swore to himself, and walked out to show the others.

“You’d better wake Ronnie up,” he said. “She’ll want to know what a million dollars in cash looks like.”

They walked lazily through the snowfall, footsteps gently echoing off the walls, and Doc told Jody his plan to sand and varnish an old speedboat, rebuild the old Caddy V8 or maybe buy a brand-new engine. He told her about a beautiful lake in Wisconsin with a stone house on a peninsula surrounded by pines. He liked to putter around and fish for bass and pike all day, then play cards and bullshit all night. Did that sound good to her?

“Are there mosquitoes?” she asked.

“Fierce mosquitoes. You bathe in bug spray.”

“Would a small-block Chevy fit into the engine bay?”

His jaw dropped. “Oh, man,” he said. “This must be a fairy tale.”

At the corner of Beaver and Williams they entered the splendid old-fashioned bar at Delmonico’s. While the world was crashing into the 21st Century, Doc felt like retreating to the 19th, to the old New York of wood paneling and leaded glass.

The bartender greeted them with a smile. “Evenin’, Doc.”

“Howdy, Nick. Two double fifty-year Macallans, straight up.”

“Got cash?”

Doc laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar.

“Yes, sir. What happened to your cash register?”

“Locked up, wouldn’t open after midnight,” the bartender said. “I tried to pry it open with a crowbar, but I didn’t want to wreck it.”

“What’s the mood around here?” Doc asked.

“It ain’t happy new year.”

Businessmen and women clustered around tiny tables, deeply engaged in earnest conversation. By the looks on their faces, they’d all taken Y2K hits of considerable magnitude. Their Asian and European markets were gone, and no one knew for how long. Transportation was a mess. Fuel supplies were uncertain. The meager news that filtered in from outside the city was almost all bad.

“Did you know that George Washington fought the first battle of the Revolution a few miles from here, right over in Brooklyn?” Doc asked, and when Jody said yes, she’d paid attention in the eighth grade, Doc continued anyway. “Did you know he got whipped by the British something fierce and retreated to right here? He camped right where this bar is today, and then the British came over and kicked his ass again. The Redcoats held New York to the end of the war, but the New Yorkers didn’t mind. They were only interested in business, faithless sons of bitches that they were. Washington was in bad shape. His army was in rags and deserting, tired of getting beat up by the Brits, but old George never gave up. The point is, these guys are crying in their beer because they’ve taken a whipping. So will they get up tomorrow and carry on the fight, or are they gonna cave?”

“I don’t know,” Jody said.

“I don’t, either,” Doc said. “That’s why I’m going to the lake as soon as things settle down and I can get gas.”

“Did he really camp right here?”

“No,” he said, deadpan. “I made that part up.”

18

Time neither accelerated nor slowed down, but rather ticked along as it always had, complex and perhaps unknowable even by Stephen Hawking. A pink sun rose over Brooklyn. Six inches of snow blanketed New York, and Bernie’s Delicatessen was open.

“You think there’s gonna be a Superbowl?” Spillman asked.

“I dunno,” Packard said. “I don’t think anybody’ll play this weekend.”

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Copeland sneered, disgusted. “The first time the Jets get into the playoffs in twenty years, and this has to happen.”

Ed Garcia came in, tossed his hat and briefcase on the table and sat down heavily.

“Any of you guys get any sleep?” he asked, unbuttoning his tunic. “Don’t answer. I don’t wanna know.”

Bernie hollered at the captain, “You gonna eat?”

“Yeah, gimme a minute, will ya?”

“Jeez. Take it easy. Hey, any you guys see the fireworks?”

“They got some fireworks over in Jersey City,” Garcia said. “Some chemical plant is on fire.”

“Only one?”

“Far as I know.”

“Hear what happened in Frisco?” Spillman asked.

“Nah, what?”

“Some guys robbed the Bank of America. Sixty million bucks.”

Copeland went white. “Where’d you hear that?” he demanded. “Who knows what’s going on in California?”

“I heard it, that’s all. From a guy.”

“From a guy, from a guy. Oh, that’s great. That’s called a rumor.”

“Oh, fuck you.” Spillman turned from Copeland. “Hey, Bernie, gimme sausage and scrambled and a side of white toast.”

“Sausage and scrambled. Toast dry?”

“Yeah. And turn on the TV.”

“Always with the TV. Get a life.”

“How’s your Jesus?” Packard asked Garcia.

“Out of his mind, if he ever had one. You hear from your old lady in Maine?”

“No. No phones. I’m going up there today if I can.”

“You got gas?”

“Full tank.”

Bernie turned on the TV, flipped through a number of whited out channels until he landed on ABC.

“Hey, Donnie, look. That’s your building.”

In the dim light of dawn ABC had a truck in front of Copeland Investments on Nassau Street. The camera panned over the dark red brick facade, while a reporter’s voice narrated a brief introduction.

“The story is emerging this morning about a small group of computer experts in this building who kept the lights on in Manhattan. Consolidated Edison has revealed that a team of programmers here at Copeland 2000, led by Donald Copeland and working in partnership with ConEd and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani…”

Copeland beamed. Bernie scrambled eggs. The voice on TV called him the Man Who Saved New York. The reporter interviewed Bo and Carolyn, both wearing Midnight Club T-shirts. Break for commercial. Chase Manhattan. Year 2000. We’re ready.