doubleZero

doubleZero
by Hamish MacDonald
??1999 All rights reserved
Paperback version ISBN 0-9685533-0-3
For more information on this story or its author, please contact:
Hamish MacDonald
[email protected]
www.hamishmacdonald.com
1
Fix pushed a button, and his watch glowed blue: Eleven forty-four. The first snow of the year fell outside the window, lit up by the streetlights below. It reminded him of the dry ticker-tape dust that spilled when the cleaning staff emptied the paper shredder. He was tired of all the secrecy around the Y2K project. What was he thinking, working for a bank?
Y2K. The Year 2000. The millennium. Fix twisted the blinds shut and walked from the window in the dark. Here they were, New Year's Eve, nineteen ninety-nine. The office was dark around him, but city dark, night filled with an ever-present pale luminance. He could easily see his way around the cubicles as he headed back to the "Control Room", as they called it, the room where they'd spent most of the last three months working on the project, trying to contain all the leaks that the team before them left in their wake. That team took most of the Y2K budget with them, too.
The six beers he'd had, a warmup for the real celebration later, made their way through him, depositing themselves in his head and his bladder. He looked at the Control Room door with its Christmas tree made of old green computer punch cards. They were the real culprits here. There'd been lots of talk about the previous team's largesse and ultimate failure to do the job at hand. But it wasn't really their fault, Fix thought to himself, looking at the punch cards. The real fuckups were the programmers who decided decades ago that with only eighty holes per card and storage space so expensive, it would be better to abbreviate the year to two numbers. Instead of punching "1976", they punched "76" to save time and some of their limited computing power. Fix tried for a second to remember the figure he'd heard about how much that abbreviation was going to cost--something like a trillion dollars, between lost revenue, lawsuits, accidents, and corrections. Almost all the major computing systems and software in the world had been designed around six digit dates, as were countless microchips and billions of lines of codes in at least 2500 programming languages, and here they were on the eve of eight digits--2000/01/01--ready or not.
He laughed. Sure, there were real horrors that could result from this date thing. Everything run by computers stood a chance to get fouled up: every bank, restaurant, and hospital, not to mention the global positioning system satellites. There could be oil tankers and planes crashing into each other tomorrow.
But probably not. After all, there were scores of people like him working on solutions, right? That thought made his stomach sink, knowing how much guesswork and jerry-rigging they'd done on this job.
The biggest problem so far for this bank wasn't a technical one at all. Tales from the Book of Revelations couldn't touch the horrors that First Dominion had encountered: seven-headed beasts didn't hold much street cred anymore, but a vanishing bank account--now that was scary! As fears and rumours spread about the millennium bug, more and more customers withdrew their money. Yesterday, lineups wound around the block. People from PR tried to stem the outward tide of money with reassurances, but in the end, the people wanted real paper money to hold onto, and the bank had to give it out when asked. Trouble was, most of it wasn't there. Fix always held a Scrooge McDuck image in his head of vaults filled with hundred dollar bills for the bankers to swim in. But this wasn't the case at all, and the banks were screwed trying to come up with enough cash to hand out. Fix felt a nasty glee watching the whole institution creak at its foundations. This wasn't It's A Wonderful Life with an earnest George opening steel boxes to give back the customers' money. As he worked on the computer systems that transferred money between branches, bought stocks with it, and loaned it to outside interests, he realized that the bank made its billions each year just by moving around the customers' money. Then charged them service fees.
"Fuck 'em," he said, as he turned from the Control Room and headed for the bathroom. He opened the bathroom door and closed it behind him, then was confronted with windowless dark. As he fumbled for the light switch, he felt a moment's panic: What if something did go wrong tonight? That's what they were here to prevent, why they were waiting here for midnight; not because the team wanted to hang out together. Julie, the project manager who'd hired him for this team, had been his closest friend for the past two years.