Deadline Y2K (6 page)

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.

PART TWO

December 31, 1999

4

The last day of the 20th Century dawned cold and clear in New York, a metropolis whose most horrific brush with calamity had been the cholera epidemic of 1832. History had been kind to the city. While the 20th Century had visited war and revolution on many great cities, nary a bomb had fallen on the Big Apple. The century was to end with New York pristine and unscathed, a virgin in the ways of cataclysm. If a city can be anthropomorphised into a sentient being, New York believed itself invulnerable to attack.

There were, of course, authorities charged with imagining an attack and preparing contingency plans for civil defense. During the Cold War, the dominating scenario was a nuclear strike, and the city had a comprehensive plan printed in voluminous quantities to be dragged out and distributed should a volley of Russian missiles be detected en route. In 1999, the location of the printed nuclear plan was stored on a computer that was not Y2K compliant. Likewise, plans were intact for all sorts of civil disturbances from labor strikes to ethnic conflict, and these plans made some sense because of frequent use. Over the years city planners had had ample opportunity to refine procedures for controlling riots and demonstrations. In a more sinister vein, the city was quite accomplished at preparing plans for dealing with terrorists, and for this received assistance from numerous federal agencies. On paper, chemical and biological terrorism posed the greatest perceived threat and thus received the most attention.

As the century drew to a close, the city was among the first municipalities to recognize the most imminent threat, the millennium bug, and in 1996 Mayor Giuliani established an office to deal with the problem. A preliminary assessment of municipal computers revealed 687 critical systems infected with Y2K glitches. Two years and $300 million dollars later, 453 systems still had problems. By the summer of 1999 the city began to realize that all the money in the treasury wasn't sufficient to correct the glitch. Many systems were junked and replaced, but expensive, complex new systems took a long time to install and brought new problems. Old data still had to be converted to Y2K compliance, a process full of pitfalls. New York was the most diligent city in the world in attacking the problem, but “fixing” the myriad systems wasn't good enough. It was impossible to find every line of infected code, and as always with software debugging, every four defects found and corrected by programmers resulted in a new flaw injected into the code. Among millions of lines of binary machine code, one incidence of corrupted code could kill an entire system, and in tests that's exactly what happened. The Department of Environmental Protection smugly declared it had no problems, but a preliminary test in 1999 shut down the water system in thirty seconds when embedded chips in the servo controllers froze the valves in the main Croton reservoir. The pumps were replaced and the system failed again. Twelve of the city's fourteen sewage treatment plants failed their tests. Supposedly compliant systems in accounting departments failed constantly.

No one knew what was going to happen at midnight, and if all the city's systems miraculously survived, they'd still be at the mercy of Con Edison's ability to maintain power. New York had experienced major blackouts in 1965 and 1977, but this time the giant utility company had time to prepare and write press releases full of reassurance. On New Year's Eve morning, business people and community groups who had little faith in the city or ConEd's PR department began making final arrangements to protect their businesses and neighborhoods. Flyers were posted and handed out. Portable radios were tested and deployed and weapons cleaned and loaded.

Reacting to a flood of Y2K news and the August 22 GPS debacle, the city grudgingly had drawn up a plan for total breakdown, fetching bits and pieces from older plans for blackouts and civil unrest. Given a priority considerably below the New Year's Eve fireworks and traditional celebration in Times Square, the plan was never completed, approved, or implemented, but the public relations department was authorized to say a plan existed. There were rumors that the mayor had built a secret bunker in the World Trade Center to serve as a command post if the city became a battleground. Its exact nature was a secret. The city fathers didn't want to induce panic.

*   *   *

They might get wholesale panic anyway, thought Captain Ed Garcia as he walked along Broadway toward his daily breakfast date with Donald Copeland and the boys. He wished the planners and commissioners would spend an hour in his precinct so he could point out the lack of stockpiled food, water, and fuel, and ask where the city planned to erect emergency shelters. If the subways went down, the city would be overrun with stranded citizens, and if Con Edison collapsed … what the hell. Nothing was in readiness because no one believed anything was going to happen. Garcia understood politics and didn't want to brand himself as an alarmist nut by shooting off his mouth. Not that it would do any good. Yesterday he'd uttered the phrase “Y2K” to a divisional commander who'd replied, “Why too what?”

At 6:30 in the morning Garcia walked into Bernie's Deli at 85th and Broadway, ordered scrambled and toast, and poured himself a cup of coffee. Forty-five, an inch over six feet, heavy and imposing in his uniform with double rows of brass buttons, Garcia dropped his hat and briefcase on a rear table as he did every day. It was a Friday, prelude to a long New Year's Eve weekend, and the good citizens of Manhattan were making earnest preparations to drink too much and wear funny hats as if this were an ordinary New Year's Eve. He'd seen twenty-five New Year's Eves as a cop, but this year, besides the usual boozy amateurs puking in his radio cars, he had to face millennium crazies, space invaders, and religious lunatics predicting the end of the world, all before midnight when the electronic shit was scheduled to hit the millennium fan.

He really loved being a cop, and long ago had learned that preventing a crime was far better than catching and punishing a criminal. In this case, the city, that anonymous bitch, was about to commit a sin of omission, a horrendous crime of neglect that he was unable to prevent.

Garcia's old friend Bill Packard arrived at the same time as his eggs.

“Happy New Year,
comandante,
” said Packard, a staff cardiac surgeon at Bellevue hospital.

“Fuck you, too, Bill.”

“You don't look happy.”

“I just want it over with,” Garcia said. “Walking over here I passed three liquor stores, all busy at six in the morning.”

“Well,” Packard said with a big smile as he sat down, “today's the day. You ready?”

“Gimme a break. Nobody's ready.”

“Copeland is.”

“He says he is,” Garcia retorted. “There's a difference.”