Val Hall, page 21
“They hate me.” Saira stated, her voice flat, lifeless.
“They’re a little afraid of you,” Eddie countered. “And you’re a superhero. They should be. But you have never done anything wrong, and they know it. They feel guilty, and maybe a little ashamed.”
“Again,” Saira said, and her smile was back, just lifting the corners of her mouth, “what is it that you have been telling them...? Because it’s you, it’s your...”
“Saira,” Eddie said, “I’ve brought you dinner. Come, eat something. And then, no matter how many of us in the big house are doomed to die in the next two days... come back to us. We want you back.”
She began to shake her head but Eddie shook his much more firmly.
“Okay, we’ll take that slowly,” he said. “Baby steps. First, dinner. There is no number above your own head, is there? You have more than just two days left to live. Come back to us, and spend the rest of the days you have remaining together with others of your kind. Come back to us. Maybe we should all know when the end is near – it gives us all the necessary time to finish all the things we’ve left undone because we thought we could always do it the day after tomorrow. You can change the path for us. You can make the last two days anyone is given... last forever. And be as golden as the numbers you see above them. That poem you love so much – the one you’re always quoting when you remember Challenger – ”
“High Flight,” Saira murmured.
“Maybe we need those last forty eight hours,” Eddie said. “Because at the end of it, there is the face of God. And of all of us here... perhaps it is only you who knows what happens when we look upon it.”
Outside, it was full dark now, the sky a black smear with the occasional dimly glimpsed sweep of dark grey cloud. It was impossible to see, but Eddie could hear a faint gurgling in the gutters outside. It was raining.
He had switched on the light in the kitchen when he had come in, depositing the food at the table, and that was the only light in the house. It cast shadows on Saira’s profile, as she sat very still by the window, and then, finally, she rose with a sigh, bowing her head. Eddie smiled in the dim room, and stepped closer, cupping a gentle guiding hand around her elbow, helping her turn her back on the rainy darkness and take her first steps back into the light.
The One About Just Another End of The World (1999)
VAL HALL 2020
“Director Antczak.”
Andrzej Antczak shifted the strap of his backpack into a more comfortable position on his shoulder and turned, smiling.
“Eddie,” he said.
“I’m glad I caught you before you left,” Eddie said, stepping up beside the other man. “I just wanted to say, we’ll miss you, good bye, good luck, and be careful out there.”
“You mean, don’t come back here again in the kind of shape I arrived before?” Andrzej said, grimacing.
“We hope not,” Eddie said gravely. “But should you need any help, you know we are always – still – here for you to come back to. And considering, as you insist on bringing it up, the kind of shape you arrived in when you first came here, it’s been quite a road you’ve travelled since. You leave Val Hall as one of its Directors, after arriving as a...”
“After arriving pretty much catatonic,” Andrzej said. “You probably remember more about those days than I could ever do. There is a part of my life that is a genuine black hole. My body might have been here, but my mind... my mind was in pieces, in atoms, everywhere...” He shook his head, as if to dislodge something unpleasant. “You were a big part of bringing me back,” he said softly, gratefully. “I will always remember that.”
“You found your own way home,” Eddie said.
“Maybe, but it was a dark road, and it was you who was holding up a lamp by the roadside to show me the way,” Andrzej said. “If I remember anything, it’s a quiet voice, just talking to me. You wouldn’t let me sleep; you wouldn’t let me slip away. You kept me tethered.”
“Your doctors...”
“My doctors performed their miracles, yes,” Andrzej interrupted firmly. “But sometimes it isn’t hard science that carries the day, you know. Sometimes it’s just a voice that whispers, It will all be all right.”
“But that’s what you did,” Eddie said. “That’s exactly what you did. That is what broke you, wasn’t it?”
Andrzej hesitated, his head bowed, his gaze on the ground. “That is the last thing I remember,” he said quietly. “Before I woke up... here. And things were, in fact, all right. After all the storm clouds that were gathering, back in the late nineties, right up to zero hour of midnight of 1999 – and then everyone woke up on January 1, 2000, the D-Day of the Y2K bug, which was supposed to have the potential to end everything, the world as we knew it, and... it was kind of anticlimactic, in the end, wasn’t it? It’s like telling a grim story and then stopping at the end and saying, ‘And then nothing happened’. Because of all the work that was done, because of all the frantic re-coding that was going on, nothing much did happen – nothing big, nothing important – we didn’t have people dying on operating tables because infrastructure went down, no planes plummeted from the skies, no power stations blew up, nothing civilization-threatening – and then naturally people sat back and said, so what was all the fuss about. But the work that was going on, in the background – that was something that only the people doing the work knew about... and even some of them weren’t sure whether anything they were doing would actually forestall the whole emergency, if they weren’t only slapping a Band Aid on a hara-kiri wound.”
“And then you... sent out the word. That it would be all right.”
“You make it sound as though I was the only one who ended up doing anything important,” Andrzej said. “That isn’t true. All the work that was done – by so many, by people whose names you will never know – needed to be done. The money that was spent on this... needed to be spent. It wasn’t something that could have just happened, by itself. The work needed to be done before it could all be knitted together, and before somehow, miraculously, it worked.”
“But you were the one that knit it together,” Eddie said. “Your words. Your mind.”
Andrzej shrugged, a little bleakly. “In that moment... I was all the electrons,” he said. “I cannot begin to explain how it felt to be... everything... everywhere... to be every computer junction, every line of code. Everywhere. I spoke every language of man that was ever used to give computer instructions in, and then I spoke the computer responses. I was a billion billion conversations, I was pure communication, for a little while there I simply stopped existing as... as myself. I was poured into the ether, along wires, along electronic synapses, across empty air from one computer mind to another, screaming that it Would All Be All Right. And the important things, somehow, were...”
“The people who screwed up originally never thought...”
“Nobody screwed up,” Andrzej interrupted. “They simply weren’t thinking in terms of proper longevity. Human lives are so short. People creating solutions don’t sit around thinking whether the problem they’re solving would still exist a hundred years from that moment. They’re going to be dead by then, and it would be someone else’s problem, anyway. So they choose the direct route, the shortest route, the easiest route, and it works pretty well while it works, and the people who dealt with it in the beginning are probably already long gone by the time it comes home to roost. Back when every year began with 19, people just weren’t even thinking in terms of years that began with 20. It was a problem for a different millennium. It just wasn’t in the mindset. It isn’t their fault. It’s human. People don’t think in terms of centuries.”
Eddie wore a strange expression on his face, but nodded agreement without speaking.
“I mean, 2099 is going to come someday,” Andrzej murmured, almost to himself. “And who, now, is thinking about that?”
“Some might be,” Eddie murmured.
“But our bug – the Y2K – that came and went. It took a year of panic and scrambling but outside of a couple of relatively minor incidents – the ATMs that wouldn’t disburse money, the occasional elevator that got stuck – no real mainframe of any importance failed, did it? And if some one-man-shop company screwed up because of it on their own personal computers... it ended up more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, right? And in the end... everyone just sat back and took their hands off the keyboards and breathed a sigh of relief that it was over....”
“But it wasn’t?” Eddie asked gently.
“The cure... had side effects,” Andrzej said. “The Son of Y2K, Y2020. You know, just another end of the world.”
Eddie chuckled. “Same problem?”
Andrzej gave him a long look. “Similar,” he said. “You really interested in this?”
“You’d be surprised,” Eddie murmured.
“It’s all been left too late now,” Andrzej said.
“You mean there was no worldwide panic, like back in 1999,” Eddie said.
“Oh,” Andrzej said grimly, “it started well before 1999.”
SEATTLE 1997
The folder landed on Andrzej’s desk with a solid thud.
“What are you working on? Drop everything. Here’s the next wildfire you’re to start working on, right now.”
Andrzej picked up the folder and opened it, and then glanced back at the man who had delivered it. “You sent me an email about this two days ago,” he said.
“Yes, and that was the warning shot. I’ve just double barreled you. There’s new stuff in there, and I’ll be feeding you data as we go, too. We’re starting in the middle, with the cluster right there starting to get antsy about the year 2000 and the tickover. They’re the canary in the coal mine. They’re not the little guys who haven’t even thought about it yet and are simply assuming business as usual – and who are going to scramble too late when everything hits; they’re not the big guys who are complacently assuming they have ‘people’ to fix it and they don’t have to worry about it, although I’ve already spoken to someone from the FAA who seems to be a little more switched on than some I could name; these, in this folder, they’re the mid-players, not big enough to fix anything themselves, big enough to know stuff will need fixing.”
“Like who?”
“Flip though the folder. You’d be astonished. Elevator operators. Microwave makers. The banks have always been nervous about it but there’s an uptick in those now.”
“I talked to a friend of mine, he’s based in London,” Andrzej said. “They’re doing stuff there. He says Germany is girding their loins. I’ve even heard whispers from the Russians.”
“But they’re not all doing the same thing,” Andrzej’s boss, Will, said. “We’re all going to have to talk to each other very soon if we aren’t to trip over each other’s feet. Fixes need to be global, for this.” He tapped the edge of the folder with his index finger. “Read that. Report back.”
Andrzej did, carefully. He had been something of a prodigy, computer-literate at an almost cyborg-level, he had earned his nickname of Code Red honestly because he could be trusted to gentle any wayward computer by just talking gently to it and performing complicated surgery on the machine, if that needed to be done, without the computer in question losing its stride. Will raised an eyebrow at him in the office two days later, in a silent query; Andrzej shook his head, indicating he was still working. And more data arrived into his queue even as he excavated the front end of the task.
He could see the bones of the problem. The decision to use the last two digits of a year as the date had seemed like a no-brainer, when it came to streamlining code and saving both saving time and eliminating code bloat. But somehow the idea that the century – and even the millennium – had a natural end had slipped past everyone’s consciousness until it was almost too late to do anything about it. Computers were literal beasts and they did not understand the nature of human calendars without being programmed to do so – and they were programmed with the ‘19’ hardwired into the year. Things that were supposed to be dated in the year 2000 would look at the last two digits of the year and simply roll everything back to 1900 because of course the 19 was the unchanging part of the whole thing. And that meant the computer trying to exist simultaneously in both the twenty first century and an era where people still travelled by horse and carriage and there were gaslights in the streets. Andrzej called it ‘cyberchronoschizophrenia’ to a friend, a fellow coder; it got a hollow laugh.
“Good to have a name for the syndrome,” the friend had said. “How do we vaccinate?”
Andrzej put forward some solutions. The Chinese were doing something a little different, which meant that there could be compatibility problems. There were even disagreements with colleagues in much more culturally and linguistically closer regions like the UK. The cyberchronoschizophrenia quickly acquired a much catchier name – the Y2K Bug – and as the clock ticked towards the midnight hour of the twentieth century, it became increasingly obvious just how huge, how expensive, the fix was going to be.
The media went into a predictable hysteria, but coders worked steadily in back rooms, without fanfare, trying to keep the world running without bankrupting it in the process. What emerged quickly, as it always did, was that there were at least two solutions to the problem. The more in-depth, more expensive one... and the cheaper version which would do the job but which would, in itself, maybe just kick it further down the line – something that would slap a quick bandage on the issue, prevent a global meltdown, and give programmers a bit of a window to work in when it came to a more permanent solution.
VAL HALL 2020
“So they just pushed out the date?” Eddie asked. “Leaving the window open?”
“It was called ‘windowing’, which I suppose was appropriate enough,” Andrzej said. “Back in Y2K days it was the fear that the computers would treat 2000 as 1900. So there was a quick fix thrown in, whereby code was implemented to treat all dates from 00 to 20 as from the 2000, by definition. Sure, there were some coders who did try to go for the bigger fix – but I’d guess almost eighty percent of computers fixed for the Y2K bug back in 1999 used the latter option. Quicker, cheaper, faster, easier, and at that point, well, it was two decades. A lot could happen in 20 years. Entire hardware systems would sing into obsolescence, entire software packages would have shriveled and died and replaced by new stuff with, hopefully, built in solutions. It was quite possibly the worst thing we could have done, but we did it. I’m not proud of it – I did my share of that. But old code... it lives faster than dog years. It is almost ephemeral. Things change completely in a handspan of years, and by that stage the people who wrote the older code have disappeared and what they leave behind is often a pile of proverbial spaghetti for the people who come after.”
“2020 is another choke point?”
“I’ve heard of utility bills presented with a 1920 date on them,” Andrzej said with a touch of grimness. “Parking meters have refused credit cards because they think the date on them should be 1920 and not 2020. It’s little things, silly things, but it could escalate. In too many cases people simply... forgot they’d done it at all. 2020 was just another year – until they all got reminded that the bill they deferred is now due. This time, it crept up on people. It’s going to take a bit of a bite.”
“So what are they doing about it now?”
“I’m not sure,” Andrzej said. “I’ve been... out of the loop. First out like a light, then fighting back from being catatonic, then... this place. I took this place as a haven, as a sanctuary, as a place to hide from everything that had piled up on me before, that led to... the place where I was back then.”
“You avoided computers,” Eddie said. “When you came back to us. You shied away from anything computer related like they carried a plague.”
“They did. The moment I circled back to them – when you all declared me cured and made me think that I would make a good Director here – I could see the writing on the wall. And unless something better is put into place now – well, as it stands, we’re going to be dancing the same dance come 2038. I know this sounds like Sanskrit to you but it’s all to do with time, something called Unix’s epoch time – the chronological data is stored as something that will run out of capacity at precisely 3:14 AM on the nineteenth of January, 2038. And that’s what we know now. The solutions we put in might come back to bite us again in another go-round, like the 2020 windowing did this time...”
“You said everything changes very fast in that field,” Eddie said carefully.
“Yes. Things shift quickly enough, and then everything that came before becomes a mystery and future is an enigma...”
“But you’ve been out of it for almost as long as your ‘window’ – the last time you had a hand in the thing was back in 1999 – you think going back now would mean anything? Won’t you have to learn stuff from scratch?”
“From scratch, no,” Andrzej said, smiling. “I was in a coma, but I wasn’t amnesiac. I remember everything I knew and I can get up to speed – and I know how to chivvy a computer into doing what I want.”
“But it nearly killed you, before,” Eddie said. “That’s why we brought you here in the first place.”
“Yes,” Andrzej said soberly. “This place saved my life. And now I owe it, to a higher cause. I was there when the first stirrings began. I remember. I can fix this.”
“Are you sure you should go back into that swamp?” Eddie asked. “I mean, it really pretty nearly did for you the last time...”
“It wasn’t that that did for me. I can still do the coding and the fixes, I know how – I really do remember how – it wasn’t that. It was the last thing, the big thing, the thing I should never have tried – the thing that brought me here in the first place because you guys thought it qualified me for Val Hall.”
