Dark Dawn - Part 6

By PAUL HEWLETT

00: time in their hands

December 31, 07:00 local time, Washington DC The operations centre for the White House Y2K monitoring unit was filled with focused people, talking in low voices in small groups, many hunched over computer monitors.

Admiral Tennison read the report he had hoped would not come. It confirmed that Soviet intelligence had embarked on a copycat programme to place EPIC chips, designed by Systemax in Auckland, throughout strategic industries in the West.

"We've found two, sir, one in a mainframe at the Defence Research Institute and one at Manhattan's Globobank. But we can't deactivate it, short of shutting down the entire networks in both organisations."

"How many in the batch?"

"One thousand."

"Which sectors do we think the commies targeted?"

"Aviation, energy, defence, financial services."

The Admiral knew shutting down the sectors was not an option. What would they shut down? All the Western economies?

Their discussion was interrupted by a cheer from the far corner. An hour into the new millennium, New Zealand's Government's Y2K monitoring facility had given its first report. The country was up and running - all systems green.

A television on the wall, with the sound low, carried live pictures of Auckland's Viaduct Basin, where noisy revellers had turned the America's Cup Village into one huge party.

At the computer screens, the Americans monitored a country's vital signs - its electricity, its telephones, its emergency services. International companies and organisations placed calls to their Kiwi counterparts. How were systems behaving? What were the early learnings? How does it feel? All these tremors, every major heartbeat pulsed back to this nondescript room, to a nation thankful, on this occasion, not to be first.

An hour later, attention turned to Australia. There was relief among many. The doomsayers had over-estimated.

But there was no such optimism in the Admiral's corner.

"Do we know when these EPIC chips might trigger?"

"No sir, our series had a random-programmed fail between four minutes and 20 months after 2000, but they have a fail capability of several years. We don't know about the ones Systemax sold to the Russians."

"What's the most likely?"

"Optimal impact is for fail within three to 12 months."

Australia was off and running. Next stop, Japan.

And slowly the last day of the millennium was unpeeled from the planet as tribes and nations turned away from the sun, into the dead of night, to greet a pair of zeros, an arbitrary construct, invisible except to millions of tiny electronic minds. 23-59-59 to 00-00-00. A moment of nothing. A second of doubt. A set of numbers that placed a seed of doubt in that most linear of thinkers, the silicon chip, created in the image of the scientific mind. Numbers that no longer knew whether they were moving forward, that were momentarily lost between past and future. Zero, zero: the electronic mind's first philosophical crisis.

The Admiral waited and watched. In his mind he looked out across his vast continent. He saw the missile silos, the submarine fleets, the weaponry, the hospitals, the airports, the power plants, the industrial plants. He knew the "all clear" would only be the beginning. It was possible now that, at any time, a major installation could go down, or worse.

Even with Russians cooperating, he thought, how would they find them and deactivate them all in time? They couldn't - not without Greenback's technology. He hoped the New Zealand authorities found him quickly. How hard could it be in a country of three million people?

His colleagues were crossing to another time zone countdown: 5-4-3-2-1-0.

January 1, 03:10 local time, Auckland Euro bar was filled with beautiful women and men and music too loud to allow meaningful conversation, which made it just about perfect. Greenback drank another frozen vodka and watched the people party.

When he walked out on Anita, barely 36 hours before, he never looked back on the life they had created in Northland. The greenhouse, the wasabi, the barn converted into a Y2K shelter, what did they matter now?

What did anything matter - those heady years at Systemax designing world-beating EPIC chips; the two Renegade deals, selling fault-programmed chips to the Pentagon and then the Russians; wooing Anita away from Robert; walking out on Systemax; "retiring" to Northland? How long would he and Anita have lived out their "idyllic" lives if Shirley hadn't blown the whistle on the Russian deal? Why waste time on hypotheticals?

On his way into Auckland he had called on an old mate in Warkworth who he did a lot of fishing with and who shared more than a passing resemblance to himself. Greenback bought him a trip to LA on the condition that he travel immediately and use Greenback's New Zealand passport.

His friend "Bazzer" McKenzie had jumped at the chance, wished Greenback well, and headed for the airport.

Greenback, his US passport in his back pocket, had headed for the America's Cup Village to think about his options. He had been idling along a pier when he bumped into Chuck Vasey, an old college friend who, unlike the drop-out Greenback, had ridden the Silicon Valley tsunami, making a fortune on share options. He was now in town on his superyacht to watch the Cup and do a bit of cruising around the Pacific.

"You shoulda stayed, Willy," Chuck had jibed.

Greenback laughed. "Well, I made and blew my own fortune, but, it's great to see you."

Chuck had insisted Greenback join his party and pretty soon he'd been persuaded to join him to sail for Fiji, leaving New Year's morning. Greenback had agreed to meet him back at the pier at 6 am, once he'd tied up a few loose ends.

Now, as the evening reached its crescendo, Greenback sat alone at the bar toying with a tiny object. Pushing it around on the varnished surface.

No bigger than his finger nail, it was cleverer than all the centuries of the millennium put together, except this one. To him its beauty was as physical as it was conceptual. A bonsai of the information age. A silicon slice intelligent enough to live its life based not on other peoples' time, but to choose its own. And buried at its heart, invisible to his now blurry eyes, was a clock so smart that it knew when not to tell the time.

As he played with the tiny chip, he thought about its twin, sitting in his computer at the farmhouse.

He was sure Anita would have got his message. No answer meant she must have gone out after all. And she had the deactivation code to salve her conscience.

"What the hell's that, pal?" Top button done up. Italian jacket. Designer beer. Greenback guessed advertising.

"It's an EPIC chip," he replied. "A computer chip. Y2K - you know."

"Yeah?" grinned the copywriter. "Cool. Let's have a look."

But Greenback closed his fist around the tiny square.

"Uh, uh," he shook his head. "This here's my lucky quarter."

Greenback walked away through the mass of noise.

December 31, 06:10 local time, east of the dateline, above the Chilean coast About now would be a good time to call, Sir Henry mused. Just when the anxiety was ratcheting up. He reached for the phone in the armrest of his first class seat in the nose of the 747. He swiped his credit card and dialled a coveted Washington DC number.

"Admiral Tennison, please. Tell him its Sir Henry Coombes."

After a minute's wait, the Admiral came on.

"Admiral, has it started raining yet?"

"Not yet, Henry, but the clouds are forming."

"I'll need $US100 million. For the identification and deactivation process on the CD in my hand."

"Who says we haven't de-bugged them?"

"You took the call."

"Have you no conscience?"

"Admiral, please. You're a trained killer. Conscience doesn't enter into it. With a product like this one, you need to create a market. So I could not have sold you and them the same chips with the same deactivation, or you'd each have been able to spoil the other's toys.

"This is serious, Henry, these things could be anywhere."

"They are anywhere, Admiral, anywhere and everywhere. You know what they say: live by the chip, die by the chip. Just give me an e-mail address, Admiral, and I'll give you a bank account number and let's get this over with."

"We'll find you, Henry."

"I don't think so, Admiral. Not looking for me is a condition of sale."

January 1, 05:10, King Country Robert woke, shivering. He had driven as long as he could, then had stopped, as far as he could tell, in the middle of the King Country. The sky was glowing with the first light of dawn.

He remembered the fireworks and the champagne on the Systemax balcony in the early hours. He'd decided to drive to his brother's farm for sunrise. But he had stopped 100 kilometres short.

He got out of the car, climbed over the fence beside the road and walked into the empty field. He stood and watched as the sun came up from behind a high ring of hills, holding the road he'd driven last night. He watched the shadows retreat down the shaded side of the hill, until sunlight surrounded him.

How long since he had watched a sunrise? He couldn't remember. It felt like his first sunrise. He thought of Anita.

He ran back to his car, and turned on his mobile telephone. While he waited for a signal, he turned on his radio and listened to the news reader's voice recounting a bizarre explosion at a Northland farm, killing two people, and a bullet train crash in Japan for which no explanation had been found.

He wondered whether the train disaster had been caused by an EPIC chip. Or whether they had found Greenback. Not yet, anyway. Better to concentrate on what he now knew he could influence. He had to say those things to Anita. The new millennium was a new chance. He had to take it.

He called her but there was no reply. Perhaps she was sleeping it off. He turned his car around and headed north, the way he'd come.