doubleZero | Page 2

But neither of them gave a particular shit about Lloyd, their programmer, except that he was good at what he did. Tonight was about seeing what would happen when the clocks changed from 11:59 to 12:00, from 1999 to 2000. They'd run simulations, but there were so many variables--outside systems, the miles of code they'd waded through, and then finally the fact that the real systems were so vital that they'd never been allowed to run tests on them. It was all switching over tonight, and their work was the baling wire that would hold it all together. Hopefully.
He flipped the switch, and an incandescent bulb lit up the single-person room. Putting his hands on either side of the sink, he looked at his face in the mirror. And didn't recognize himself. His wiry dark blonde hair was tousled, pushed back from his pale, oblong face. His eyes were sunken, ringed with tired purple. His mouth was a small, deep red silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge. He knew the features well enough, but he was scared to find himself looking deep into his own eyes, into the infinity held in the black of his pupils. Was it infinity, or nothingness?
New Year's Eve always had this effect on him. He was okay with being at work, instead of at some bar trying to have the happiest time of the year, like it somehow epitomized how his life was going. Really, being at work pretty much summed it up. At least he wasn't mired in any kind of fears about the apocalypse. Anyone who'd done their homework knew the Gregorian calendar was about four years off. So all the people waiting at home with their loved ones for the arrival of a bearded figure in a housecoat should have been better behaved in '96, not now. It was all just a bunch of numbers anyhow, right? Funny that those numbers--time--were the one thing that everyone on earth agreed to, and now that was the one thing that could fuck it all up.
He really had to pee, but teased himself, pausing when he finally made it to the bathroom. He turned to the urinal, unzipped his jeans, pulled out his dick, and relieved himself, letting all his heavy thoughts fall into the white porcelain with the beer.
On the way back to the Control Room, he stopped by his desk. Unlike most of the others around him, he hadn't pinned cards and inspirational sayings to the fabric walls of his cubicle, and there were no little rubber creatures on his monitor. Instead there were napkins and torn pieces of graph paper covered in cryptic scribbles of shapes and fractured phrases, ideas had in a coffee shop or a bar, on the way to work or in the middle of a sleepless night, jotted down and brought here.
Julie was the project manager, holding the team together and giving them direction. She also defended their methodologies and schedules to the management, who were filled with hesitation after being snowed by their predecessors. She'd done it though, he thought, switching on his CPU. They were right on time, and everything was done.
His screen came to life. Across the computer's desktop display were the characters "Y2K" in a futuristic sans serif font. That was his focus, Y2K. No chat at the watercooler, no new baby pictures, no feel-good organizational pep talks. Just a job to do. He entered his password. The screen displayed the words "Logging On: Felix Lauzon". He hadn't been called Felix since he was eight. That was when he repaired the timer on his mom's broken washing machine. The family couldn't afford to hire a repairman, so his father and he pulled the workings out to service them. To Fix it was just a puzzle. He wasn't a genius, just good at fixing things, seeing through to the underlying patterns that made them work. So his name got abbreviated to Fix, and it stuck.
The computer presented an array of folders and files, grouped according to a system that only made sense to him. He checked out some of his last-minute corrections. It was hard to tell in this state, but everything looked okay. He clicked through to an old folder, an experiment he'd worked on about a month ago. The folder was labelled "Y2kaos". It was something he'd written, never meant to be run. He didn't even know if it would work, but in his drunken, careless mood, he double-clicked the last version of his experiment, the one he'd compiled into a live program. "Hmm," he muttered to himself, realizing that he hadn't given the program any kind of interface to tell him how it was doing. Or what it was doing. He giggled to himself about his first from-scratch programming attempt, and left