doubleZero | Page 3

the computer to shut itself off.
Eleven fifty-six. He made his way back to the Control Room. The air inside the dark little room had a tang of ozone from all the electrical systems, and was slightly cooler than the rest of the office, climate-controlled to protect the banks of computers that stood like racks of bombs in a B-52. The running noise of all the machinery struck his drunken senses, reinforcing the bombing run theme. A closer look, though, showed an intricate macram?? of modern wires--thin capillaries, flat wide connectors like ribbon licorice, and thick blue vines of Ethernet cable. Julie and Lloyd sat in the glow of five monitors. Four of them displayed scrolling pages of text. One showed a big digital clock, now reading "11:57".
Julie was in her usual black leggings, jacket, and boots. Functional, elegant. It also suited her frame, which was fit and muscular. Fix found her face in the blue-green glow comfortingly familiar, in every way his wasn't back in the bathroom. Her dark hair was pulled back, her mouth a wide, full smile that showed confidence yet reserved some thoughts to herself. And that nose, too wide to be traditionally pretty, worked on her. She wore one earring in the top of her left ear. Fix figured it was a tiny hint of rebellion.
Lloyd, sitting next to her, defied the traditional notion of a programmer. He was dressed in 'upscale casual' clothes, a complete Roots lifestyle that looked tailored to him. Everyone thought Fix was stocky, but the few who'd seen him naked were surprised to find out how thin he was. Sitting in front of a computer all day didn't do much for his physique. But here was Lloyd, in a sweater and cords, looking like a picture from a Christmas catalogue. His close-cropped black hair always looked perfect. His jaw was almost ridiculously strong, yet his face still looked boyishly cute. He was good in public, too. "There is much to hate about Lloyd," Julie once said.
But he was good at what he did. A year ago, he reprogrammed a telecommunications satellite from Earth, making it useful beyond its clock's built-in expiry date. The satellite's owners saved several million dollars, and Lloyd became the golden boy of the embedded systems community. Here, he invented defenses for any kind of errors or intrusions that the bank's computer systems might face.
Julie found Fix at a trade show, where she heard him give a talk on an idea of his called "kinematic programming": "the natural extension of object-oriented programming, describing the interrelationship of objects as they act together." No one in the room followed what he said. But he was onto something--Julie could see that--even if she didn't know what. After the talk was cut mercifully short, she spoke to him. Two years later, they were the best of friends, and now she was giving him the chance to put his ideas to work. Fix was in charge of imagining structures and connections, dreaming up solutions that were way "outside the box". But Lloyd was the one who made them work. Tonight was Lloyd's show. Or his funeral. Yet Fix knew everything would go perfectly. That's just how it went for Lloyd.
"Ready?" Julie asked. She picked up a bottle of champagne from the desk and pulled at the thin gold foil around its neck.
"Yeah," said Fix. "Nervous?" he asked Lloyd.
"Honestly? Yeah, I am. I think you're the only person who understands just how wrong this could go, Felix." (Almost no one called him Felix.) "Remember that experiment you told me about, the thing that messed with date byte lengths?"
"Yeah," he answered, feeling sheepish about having just run it.
"What kind of numbers would that produce?"
"Oh, like, imaginary. There's not that much money in the world, let alone in someone's personal account."
"So this has got to work."
They all stared in silence as the clock made its way through 11:58. "This is it," Lloyd said, tapping at the keyboard. "I'm removing the bridges between our test-bed and the main process. We're going live, guys."
"Jesus," Julie said, "our system is actually going to take over the bank. I mean, I have every confidence in you guys, it's just, god, who are we to be doing something this big?"
"We're the best team in the country," Lloyd replied flatly. To him it was just a fact.
The time disappeared from the main screen. Julie gasped, then felt embarrassed when Lloyd made the clock come back, now with seconds scrolling. Everything about this project had been under her control since she got involved. But now there was an infinite number of variables--how would this work with outside systems? What if they'd missed something? Maybe they should have used the Julian calendar. Maybe--she told herself to shut up. At least she could still manage