doubleZero | Page 7

for now.
He stuffed his wallet in his pocket and pedalled off to Julie's apartment to help her with the writing, to try and remember the thousands of corrections they made over the past few months. The sky overhead was the same washed-out gray as his socks. The milky clouds stayed low enough to block out the sun and its memory, never giving up any snow. Fix's face felt like it was turning to stone as he passed through street after street on the way, his nostrils frosted inside with each intake of air. This was definitely the coldest day this year. He tried to appreciate the old wartime homes in Julie's neighbourhood, to look at the people, anything to rouse himself from feeling like a zombie on a bike. It was no use: February in the city just plain sucked. It was no place for the living.
Was he living? Really, he wondered, how much longer could he go on like this? Would he get another job? What would it be? Could he get a job, after being fired like that? He felt desperate. Okay, he thought, stopping, pulling his bike up onto the sidewalk, what can we do? He reached around for his back pocket and ripped open his wallet, fishing inside for his transaction record. He unfolded it and read it: WD-CHQ $40.00 BALANCE: $15,894,331,708,547,853,540,132,913,152.00.
The bike fell to the sidewalk, twanging and rattling. Fix stumbled backwards, tripping on his heel. His butt hit the sidewalk. He sat on the cold concrete looking at the little slip of paper that fluttered in his hand.
"It's just a miscalculation. Or maybe you took someone else's receipt instead," Julie said, examining the transaction record.
"Yeah, someone with fifteen bazillion dollars in their account? No, I did this," said Fix, staring down at Julie's Iranian-print bedspread. They sat cross-legged across from each other on her bed, just as they had for the past few weeks while working on the documentation. Only this time Fix had on a dog-like I did a bad thing face.
"Don't you think you're being a bit dramatic? If this is some system error, then all three of us did it."
"No," Fix argued, "I did it. On New Year's Eve. I wrote a little program, not even a program, earlier in the project, and on New Year's Eve I ran it. I was drunk, and I didn't think it would do anything. It didn't look like it did anything. Guess it did."
"But how would you have done this? Fix, if you stole money, tell me now. You're my best friend, but if you did something like that on my project, I want you to tell me right now," Julie said, screwing her head forward to give him the most direct, piercing look she ever had. Fix looked over her shoulder at the rock climbing holds that were screwed to the wall, colourful little blobs of rough cement. Her body was all sinew and muscle, and for a brief moment he wondered if she was actually going to beat him up over this. Being beaten up by a girl would be a new twist on an old theme.
"I didn't steal anything. It is my money... in a sense. It's the test account I created. You know how they wouldn't let us test on any of the real systems? Well, I created this account that existed out in the real system, but in a kind of bubble. It's invisible to anyone inside the bank. And now that I've been fired, the only way I could get in is with my bank card. It never occurred to me to try until now, 'cause I didn't need to. It's only a hundred and fifty bucks."
"Sorry, correction, it's 15 bazillion dollars."
"No, it's a hundred and fifty bucks. It's just--how do I explain this?--it's just in another time." Fix shifted himself, getting comfortable, his hands at the ready in front of him as he prepared to unravel it for Julie. He loved turning techno-speak into English for people. When he could do it, he knew that he really understood a thing at its core. "You know the time code harmonization function we added to the system? How does that work? Well, our bank system has its own clock, right? Every time an outside computer talks to our system, it's asked for its version of the time. If it's different from ours, the system checks the other computer's time against a radio signal from an atomic clock in Colorado. Perfectly accurate. If the guest computer's date is off, our computer corrects it."
"Then we never have bad data infecting our system. Right, that's what Lloyd programmed for us, based on your weird little logic drawings," Julie added.
"But what if there was, say, this one account that lived in a bubble