doubleZero | Page 2

for this team, had been his
closest friend for the past two years. 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