doubleZero | Page 3

doing. Or what it was doing. He giggled to himself about his first
from-scratch programming attempt, and left 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 macramé 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