The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [16]
Air traffic control was a major federal computer system. It was one of the biggest and oldest. Repeated attempts to fix it had failed. The guys in the FAA used simple, old-fashioned computers dating to the 1970s. They used them because they were much more reliable than any of the modern ones. FAA guys had very dark jokes about computers crashing. For them, a computer crashing meant an aircraft crashing. It meant “a midair passenger exchange.” It meant “aluminum rain.”
Now, Van realized, he was watching “aluminum rain” on New York’s biggest skyscraper.
There was no way this was going to do. Not at all.
Van drew a slow breath. There was a bad scene on the TV, but he was prepared for it. He had been here before, in his imagination. In 1999, Mondiale had spent over 130 million dollars chasing down Y2K bugs, with many firm assurances from security experts that the planet would fall apart, otherwise. Van had believed it, too. He’d felt pretty bad about that belief, later. When computers hadn’t crashed worldwide and the world hadn’t transformed itself overnight into a dark Mad Max wasteland, that had been a personal humiliation for Van.
At least the Y2K money had really helped a big crowd of old programmers who had never saved up for retirement.
Van’s New Year’s resolution for the year 2001 had been to never panic over vaporware again. So Van stilled his beating heart as the blasted skyscraper burned fantastically on his television. He was living way ahead of the curve here. He was already thinking in tenth gear. Calm down, he thought. Chill out. Be rational.
Nothing really important was going to happen unless his phone rang. Some flurry of e-mail from his most paranoid and suspicious acquaintances, that did not mean a thing. Internet lists were no more than water coolers, nothing more than a place for loudmouths to shoot off. His home phone number was extremely private. If that phone rang, then that would mean big trouble.
If the phone did not ring, then he was much better off not saying anything to Dottie. Let her be happy. Let Ted be happy. Please, God, let everyone just be happy. Look at that sun at the window, that oak tree out in the lawn. It was such a nice day.
Uh-oh. There went the other one.
CHAPTER
TWO
NEW JERSEY–CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 11–14, 2001
Air traffic had shut down. Van was living in a world without airplanes. His Frequent Flyer cards were useless plastic.
Van finally understood why he had bought himself a Range Rover Sport Utility Vehicle.
Van climbed into the Rover, parked at curbside as usual, for his Victorian mansion had no garage. He drove a few hundred yards from the village, parked in the colossal lot that had taken over a former horse farm, and walked through Mondiale’s brown Plexiglas entranceway. Then he raided his lab for equipment. His coworkers asked him no questions about why he wanted so much hardware, or where he was going with it. At Mondiale’s R&D lab, Van’s friendliness to federal agents had never gone unnoticed.
The mood at the lab was shattered and jittery. Mondiale had lost a branch office inside the World Trade Center. While most of the Mondiale staff had retreated from the burning building in good order, two fatalities had been entombed in the giant disaster site. To have dead colleagues horribly killed by terrorists, that was very bad news, but the physical damage to Mondiale’s telecom system was a stunning calamity. When Manhattan’s two tallest buildings collapsed, New York’s microwave capacity had been gutted.
Wrist-thick fiber-optic cables, safely buried deep in the WTC’s subway, had been snapped, burned, and drowned. Bursting debris from the falling towers had crushed a telephone switching station in another building a block away. With cell-phone relays buried in the rubble, only one call in twenty was connecting. The landline networks were overwhelmed, with call volumes off the scale.
Cops, feds, journalists, even professional system administrators, were reduced to using Blackberry pagers. New York’s telecom companies were howling for hardware,