cellular phone. Although they were expensive to use, many cops bought them as backups for the car radio, or to make personal calls when phones weren’t available like now.
He pressed the dial and 1 buttons and heard the phone dialing. But the message window displayed “no connection.” He tried again, with the same results. What exactly was going on?
He put the portable away, a scowl on his face. The bum phone meant another long explanation to Linda, he thought irritably. He enjoyed her company and her conversation, but she was not a patient woman. The dangerous aspects of his job also worried her, and she often needed to hear that he was still okay.
“All units on this frequency, all units,” the radio crackled as he settled himself and started the engine. “Repeat, all units. Landline phone service is out. No incoming or outgoing calls from Dispatch can be made. The problem may be citywide.”
“Wonderful,” Calvin muttered sarcastically. The city was on the verge of blowing up, and now the utilities were on the blink. At least that explained his problem.
He often missed having a partner not for backup, but just someone to keep him company and bitch to at times like this. He could share his worries with another cop, but not with Linda.
The nationwide, tit-for-tat wave of white racist and black supremacist terrorism was threatening to tear Detroit apart. He’d seen some of the confidential memos circulating through the department. Many in high places were increasingly worried by the prospect of major trouble between the city’s poor, black inner-city neighborhoods and its affluent, white suburban neighborhoods. Far too many of Detroit’s people were already choosing up sides. Plenty of “black spokesmen,” radicalised by the violence or radical to begin with, spoke of “taking the war back to the whites.” And too many of their white counterparts were talking the same kind of garbage. The ugly reality of a race war seemed to lie just around the corner.
Calvin shook his head. He’d broken up a lot of interracial arguments lately. Vandalism and other low-level crimes were way up, and gang activity was at an all-time high. He saw the murderous punks all the time now, in packs on the streets, just hanging or cruising from somewhere to nowhere, just looking for trouble. All they needed was a spark to set them off.
Even as he worried, a small corner of his mind relaxed, imagining the tack he could take with Linda. “I tried to call you, honey, but the phones were out.” Best excuse in the world.
But he knew that the solution for his small problem with his girlfriend had created a much bigger problem for the city as a whole. Well, with luck, the phone company would uncross their wires in short order and bring everything back online.
Resolving to cover as much ground as possible, Officer Bob Calvin pulled out of the hamburger restaurant’s trashlittered parking lot and started his patrol. He still had half his shift to go.
Maggie Kosinski pulled a printout out of the printer so that she could see the data for herself. The traffic counters all read fine. The links to the other Baby Bells throughout the rest of the country were busy too. It was just that no calls were getting through anywhere in the company’s service area.
She temporarily ignored the shift operators clustered around her as they all tried to suggest possible courses of action at once. She was the boss, the person in charge of operations at the center. She’d been summoned only moments after the outage began. Unfortunately, ten minutes of analysis told her nothing.
Kosinski had worked for the phone company for almost twelve years, starting after a tour in the Air Force as a communications technician. She’d paid her dues as a technician and operator before becoming a supervisor and then operations manager.
She was pretty, a little over average height, and had short blond hair. She kept her hair short and dressed down at the office so she wouldn’t be accused of using her looks to get promoted. Today, for instance, she wore a plain black sweater and cream-colored pants, little makeup, and small, gold hoop earrings. Hopefully, they’d pay more attention to her brains than her outfit.
Her second-in-command looked up from his desk. “Maggie, it’s Jim Johnston on the E-phone.”
Jim Johnston was Kosinski’s boss, the man in charge of company operations. She ran to pick up the special line. Midwest Telephone had its own backup system for maintenance and for emergencies like this.
“What have we got, Maggie?” asked Johnston matter-of factly.
She started spelling out the symptoms, using the same straightforward tone. “The whole system’s locked up tight. We’re getting traffic readings, but nothing’s really being passed.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end as Johnston tried to digest news that was worse than anything he’d anticipated. “What have you tried so far?”
“We aren’t getting any hardware faults. So first we tried isolating each of the switching computers from the others. That didn’t help. So we’ve stripped as much of the load as we can. But that still isn’t making any difference.”
Because Johnston had once held her job, she only needed to give him a shorthand picture of the system’s condition and their first attempts to fix it. Kosinski was more worried than she wanted to admit. She’d seen a lot of different problems in her time, but all the standard fixes, plus a few imaginative ones, hadn’t done a thing. There were only a few options left. And none of them were very palatable.
“All the switching computers are down?” Johnston asked.
“All within a minute of each other, all over the region,” she replied. It was hard to believe. This had never happened before, in her experience or in the experience of anyone in the operations center. Still, working with computers, you learned to expect the impossible.
“The system may be corrupted,” Kosinski ventured reluctantly. “Either by a bug or by damage to the code.” “Meaning a virus,” Johnston said flatly. The chance of a bug in mature software was very remote.
“It’s possible,” she admitted. “The code’s clearly been corrupted somehow. I recommend that we shut everything down and reboot from the master backups.”
That wasn’t her decision to make, thank goodness. Shutting the system down and restarting it from scratch would guarantee that all telecommunications services in the Midwest would be off-line for at least another thirty minutes. The company’s own losses and financial liability were probably already running somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. Another half an hour out of commission might increase that by an order of magnitude.
There was silence on the other end of the E-phone for several seconds.
“Can you salvage the accounting data?” Johnston asked finally. The system’s RAM held a significant fraction of the day’s billing records in temporary storage. Shutting the machines down would wipe all of that information, adding millions more to the company’s losses.
“I don’t know, Jim. We’ve already dumped all that we can, but it looks pretty bad.”
Another silence. This one lasted longer.
“Well, go ahead. The quicker we start, the quicker we’ll be back in business. I’ll call public relations.” She could hear the frustration in his voice. “Christ, they’re gonna love this.”
Maggie hung up, turned back to the shift crew, and started snapping out orders. She was determined to bring the system back on-line in record time, if only to shorten Jim Johnston’s discomfort.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange sat quiet, almost as silent as a tomb.
Jill Kastner, one of the hundreds of commodities traders milling around in confusion, wished they’d kill the power as well and make the effect complete. She had never seen the brightly lit trading floor so still. It made the whole vast room seem alien and utterly unfamiliar.
Ordinarily, the exchange handled millions of dollars of business a minute. Pork bellies, gold, stock market indices, foreign currencies, and hundreds of other commodities. They all moved from seller to buyer amid the shouting, yelling, and waving chaos of the separate pits. Ultimately, though, the traders and their customers relied on near-instantaneous communications and information retrieval. The exchange’s computer terminals were linked by phone lines to a sophisticated net that spanned the globe. Without those phone lines, the exchange was just another large, paper-littered room.
Jill Kastner frowned. They had been out of business for fifteen minutes so far. Fifteen minutes that had cost her and her partners tens of thousands of dollars of potential profit.
Some of the traders scattered around her were trying to catch up on their paperwork. Others read the paper or tried the telephones over and over, hoping to be the first back on the electronic web that made their business possible. A few had already left the building for a quick drink or a walk to blow off steam.
