"c251" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burt Andrew - Noontide Night)
NOONTIDE NIGHT - Chapter 25.1
Chapter 25.1
7:09 A.M., Tuesday, February 22, 2000
Halifax, Nova Scotia
God, Morgan thought as the first rays of sun tickled the stone
floor, I don't care if you leave me in here forever, but let my baby live. If
only he could see Desiree and Jeremy to know they're all right.
Morgan was not particularly religious, but he'd grown up
Presbyterian, and the concept of a God was a convenient one in a
pinch. God, just give me a sign that they're ok. But though he waited,
and focused on the anguish, no sign came. He pondered whether
to promise going to church regularly, but knew that was false.
Blowing up at Nate had been intended as cathartic for Nate.
Morgan could tell, as if Desiree were whispering in his ear, that the
guy was racked with guilt and pain, and needed to vent. He
expected Nate to explode back at him, but instead he proved to be
the silent, steaming type. No matter; Morgan hoped he'd helped.
What he hadn't realized was how much he needed to dump his
anger, and he felt a tiny, though reassuring, pang of guilt that his
release had helped him as much as it had his friend.
Dwelling on the matter all night—the bunks being actually
much less comfortable than in the barracks, despite what he'd
said—he'd come to understand that his anger at himself for his
part in causing global chaos and Jeremy's danger was, though
deserved, non-productive. He just couldn't beat himself up over
it any more. If imprisonment was to be his punishment, then so be
it. So long as Jeremy lived, he could handle that.
Nate stirred across the room.
"Ugh. I thought you said these bunks were just as lousy as the
barracks." Nate stretched painfully. "These suck."
"Sorry I blew up at you yesterday," Morgan said.
"No, man, you were right. I've totally fucked things up."
Morgan extended his hand. "No, you didn't. Not more than
anyone else, anyway. No hard feelings."
Nate took his hand and pulled Morgan into a quick back-slapping embrace. "You're okay, man."
"Well. Now what do we do."
Nate looked around. "Maybe they got a jail library or
something. I've always wanted to read War and Peace."
"We've got a bunch of pebbles on the floor, and I've got more
in my boot treads. Doubt we could remember what's what long
enough to play chess, but maybe checkers."
"Or go."
"Don't know how to play."
"Now there's something I can show you..." Nate said, and for
the next several days they moved large and small pebbles around
on a board scratched into the floor. They joked how this must
either offend or amuse the ancient Japanese gods who presumably
oversaw the game. They played mostly in silence, a mutual,
momentary retreat into denial that anything was wrong with the
world.
At ten o'clock on the third day, Sam arrived with a guard.
"Awright, get up you two," Sam said. "You're outta here.
Morgan, charges against you have been dropped. Nate, you've
still got some explaining to do about the forgery and that program
you're trying to fix, but we've got too damn much work to do, so
I've got you out on my recognizance. I know you won't pull any
funny stuff or I'll kill you myself."
Nate beamed at Morgan. "Now who's Golden?"
They high-fived. Damn it, Morgan thought in mock
frustration; how could the guy be right?
Littlefield scowled deeply as Sam escorted them back into the
Rotten Core. He saluted Sam sharply, but as soon as Sam left the
snide remarks began. "So, our little chickadees decided to come
into work today. Nice of you to join us. Perhaps later you'd like
some time off for more shopping?"
"No, but I've got an Unauthorized Fix I need to shove up your
ass," Nate said.
"We'll see about that! We'll see whose ass gets busted again
tonight at that little toga party your barracks is planning! Don't
think I haven't about that! Or maybe you want to step outside
right now!"
"Hey, hey, guys," Carmen Ortega cut in. "Stop it, both of you.
You know we need to get to work, now you guys shake and let's
work together."
Morgan didn't think Nate could shake with the weasel, and
was proved right. But they retreated to their chairs (in their
absence, someone, presumably Littlefield, had removed Nate's
kneeling chair and replaced it with a gray metal folding chair).
Work proceeded in silence, broken only by key tapping and
printout rustling.
Morgan settled back into his routine, pouring over code and
jotting notes to justify his triage determination. This particular
program was one of the classified programs, which were instantly
identifiable by their complete lack of comments and other
documentation, and the fact that all the variables and function
names had been replaced with sequentially generated junk names.
The variable v1398 could have originally been called
NumberOfWarheadsLaunched, and this could be a nuclear missile
targeting program, or... maybe function f616 used to be named
Find_Nearest_Spy_Satellite and this was merely a program to track
film drops from orbital eyes. No doubt the spooks had undergone
great distress at the thought of pizza-popping hackers staring at
their code. Yet it had to be fixed.
One thing was for sure, this baby had a bad bug. The program
repeated a query every four hours; or 14,400 seconds as it had been
coded. But the programmer had reinvented the wheel like Morgan
had done to compute the current and prior times. Instead of using
a built in function, he'd used the same number_of_elapsed_days
function Morgan had pasted into the generator program. Fine, but
he'd botched the calculation. Morgan knew you needed to add a
century correction into the number of days routine; otherwise it
didn't work for dates before 1900. And, presumably, after 2000.
You had to add one day for each century before that—add 1 for the
1800s, 2 for the 1700s, and so on. No change for the 1900s. That
implied subtracting one for dates in the 21st century.
But that didn't make sense. Morgan's internal logic sensor
went off, his "sanity checker." If you subtracted one, then
somewhere one date and the next day's date would have to have
the same number. He hadn't considered that when he'd pasted his
function into the generator program. Never occurred to him. It
only did now since he'd spent so long thinking about century
rollovers and related trivia like leap years.
Leap years!
That was the reason for adding the extra days for 19th and 18th
centuries. 1900, 1800, and 1700 were not leap years, even though
they were divisible by four. But 2000 was a leap year, since the rule
said every 400 years was a leap year. 1600 would have been too,
though they didn't even know about the hundred year rule back
then and had to lop out ten days when Pope Gregory XIII corrected
the calendar in October of 1582. The English hadn't adopted the
calendar until 1752, when September 2nd was followed by
September 14th.
The longer Morgan he thought about the generator program,
the more the butterflies in his stomach fluttered.
He was positive his program had nothing about 400 in it. He
was pretty sure he'd pasted the version that handled 1800s, so it
must have, in some fashion, encoded the 100 year rule. He didn't
remember ever reading anything about why the assignment in
college had said to add 2 for 1700s and so on, but now he
understood. He'd inadvertently written in a hundred year rule
without a clue that he needed a 400 year rule. Shit.
His program was going to fail in 2000.
After a time Nate jumped up from his chair, overturning it.
"Carmen!"—for some reason Nate had taken to calling Ortega by
her first name—"Carmen! What's this note, 'A woman called for
you'? When did Amber call?" He waved a small note at her.
"Oh, yeah, she called, maybe, two days ago. Only I don't
know it was nobody named Amber. She didn't say."
"What did she say? What did she say?" Nate grasped her by
the shoulders.
"It was a pretty short call. The base operator said we had an
outside call. Then some woman's voice asked for Nate. Before I
could start telling her you were not here the line went dead."
Nate stared at the black phone. "How did her voice sound?
Upset? Happy? What?"
"Well, I don't know. We were awful excited the phone was
ringing. I think all she said was 'Is Nate?' and the line dropped."
"You think? Aren't you sure? You mean you couldn't tell if she
was happy, or in pain, or—"
Nate was getting animated, prompting Morgan to put a hand
on his arm. "Hey, chill, chill." Yet Morgan understood. If a
woman called for him—Desiree—he'd demand the same
information. "Look, if it's anything important, she'll call back."
"But she hasn't called back for two days!"
"She'll call back. It'll be ok."
Nate stood, breathing quickly.
"It'll be ok," Morgan repeated.
"It'll be ok," Nate said. "I'm ok." He sat down quickly.
Morgan returned to his chair, his attention immediately drawn
back to the similarities between his generator code and the
classified program's. He frequently checked on Nate over his
shoulder. Nate angrily thumped papers and slammed pens down.
Poor guy, Morgan thought; but he'll calm down.
Morgan wished he himself could calm down, but he couldn't
silence the realization that
his generator program was going to fail in 2000.
But when? Maybe it was safe. Hold on. Maybe. Wait.
Maybe... Maybe the overlap of dates would have been from
12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 and was no longer a threat. His breathing
accelerated.
No, that failed the sanity checker. It would have to be
2/29/2000 and 3/1/2000 that would share the same value. It had
to be. He dimly remembered a line of code inside the "if month is
less than or equal to 2" test; something about altering the century
correction. Shit. It had a leap year bug, and he'd never known it.
The program would quit kicking the generator shortly after
midnight on March 1st, just one week from now, when it internally
computed the elapsed number of minutes as being the same as 24
hours earlier. It wouldn't decide to kick the generator again for
another 24 hours. And if nobody was on duty at midnight who
knew how to manually kick the generator, or didn't know to do it
every two minutes, or couldn't physically keep it up...
Morgan rushed to the phone. "Is this the base operator? Yeah,
I need to reach—" Shit, who? Was the hospital still under terrorist
control? Would Desiree be at home? "I need to reach Desiree
Hyland in New Zealand." He gave his home number. "This is an
emergency. If there's no answer, try Middlemore Hospital. I don't
know the number. But my baby's life is at stake!"
The operator said he doubted he'd be able to get through, and
would ring him back when he had.
"No, I'll wait," but he'd already clicked off.
Morgan paced around the room. Nate seemed not to notice,
wrapped up in his own problems. Ortega asked what the problem
was, and Morgan explained. For once, Littlefield kept his snide
trap shut, keeping his reaction to a mere scowl. But the damn base
operator wasn't calling back. What was taking so long?
After a couple minutes, Morgan called back, but got a different
operator, who didn't know anything about it, nor who was
working on his call, and refused to duplicate the efforts.
Damn! Morgan paced around the room again.
Calm down, he told himself. You know the phones in New
Zealand work; at least, the emergency 111 had. Besides, there are
still seven days. You can write a damn letter if you have to. It's
not a crisis yet.
Of course it was! His mail wasn't getting through, who was he
kidding? He hadn't had a single letter back from Desiree.
Granted, maybe she'd been receiving all of his, and her replies
were being lost. But it wasn't a good sign. Global Overnight
Priority Mail service hadn't exactly been restored.
"Will ya sit down, Hyland?" Littlefield had no sympathy.
"Fuck off!" Morgan had always thought he could handle
stress quite well. What he'd come to realize was that only applied
when there was something he could do. When it was out of his
control like this, and he could think of no viable solution, he
realized he was prone to losing it. He paced, waiting for the
phone. "Fuck off!" he said again for good measure. Littlefield sat
very, very still.
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