(Here the orignial German text)
"Ten more minutes."
"Keep cool, Bill. Everything's under control."
"Do you think so?"
"I'm sure."
"The only sure things are death and taxes."
"Okay, we're dealing with probabilities. The experts say the risk
that there is still a bug in the system is one in a million."
"I was programming back then too. It's impossible that they've
found and corrected every bug we left in the system."
"The control office has developed special software for this. It
all works automatically. Trust me, Bill."
Jan turns his head. An alarm goes off. At the back of the control room a red warning light is blinking. "Damn," Bill lets out. He reaches into his pants pocket, looking for a tissue. Mary, he thinks. His hand trembles. Good night, Mary. He sent his wife and kids to Montana, to her father's in the mountains. You never know what could happen. Montana's safe. Mary my love, he thinks. We'll see each other again. In paradise. The alarm beep falls silent.
"What went wrong?"
Jan turns back with a long smirk on his face. "Nothing. Like I
said, everything's under control."
"And the alarm?"
"People are nervous. Fuller conducted the last test and made a
mess of it. Hit the wrong key. The press is making everyone crazy.
For months they've been babbling about the same theme: 'the Millenium
Bug,' the problem with dates. But it's not a problem anymore."
Bill's hand goes into his other pants pocket. There's the tissue.
In the wrong pocket. I'm beginning to lose it, too, he thinks
while dabbing sweat from his brow. "Five more minutes."
"Five to twelve. You nervous? Keep cool, Bill."
"It's hot in here. Is the air conditioning on?"
"Of course. The market is going crazy. IBM is down twenty bucks,
all because of the journalists. They don't know shit. Do you have
any stocks?"
Bill glances at the screen. Stocks. I'm up to my ears in debt. The house is over-mortgaged. Sara's illness. Pollen allergies. Neurotic, says the doctor. But now they're in safety, in cleaner air. Mary, Sara and Pete. He watches the map of the power lines, the switches and the voltage of the transformer. Everything's normal. Energy production is on target. Eighteen hundred megawatts. No more irregularities. The digits on the timers jump regularly like heartbeats. Three more minutes and ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight seconds. Jan's optimism disgusts him. It was the kind of optimism they teach you in those courses. Maybe he's shitting his pants and can't let it show. He's being discussed as the replacement for the head manager. Always smile, show no weakness, let no criticism show through. Everything's good, everything's positive. We have everything under control.
"You know," Bill says to himself more than to Jan, "I was programmming
when the control office was built. I know how many errors we made
in the code back then. Not a hint of structural programming or
anything. No one thought that the system would last to the end
of the century. No one noticed in the tests that we had stuffed
the date into the minimum ammount of storage space. We had to
economize back then. Every bit was worth gold. And now..."
"It's all debugged, Bill. All clean, old buddy. Go to the cafeteria
and grab a drink--they're already toasting in there."
Bill wanders through the corridors of the central building. Through
the skylight he sees the reactor out in the open, a concrete cylinder
shrouded in pale light and surrounded by a double security fence.
They've stepped up the watch, a searchlight is circling the building.
What's become of our technology, he thinks. A concentration camp.
A time bomb. It could go off any second. When the date changes,
if only one single computation goes wrong-- for example a zero
comes up in a denominator--a massive arc of light. Blackout. The
end. Back then we wanted to create a better world with all this.
I was a young, succesful engineer. Mary was a teacher. It was
love at first sight, back then in Salt Lake City, where she was
serving her mission with the Mormon Church. We wanted to create
a heaven on earth. My God, we swore it. And now?
He starts feeling a tremor pushing through the concrete floor
of the corridor. He hears the din of voices and glasses clinking
into one another. Happy New Year. Happy Millenium. They sing Auld
Lang Syne. He stands there.
The shaking comes in waves through the floor. Bill is thrown against the wall, tries to hold himself up but slides down. Am I shaking or is it the world? He sees Mary in the mountains. Mary and the kids. The clear sky of Montana is above them. The big bears, the North Star, the black forests around them. His father-in-law hunches in his chair, reading aloud from the Bible. Then the seventh angel blows his horn. A censer flings smoke over the earth. And a third part of all the men are carried away, and a third of all the animals, and a third of all the fish in the sea. The waters of all the rivers turn red, a third part of all the forests burn and turn into desert.
"Hey Bill! What's with you?" He lies on the floor, staring into
the face bending over him. Behind it, there are other faces, hands
clutching champagne glasses, dangling neckties, white hard-hats.
A voice yells for a doctor.
"He had too much to drink. It's not so bad. Get some water."
"No. He was on shift until midnight."
A mobile phone beeps. Everything works. No Millenium Bug. Nothing.
"Hey Bill! Say something!" Jan feels Bill's wrists for his pulse.
"Come on, old buddy. Take a sip. Everything's okay. Nothing happened.
Five past midnight and the world's the same as it ever was." Bill
hears a voice far away. Mary is it you?
Yes, it's Mary. We'll see each other, and soon, Bill, she says.
Up there.
Up there?
Yes, up there. I'm totally sure. I believe. Do you believe too?
Unshakably?
Yes Mary, I believe.
Now it's completely dark. Like it was back then in the Temple
in Salt Lake City, when we were wed. An amazing moment. You were
still a virgin, as it is written in the law. We loved one another.
And we promised to build a better world, in God's name.
Yes, Mary, I believe. I'm coming.
"Damn," says a voice. "See that? He's got a pacemaker."
"Yeah. So what?"
"Year, model? A warning just came through from San Diego. All
pacemakers with Zentium processors will stop at zero hundred hours.
Millenium Bug."
Translated by Jason Vincz and Johannes Gorannson