Turn of the Century (98 page)

Henry Saddler has contrived today to be where the boss is not (Mose is Global Expressing from Toronto to Washington for a sit-down
with the vice president elect), and Cissy has cleared his schedule through dinner. All morning he’s been clicking back and forth between his open web-browser windows. At WinWin.com, he’s ready to cover his Microsoft shorts as soon as the stock plunges. At the Reuters web site, Moneynet (cute), he’s watching the pot that just
has
to boil.

What if the hackers were joking around? What if this is all just some punk kids’ Dungeons & Dragons game? It’s almost eleven-thirty—two-thirty in New York, and the stock market closes in an hour and a half. What if … heavens to Betsy,
there it is
. Oh, goodness
—there it is!
Henry Saddler is fantastically, dazzlingly
clued-in
.

Henry Saddler isn’t just tingling and breathless, he feels changed, redeemed, rapturous, initiated into the ranks of the chosen. For once! For once, he is a true mover and shaker, a member of the elect. “Thank you, God,” he says sincerely. “Thank you.”

He has never really
won
before. The grand prizes in life were always withheld, like a treasure room from which Henry Saddler was waved away by the graceful and smart-alecky and popular ones.
I’m a believer
, he thinks.
We really do inhabit a wonderful, wired new world where every one of God’s children has a chance for success
. And when a once-in-a-lifetimer
like this is suddenly knocking like a crazy fool on Henry Saddler’s door, you think he’s not going to open up, let that golden goose in, and hug it to death right there in the foyer?

He punches up a Microsoft quote—still high, $129½, there’s still time. He pushes the platinum WinWin.com
EXPRESS TRADE
button. He goes to
HENRY G. SADDLER IV SHORT POSITION
and after
INCREASE?
types in 14,000. He punches
EXECUTE!
As a line of type designed to look like an old-fashioned ticker tape flows past, reassuring him,
JUST ONE MOMENT WHILE WE EXECUTE YOUR TRADE, HENRY G. SADDLER IV!
the little WinWin.com animation of a cash tornado spins and spins to pass the time. He clicks over to his third open browser window, to see if his online pals at the stock market chat room are crazed.

Talk about out of the loop! He can’t resist being the first in with the news. He types in,
GATES AND BALLMER OF MSFT ARE DEAD! GET SHORTY!
and sends the message, then clicks quickly back to WinWin. com.
TRADE CONFIRMED, HENRY G. SADDLER IV! WE EXECUTED YOUR TRADE AT 11:27 PST. YOU SHORT-SOLD 14,000 SHARES OF MICROSOFT CORP. AT $87⅝ A SHARE—FOR A TOTAL COMMISSION-FREE PRICE OF $1,226,750!

He is dumbfounded, incensed. At 87⅝?! He pushed the button when the price was $129, and now they say he’s made the deal when the price was down to $87!
“Real-time quotes,”
WinWin.com promises, right on their home page. They’ve taken advantage of him, he thinks, the old tease and terrorize Henry Saddler routine. This golden goose bit him on the ass, took a dump on his loafers, and then ran away. This is no fair!
No fair!

It’s such a warm, dazzling, improbable day (and the last of them, according to the forecasts) that as soon as the kids were at school, George and Lizzie decided to set out for a stroll, a long one, without any destination in mind. It has been years since they wandered for miles like this together.

Since that last walk, in fact, the city has transfigured itself, changed so profoundly for the better that it might as well be an act of God or a magic spell. As the new century dawns, the streets of New York teem with people who should be dead, who were scheduled to have been shot or strangled or crushed or stabbed had homicides proceeded at the rates that seemed hopeless and uncontrollable, like earthquakes. Two
thousand New Yorkers were murdered in 1993; five hundred were murdered this year. Is that not a miracle? Those thousands of fortunate people, the anonymous horde of the reprieved, are right now hailing taxis, buying Yoo-Hoos, eyeing Lizzie’s ass, barking random words at George, running, parking, cursing, reading, smiling, spitting, living instead of lying dead. And those ten thousand New Yorkers have not left behind their hundred thousand wives and children and parents and friends to mourn—a small city spared from grief. And another city almost as large has been saved from its self-made nightmares—the thousands of hooligans and punks and psychopaths who were bound to kill someone but did not, thanks to this metamorphosis, this great wonder of the age. How many millions more New Yorkers
—millions
—were not robbed or raped or ripped off or beaten? Luck turned. The better history played out instead of the worse.
It’s a wonderful life
, George and Lizzie each think, more or less, as they reach Forty-first Street, the broad steps of the library jammed with people lolling in the winter sun.

They stop in Bryant Park (and consider its transformation, from comatose to staggeringly suave and glistening) for sandwiches on a bench. Afterward, Lizzie smokes a cigarette and they discuss whether to go to Vermont (no) or Nevis (yes) over Christmas, and whether or not to tell Mr. Hoff at St. Andrew’s that Max has just received a two-year associate bachelor of arts degree from a junior college in Ohio, online. Max is proud—it took him six months, and he kept it secret from everyone except Sarah (who paid the tuition out of her Chelsea Girls earnings) until his online commencement ceremony a couple of weeks ago. But George and Lizzie worry that Mr. Hoff may consider a ten-year-old’s unsupervised, unauthorized college degree a reason to turn them in to the child-welfare authorities after all.

As Lizzie finishes her cigarette in the park, a beautiful old lady in a Chanel suit approaches them and says, holding out a dollar bill, “May I buy one of those from you?” Lizzie gives her one, and the lady insists that Lizzie really take the dollar. “As my penalty,” she explains. Then, after inhaling her first drag deeply, she hands the Marlboro to her old-lady companion for a puff and says, “
Delicious
, isn’t it?”

George and Lizzie stroll up into Infotainment Zone, intending to take the subway from Times Square and, if they’re very lucky, to make love before the kids get home. It’s after two already.

“I guess I was hearing all noise and no signal.”

George is once again picking over his Lost Time, as they call the period from July 17 to October 4. She accepts his obsessiveness as a kind of apology loop, repetitive elliptical contrition.

This afternoon she tosses him a new refinement, if only to keep herself interested. “You know what you were like? You were like the first, old, eight-bit cell phones. They fluttered and warbled because their primitive chips interpreted every little click and whistle as speech. The phone didn’t know any better. It tried to make sense out of meaningless static.”

As Lizzie stops to light another cigarette (the last of the pack; her last, period, she swears), George turns to stare up at the quarter-acre TV screen on the new Condé Nast building. He can’t resist looking at it, as he couldn’t resist the Panasonic and Sony JumboTron screens that preceded it. It is his obligatory gawk, and it makes people think he’s a tourist every time he’s in Times Square. Yet having spent his first eighteen years in Minnesota, he will always be a tourist in New York; having spent most of the last twenty-six years here, he doesn’t care anymore what passersby think. In fact, what he has always enjoyed about the giant TVs is the feeling of being a visitor in some outlandish foreign city of the future—particularly with the English subtitles scrolling across the screen. On the live CNBC feed, now, is a story about the Boston Red Sox lawsuit against the Chicago Cubs, who won the World Series last month with a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game—a homer that the Red Sox now claim, based on an MIT digital enhancement of the video image, was actually a foul ball. There’s a pause as the anchor moves on to the next story, and then in the three-second delay before the text of his words begins scrolling, George can see that the man on TV has turned suddenly excited and serious.

“My God,” George says as he reads. “My God. Look.”

The two of them stand, stuck in place by the breaking news, staring up for the next twenty minutes.

Humfried has all but the last dirty computer unplugged and packed up. “You know,” he says, “this action now is unnecessary, I think. It’s unnecessarily … 
sagen Sie ‘ungünstig’?
”

“Wasteful?”
Willibald can’t believe his friend is getting sentimental about chips and motherboards and drives. “The machines are evidence, man,” he says. “It is the evidence. We can afford to buy new hardware.”

“No,” Humfried says, waving toward Fanny and the last of the live machines, “I mean the smurfing. It seems a little … 
falsch gezielt
, to the journalists instead of Gates.”

“We’re not targeting Reuters as an enemy,” Willi says. “It’s, you know, collateral damage. They won’t be down long. But the longer they’re out of action, the longer they can’t say Gates is alive. And the longer Gates stays dead, the bigger wizards we are.” He shrugs.

Fanny’s right hand is arched over her mouse for the last big click of the day, her index finger hovering, trembling slightly. “We got the A,” Fanny says, “and this gets us an A+.” She looks at Willi. “Shall I?”

The network administrators at Reuters have the ability to “ping” any of the hundreds of computers in news bureaus and reporters’ hotel rooms that are networked into the system, sending a signal to a machine, which bounces it back. It’s a way of monitoring the colonial garrisons, an automated exchange of “Okay?” for “Okay!” Fanny is about to ping scores of Reuters computers around North America simultaneously, by way of a computer on a T1 line in Berlin, which will cause each of those desktops and laptops to respond all at once to their headquarters’ computers. Too many
okays
will gush into too few machines. The communication lines will be overwhelmed. The system will be disabled. Reuters will be smurfed.

“Ping,”
Willibald says, his voice all high-pitched cartoon onomatopoeia.

With one finger, she clicks.

After less than a minute on the Virgin machine, Willibald reports that the Reuters web site is frozen, and then gone, crashed. Fanny clicks quickly around her screen four more times, breaking for good those precious connections between the rec room in Edina, Minnesota, and Berlin, and Reuters outposts all over the Western Hemisphere.

And in less than an hour from now, only the Virgin will remain up and running in the Taft basement, an innocent window on the ruckus. The dirty machines will have had their brains popped out and taken
away. The hard drives, nails hammered through each of them, along with a dozen Jaz cartridges and Zip disks nailed together and packed in a Baggie with a brick, will be way on the other side of Minnetonka Boulevard, somewhere in Elm Creek Park, heaved aloft, hurtling through the icy air, one after another, into the Mississippi River.