Timestruck (2 page)

“Nothing, except to be left alone while I
work.” She marched past him with her nose in the air. “By the way,
I am not your honey. Call me that again, and I’ll sue you for
sexual harassment.”

“Yeah, right.” Mr. Hairy-Face stood up at
last and took a step in her direction as if to intimidate her. He
was several inches taller than Gina and a lot heavier. She kept
glaring at him until he grinned at her, almost as if he knew how
hard her heart was pounding in alarm. “I’m leaving now. It’s time
for my lunch break. If anyone calls or comes by, tell them I’ll be
gone for about an hour.

“By the way, honey, “he added, shoving his
face much too close to hers, “I was only asking if you wanted me to
bring back anything for you to eat or drink.”

“Close the door when you leave. I don’t want
to be interrupted,” Gina responded.

She waited until he was gone before she
entered the inner office. There she leaned against the door,
letting out a long, shaky breath. Then she noticed there was no
lock.

“Oh, well, with any luck I’ll be out of here
before the creep comes back, and I won’t have to deal with him
again,” she said to herself, still using her tough voice.

Despite her desire to complete the job she’d
been sent to do and leave, she stayed where she was for a minute or
two, leaning against the door for support and despising herself for
her weakness. Though she felt like swearing, she refused to let
herself utter a single four-letter word.

She had been six years old – she couldn’t
recall whether she was living in her third or her fourth foster
home – when she decided that she was never going to use the kind of
language the people around her used. She didn’t understand the
impulse; she just knew she wanted to be different, so she decided
she would always speak proper English and would never resort to
cursing. It was her first small rebellion against the circumstances
of her life.

Unfortunately, she was the only person who
thought she was different from any of the other foster children.
Everyone else saw just a skinny, sharp-faced kid with black hair
that was too curly and big eyes that people teased her about,
calling them cat’s eyes. As soon as she was old enough to get a
part-time job and earn enough money, she solved the hair problem by
visiting a stylist and having the unmanageable curls cut into an
ultra-short, spiky style. She had kept the same style ever since,
no matter what the fashion trends were. That taming of the
apparently untamable was her second act of rebellion.

Her third revolt was her decision to call
herself Gina instead of Ginny, the nickname others invariably
used.

She couldn’t do anything about her green
eyes, but few people teased her these days. Gina was too
street-tough now for teasing. She never let anyone see her real
feelings. Half the time she didn’t even let herself know her real
feelings. Life was easier that way. If she thought about how alone
she was, how empty inside, without a place where she belonged or
anyone who cared about her, whom she could care about in return,
she’d never get any work done. Which, she told herself, was what
she ought to be doing right now – working, instead of daydreaming.
Dreams weren’t going to pay the rent.

She surveyed her surroundings, discovering
that while the inner office was neater and cleaner than the
reception area, it was no more cheerful. There was an oddly unused
look about it, almost like a haunted room in an old house, in spite
of the perfectly ordinary furnishings. Beige file cabinets and a
bookcase stood against one wall, and the floor was covered with
wall-to-wall brown carpeting. The desk in front of the windows was
plain dark wood, its swivel chair upholstered in brown.

The office was unnervingly quiet, with no
noise coming from the street outside. Shafts of pale sunlight
slanted through the windows in shifting patterns as the clouds blew
across the sky. Gina shivered, trying to shake off the eerie effect
of sunlight, shadow, and complete silence, telling herself her
reaction was the result of Mr. Hairy-Face’s suggestive leers.

“I wish I were somewhere else,” Gina
whispered so intensely, it was almost a prayer. “I wish there were
someone – ah, forget it. No one cares. No one ever has. No one ever
will. Get over it, Gina. Live with it. Do the job, and clear out of
here.”

There were no papers on the desktop, no
pencils or pens, no In or Out box, not even a paper clip. The
computer she was to repair sat squarely in the middle of the barren
surface.

“That’s odd,” Gina muttered, frowning. “If
Mr. Brown is a neat freak, why is the reception area such a
mess?”

Shrugging off the peculiar discrepancy
between inner and outer offices, she dumped her purse on the floor
beside the swivel chair, then pulled off her coat and draped it
over the chair back.

“OK, let’s see what we’ve got here.” She
quickly discovered that the computer was plugged into a relatively
new surge protector, which in turn was properly connected to the
wall outlet. Wiring to both the keyboard and the printer appeared
to be in good condition. When she pressed the switch, the display
lit up, and the self-test sequence began to run. The familiar, soft
noises of a working computer eased her tense nerves a little.

“So far, so good.” Proud of her typing
skills, Gina preferred to use a keyboard rather than a mouse. She
derived great pleasure from the sensation of her fingers flying
over the keys. She sat down in the swivel chair, pulled the
keyboard closer, and waited for the screen to turn blue.

The Y2K problem that so terrified Mrs. Benson
had resulted from the need to conserve expensive space in a
computer’s memory. Traditionally, only the last two digits of a
year were used when recording dates in a computer program. Thus,
when the year 2000 arrived, some computers were going to read the
new year as 1900. Others would stop working altogether.

As Gina had assured Mrs. Benson, most large
corporations and governments had already made the changes necessary
to eliminate the problem. Unfortunately, there were no hard facts
available on how many computers were not Y2K compliant. Predictions
on what would happen at midnight ranged from airplanes falling out
of the sky and elevators tumbling dozens of stories to the ground,
to the stock market crashing and causing a worldwide depression
while nuclear missiles launched themselves at predetermined
targets, to nothing much happening at all. In Gina’s opinion, the
biggest problem of Y2K was the uncertainty, that allowed all kinds
of shady characters to make money from the fears of the
uninformed.

But whether the world entered the new
millennium with disastrous results or with a snore, for a small
business like The Brown Detective Agency, the issue was
economically crucial. No bills could be sent out until the date on
the computer was adjusted, so that charges made to clients would be
properly listed. In addition, if income tax information was
incorrectly dated, and tax payments weren’t made on time, the
agency would soon be in trouble with the IRS.

The computer Gina was dealing with was one of
those programmed to reset itself to an earlier date. From the
information showing on the monitor, it looked as if the automatic
resetting had already taken place, which was strange. The year was
showing as 1972. Even more puzzling was the time of day, which was
displayed as 11:57:06 P.M., exactly twelve hours late. But it
didn’t matter. The system was so simple, not to say primitive, that
it wasn’t going to take long to reset both the date and the
time.

“I’ll be out of here in half an hour,
forty-five minutes tops,” Gina told herself, and began to type in
her first command.

It was then that she made the mistake. For
someone whose fingers were as nimble on the keyboard as hers were,
and who was as knowledgeable about computers as she was, it was a
mystery to her how it happened. Afterward, when she thought about
those few crucial moments, all she could remember clearly was
sitting there, staring

at the screen where 792 appeared, and
realizing that, instead of typing in the correction she intended,
she had inadvertently transposed three of the numbers from the
wrong year – and she had already hit the Enter key.

She was going to have to start over again to
reset the program. She’d have to give up her lunch break, and she
was going to have to rush to pick up her paycheck in time to cash
it before the credit union closed. It was definitely not a good way
to end the old year.

In desperation she hit the Escape key twice,
hoping against all logic that she could erase the error she had
made. Nothing much happened. The computer continued to display the
date as 792, though the time had advanced to 11:59:10 P.M.

“The third time is the charm, so I’ll try it
once more,” she said, and pressed the Escape key again.

The time display changed to 12:00:00.

“It’s not midnight. It’s not even noon yet.
What’s going on?”

As the time display changed to 12:00:01 A.M.,
the computer exploded. It happened silently and in slow motion. The
screen simply split open before Gina’s face, and a red flame
enveloped her. She tried to scream, but she could not draw in
enough air to make any noise at all.

She thought she was about to die, and for an
instant thoughts of all the things she still wanted to do in her
lifetime whirled through her distraught mind. Then the fiery
redness was gone. In its place was a cold black tunnel through
which she was being sucked. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe,
and her last conscious thought was that, contrary to everything she
had read or heard about the death experience, there was no light at
all at the end of this particular tunnel.

1:30 P.M.

Friday, December 31, 1999

“Honey, I’m home!” The bearded man stuck his
head around the door frame and peered into the inner office. “What
the – Gone already? That’s the thanks I get after I bring you a cup
of coffee?”

He glanced around the empty room, then stared
at the computer. The screen displayed a list of names, addresses,
and charges—all the information he needed to start billing clients.
On closer inspection he saw that the dates were correct.

“All right! She did fix it.” Taking a swig
from the cup of coffee he had intended for Virginia McCain, he sat
down at the computer. “Now I can print out the January bills. Bob
Brown is going to be very happy about that.”

Being careful not to spill coffee on the
keyboard, he set to work, alternately typing commands into the
machine and sipping the hot, bitter liquid. Within a few minutes he
had forgotten all about Virginia McCain.

When late evening came and Gina still hadn’t
returned to the shabby boardinghouse where she lived, Mrs. Benson
grumbled for an hour or so. Precisely at midnight, knowing her
rights as a landlady, she went into Gina’s single room and packed
up her few belongings. She stacked the boxes in the basement, where
she kept the effects of any tenants who left without paying their
rent. It was a common enough occurrence, especially with young
people, who, in Mrs. Benson’s opinion, were almost always flighty
and unpredictable.

Sometimes renters came back later and paid
what they owed, plus interest, so they could get their belongings
back. Most of the time the stuff just accumulated until Mrs. Benson
called in a local charity organization to haul the boxes away.

She wasn’t overly concerned about Gina,
although she was greatly annoyed at not receiving the rent on the
room. She was also disappointed in the young woman. Sometimes
people you didn’t think would turn out to be deadbeats, were. It
was now clear to Mrs. Benson that Gina McCain was one of them.

For Gina, time had stopped. Unable to breathe
or move, she was being sucked through that cold black tunnel for
what seemed like an eternity. She wasn’t experiencing any pain, but
the dark emptiness and the lack of any sense of direction combined
to produce heart-pounding terror.

Abruptly, with no warning at all, the
darkness ended, and she was bathed in light. And with the awful
clarity that sometimes occurs during nightmares, she knew she was
falling from high above the earth. She wasn’t plummeting downward,
she was just drifting, softly and gently, like a feather borne on a
current of air.

Still, she was certain that when she finally
hit the ground, she was going to die. Oddly, though, now that she
could use her eyes again, she wasn’t afraid. What she felt was
curiosity, so as she slowly turned head over heels, she took the
opportunity to look around.

She was seeing through a mist that softened
every object. Perhaps the haziness was due to oxygen deprivation
after not being able to breathe for so long. Or maybe her vision
had been damaged by the computer explosion. It didn’t seem to
matter which it was. Since she wasn’t able to do anything about
what was happening, she just accepted her predicament.

The blue sky above her contained a few
streaky white clouds. Off to one side was a range of mountains,
tall, jagged peaks topped with snow tinted pink and gold by a sun
that appeared to be rising. Below her stretched a thickly wooded
landscape. In some places the forest had been cleared and the land
planted in neat rows. Born and bred in a big city, Gina wasn’t sure
what the crops were, and she couldn’t tell the exact time of year,
but the leaves on the trees indicated either spring or summer.

She did like all the different shades of
green, and the way a silver stream meandered through the land. Seen
through the softening mist, the landscape was prettier than
Rockefeller Center in the springtime. She wondered idly if there
were any hyacinths growing down there. She always liked the blue
hyacinths planted beside the fountains at Rockefeller Center.