The End of an Epoch

Liam Hepworth was a toddler when his father helped to save the planet from the Millennium Bug. 

However, Chris Hepworth’s Y2K triumph was only a temporary fix as the world’s Unix computers retained their life expectancy of 2,147,483,647 seconds. 

This time span may seem like forever, but at precisely 03:14:07 on January 19th 2038, every 32-bit computer will automatically reset to December 13th 1901 and chaos will ensue.

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Liam embraced a career writing computer code and pursued his late father’s long-term goal of averting disarray at the end of the Unix Epoch. 

It’s after midnight when the phone rings in the city office of Robust & Co, NYC. 

Liam is still tapping away on his terminal by the light of a single desk lamp. 

He clocks the caller’s number and rams the receiver between his tilted chin and right shoulder.

“Hey, Pattie,” he says, inputting characters with his free hand.

“Have you any idea what time it is, love?”

“In 3 hours that’ll be me done,” he sniffs. “Just got a couple more to index.” 

“Don’t suppose you’ve eaten much for the last two days?” 

“I know, I know.” He skews his mouth to one side and peers at the cascading lines of script on his monitor.

“Mission control, are you still there?”

“Sorry.” His fingers rattle on the keyboard. “What was that?”

“I asked if…”

“…Err, yeah,” he smacks his lips. “Food would be great.”

“Superman can’t save the world on empty,” she sighs. 

“Is there anything for me in the fridge?”

“You need to think of yourself as well.”

“I’ll be back by four, with a bit of luck.”

“Yeah, right,” she laughs.

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Chris fixed everyone else’s houses but abandoned his own. In due course he departed this life and the Hepworth household. His newly widowed wife, Jean, had to raise Liam by herself. She struggled to make enough money, and often Liam had to remain late at school until she could collect him.

It was in the library during the after-school club that he first encountered Nostradamus. He was surprised how much notice people take of his predictions. The doom-laden tales amused his developing mind, and he was impressed by their resounding power. He grew to enjoy uncovering and debunking conspiracy theories and apocalyptic prophecies. However, in doing so, he discovered documentation about his father’s accomplishments and understood the gravity of the Y2K forecast. Liam’s insights revealed how Chris’s dedication had prevented the potentially severe effects because of the issue with the original Unix coding. These revelations affected Liam’s view of life and by the time he graduated from college, he knew what he wanted. He was set on a course to complete the work started by his father. 

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Unlike the turn of the Millennium, there’ll be no fanfares at the end of the Unix Epoch because nobody gets thanked for maintaining the status quo. The code writers of 2038 won’t be associated with a catchy tune and a timeless lyric. Alas, the phrase, “Party like it’s 13th January 2038,” doesn’t have the same memorable ring to it as Prince’s musical celebration of “1999.” Prince’s song might have been a dance party sensation, but his hit also had a prescient quality. “1999” contains the haunting line, “When I woke up this morning, I could have sworn it was judgement day.” He wasn’t the only artist to be concerned about the future, but despite gloomy media predictions and an enormous hangover, the next day arrived more or less intact, and the world creaked into the year 2000. 

It’s now January 19^th,2038, and at 03:14:07 this morning, Unix time will be gone. The code writers of 2038 have been employing a replacement code with a new wraparound date that is 20 times the age of the universe. That’s approximately 292 billion years from now. 

Soon it will be tomorrow, forever.

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At 2 o’clock in the morning Liam calls it a day. He’s got approximately 4,500 seconds of Unix time left to clear his desk. The phone has been silent for over an hour while he completed his last tasks. He sighs as he removes the plastic wrapper from a cardboard package. It’s never easy assembling an archive box; those stiff ribbed sections are so tricky to fold. His personal effects have accumulated like detritus left beyond the high tide line on someone’s forgotten shore. Paper, printouts, and notes litter every surface, all those forsaken items to catalogue and pack away. He pauses before wrapping a picture of Pattie and Jim. Liam’s been absent for so much of his son’s life. Jim’s grown so much in the last three years. Precious moments he’ll never get back, gone with little trace. 

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President Clinton urged the government in mid-1998 to “put our own house in order.” As a result, it’s estimated that large businesses in the USA spent $100 billion to pay for the code fixes before the Millennium Bug deadline. The Y2K price tag works out to $365 for every American citizen.

Back in 1999, Chris Hepworth’s fellow code writers considered the Unix time dilemma, but they assumed we’d have updated everything by now.  

Since the turn of the Millennium, giant companies have acted accordingly and fully replaced their Unix systems prior to 2038, but the smaller companies have had issues. Even with three decades’ warning, funding yet another digital transition is a heavy expense for them. Maybe they are reluctant to spend more money because they assumed their initial expenditure was a onetime fix with a lifetime guarantee? 

However, the law is the law and compliance is mandatory, although the regulations contain a loophole that allows for further patch-ups.  The result is that as 2038 approaches, up to 500,000 smaller companies gambled on either cost-saving tweaks or a “fix-on-failure” strategy. 

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The inherent conundrum of the Y2K debate was that those on both ends of the spectrum, from naysayers to doomsayers, claimed that the outcome proved their predictions correct. After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, relief gave way to derision, as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. 

The conflicting opinions about what horrendous problems were averted and what was achieved has caused long lasting confusion and apathy. 

It was called a big hoax and the effort to fix it a waste of time.

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Chris Hepworth’s framed picture is the last item Liam places in his archive box. It’s the shot somebody grabbed at Sequoia Forest. Maybe a passer-by helped to document the occasion. Liam was six at the time and it was a family holiday. They’d been staying at a cabin in the state park. The immense trees were beyond the boy’s imagination. He’d seen the celebrated picture of a car driving through the tunnelled-out trunk, but the reality was awe-inspiring. The trees went up forever. He imagined spiralling coils of Fibonacci numbers scraping the cloudscape above their heads. His Father and Mother had natural smiles on their faces, there’s no sense that this was to be their last holiday together. Liam was older when he understood there were things unspoken, and matters unresolved.

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But what if no one had taken steps to address the Millennium Bug? Isolated incidents from 1999 illustrate the potential for adverse consequences, with varying degrees of severity. For example, a video store in upstate New York tried to charge a customer $91,250 after computers showed a rented movie was being returned 100 years late.

On the same day, at a nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee, Y2K disrupted a computer that tracks weight and type of nuclear material. Thankfully, the plant avoided structural damage and eventual meltdown.

If similar incidents had happened on an international scale, the ensuing mayhem could have been catastrophic, it would have affected everybody.

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Liam needs to go home and pray that everything has worked. It’s time to close the office; he’s done all he can. All Liam’s clients should have installed his new replace scripts by this point. 

He turns his key in the lock, pops it in an envelope and pushes it under the door. Liam summons the lift and picks up his archive box. It grinds its way up the metal-lined shaft. The doors open and a reverberating clunk echoes down the dusty corridor. Liam steps inside the carriage for the last time. He sets his burdensome load on the carpeted floor and presses “G”. The mirrored doors slide closed, lock tight, and seal him inside.

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The Hepworth Family attended a local church whose pastor regaled the congregation with colourful topics on a weekly basis. He’d often start his sermons on a reasonable note; find a reason to introduce talk of hellfire and finish with threats of eternal damnation. The transgressors were always destined for a speedy descent to Hell.

Liam‘s childhood was infused with these anxious thoughts, so it’s no wonder that he got interested in his father’s profession. When he attended engineering school, Liam used to joke about his personal favourite ten apocalypses. He and his drinking buddies even compiled their own definitive compendium of “end of the world prophecies.” The collection incorporated many well-known predictions, such as the Mayan Apocalypse of December 21^st 2012 that never happened and Harold Camping’s Biblical floods of October 11^th 2011 that didn’t arrive. They also detailed endless lists of assorted non-plagues, no-show famines, and various disappointing firestorms, including the infamous Iraqi oil fields that were heroically extinguished before creating catastrophic damage. 

But, without a doubt, everyone’s favourite scare story was the global Unix time disaster predicted to happen in 2038. It seemed highly amusing to Liam and his peers 20 years ago when they decided that would be the end of the world. Joking apart, they also agreed that someone would probably sort it out. There have always been prophecies about the end of civilisation and they will be foretold ad infinitum.

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In a quiet city street, outside an office block, the last seconds of Unix time are bearing down on Liam. His car has over-run time on the parking metre by some 36 hours. He owes $150 in extra charges. Liam nudges his reading glasses into place and rifles through his wallet compartments for plastic. He punches in the car licence number, depresses the payment button and swipes a credit card. 

The machine flickers and responds. Payment invalid. 

Liam selects another card and tries again. Payment Accepted. 

He exhales with relief, but flinches. 

It’s only a car alarm; 2 blocks away. 

Liam starts his hydroelectric car, announces his destination to the on-board Sat-Nav. He kicks back, adjusts the volume on his music player and the vehicle manoeuvres onto the route.

It’s only when he drifts into a lane of on-coming traffic that he grabs the wheel and switches to manual control.

He clocks the time on his dashboard. 

The display is showing 00:06:25. 

Liam scrolls through the menu.

The current date is 12:13:1901. 

A new epoch has started.

The End