The Enemy Within

Resolving to cover as much ground as possible, Officer Bob Calvin pulled out of the hamburger restaurant’s trashlittered parking lot and started his patrol. He still had half his shift to go.

1:10 P.M., EST Midwest Telephone’s primary operations center, near Fort Wayne, Indiana

Maggie Kosinski pulled a printout out of the printer so that she could see the data for herself. The traffic counters all read fine. The links to the other Baby Bells throughout the rest of the country were busy too. It was just that no calls were getting through anywhere in the company’s service area.

She temporarily ignored the shift operators clustered around her as they all tried to suggest possible courses of action at once. She was the boss, the person in charge of operations at the center. She’d been summoned only moments after the outage began. Unfortunately, ten minutes of analysis told her nothing.

Kosinski had worked for the phone company for almost twelve years, starting after a tour in the Air Force as a communications technician. She’d paid her dues as a technician and operator before becoming a supervisor and then operations manager.

She was pretty, a little over average height, and had short blond hair. She kept her hair short and dressed down at the office so she wouldn’t be accused of using her looks to get promoted. Today, for instance, she wore a plain black sweater and cream-colored pants, little makeup, and small, gold hoop earrings. Hopefully, they’d pay more attention to her brains than her outfit.

Her secondin-command looked up from his desk. “Maggie, it’s Jim Johnston on the E-phone.”

Jim Johnston was Kosinski’s boss, the man in charge of company operations. She ran to pick up the special line. Midwest Telephone had its own backup system for maintenance and for emergencies like this.

“What have we got, Maggie?” asked Johnston matter-of factly.

She started spelling out the symptoms, using the same straightforward tone. “The whole system’s locked up tight. We’re getting traffic readings, but nothing’s really being passed.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end as Johnston tried to digest news that was worse than anything he’d anticipated. “What have you tried so far?”

“We aren’t getting any hardware faults. So first we tried isolating each of the switching computers from the others. That didn’t help. So we’ve stripped as much of the load as we can. But that still isn’t making any difference.”

Because Johnston had once held her job, she only needed to give him a shorthand picture of the system’s condition and their first attempts to fix it. Kosinski was more worried than she wanted to admit. She’d seen a lot of different problems in her time, but all the standard fixes, plus a few imaginative ones, hadn’t done a thing. There were only a few options left. And none of them were very palatable.

“All the switching computers are down?” Johnston asked.

“All within a minute of each other, all over the region,” she replied. It was hard to believe. This had never happened before, in her experience or in the experience of anyone in the operations center. Still, working with computers, you learned to expect the impossible.

“The system may be corrupted,” Kosinski ventured reluctantly. “Either by a bug or by damage to the code.” “Meaning a virus,” Johnston said flatly. The chance of a bug in mature software was very remote.

“It’s possible,” she admitted. “The code’s clearly been corrupted somehow. I recommend that we shut everything down and reboot from the master backups.”

That wasn’t her decision to make, thank goodness. Shutting the system down and restarting it from scratch would guarantee that all telecommunications services in the Midwest would be off-line for at least another thirty minutes. The company’s own losses and financial liability were probably already running somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. Another half an hour out of commission might increase that by an order of magnitude.

There was silence on the other end of the E-phone for several seconds.

“Can you salvage the accounting data?” Johnston asked finally. The system’s RAM held a significant fraction of the day’s billing records in temporary storage. Shutting the machines down would wipe all of that information, adding millions more to the company’s losses.

“I don’t know, Jim. We’ve already dumped all that we can, but it looks pretty bad.”

Another silence. This one lasted longer.

“Well, go ahead. The quicker we start, the quicker we’ll be back in business. I’ll call public relations.” She could hear the frustration in his voice. “Christ, they’re gonna love this.”

Maggie hung up, turned back to the shift crew, and started snapping out orders. She was determined to bring the system back on-line in record time, if only to shorten Jim Johnston’s discomfort.

12:15 P.M, CST Chicago

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange sat quiet, almost as silent as a tomb.