Y2K

By Kari Kilgore

Timing Is Everything
Lucy Mitchell dreamed of celebrating New Year's Eve in Times Square her whole life.
Now she awaits the turn of the millennium there, after years of hard work heading off the dreaded Y2K bug.
But the bug shows signs of wriggling past her efforts, with its devastating sting intact.
Can Lucy head off digital disaster before the clock strikes midnight?

 

An excerpt from Y2K:

Countdown to the Worst Case Scenario

"Not seeing any errors, no," Chuck said. "But several are offline. A couple of databases, and…huh. HR servers. Email is working, same with the rest of the servers." "I'm going to have to take a look at this myself," Lucy said, "and I can't exactly get to Rio right now. We won't be back in Atlanta until the second."

"I hate to say this, but we can't wait that long. We've got less than an hour until we find out if this bug is going to be widespread in our systems."

"When it hits Buenos Aires," Lucy said, closing her eyes. "No signs of it in Paris or London?"

"Nope, not a trace. If it does hit the Argentina offices, we'll be in for a much bigger shitstorm not long after."

"Yeah. Two hours after that, we're looking at the whole East Coast."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393560111

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

Y2K

For everyone who put in years of hard work

to squash the Y2K bug before it hatched.

Y2K

A Turn of the Millennium Mystery

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Y2K

Times Square on New Year’s Eve was magic.

Vast, happy crowds as far as the eye could see, laughing and talking and dancing, sometimes to music Lucy Mitchell could actually hear. Wearing silly, oversized keepsake glasses shaped like 2000 on their noses, absurd swaying hats on their heads, huge grins on their faces.

Lucy and her husband Dan staked out their spot at just after five pm. Just in time to make it into the last closed-off section with a view of the famous, glittering ball high overhead.

The Winter Garden Theatre’s old-fashioned script sign loomed over their right shoulders, with a rather threatening image of two gigantic pairs of Cats eyes floating just above. It seemed the longest running show in the history of Broadway would make it into the new millennium.

The mass of people who’d squeezed inside that last section of metal barricades chanted along with Dan and Lucy, counting down the New Year in each time zone to their east. The only time the crowd quieted at all was when a phalanx of New York police officers—in full uniform and astride great, gorgeous horses—paraded by.

Surely no one would cause trouble even in this vast sea of humanity after that display.

At the same time, Times Square on New Year’s Eve was nightmarish.

None of Lucy’s lifelong daydreams of welcoming in the New Year right here included the smells. Spilled beer, stale coffee, the acrid results of people who weren’t allowed to leave the barricaded area for several hours relieving themselves where they stood.

Years of watching Dick Clark and