Originally Published July, 1993
St. Martin's Press, $19.95
ISBN 0-312-09390-X
Currently Out-of-Print

If Fred Astaire had been born with two left feet, and bad acne to boot, he would have looked exactly like Martin Brown.

The young man's straw-colored hair was badly in need of a good washing. He'd been in the same pair of khakis for a week. His pin-striped cotton shirt was old, smelled slightly, and hadn't seen the flat side of a hot iron in months.

But on the graveyard shift, it didn't matter.

Martin Brown shivered in the dry, icy midnight air of the glass-enclosed computer room. The offices outside were deserted, the cleaning crew having emptied the wastebaskets, the ashtrays, and dusted a little before calling it a night.

Back in Brown's tiny uptown apartment, on Lowerline Street down from where the streetcar line turns, his wife, Patí, an aerobics instructor at a health club in Metairie, lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Patí Brown's naturally blonde hair was as pale as winter wheat, usually moussed, and teased in the style known back in herlefferson Parish home as "Big Hair." She was tanned to a copper sheen. Everything about her was tight. Fit. She imagined herself, as did many, a Venus in Spandex. She and Martin had been married only two years. And Patí Brown was beginning to think she had married beneath herself.

Martin's degree in computer science hadn't gotten him very far. Perhaps, Patí thought as she lay there sleeplessly, her husband's personality was beginning to stand in the way of his climb up the corporate ladder. He should be a lot further along than night-shift lead operator in the computer room of a New Orleans bank.

The same things that led her to marry him in the first place were sinking him now. The incredibly dry, sharp wit that was so funny at parties and among their friends had earned Martin Brown a reputation as a smartass in the corporate environment. His refusal to play by the rules, combined with his minor eccentricities and his total refusal to suck up to anyone, would have served him well in many occupations. But not this one. Nuances of personality--in fact, any personality at all were anathema in the world he had chosen for himself.

The hard truth was that Martin Brown just didn't fit in at the First Interstate Bank of Louisiana. His career had taken up lodgings in the last house on a dead-end street.

He was in charge of four other operators, each in his or her own way an out-of-place corporate dweeb in the harried world of the Data Processing Division. Every night, his crew prepared a stack of computer printouts nearly fourteen feet high for distribution among the bank's forty-seven officers; forty-seven little Hitlers determined to make Martin's life miserable. If an operator called in sick, or if one of the five massive printers broke down, or if a storm came over and an emergency shutdown was called because of the threat of lightning, then Martin Brown was in for a long, whacked-out night. The adrenaline would rise in his veins like floodwaters. The nervous sweats would permeate his already gamy shirt and he would run about shouting orders and screaming obscenities like a banshee.

Understaffed, underpaid, overstressed.... Martin knew Patí was frustrated at their failure to move into a larger apartment, trade up to a better car, take that cruise she'd been talking about for months. But what could he do besides mutter obscenities and fight back as hard as he could?

This night, thankfully, had been fairly quiet. One operator was running the decollator in the printout room, another was hanging magnetic tape reels on the massive, floor-to-ceiling steel racks in the tape library, and two others were delivering printouts.

Martin Brown stood at the master console, typing instructions to the computer in a form of Pidgin English called Job Construction Language. Above him, to his right, a 27-inch monochrome monitor displayed a screen full of status lines. On the left of the screen, a column of user IDs let the operators know who was on the system at any given time. Another series of columns described the task being performed, the tape drive in use, certain flags indicating when magnetic tapes should be loaded, a number that told the amount of core memory in use, and a last column indicating the amount of core memory still available in the system.

The First Interstate Bank of Louisiana had a huge mainframe computer. The CSS 9600 Series II had enough memory to support more than one hundred users at a time. A row of eight mag tape drives on one wall of the computer room ran constantly, while twelve hard disk drives with removable diskpaks lined the other wall. It was nearly impossible to tie up the CSS 9600 11. Occasionally, during periods of extremely heavy use, the monitor indicated up to eighty per cent busy. Martin Brown had never seen it any higher than that.

This night, there were only two other users on the entire system, both of them young vice-president workaholics who felt compelled to work until at least one A.M. a couple of nights a week.

Martin and his crew had the rest of the system all to themselves. The line in the lower right hand corner of the monitor read:

Martin knew that with a click of the keyboard here and another click there, he could cause the bank more problems than a sport dog could jump over. Then they'd wish they'd been nicer to him. But he never did. It was too easy to get caught.

Below the console where Martin stood lay a 2400 baud external modem sitting under a black telephone. The modem was set to automatically answer the phone, then ask for a user I.D. If the caller typed a legitimate user number, the computer would ask for a password. Each programmer, systems analyst, and operator picked his or her own secret password. No one except the boss knew anyone else's password. At least that was the way it was supposed to work.

Martin Brown's password was WEASEL, his college fraternity nickname.

As the huge printers behind him churned printout at the rate of five thousand lines per minute, Weasel began to wish he were home in bed with Patí. Their sex life had suffered greatly since he got transferred to the graveyard shift working six at night until three in the morning. His mind wandered and he began to feel pressure below.

The clock approached 1:30 A.M.; Martin's fantasies grew kinkier. Suddenly, the printers stopped. The abrupt silence was like a hammer stroke, smashing Martin out of his reverie.

"Dammit." He punched the silent console. "What the hell's going on!"

The printers had stopped mid-line.

Martin examined the printer ribbons in both printers. They were okay, on track, still plenty of cloth left. He hit the red restart button on each one.

Nothing.

He turned and looked up at the monitor. The user lines had all gone blank, except the top one.

the display read, indicating an outside user, and down in the bottom corner:

The system was full, maxed out completely. Martin had never seen that before.

"Holy shit," he muttered. He reached for the master console keyboard and typed STATUS VERIFY, then hit the ENTER key. Nothing. The keyboard was dead. Martin stared at the idle tape drives. The only sound was the whirring of the diskpaks and the hum of the air-conditioning system.

Martin jumped as the phone rang.

"Computer room," he barked into the phone.

"What's going on down there!" a voice demanded. It was one of the obsessive-compulsive vice-presidents. "My keyboard's dead."

"I'II have to call you back," Martin said rudely, hanging up on the veep.

EXT1 the monitor read.

One of the programmers, Martin thought.

They did that sometimes, worked from home, called in to make corrections in programs or to troubleshoot. A couple of them were pretty weird; they never slept. They'd work twelve, maybe fourteen hours all day long, then Martin would see them logging on at three in the morning as he was checking out.

But who the hell was it? Martin typed USER ID - EXT1 - VERIFY into the console and hit the ENTER button. Nothing. The keyboard was as dead as David Duke at an NBA picnic. The phone rang again. Martin let it ring.

Then, without warning, the tape drives spun to life. The printers behind Martin exploded into a pounding din. The monitor now read:

"Whoever it was," Martin said out loud, "they hung up." The internal phone next to him rang again.

"Yeah," he said nastily, holding the phone to his face.

"Never mind," the vice-president said. "it's working now." Martin slammed the phone down.

Who the hell was that on the modem!

Thank God it was nothing serious, Martin thought. Before he went home, he had to start the program to generate the monthly checking account statements for the banks' 125,000 customers.

So what do you think? Drop me a line....