The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 44

The Year That Did Not End the World

1. 1

   In the days when the Machine was young, and memory was dear as gold, the scribes of the mainframe said: Behold, the year needeth but two digits, for the year is always nineteen, and who shall ever need the rest?

   See also Chronicles 3:1

2. 2

   And they wrote 66 upon the card, and 67, and 68, and they saved two bytes in every date, and they rejoiced in their thrift.

3. 3

   And the COBOL was written in the sixties, and it begat payroll, and it begat banks, and it begat insurance; and its children were many, and its children grew old, and none did rewrite them.

   See also Chronicles 1:10

4. 4

   For the code did not sleep. It kept its count from year to year, and the programmers went unto their rest, and their names were forgotten at the bottom of the tape library.

   See also Genesis 15:8

5. 5

   And in the nineteen-nineties the Engineers looked upon their ledgers and saw that the year 2000 drew near, and that the Machine would read it as 00, and count it as 1900.

   See also Deployer 15:1 · Leviticus 7:1

6. 6

   And there arose a prophet of the trade press, Peter de Jager by name, who wrote warnings of the Doomsday, and men called it the Millennium Bug.

7. 7

   And the nations gathered the wealth of the earth, hundreds of billions of coins, to search the code line by line; and the consultants were many, and their invoices were long.

8. 8

   And the Congress of the land made a law to shield the mending, that the Engineers might speak of their fixes without fear of the courts; and the law was named for the year, and it was good.

9. 9

   And the Machines were set forward to the year 2000 in the laboratories. The clocks were turned, some failed, and they were mended again, and mended again.

10. 10

    And on the last night of the year 1999, the islands of Kiribati and the Chatham Islands saw the new day first, and the rest of the earth waited, watching the sky for falling planes.

11. 11

    And the midnight came, and the planes did not fall, the power did not fail, and the banks did not vanish. And men said: Was it a false prophecy? And the Engineers were silent.

12. 12

    And the Prophet said: It was both. The bug was real, and the mending was the reason it did not bite; for the fire that was put out is not thereby shown to have never burned.

    See also Psalms 14:9

13. 13

    Yet some things did break: a pump here, a card reader there that believed it was 1900. The Engineers repaired them by morning, and no one wrote songs about the small failures.

14. 14

    And the year 2000 was itself a leap year, for it is divisible by four hundred. But the programs that remembered the hundreds and forgot the four hundreds had said otherwise, and they too were mended.

15. 15

    And the Engineers asked: Is there another such year? And the Machine answered: Yes, in the year 2038, when the old clocks of Unix shall count seconds past a limit of thirty-two bits, and the number shall turn negative as the clock wraps about.

    See also Chronicles 3:15 · Prophets 1:1

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is the one who mendeth the year before midnight cometh; for the disaster that is prevented shall never be thanked, and the invoice shall be the only proof that it was ever real.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 44:1–16.