Gene Mapper Read Online Free Page B

shame.”
    “I told you, we upgraded time_t support from 32- to 64-bit almost immediately. Weren’t you listening? We had a 64-bit patch as soon as the processors came out. It was there for anyone who— What’s so funny, you piece of shit?”
    The old guy pulled the IV bag off the stand and fastballed it at the camera. The video reframed. Now I was looking at a TV studio, with the man in the hospital frozen on ranks of monitors along the walls. The World Reporting Network logo revolved slowly in the lower right corner. A woman in a short jacket and slacks was perched on a tall chair, legs crossed. I guessed she was in her early thirties.
    sascha leifens was subtitled across her chest. So this was the reporter my waitress liked so much.
    Sascha shrugged her shoulders and tossed her bobbed red hair as she stepped down. I knew she was an avatar when her hair returned to exactly the same position. Most casters use RealVu to at least give the impression that they’re communicating facts. Not Sascha.
    “There you have it. What do you think?” It was the voice from the interview. “The operating system he coded in a trance, while ignoring his responsibilities to society, has an astonishing flaw.”
    A large chart appeared above her head with a string of thirty or so ones and zeros along the top. Below the ones and zeros was a date readout: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds.
    “These are time values for Unix. Look closely. He used a 32-bit integer to express these values to the second, even though he knew very well that Unix would have to be viable for at least decades. The way he coded it, the time value will reach its overflow point next year—at seven seconds past 3:14 a.m., January 19, 2038.”
    The time count on the chart rolled toward the overflow point. Now almost all the numbers were ones. Sascha made a pistol with her thumb and index finger and took aim at the chart.
    “Bang!”
    The last zero changed to a one, and all the ones rolled over to zeros. The time readout flipped to January 1, 1970, and the chart shattered into a million pieces.
    “I’d like to invite everyone out there to ask software engineers and corporations what will happen when our PCs can’t handle time signatures correctly. I did, and this is the answer I got.”
    Sascha lifted a corner of her shapely mouth and faked a male growl. “Well, miss, there won’t be enough 32-bit computers left in the world to matter.”
    She shrugged. “When I asked how many computers will be affected, they couldn’t answer. Why? Because they don’t know. But for some reason, they do know there won’t be any problems . That’s techies for you.”
    The sugar in my espresso couldn’t mask the bitter undertaste. Zucca’s coffee wasn’t very good. I felt like blaming Sascha. I couldn’t believe that a major information conduit like Times of the World would stoop to this kind of tabloid agitation.
    First, nearly all CPUs are 128-bit now. Maybe there are some 32-bit devices out there that can’t be patched, but the programmer Sascha spoke to was right: there couldn’t be enough devices like that to make a difference one way or the other.
    “Want to hear something even scarie r ? This flaw will affect programs that control forces powerful enough to threaten our very existence.” The studio monitors switched from the guy in the hospital to images of mushroom clouds over nuclear power plants, ICBMs popping out of silos, and fusion reactors melting down. Sascha frowned, shook her head, and turned both palms upward in a “Whatcha gonna do?” gesture.
    “If this was a problem the human species never faced before, we might cut those programmers some slack. But in the year 2000, during the Internet era, the man in the hospital and his friends created an identical problem. They never learn.”
    Video from the early oughts rolled past on the monitors. There was a red-faced kid with curly hair wearing a hoodie in a cubicle crowded with toys, then a guy