Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

Author:Lisa Ko [Ko, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

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The end of the century, or the end of the world, depending on your take, approaches. At Sola, the residents line the walls with Styrofoam to dampen the noise of a nearby construction site. They break into the lot and give the machines flat tires. At Wonder, Jackie and her coworkers snicker at the Y2K fearmongers while harboring their own private apprehensions. Jackie triple-checks her code. The news alternates between the profiles of survivalists with their bunkers stocked with bottled water and canned food and the awkward reassurances of corporate directors saying everything will be fine, that the prospect of the world’s computers crashing simultaneously at midnight, having been programmed to use only the last two digits of a year and unable to distinguish between 1900 and 2000, is a myth. There are patches in place. People have been working hard to ensure collective safety. But the survivalists always knew the technology revolution wouldn’t last, believed computers had been created to destroy and the world is at the end of a very long con. Sometimes Jackie thinks it wouldn’t be so bad if everything collapses like the survivalists claim. She keeps extra cash around, has an address book with phone numbers and actual addresses. If the internet goes down, everything will be how it used to be. If it gets worse, Ellen will know what to do. The squatters were survivalists long before Y2K.

Jackie has barely had a chance to talk to Ellen since Ellen got back. On New Year’s Eve, Diane is offline by noon, driving up the coast to where she and her friends are renting a house with a hot tub. At Wonder, where they’re supposed to be working a half day, Jackie is two beers in with Mike and Ashok by three p.m., four beers by six p.m. They order sushi while they run updates and discuss the Blitz.com Y2K party, three floors of a warehouse near the Hudson River, inside which Blitz has built fifty cubicles, each equipped with its own twenty-four-seven webcam. Everyone at Wonder is going. Just stop by, Mike says. When else is this going to happen again, when are you going to be alive again at the beginning of a new millennium? I don’t know, Jackie says, I could live until the year 3000. I could get my brain frozen like Walt Disney. Oh, come on, Ashok says, waving his hands around in circles over his head. Come for the bullshit, the spectacular bullshit.

They share a cab to the party with Deth. Jackie loses Ashok and Mike immediately, but Deth lingers behind. On one of the far walls, two men are spray-painting a city landscape with a subway train snaking through the skyscrapers, a Gotham in neon, and in the center they have painted Brian Baker, the Blitz CEO, a short man with tortoiseshell glasses, improbably slam-dunking a basketball. The Blitz.com website is like public access TV but online, hundreds of channels of people blathering about baseball, veganism, colonics, content made for broadband but with frequent glitches.

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