All over the world celebrations were in swing. As each time zone after another entered the year 2000, there were jubilations and fireworks. Among government and business leaders even more satisfaction that the Y2K was successfully wrestled.

There were only six isolated instances of really measurable damage. The social security system for New Zealand would need to be reentered by hand. Iceland's Gene Pool Project crashed, but could be restored. Here and there, of course, a real old PC or practically archived computer system failed. But there were no major repercussions. Microsoft Corporation had supplied a secret 6kb code three months before, a self-feeding self-replicating eu-virus, that had solved the whole problem. In return for this long suppressed secret program, the U.S. Justice Department had withdrawn all its antitrust cases against the giant computer firm.

What damage had occurred was easily corrected, and by January 2, 2000, all computer operations were back to normal. And, best of all, it looked like the century question would never matter again, not until the year 10,000 anyway.

However, the year 2000 is not the Millennium. 2001 is. The Pope was still hanging on waiting for it. His body needed to die, but his spirit and mind compelled him to linger another year.

Most people of course thought 2000 was the Millennium. It was a Holy Year, certainly. Well, it's only a statistic really, so what does it matter? Even the purists were caught up in the enthusiasm.

But the Millennium Bug was still lurking.

***

Julian Bates wrote the first Millennium Bug. There were others, but Julian's was the most powerful.

He was a 14 year old Utah boy whose father worked for Iomega. Julian hated girls. Now, lots of boys don't like girls, especially boys maybe 10 to 12 years old. But Julian carried his loathing past puberty. Even though he joked around with his buddies about tits and ass and stuff, he would rather be dead than put his prick in a girl. It wasn't he was gay or anything, he just thought girls were geeks.

Julian was a genius, and he wrote a code. He wanted to get rid of all girls. Reluctantly, this would include his own mother. And Grandma, too, whom he liked because she always had nonpareils in a dish when he came over to visit.

On December 24, 2000, Julian uploaded his code. First he sent it to every NewsGroup he could find, as a veiled attachment to a demure "inquiry". "Does anybody have all parts of 'Melanie's Lubricious Adventures' by Young Fox? Please e-mail me." Merely by clicking on the post, a cookie slipped into the recipient's computer, and it was written to bypass cookie warnings.

Then he rewrote it as a server-test internal query & posted it by auto re-mailer to all the major Internet providers, online services, and search engines. Then to all electrical and gas utilities, all church web sites, and US and state government cites. He had created a batch file with the 2 letter codes of all foreign countries, and on December 29 sent those as well.

Julian kept checking his accounts to see if he'd received the message. It didn't show. Good. That was how he'd written the code. On December 31st at noon he posted a "newzbomb", set to go off the next day at 0600. It would announce his achievement and claim him immortal glory. Virtually all world media would beginning broadcasting his story, high priority, overriding local control.

It slept. Dormant. Like a little mouse playing dead in front of a cat.

At precisely 0001 hours January 1, 2001 the virus kicked on......(cont)