Common Era Reset
Tech Support
The plaza glittered with salvaged Christmas lights strung between repurposed telephone poles. Maya adjusted her cardboard crown, spray-painted gold three weeks ago in preparation for tonight. Around her, two hundred people filled the square, the largest gathering New Haven had seen since the Fall almost a century ago. Someone had fashioned a disco ball from shattered mirror fragments. It caught the firelight and scattered it across faces painted with hope.
“Ten minutes!” Old Chen’s voice carried across the plaza. He stood under the telephone pole where someone had wrapped the lights in figure-eights, the bulbs throwing uneven shadows across the cracked pavement. His flannel shirt hung open over a paper “100” safety-pinned crooked.
The woman beside Maya lifted her arms. Bedsheet wings, painted with blue butterflies, rose and fell. “My grandmother said she’d never see this day.” Her voice caught. “She almost made it.”
Maya didn’t know what to say to that. She looked up instead, at the disco ball spinning above them. Someone had glued mirror fragments to a basketball. The pieces were different sizes, irregular, catching firelight at odd angles.
“Will the fax machines do something?” Dante poked the foil again. “When it changes?”
“They’ll probably just sit there. Same as always.”
“But what if they print something? Like a message?”
“From who?”
He shrugged, the foil crinkling. “The universe.”
The drums started up again near the platform, three people hitting different rhythms on paint buckets and oil drums. A man in a suit jacket squeezed between them, the bottle in his hand sloshing. “First century!” His words slurred together. “First whole century and we got lights, we got music, we got—” He gestured vaguely at the platform where the mayor stood. “Computers that talk to each other!”
Someone cheered. Others took it up, the sound building until Maya felt it in her chest, something larger than herself pressing outward.
“Five minutes!”
Dante’s hand found hers. His palm was damp through the foil glove.
The ceremonial computer sat on a folding table behind the mayor, its monitor glowing that particular shade of green that meant it was working, actually working, not just pretending. Maya had helped wire it to the town’s systems last month. Traffic light, generator controls, radio transmitter. The engineer had explained it three times, drawing diagrams, making sure she understood how the connections worked. “Everything talks to everything else now,” he’d said. “That’s how they did it Before.”
The screen showed 99/12/31, 23:59. The seconds ticked in the corner. 23:59:12. 23:59:13.
“Thirty seconds!”
Bodies pressed closer. The butterfly woman’s wing brushed Maya’s shoulder. Old Chen pushed forward, his boots scraping concrete. A child sat on someone’s shoulders, too young to understand numbers but clapping anyway, the sound sharp and off-rhythm.
“Ten!”
Maya’s throat tightened. She tried to swallow.
“Nine!”
Dante’s grip hurt now. She squeezed back.
“Eight! Seven!”
The drums got louder. Someone was singing, the words wrong but the melody almost right.
“Six! Five!”
Her great-grandmother’s face came to her then, not the stories she’d heard but the actual memory. The way the old woman’s hands had shaken when she held Maya after birth, the whisper barely audible. “Made it. We made it.”
“Four! Three!”
The crowd’s voice rose, hundreds of throats pushing sound into the night.
“Two! One!”
Everything released at once. Arms thrown up, voices hoarse, drums crashing. Someone set off fireworks, the kind that shrieked and popped. Dante jumped, his foil crunching. The butterfly woman spun, her wings knocking into people who didn’t care, who were hugging strangers, crying, laughing.
Maya opened her mouth to shout.
The Christmas lights went dark.
All of them, every strand, in one instant. The disco ball stopped mid-spin. The speakers cut out, the music ending halfway through a word.
The crowd noise continued for three more seconds, then fractured into confused murmurs.
“Just the generator.” The mayor’s voice came from the darkness. “Tripped the breaker. Someone get—”
Flashlights clicked on. Five, then a dozen, beams crossing and separating.
Maya’s eyes adjusted. She could see the mayor now, lit from below, staring at the computer screen. His mouth was open slightly.
“What’s it say?” someone called.
The mayor didn’t answer. He typed something, his fingers jabbing at the keys too hard. Typed again. His jaw muscles worked.
“The traffic light’s stuck red,” a voice shouted from the street. “All directions.”
“Radio’s dead.”
“Archive building—something’s wrong with the fax, it’s printing but it’s just—it’s garbage.”
The murmurs got sharper, words cutting over each other.
Old Chen reached the platform. His flashlight beam hit the screen. “What’s the date say?”
“It reset.” The mayor’s voice was flat. “It thinks it’s year zero.”
The butterfly woman’s wings stopped moving. Dante’s hand went rigid in Maya’s grip.
“My grandfather talked about this.” Old Chen turned to face the crowd, his flashlight sweeping across faces. “In the old world. He said they feared the turn of millenia. That the machines would forget how to count, that they’d stop working, all at once.”
“That’s not—” The mayor typed again. The screen flickered, reset, showed the same numbers. “There’s a simple explanation, I’m sure.”
“It’s the Fall all over again.” Someone in the back, voice rising. “We reached too high, we connected everything together, we—”
“We angered something,” someone else finished.
A child started crying, the sound thin and frightened.
“Disconnect it.” The man in the suit jacket grabbed the table’s edge. “Before it spreads, before it corrupts everything we built.”
“We should burn it,” another voice said.
“No.” The mayor held up his hands. “Stop. We can fix this, we just need to think, we need to—”
But people were already moving, pulling back, parents lifting children. The drums sat abandoned. Someone kicked over a paint bucket and it rolled, the sound hollow.
“Hey!” Maya called, loudly. “Everyone, the machine thinks it’s Year Zero again.” Faces turned toward her, uncertain. “It never learned what happens after ninety-nine. It doesn’t know numbers that big.”
The mayor pushed through the crowd. “You’re saying this is… mathematics?”
“Yes,” she said. “A glitch.” Her breath shuddered. “I read something in the archive once, from the old world. They were worried about the same thing when their calendar reached a new century. They had a name for it. For whatever reason, I think it was called…” She reached for the faded syllables.
“Y2K.”