A New York Minute
Photographers and podcasters filled the Blue Room in City Hall, cramming together and trying to stay clear of the cables snaking across the floor. Everyone wanted to get a good photo of Mayor Diaz as he stood at the podium, gathering his thoughts before the press conference began. The gossip, passed around in encrypted chats, was the the mayor was planning something that would change the city forever.
On the right of the mayor, behind him, stood Dr. Patel, the city’s Chief Information Officer. Her eyes were focused on the ceiling, rather than the cameras, looking visibly uncomfortable.
The ground rumbled briefly as a subway passed underneath the building. It was a regular occurrence that real New Yorkers were used to, but a few reporters grabbed their cameras nervously and revealed they had never been to the city before.
“New York is always moving, even under our feet,” the mayor joked at their expense. There were a few chuckles before the mayor went into business.
“With that out of the way, let’s get to the point. For the last three hundred years, New York City has been a leader on the world stage. We lead in finance, in art, and in culture. Our buildings are greener, taller, and better connected to transit than any other city in the country. When I took office, I promised that we would continue to lead, to show the world that the future is right here. In New York City. Today, I’m announcing a new initiative that will do that. Effective October 1st, New York will be moving to a new timezone: NYST.
“How can we be in the the future if we are not living in the future. Our new timezone will be set to one minute ahead of Eastern Standard Time. New York’s time is now and we will always be ahead of the curve. It’s time our clocks reflected that.”
Hands suddenly shot up, eager to ask questions. Cameras and microphones leaned in, ready to capture every inch of this historic moment. The mayor pointed at a reporter in the front row.
“Grace Van Cortlandt, WNYC. Mayor, Wall Street and other financial institutions rely on precise timekeeping. Trading happens on nanoseconds. By establishing a non-standard timezone, are you worried for the consequences to high-frequency trading and smart contract execution?”
“Leadership requires ensuring our city’s great institutions are prepared for the future,” the mayor nodded. “New York’s new timezone should not cause any issues. And since Dr. Abby Patel is here with us today, I can pass the question over to her for a more detailed technical answer.”
He turned and gestured to Dr. Patel, who was still looking at the ceiling. She took several steps forward, still looking lost, and grabbed the sides of the podium tightly.
“Thank you, Mayor,” she said coolly. “We are aware of the concerns regarding time synchronization for our local and international businesses. Systems that currently rely on Coordinated Universal Time will retain the ability to do that. Our timezone implementation will mainly affect local timekeeping. We have already been working with the exchanges to ensure that this transition goes smoothly.”
Diaz quickly pointed to a new reporter to ask a different question.
“Pat McGuire, Associated Press. Mayor, Dr. Patel, what about regional infrastructure, systems that connect outside the city like the Long Island Railroad, PATH, Amtrak, and others. Their switching systems are old and famously complex. How do you guarantee there won’t be any issues with scheduling and timekeeping? Has this been tested?”
“Safety and reliability and paramount,” the mayor boomed from behind the podium. “Dr. Patel?”
She coughed and nodded before answering. “Interagency coordination has been a top priority for us. We have added a new firmware layer to the existing scheduling systems and signal controllers. It is true that working with legacy systems have presented some unique challenges, but we are confident that our solution has addressed all of them.”
“Dr. Patel, I have a question for you directly,” stood a reporter from the front row without raising their hand. She squinted and saw he worked for Tech... something. “Are you sending a formal request to the IANA tzdata timezone database to have NYST added as a recognized timezone for devices around the world? What is your contingency if this request is denied or delayed? What’s the budget for all of this? Can you guarantee there won’t be any disruptions to critical systems?”
Abby’s patient smile faltered for a moment. “We have already submitted a request to the IANA. Nevertheless, we will continue to support NYST on our own through our local NTP servers. Redundancy and testing through our emergency systems is ongoing and our phased rollout will allow us to catch any issues before they are disruptive.”
“Thank you, Doctor!” Mayor Diaz reclaimed the spotlight before she could answer the question on budget. “Proactive! That’s our goal! We are always looking ahead and always prepared. A New York Minute is about embracing the future. And we thank you for all the questions.”
There were several hands that then went down, knowing the rest would need to be submitted to the press secretary. The mayor beamed for the cameras while Abby stood beside him, still thinking about all the failures that would start happening in the next few weeks.
Technicians sat in rows in the basement of City Hall, with Abby supervising them. For several weeks, her team had been working overtime to push patches and test that everything would go smoothly. She had burned a lot of political capital on manual overrides to update 911 and hospital systems, giving her team the ability to quickly rollback if there were any glitches. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much control over the thousands of other systems outside of her control.
She looked up at the large clock hanging on the wall: 23:59:00 EST. There was a growing tension in the room. The moment of truth was approaching.
The clock ticked to 23:59:30. The technicians were frantically monitoring the system, looking for any signs of trouble.
The clock hit 23:59:45. Abby picked up her coffee and took another sip. She had been up for 48 hours straight, and by this point even the caffeine was ineffective. Yet she couldn’t let her guard down now.
23:59:58...
23:59:59...
00:01:00 NYST.
The dashboards remained green. Abby felt a wave of relief wash over her. The transition had been successful. She allowed herself a small smile. But then everything started to go red.
“NTP sync requests are hitting timeouts,” a technician called out frantically. “Client machines across multiple agencies are rejecting the time offset. We’re seeing automated reports of security alarms, viewing it as a man-in-the-middle attack.”
“ConEd is offline!” another technician called out as their screen flashed with red.
“MTA is reporting signal a cascade of signal failures in the East River tunnels. An M train is stuck in the tunnel and isn’t authorized to move forward or backward. Signal controllers are reporting a time synchronization failure.”
“We’ve got gridlock in Midtown. Signals are stuck on red. NYPD is already reporting an accident.”
It was worse than Abby had anticipated. There were a thousand papercuts happening everywhere across the city without any clear sense of which one was highest priority. Half the systems were running NYST, but they were sending time to the other half from the future. In the event of this contradiction, the fallback was to just stop working.
“We need to triage,” she ordered, feeling exhaustion and adrenaline wash over her at the same time. “Focus on transport and power grid issues for now. The rest should be logged in a spreadsheet so we can review later. For now, we need to make sure 911 systems are stable.”
Midnight in Queens, Pablo was just closing his bodega for the night. He had been working there for twenty years, but it was only in the last year that he finally replaced his cash register with a new point-of-sale system. Finally patrons could use a credit card or tap. It felt like a big step for him, one that he expected would make his life easier.
Yet as the clock struck midnight, the payment system stopped working. When a customer tapped their phone to the tablet, the wheel spun and spun. Then, it spit out an error which made no sense to him.
ERROR 5031: TIMESTAMP MISMATCH WITH PAYMENT PROCESSOR
“I can try again,” the young, drunk lady offered as she tapped her phone against the tablet for a second time. There was the same result.
“Timestamp mismatch?” he looked at the tablet’s clock. It was 00:02 NYST. “Let me look up the manual.”
He pulled out his phone and navigated to the manufacturer’s website. However, the browser connection failed. He turned off the bodega’s Wi-Fi and refreshed without any change.
HTTPS CERTIFICATE ERROR: Time out of range with server
“What’s going on?” the lady slurred.
“It’s Jamie time,” Pablo muttered to himself. “Look, I’ll give it to you for free. I don’t think I can fix this right now.”
“Thanks, Pablo,” the lady said as she stumbled out of the store.
His bank, his credit card processor, and his suppliers were all still running on Eastern Standard Time and were not prepared for this time change. His own system was reporting a time that made no sense to the outside world. He couldn’t close out the day’s receipts or place any new orders for the morning. He was just going to have to close up early. It was like the city had been severed from the rest of the world.
As the sun rose over the city, the full chaos had not yet come. They had managed to manually pull the M train out of the tunnel, but the MTA decided to shut down all interborough tunnels until they could be sure the signal systems were stable. That meant a lot of commuters were scrambling to find alternatives to get to work in Manhattan. It didn’t help that busses were stuck in the same gridlock as the NYPD slowly tried to route traffic around broken traffic lights.
The morning news feeds were entirely negative, more negative than usual:
- GRIDLOCK? MORE LIKE MATTLOCK AS MTA, NJ TRANSIT, AMTRAK ALL REPORTING DELAYS FOR COMMUTERS
- CASH REMAINS KING: Payment processor outage means you can’t get your morning coffee
- ConEd customers reporting brownouts all night
Grand Central, Penn Station, and Atlantic Terminal were all swollen with commuters who were waiting for their train, another train, any train to show up and get them somewhere else. Some trains were cancelled outright, leading to groans of disappointment when the departure board updated. Automated systems were sending out contradictory announcements about delays and trains, overlapping with each other.
Intersections were now completely shut down, with cars blaring horns and cyclists struggling to weave through them all. Pedestrians had a hard time knowing when they were supposed to cross, so they just decided to cross regardless of what the signals said. This was actually causing gridlock to worsen, as well as the cacophony of horns and sirens.
Pablo had returned to the deli in the morning and scribbled a sign with a red marker on the door: “CASH ONLY”. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much cash-on-hand when his produce delivery arrived, and the driver wasn’t able to actually complete the transaction because the system wouldn’t validate any deliveries.
The two of them worked around that, with Pablo handing over 10% of the delivery in cash while the driver unloaded just half of the crates. Then the driver would have to come by the next day to collect the rest or these half-deliveries on credit would start building up. Pablo was already worried about how this would affect his cash flow and making payroll for his employees.
He fumed as the driver shut the backdoor earlier than he should’ve, leaving him with just half of the fresh produce he needed for the day. “What do you mean cash only?” he heard a customer complain from inside as she waved her phone at the inactive payment terminal.
As dawn rose over the basement in City Hall, Abby had still not gotten any rest. Her night was spent slowly trying to unbreak every system that had been broken by the time change, but they had only managed to stabilize the systems considered life-and-death even as others continued to worsen. Still, the power grid was holding, 911 calls were still being answered, and hospitals were operational. That was the best they could do.
Everything else was flickering dark amber and red on the dashboards. Other systems: commercial, logistical, administrative, and transportation were still burdened by cascading timestamp errors. The patches they were sending out weren’t holding, just causing other things to break in new and unforeseen ways.
“We can’t access third-party servers,” a lead engineer said to her as he let out a loud yawn. “Banks are private entities. New Jersey and Connecticut are separate states. And the federal servers... well we aren’t even allowed to think about touching them. Every time we try to talk to any of them, it generates a new fault. But these handshakes happen a million times every minute. We’ll never be able to patch the rest of the world.”
She rubbed her eyes and looked at a new message that just buzzed on her smartwatch. She had just been forwarded an email from the Mayor’s Press Office.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mayor Diaz Hails New Yorker’s Resilience Despite Minor NYST Transition
“We are experiencing some minor friction as systems across the region adjust to our timezone change. We have confidence these temporary hiccups will resolve quickly as our partners update their operations. City services are working as normal. We appreciate the patience of all New Yorkers as we boldly walk into the future...”
“Minor friction? Temporary hiccups?” Abby felt her stomach drop as she read the words. Looking at the chaos unfolding across her dashboards, she knew this was not going to be as temporary as the mayor promised.
Although the chaos had transitioned to a long-term cynicism as the resilience of New Yorkers was put to the test. People figured out how to travel to Jersey City to empty out the ATMs and arrived at their workplaces later than expected. Businesses had to adjust their hours a tad to accommodate their workers’ tardiness.
But then before the weekend arrived, the news feeds were full of amateur videos of buckled cars and stretchers illuminated by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. On a stretch of track below 14th Street, a westbound L train proceeded under what its system believed to be a clear signal. Instead, it slammed into the rear of another train that had been stalled just past 6th Avenue. Despite the low-speed, the impact caused three deaths and more than fifty injuries. Worse yet, because it didn’t happen in a station, it took hours for emergency responders to get everyone out safely and to the hospital aboveground.
When Abby arrived at the station, she saw several agents in windbreakers from the NTSB who had already arrived. Their MTA counterparts already understood the root cause of the accident. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind of the commuters struggling to get out. The stretchers were full of people with broken bones, concussions, and worse. So much blood.
She faced the mayor before his next press conference, to debrief him.
“The interlocking controller is an old Siemens unit. We had sent out patches to update the firmware of everything,” Abby told the mayor candidly, making sure she didn’t use any political spin. “The patch also introduced a memory-leak bug which causes a dogwatch reset after seventy-two hours of uptime. This causes it to perform an automated rollback for safety, but that means it reverts to the firmware before the NYST patch.”
She took a deep breath and looked at the mayor’s face. He seemed to her to be almost bored.
“So, the Central Traffic Control checked the signal status, and saw that the train had passed by a minute ago and it was safe. However, the train was actually still there because it was actually not a minute ago. The operator of the second train believed the track was clear and he proceeded, which caused the collision.”
The mayor’s face was growing paler by the second.
“In my report last year, I had warned that the complexity and age of our infrastructure would have a high risk of failure. This is the kind of consequence I meant.”
The mayor was silent for a moment, then said, “We will have to investigate this further, but do not say that in public. You were my point person. If I go down, so do you. None of this whistleblower stuff. Do you understand me?”
“Mayor, with all due respect, we’re about three deaths too late for this kind of political spin. The public needs to know the truth.”
“Let the feds figure that out. But don’t you dare say anything. Do you understand me, Abby?”
“I understand what you’re saying,” she said resigned. “Let’s just get through the press conference.”
“Good. Follow my lead. I’ll make sure to handle the press.”
When they stepped out of the office into the hallway, photographers and podcasters were waiting for them. Questions were being shouted at them from all directions, over one another. Abby kept her eyes to the ground, pretending not to hear anything. The mayor shouted answers back with a defensive tone, lacking the slick charisma he had a week before when announcing the initiative.
As they walked through the hallway, they stopped at the doors of City Hall. A crowd of protestors had gathered outside, with the families of victims, small business owners, and all other kinds of constituents. Lawsuits were sure to follow suit.
His ‘Minute Ahead’ plan was now considered a disaster, and the city had collectively decided to ignore it. Everyone was already starting to change back to Eastern Standard Time, while ‘Jamie Time’ had turned into a punchline. There was now the mayor’s time and the real time.
Pablo was back at his deli, figuring out that he could mess with the settings of his business router to pretend he was actually in Hoboken, allowing him to sync with the rest of the world. While his business and his job had been saved, it was clear that pretty soon the mayor would be collecting unemployment checks.