1/1/00

A computer thriller with a mystical climax not so far from Jodie Foster's mind-altering trip in Contact. Two years ago, a hacker in D.C., ballistic after being fired from the city's traffic control division, worked out a vires for freezing the traffic lights throughout the capital. One frozen light led to the death of computer scientist Susan Garnett's husband and infant daughter. Time now leaps to December 11, 1999, with Susan in her tub and her late FBI husband's pistol under her chin. Then the phone rings. Her boss needs her fast: all the computers on the globe froze for 20 seconds at 8:00 this evening. A new virus! Hacker-catcher Susan goes back to work. It's seems impossible that every computer worldwide could freeze simultaneously for 20 seconds. But next day they freeze for 19 seconds, and the next after that for 18 seconds, clearly working toward the millennial countdown 01-01-00. Susan's work leads her to archaeologist Cameron Slater and buried temples in the Central American jungle, where the Mayans were touched 1,200 years ago by a galactic understanding that they then encoded in numbers. Incredibly, the computers on Susan's team that break down the Mayan code abruptly find themselves looking at . . . well, we're not going to say. Pineiro (Breakthrough, 1997, etc.) takes us on a fancy head-trip with plenty of computer fun and thrills along the way.