Millennium Shock
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| Author | Justin Richards |
|---|---|
| Series |
Doctor Who book: Past Doctor Adventures |
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Release number
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22 |
| Subject | Featuring: Fourth Doctor Harry |
| Set in | Period between The Deadly Assassin and Asylum |
| Publisher | BBC Books |
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Publication date
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May 1999 |
| Pages | 283 |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Players |
| Followed by | Storm Harvest |
Millennium Shock is a BBC Books original novel written by Justin Richards and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Fourth Doctor and Harry, and is a sequel to Richards' Virgin Missing Adventures novel System Shock.
In late December 1999, the TARDIS materializes in the offices of Condef, a British defense contractor, and the Doctor interrupts a break-in. One of Condef's employees, George Gardner, discovers that the intruders were not stealing anything, but were instead installing chips from the company Silver Bullet Systems. The Doctor realizes that the gas used to anaesthetise the security guards surpasses Earth's current level of technology, and advises George to go to Harry Sullivan at MI5 if he learns anything further. George soon contacts Harry with devastating news; he has tested an SB chip for Y2K compliance, and it has failed. Earlier in the century, computer programmers decided to drop the number of the century from date calculations in order to save memory space; thus, when the date changes from '99 to '00, computers all over the world will assume that the year has decreased by 99 instead of increasing by 1, and chaos will ensue. Silver Bullet has made its name by promising solutions to the Millennium Bug, and thousands of companies have bought SB chips and now assume themselves to be Y2K-compliant... but on 1 January 2000, the chips will fail spectacularly. And now it appears that someone is deliberately installing these chips even in companies which did not originally purchase them.
George tries to run further tests on the chip at home, but the chip detects illicit tampering and sends a pulsed signal through his electrical wires. The staff of Silver Bullet use the embedded chips in his ordinary household appliances to strike out at him, sending a cripplingly high-pitched whine through his phone line and causing his toaster to overheat and set his house on fire. George barely escapes with his life, and retreats to a bunker in the country which he had already furnished to sit out the millennial chaos. Harry, meanwhile, is contacted by Silver Bullet's PR official, Andi Cave, who claims to have similar suspicions about SB's Y2K-readiness; she asks him to investigate rumours of suspicious meetings between Condef employees, a Russian colonel, and General Randall, Britain's NATO liaison.
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