The First State of Being

Y2K, the colloquial abbreviation for “Year 2,000,” was a computer bug that many people feared would cause major problems when the year 1999 became 2000. The Y2K bug stemmed from computer programming created from the 1960s to the 1980s. To save money, computer engineers coded years with two digits instead of four (e.g., 1965 would be coded as “65”). Because of this, people feared that computers would read ‘00’ as 1900 instead of 2000, which would drastically affect many sectors of contemporary life, including banks, air transportation, and even government missiles (“Y2K Bug.” National Geographic, 2024). Many governments, including those of the US and the UK, worked hard to prevent this problem, spending millions of dollars in their efforts (“Y2K Bug”). In the end, there were very few negative effects of the 1999 to 2000 computer switchover, leading many to “dismis[s] the Y2K bug as a hoax or end-of-the-world cult” (“Y2K Bug”). One positive result of the Y2K panic is that computers now have a four-digit year code, a practice still in use today.

This duality of perception regarding Y2K is depicted by the characters in The First State of Being. Michael is very anxious about it, viewing Y2K as a looming disaster, mostly from news reports (136). As a result, he stockpiles stolen food and tools (26) to support his family should the worst occur. This is also likely a manifestation of his anxiety and guilt about his mother’s loss of work, which he perceives as his fault for being sick (100). He is mistaken on all counts, but due to his youth, he cannot be dissuaded. In contrast, Gibby is unconcerned about Y2K; she is instead more focused on the anomaly that is Ridge, both as a teenage boy and as a time traveler. She and many of the adults in the book represent the group who dismiss the perceived danger of the Y2K bug. Ridge, as a citizen of the future, knows the truth about Y2K but is forbidden from revealing it, even to allay Michael’s fears (137-38). Ridge thus represents the idiom that “hindsight is twenty-twenty,” though as the first every time traveler, he faces uncertainties of his own time—his version of the Y2K panic. In essence, the Y2K bug reflects anxiety over new technology and over the uncertainties of the future, while raising questions about the authority of media and other information sources. Human understanding is imperfect, whether one seeks to understand the past, present, or future.