Thirty hours to Y2K. The fix was never applied. The audit was deleted at 23:11.
Thursday, 30 December 1999. Thirty hours to the millennium. Meridian Payroll Systems in Reston runs payroll for two million workers. Dr. Wendy Achebe, 39, who has led its Y2K remediation for two years, spends the evening in the data center proving that the fixes the company certified to its clients and the SEC in September were never applied to the mainframe.
At nine on Friday morning she will tell the CEO and the board. At 00:20 the operations shift lead finds her in the tape vault. At 23:11, after she was dead, her mainframe ID was used from the terminal by the vault door to cancel her second audit and delete the first. The printout of the first was under her body.
The badge system, the Dulles Toll Road, the mainframe's own security log, a pager network and a dial-up server kept records that night. Six people had a badge, a reason or a lie. Read the machines and decide.
Read all 24 documents and name the person who killed Wendy Achebe. One accusation. Right or wrong, the solution file opens and shows every document that convicts. There are no hints and nothing is marked.
Press play and choose Create a room. Up to eight of you read the file on your own phones, see what the others have opened, vote in secret and let the host reveal. Only the host needs to own the case; guests play free.