The cybernetic apocalypse.

Or a scattered bunch of computer glitches.

Or a big, worldwide yawn.

Whatever form the millennium computer bug takes, a few Fluor Federal Services employees will watch it creep hour by hour around the planet today and Saturday, trying to see if the Pacific Northwest needs to brace itself at midnight.

Fluor Corp. has about 50 offices around the world. And each is required to report to a corporate command center in California as midnight and 1 a.m. pass at each location.

That means Fluor Corp. - parent of Fluor Federal Services and Fluor Daniel Hanford in Richland - will start tracking the Y2K bug at 5 a.m. today. That's when midnight shows up at a Fluor nickel mine operation at Perth on Australia's west coast, Fluor's closest outpost to the International Dateline.

Then as the Earth turns, midnight will pass by Fluor offices and installations in Asia, Africa, Europe, the eastern United States and then the Pacific Coast.

"We will have an early warning system. We'll be one of the last time zones,"said Keith Karpe, Fluor Corp.'s senior director for media relations in Aliso Viejo, Calif. -which is in the same time zone as Hanford.

"This early warning is to see if (Fluor's sites to the east) have problems. If so, we better start looking (in the Tri-Cities),"said Steve Sterling, Fluor Federal Services director of information services.

Fluor Corp. has set up a detailed reporting system for each of its sites so its command center can identify and track Y2K problems.

Each site has to file a full report in its basic and most critical systems to Aliso Viejo by 1 a.m. local time. Other Fluor offices - including Fluor Federal Services in Richland - can view those reports on their computers as they are filed, assuming no Y2K glitch prevents that.

If no report shows up, Fluor Corp. and its subsidiaries will assume the Y2K bug knocked out the originating site's communications.

Each site has several ways to try to communicate with Fluor's command center - e-mail, telephones, cellular phones, radios, satellites.

"Maybe we'll end up with two cans and a string,"Karpe said. "We're not expecting any problems."

A nail-biting moment will be 4 p.m. today. That's midnight in London. And London is the home of "Greenwich" time, the zero point from which the rest of the world's time zones are set.

Greenwich time also is "Zulu"time, which is the universal master time that all U.S. military installations and ships use as a common reference. And all the satellites orbiting the Earth also operate on Zulu time.

Computer glitches in those satellites could deliver a cosmic whammy to the world, Karpe noted.

Meanwhile, even Fluor Corp.'s command center has its own reporting requirements. It has to pass along all its reports to IBM, which will try to track what is happening to its computers.

In Richland, Fluor Federal Services is an engineering and construction management firm whose computers don't handle Hanford's main safety or radioactive storage operations. Instead, Fluor Federal Services has about 140 software and hardware systems where a Y2K bug could bite - with a lot in the financial and billing programs.

Fluor Federal Services has run simulations on those programs and hardware, Sterling said. And since Fluor Corp.'s fiscal year 2000 started Oct. 18, that means many of its programs already are operating with "2000s" and "00s"in their systems, Sterling said.

However, Fluor's computer employees won't be able to breathe easy after 1 a.m. Saturday.

Less-vital systems have to be checked out by 1 p.m. Saturday. And the least critical programs have to be tested by 2 p.m. Sunday.

Sterling said: "We want to make sure when people come in Monday to work, that they are not sitting around while something is getting fixed."