Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  “So Dad’s fine? There was no heart attack?”

  “Don’t I look fine?” his father said, spreading his arms wide.

  “He’s as heathy as an ox. If anything happened, do you think I’d send an email? I’d call, of course.” She frowned at him, and gave the phone Mike still held in his hand a dark look. “I don’t know what you’ve got there, but I didn’t send nothing.”

  Mike stood in the middle of the living room, speechless.

  “Don’t stand there. Come in the kitchen with me.” She bustled toward the kitchen, somehow pushing and pulling him until he found himself, still in shock, sitting at the counter. “I don’t know if this is a late lunch or an early dinner, but I can’t welcome you home properly without a meal.”

  In only a short while, food was ready. There was bratwurst of course, and mashed potatoes, and after dinner his mother pulled out a warm kringle from somewhere. Trust his mom to make all his favorites, and with less apparent effort than Mike exerted making himself spaghetti. Not for the first time, he wondered at his mother’s magic.

  After dinner, they sat at the table drinking coffee and reminiscing. Mike examined his parents’ dining room, the wood and glass china cabinet unchanged since he was a teenager. During one of his father’s stories about getting stuck on a dirt road with a couple of his lodge buddies, Mike considered the email that had brought him here. He abruptly remembered what David had told him last night.

  David admitted he had turned on ELOPe to help get support for the servers they needed. They toasted the success of the project, pleased at how persuasive ELOPe had been. But what exactly had David done?

  Was there some remote chance ELOPe sent the email that appeared to be from his mother? Preposterous… But chills raised the hair on the back of his neck. Was ELOPe sending spurious messages to everyone with an AvoMail account? Surely that would have been noticed. But the alternative, almost too alarming to contemplate, was that ELOPe intentionally targeted him. Why would a bit of server software send him on a wild goose chase halfway across the country to a landlocked town with downed phone lines and lousy cellphone service?

  Mike had meant the question as a joke to himself, but now he realized how out of touch he was. He palmed his phone, which still had no service. He really wanted to log into Avogadro’s network to figure out what ELOPe had done, or talk to David to understand what changes he’d made.

  He looked up to see his parents staring at him, his mother frowning at his mobile out on the table. He apologized and asked to borrow their house phone, only to discover the lines were out. No Internet service, either. And still no cellular signal.

  Later, after his parents had gone to sleep, he paced back and forth in the privacy of the kitchen, thinking about the design of ELOPe. The intended use was to provide suggested language changes, which the user could then accept or ignore. But in fact, the changes could be applied without intervention. They’d implemented an autonomous mode to help make human factors testing easier, allowing hundreds of language variations to be evaluated. Tests had shown recipients preferred the messages modified by ELOPe by a wide margin. More importantly, even when the test subjects been told one text was computer-generated, they couldn’t reliably identify which was which.

  That experiment had taken place last March. Afterwards, one of the developers created an April Fools’ Day prank, giving ELOPe the ability to generate messages without any human-created text at all. The hidden module wrote emails based on goal clusters, leading to no end of practical jokes among the team. It had been created for the team to have fun with and wasn’t meant to be used seriously. If David had used that module…

  Stranded now in a snowstorm in the middle of Wisconsin with no connection to the outside world, Mike found himself wondering if ELOPe had social-engineered him into this situation. If so, to what end?

  Chapter 7

  “Mike, I hope your dad is okay. Christine and I have been thinking about you guys, and our prayers are with you and your family. I thought I’d hear back from you by now, but we’ve seen the weather report and phone and power lines are out across half of Wisconsin. That’s one hell of a storm. Christine and I are going to visit her parents in New Mexico for the holiday. I’ll keep my phone with me. Please give me a call when you get this message. I’ve got something important to discuss with you. I’m worried about ELOPe. I’m going to be somewhat incommunicado while we’re at Christine’s parents’ place, but keep trying me.”

  David hung up and looked over to where his wife waited with their suitcases. Under normal conditions, he loved going to the ranch Christine where grew up for the holidays. Although a city boy, he found deep pleasure in the outdoors. Visiting the ranch was one of the highlights of his year, especially in the middle of the rainy Portland winter.

  Unfortunately, his panic overwhelmed any possibility of joy. He was convinced ELOPe was originating emails. He still hoped he and Mike could take care of the problem without telling anyone else, but with each passing day he became more afraid for his career.

  He had three things to worry about: the original deception about the number of approved servers, his deploying of the modified version of ELOPe on all the production machines, and now whatever actions ELOPe took on its own.

  If what he had done materially affected Avogadro’s business…Word would get out. He’d never work there or at any other big Internet company again. No wonder his stomach roiled in despair.

  He’d tried to remove ELOPe’s changes on his own, and had found himself getting mired in the obscure and complicated process for live-patching. In the end, he couldn’t revert the code without Mike’s help.

  To make things worse, by heading out of town now, David wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on ELOPe. Yet he couldn’t cancel his trip with Christine on an unconfirmed fear; nor did he want her to know how worried he was.

  The only consolation, albeit a small one, was the holiday closure. Most people at Avogadro would be out of the office. With a little luck, there wouldn’t be much ELOPe could do with minimal email moving around. And he still had a thread of hope his worries were running away with themselves, just baseless fears built by his subconscious.

  Christine gestured to him from the terminal gate as passengers began to board. Reluctantly, he joined her, managing a weak smile as he gripped his luggage with white knuckles and followed her to the plane. He told himself everything would be fine, just perfectly normal, when they got back from New Mexico. He’d laugh at everything that worried him now.

  Meanwhile, a stiff drink or two would be really nice.

  Bill Larry flew out by helicopter to inspect ODC 4 again. Since his last trip out after the pirate attack a few weeks ago, the standard “data center in a box” containers had been replaced with specially hardened units, and iRobot had delivered their automated defenses.

  For the first time, Bill had to authorize the visit via an administrator before taking off. Otherwise their landing on the floating helicopter pad would have triggered the defense protocol.

  He hesitated before stepping on the ODC deck. The lethal robots were far more unnerving than armed guards might be. Bill’s unease stemmed from the lack of positive feedback. Unlike soldiers he’d served with, there was no way to know whether the robots were passive or ready to attack. They stood as still as any other piece of machinery.

  He inspected one of the deck units, more than a little scared the robot would lurch into motion and kill him. The miniature tank, four feet long and three wide, had treads on either side of a small lower chassis containing the motor and power supply. A rectangular case the size of a box of long-stemmed roses extended up several feet on a hinged and rotating scissor arm.

  He ran his fingers over the thick, transparent pane covering the sensors. Small retractable covers below protected the business end of the armament. Infrared lighting and cameras, as well as sonar and directional acoustic sensors, allowed the robot to see in 3D even when the visible spectrum was obscured. Speakers enabled the
bot to instruct would-be attackers to back off, and if they failed to obey, the robot could fire pepper spray in a sixty-degree arc or deliver taser-like electrical shocks. The same speakers that broadcast warnings could also deliver an 18.9Hz acoustic blast powerful enough to vibrate the eyeballs of anyone within thirty feet, causing pain and disorientation. Should the non-lethal defenses fail to be sufficient deterrent, as a last resort the unit carried 10mm body-armor piercing rounds.

  In theory, all this would be under the control of a trained iRobot handler, stationed at a central location from which they monitored defensive robots around the world for a variety of customers. Bill had visited the command center, which performed a function similar to what contracted security companies did for old-fashioned corporate security, except the crew were pimple-faced kids who appeared to spend most of their time playing video games.

  When the robots sounded an alarm, the handlers took immediate action from their location to deter the pirates. A human being on the other end of the camera didn’t worry Bill too badly, even if they were teenaged video gamers.

  But the alternative scared him. Bill took his hand away from the metal casing of the bot and stepped back. If an iRobot handler didn’t direct the robot—if jamming or inclement weather caused signal loss, or the handlers were unavailable for any reason—the robots acted on their own. They’d revert to autonomous mode—broadcast a verbal alarm, escalate to non-lethal measures, and, finally, start shooting. Coordinating together, the robots would cover all aspects of the deck and back each other up. The autonomous behavior freaked Bill out, to put it plainly. He backed further away, avoiding the current aim of the robot’s armament.

  With one eye on the robots the entire time, Bill hastily finished his inspection of ODC 4. He boarded the helicopter, running the last few steps, and signaled for the pilot to take off. Only in the air did he relax.

  As they circled toward land, Bill watched the sea for some evidence of the underwater robots, but he couldn’t spot anything under the chop. The submersibles used sonar to detect approaching vessels, broadcasting across the entire radio spectrum to warn boats away. They shared intelligence data with the on-deck robots and they too had weapons, a pair of torpedoes apiece, each capable of sinking a boat. The submersibles could even attach to a hull to track a ship back to port.

  If the deck tanks were unnerving, well, at least they could be seen. The hidden underwater robots brought back terrifying childhood memories of the movie, Jaws. The photos he’d seen of them, with their side-mounted torpedoes and maneuvering fins, only strengthened the fear. Bill made a mental point to never visit the ODCs by water.

  At least the offshore data center deployments were back on schedule. The team agreed that with the new hardened units and robotics defenses in place, further pirate attacks were unlikely to be successful. With that, they put the final preparations on the next ODCs to rollout, which included not just the barge platforms, but Bill’s proudest achievement: two data centers built on reclaimed oil tankers. The forty-year-old ships were a bargain. Everything they had that floated would be emplaced this week by more than three hundred contractors spread across eight teams working overtime through the Christmas holiday. Getting those ODCs deployed would put the master rollout plan back on track.

  Prateet said a silent prayer before he boarded the unmanned high tech island his company was under contract to Avogadro to service. This floating data center off the coast of Chennai, India, one of the original prototypes, seemed a sad place. Although he wasn’t an excessively superstitious man, he thought the computers here were lonely. To make a bad situation worse, just prior to this trip Avogadro notified him that armed robots now guarded the barges.

  Long pages of documentation explained today’s task. Prateet would not need to service the robots himself, as that work would be done by the robotics contractor. Prateet had been most thorough and exacting when he followed the protocol to disable the tanks and submersibles before boarding. On reflection, he preferred his visits when his only concern had been the lonely computers.

  An offshore tropical depression had caused communication delays between the robot administrators and the robots; finally, they pronounced it safe for him to board the vessel. The rough seas made his task more difficult, but his company had been given a substantial bonus to install the new backup equipment, including satellite radio and line-of-sight transmitters.

  Why did they want the extra gear? The vessel was, as he knew from previous service visits, already connected to the mainland through two fiber optic cables and backup satellite communications. The new installation today would provide two more systems. This level of redundancy went from cautious to paranoid. Well, he would not second-guess a rich American company paying him double the normal rate: if they wanted five independent communication channels, that was fine with him.

  He manhandled the heavy equipment across the deck and into their weatherproof housings, fighting against high seas and trying to ignore the unsettling stares of the robots at his back. He bolted the satellite radio unit and antenna into place, and attached power and data lines. The line-of-sight transmitter was more complicated, the aiming procedure made difficult by rising swells. Finally, this installation too was complete. When he boarded the boat to take him back to Chennai, he said a few prayers in thanks to Vishnu that he was finished and on his way home to his family.

  Unknown to Prateet, other subcontractors performed similar work on the newly-deployed ODCs off the coasts of Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands.

  Gene Keyes sat in his office, perhaps the only person left in the entire campus. On his way to get coffee, he passed one dark, locked office after another. When he’d started working corporate jobs, he put in sixty-hour weeks and more when needed. He still did from time to time. But these self-entitled kids took off two weeks for Christmas and didn’t think twice about their work. A holiday closure could be a frugal business measure, but not when employees left projects half-finished and paperwork uncompleted.

  He pulled a two-inch-thick stack of printouts front and center on his desk. This pile represented every purchase at Avogadro since the start of December. He sipped his coffee, took a deep breath, and prepared to scan through the entire stack of pages.

  When one of his coworkers found him doing this a few months ago, they laughed and told other employees, making Gene’s time-honored process into a department-wide joke. “Don’t you know the computer can do that?” they said, as though he was a prehistoric Cro-Magnon who didn’t know what a spreadsheet was. Even Gene’s new manager had come by and told him manual inspections were a “nonproductive expenditure of time.”

  So now he waited until six o’clock to start his inspection, and only did the paper reconciliations at night after everyone left. Despite ongoing electronic errors, they insisted on trusting the computer. Gene trusted paper printouts. There was a reason they called it a paper trail, damn it: you could trust paper. Printed records didn’t change afterwards. The same couldn’t be said for computer audit trails.

  As he read, he took notes. For minor errors, he jotted off memos to affected departments. A delivery to one department billed to another usually indicated transcribed billing codes. In other cases, invoices totals didn’t match when digits were missing or wrong.

  At almost eleven, Gene spotted the first serious discrepancy. At first, he thought he’d stumbled upon a case of Gary Mitchell running out his fiscal year budget. Improper, of course, but nothing Gene could do anything about. However, as he worked through the expenditures, he discovered Mitchell had spent every penny of every budget under his control.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true on a second look. Flipping the printouts back and forth, Gene found Mitchell had underspent each budget by exactly one cent. He sat up and unconsciously tapped his pencil on the table. A budget completely spent, or worse overspent, generated a memo to the responsible manager, their manager, and the finance department. An underspent budget, on the other hand, rarely attracted attent
ion or review.

  He checked the paperwork again. Mitchell had fifty-eight independent projects under his authority, each with their own allocated budget dollars. Fifty-eight budgets with one cent remaining in each took some planning. Deception? Fraud? The only person in common across those projects was Gary Mitchell, so either Gary or someone with signature authority had to be responsible.

  Gene prepared himself for a late night. He wouldn’t be done until he had gone through every one of the three hundred and fifty pages of the budget printout. This was a major discovery. What had Gary Mitchell spent the money on?

  In spite of Gene’s vigil, through the abandoned hallways of Avogadro, Christmas lights twinkled, and all was silent.

  ELOPe Override

  From: Gary Mitchell (Communications Products, Avogadro)

  To: Oliver Weinstein (Department of Technology, Germany)

  Subject: Avogadro Cloud Services Program

  Hello Oliver,

  How are you? It’s been a long time since my last visit to Germany. I still remember our last get together fondly. Maybe a little less beer next time?

  I am writing to give you the inside scoop on a new project we have. Avogadro is developing a new technology product suite targeted at national governments.

  The new service we’re offering is our cloud-based application architecture: comprehensive email, chat, web servers, cloud-based documents, online backup. As you know, Avogadro has the highest uptime and reliability in the industry.

  If Germany is willing to be the poster child for our new services, we’re prepared to offer free national wireless Internet access for all of Germany. This would give Germany the highest Internet connection rate in world and a significant technology advantage.