Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  She felt the hard plastic edges under her thumb and pressed. The tiny click of metal contact sounded, and a second later a thunderous roar, followed by a rush of heated air spewing out of the access tunnel as the explosive charge a hundred meters down the line disintegrated thousands of power and fiber-optic cables.

  Forty-three seconds after Boise went offline, Tokyo was the last land-based data center to shut down.

  After the explosion, thick choking dust filled the maintenance room, now lit only by the dim glow of battery-backed emergency lighting. Ripping the hearing protection off, Nanako stumbled for the stairs. She planned to meet David in the subway to travel together to the airport. It might be a long time before she could come back to Japan.

  Off the coast of California, a highly trained team sprang into a different kind of action.

  They’d known the offshore data centers would require more specialized expertise. While Avogadro employees had handled the facilities on land, they turned the floating barges and ships over to private military contractors, the polite term for mercenaries in this century.

  Eighteen teams of mostly ex-military personnel, synchronized via their own encrypted radio communications, enacted the Emergency Team’s plans.

  At ODC 4, thirty miles southwest of the Golden Gate bridge, divers had spent the early morning hours approaching the platform, one of the original twin-barge designs. They swam slowly, conserving their energy as they towed explosives and other equipment in buoyant packs with only human power. The submarine drones, programmed to respond solely to boats, ignored the swimmers.

  The deck tanks also disregarded the divers in the water, since their algorithms responded only to people on a hard surface: either the ODC itself, or on a boat in the immediate proximity.

  It had taken a dozen Avogadro employees, armed with paper copies of the specifications of the military-spec robots, liberated through not-exactly-legal means, to find these chinks in their recognition algorithms.

  Drew Battel, ex-Navy Seal, clad in a wetsuit and tactical swim-vest, swam to a point forty meters from the barge and rested, neutrally buoyant, thanks to small flotation packs in his vest. Pulling a waterproof monocular from a holster, he spotted communications pod number three, his designated target.

  On his left, a similarly clad mercenary gave a thumbs-up that he’d identified his own goal, the main power supply cabinet. Drew returned the sign. To the right, the slimmer profile of one of the female team members also held a thumb up, confirming she’d found the power backup unit.

  Relieved to focus only on his primary target, Drew swam closer until he was thirty meters away. He pulled a speargun from his floating pack and waited for the signal. Four miles distant, the mission lead monitored everyone’s location from their boat. When everyone was in position, he used a secure satellite channel to communicate back to headquarters.

  The mission lead had his short-range radio in hand. When the red flash came, he fingered the trigger. “Go, go, go!” he shouted into the mic.

  Drew lifted the speargun, sighted again on the target, and fired. The thick magnetic head thunked onto communications pod number three and held firm as the spear quivered from the impact.

  On the platform, the deck robots evaluated the sudden noises, sufficiently out of the ordinary to trigger a secondary evaluation. Spears and attached cables caused visual analysis algorithms to register changes. But on active scan, even synchronizing surveys and dedicating additional processing power, the bots found no sign of people on deck or boats in the vicinity. They took no defensive actions, but uploaded alerts of the noises and visual changes to the monitoring server.

  Still treading water, Drew confirmed on his left and right that each team member had hit their primary targets. From the floating pack, he withdrew a crawler and snapped it onto the spear line. The apple-sized mechanism consisted of waterproof explosives, a radio-triggered detonator, and a cable-straddling electric motor. Synchronizing by short-range radio, Drew and the other six divers engaged the drive mechanisms.

  They swam away underwater as soon as the crawlers started up the lines. Each tiny drive traversed the thirty meters in a minute, seamlessly transitioning up the spear shafts until the shaped-charge payload rested directly against the magnetic heads.

  On the boat, the mission lead waited for seven green lights to show on his remote monitor, then sent the signal. With a thud felt fifty meters away by the underwater divers, the communications and power modules they’d targeted disintegrated, sending metal shrapnel, electronics circuitry, wiring, and burning plastic flying over the deck and into the ocean.

  The team swam back to the barge through burned, floating debris and used military grade electromagnetic frequency detectors to ensure the computer equipment was offline. The EMF sensors showed zero activity. Then they paddled off to a safe distance to give each other high fives while they waited to be picked up by the boat. Later, back onboard, the team celebrated by lighting up the cigars Drew handed out.

  Drew glanced across the water at the wrecked barge as they pulled away at high speed. He still didn’t understand their mission. It was a lot of effort to turn off a few computers. Who was the client and who was the target? He shrugged off the feeling. It was better to not know.

  On the other side of the world, fifteen miles offshore from the Netherlands, in the North Sea, operations commenced on a much larger scale. ODC 15, a 90,000-ton converted crude oil tanker more than 800 feet long and 150 wide, was representative of most of the ships that Avogadro had acquired.

  Everything about ODC 15 posed a challenge. Whereas the shipping containers rested in the open on barges, here they nestled deep within the holds of the oil tankers, protected by layers of inches-thick steel. Metal conduits and shielding encapsulated power and communication equipment spread throughout the vessel in obscure locations.

  With the tankers so lightly loaded, the main deck rose more than fifty feet above the sea, rendering it impossible for divers in the water to target anything onboard.

  The locations of the tank robots weren’t known ahead of time, and, of course, the ship itself was large enough that blowing the entire thing up would have caused an international incident.

  The financial records Gene discovered showed ELOPe had hired contractors to make multiple visits, so the ships could contain any manner of defenses, with communication and power equipment installed in unknown locations.

  It turned out to be nothing less than a small-scale war.

  Hours earlier, deep-sea divers set out from boats more than two miles away. They swam below ODC 15 and planted explosives on the underwater fiber optic cable connections before retreating back to their launches.

  Charges set on the communication lines, they prepared for the next stage, synchronizing with activities around the world.

  Two Sikorsky S-76 helicopters, each with a pilot and copilot, launched from Leeuwarden, sixty miles northeast of Amsterdam, carrying a combined force of twenty heavily armed mercenaries.

  Frankie Gonzalez, an ex-Marine, was one of the boarding party. He glanced out the starboard window, but couldn’t see the UB-8 rocket pod technicians had installed last night. They carried air-to-ground S-5 rockets, illegal for any civilian to own or use, which meant one hell of a well-paying client. Just bolting the UB-8 on cost a million, never mind the expense of firing the rockets themselves.

  The helicopters slowed to hover carefully outside the maximum activation range of robotic anticraft defenses. Frankie watched as the copilot flew the remote-controlled Aerostar, one of two they employed for the mission.

  The lightweight cargo planes had been converted to expendable autonomous drones for this job. Each carried an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, weapon, another bit of questionable tech for them to use. They flew the twin-engine planes up to six thousand feet, then dove at a forty-five degree angle toward the tanker under full throttle.

  Onboard, antiaircraft robots picked up the incoming flights and broadcasted messages on multiple freque
ncies, warning them off.

  The bots, designed primarily to repel slow aircraft intending to land, responded too slowly to airplanes approaching at a terminal speed of almost four hundred knots.

  The first iteration of broadcasted warnings finished in fifteen seconds and began to loop. But by then, the planes were within five hundred feet of the oil tanker. The pilots triggered the EMPs as the robots opened fire.

  The civilian grade electronics of the Aerostars fried instantly, turning them into inert missiles. One passed yards from the deck before crashing harmlessly into the ocean. The other plane, on a similar trajectory, hit a gust of air and tipped, one wing grazing the ship, sending the aircraft into cartwheels. Hitting an exposed pipe once used for loading oil into the tanks, the Aerostar flipped a final time and smashed to the deck, exploding in a ball of fire.

  The explosion was irrelevant; only the EMP counted. The electromagnetic pulse wasn’t strong enough to affect the computer servers buried deeply inside the thick metal hull of the oil tanker. But the signal disrupted the communication equipment and antennas mounted on deck, isolating the ship’s data center. Even if ELOPe knew of the attack, it would have no way of communicating with the outside world.

  Even as the EMPs worked their damage, the waiting helicopters launched the S-5s, targeting satellite and microwave antennas and visible robots. And as the rockets closed in, the mercenary team set off the explosives on the fiber-optic cables.

  The air-to-ground rockets rained fire and shrapnel on deck and sea when they hit. The underwater charges blew, a visible bubbling on the surface of the ocean.

  Frankie readied himself as the pilot approached the tanker fast and low to avoid any remaining defenses. As they swung around the elevated bridge, the churn of the ship’s propellers became visible. Whatever was onboard that they’d been hired to attack had decided to move.

  Frank jerked the handle up and slid the door back as they passed over the edge of the ship. He pushed the rope off the floor into open air, snugged his assault rifle over his shoulder, and glanced down to make sure the path was clear. He rappelled onto the deck followed by the rest of the team.

  He made his way down the starboard side, toward the stern, in a cloud of smoke. The rockets appeared to have eliminated the surface robots. The HK417 rifle carried armor piercing rounds, which he’d been assured would be enough to put down any armed bot. But he’d never gone into a firefight against machines before. His kid sister would probably make some dumb comment about how they lived in the future now. He wiped sweaty palms on his pants as he found the hatch he’d been looking for.

  He struggled with the opening only to discover the wheel had been chained shut. Backing up, he took aim at the heavy padlock and fired three times. The lock destroyed, he removed the chain and unlatched the watertight doorway.

  The munitions from the rocket assault must have penetrated inside because the narrow corridor was thick with smoke. Frankie tried his thermal lenses, but remembered the warning that the robots would not show up on thermals if they’d been inactive. He switched to light-magnifying goggles, which made a mess of the smoky conditions. Cursing the poor visibility, he traversed the corridor, his mission to descend several levels, then head forward using a retrofitted service tunnel designed for maintaining the data center.

  Hard edges and sharp protrusions defined each step of his progress, with pipes and assorted machinery in every available space creating a visual puzzle. How was he supposed to see a robot in this maze? He kept the rifle up, scanning for movement as he followed the layout he’d memorized.

  Frankie came to a junction and peered both ways through the haze, orienting himself. Unidentifiable machinery suddenly lurched toward him. Only gradually did he recognize the hard edges as one of the bots.

  Before he could react, the robot fired, once, twice, and a third time. The impacts in his chest slammed Frankie back even as the gunfire echoed and deafened him in the enclosed hallway.

  Stunned and overwhelmed with pain, he nonetheless did what came naturally from weekly training, swinging his rifle into position and firing a burst of three shots. As he recovered his aim, he loosed a second burst. The high-powered rounds penetrated the robot’s metal cladding, shredding the circuit boards inside. The robot ground into an exposed pipe and halted.

  For good measure, Frankie put another two bursts into the bot, then slumped against the wall. He worked a hand under his Kevlar, and although each breath was agony, he didn’t feel the telltale slickness of blood. The military grade body armor had stopped the bot’s ammunition.

  He readjusted his vest, wiped his forehead with a gloved hand, and kissed the cross hanging on a chain around his neck. He straightened up and resumed his trip. A few minutes later, he emerged into the converted oil tank where the data center containers were held, the cloying smell of volatile chemicals thick in the air.

  He thumbed his mic. “Frankie here.”

  “What took you so long?” Sam asked. “The tank is clear. I’ve started on the forward end, you take aft. Time to party.”

  “Sorry, a robot hit me,” Frankie replied as he looked for the aft-most container. Shots echoed across the vast tank.

  “You OK?” Sam said.

  “Yeah fine, body armor held up.” Frankie lined up his sights on the power junction at the left forward corner of the container. Rounds slammed into the box and sparks shot out. He moved on to the next.

  “Well, this beats the target range.”

  Fifteen minutes later, with fire and smoke boiling out of much of the ship, they were satisfied they had neutralized everything.

  Frankie boarded the helicopter with the rest of the mercenaries. They flew back to Leeuwarden, leaving a burning tanker behind them.

  Chapter 17

  Engadget.com: Avogadro Downtime Ends—Site Restored to LAST YEAR!?

  Filed Under: Avogadro, FAIL, WTF.

  As reported by many readers, all Avogadro sites went down as of 1pm EST Saturday morning. After a complete outage for 8 hours and 15 minutes, the main Avogadro sites came back up, including Search, AvoMail, Avogadro Maps, and AvoOS phone data connectivity. Response time is slow. However, as many readers pointed out, the site is back up with last year’s features, look and feel, and data. There has been no comment from Avogadro, and no word on whether user data, such as recent emails, will be recovered. WTF Avogadro?

  Mike sat on a bar stool behind Sean. He found himself biting his nails, a habit he broke in grad school. Well, he’d be forced to give it up again in a few minutes, because he was on his last ragged nail.

  Sean leaned back in his chair, the dark circles under his eyes almost grooves in his face. They’d been up for twelve hours finalizing plans, and they were dog-tired, the final vestiges of energy giving out. Ninety minutes had passed since the signal to start, and they’d been tabulating the text messages and emails that came quickly at first, and now trickled in.

  “London offline,” Gene said, his voice hoarse.

  Mike turned and placed a checkmark next to the city on the whiteboard. All the traditional data centers had long since called in and been checked off. Something in Mike relaxed when they received the text message from David in Japan.

  “Houston reporting in again,” another engineer said. “Confirmed all computers offline.”

  Mike added a check to the second column.

  “ODC 15 in Netherlands operation complete,” Gene called out.

  Mike held the marker over the board, so exhausted his hand trembled. He scanned the list.

  “That’s it,” he said, marking the box. “The last one.”

  He couldn’t help having mixed feelings about the whole thing. They’d regained control of the company, but at what sacrifice?

  A ragged cheer went up.

  “Hold on, people,” Sean said. “Save the celebration until we get confirmation from everyone that the computers are down.”

  A few more messages came in, and then finally Gene spoke for a last time. “Netherl
ands confirms ODC 15 offline at 9:52am, no electrical activity, no fatalities.”

  “All sites confirm no detectable electromagnetic frequency emissions,” Mike said.

  There was a moment of hushed awe spread across the group as the realization sunk in. They’d successfully taken the largest Internet presence in the world offline, the very thing many of them, in their regular jobs, worked to prevent day and night.

  “Avogadro.com is down,” Sean called out, and the room erupted into applause.

  Mike stood, stamping his feet to restore circulation. He slapped his cheeks, tried to wake up. He hugged several engineers and came face-to-face with Gene. He shook hands with the older man. “Thanks, dude. We couldn’t have done this without you.”

  The cost of the multi-week effort was staggering, never mind what the cleanup and recovery would take. The project coordination, given the constraints they’d operated under, was a miracle of planning. The accuracy and effectiveness, all done on paper, was a testament to the intelligence of the men and women involved.

  Sean’s house, their temporary base of actions, covered in flip charts and hand-drawn timelines, recalled great accomplishments of the mid-twentieth century, when humans routinely tackled tremendous efforts in nothing but shirtsleeves.

  Human intelligence, creativity, and planning had prevailed. They’d won!

  David arrived at the Haneda airport in Tokyo, adrenaline keeping both him and Nanako on a fine line between alert and paranoid. Sean had teams of lawyers standing by in case the police apprehended any members of the Emergency Team. But they’d illegally used explosives to kill the power supply in Japan, and David would just as soon avoid getting arrested in the first place.

  Waiting in the terminal, David checked with Sean and found everything had gone according to plan, and all the company’s servers were down.