Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (Singularity Series)

by William Hertling

  While people played and laughed, thousands of servers hummed and exchanged data. A few servers allocated to Internal IT spiked in usage, but nobody was around to notice.

  * * *

  Gene Keyes walked back to his office with another cup of coffee, grateful that the campus had returned to a somewhat normal decorum after the insanity of the hunt for the billiard room that morning. On some deep level, he was curious about the mystery of the moving room, but he hated the way that the kids around him turned it into a superficial game, as they did with everything.

  He searched the pockets of his old suit looking for a note he had written down. His rumpled suit and graying, disheveled hair was a stark contrast to the young, hip employees dressed in the latest designer jeans or fashionable retro sixties clothing. Nor did he fit in with the young, geeky employees in their plaid shirts or T shirts with obscure logos. Not to mention the young, smartly dressed marketing employees in their tailored business casual wear. Fitting in and impressing others weren’t high on his list of priorities.

  As he approached his own office from the coffee station, he found a young blonde girl knocking on his office door. “Can I help you?” he asked, temporarily halting the search for the missing note.

  “I’m looking for Gene Keyes,” she said in a bubbly voice. “I’m Maggie Reynolds, and I...”

  “I’m Gene,” he said, cutting her off. “Come in.” Gene opened the door, and walked into his office. The girl could follow him or not.

  “Uh, my boss sent me because he’s missing four...” She trailed off.

  Gene put his coffee cup down, and took a seat. He looked up to see an astonished look on the girl’s face.

  “Wow, I didn’t know anyone still used... Wow, look at all this paper.”

  Gene looked around, despite himself. Yes, it was true his office was piled with computer printouts. Stacks of good, old fashioned 8.5x11 paper were littered everywhere. Oversized plotter printouts with huge spreadsheets and charts hung from the walls. The centerpiece of the office, the desk he currently sat behind, was a 1950s era wooden desk that nearly spanned the width of the office. It might have been the only furnishing in the entire building complex manufactured in the previous century. Incongruously, the desk was far larger in every dimension than the doorway. The people with a good brain on their heads, usually engineers, but occasionally a smart manager, those who trusted their guts, instincts, and eyes, but took little for granted, they’d come into the office, and their eyes would bounce back and forth between the desk and the door trying to puzzle it out. Sadly, she didn’t appear to be one of them.

  “Wow, is this continuous feed dot matrix paper?” the young woman asked, coming round his desk. She fondled a stack of green and white striped paper on a side table. Her eyebrows went up, and her jaw went down. “I saw this in a movie once! Hey, do you have any punchcards?” she asked earnestly, turning to him.

  It rankled Gene to hear the same comments from every kid that walked in the door. He sat a little straighter in his wooden office chair, the same chair he liberated from the army the day he was discharged.

  “Some things are better on paper,” he explained calmly, not for the first time. “Paper is consistent. It doesn’t say one thing one day and a different thing a different day. And, no, before you ask, I don’t have punchcards. I’m not preserving the stuff for a museum. This is how I do my job.” Gene tried to work some venom into his voice, but what came out just sounded tired. Gene knew what she would say next, because he heard some variation of it from everyone who came into the office.

  “You know we work for Avogadro right?” Maggie smiled as she said it.

  Gene knew it. He also knew he worked in the Controls and Compliance department, what they used to properly call the Audit department. When push came to shove, paper never lied.

  “Uh huh,” he grumbled, ignoring that whole line of thinking. “So, what can I help you with?”

  “Well, I have this problem. See, the finance database says we’re supposed to have more than four million dollars left in our budget for the fiscal quarter, but our purchase orders keep getting denied. The finance department says we spent our money, but I know we didn’t. They said you would be able to help.”

  Gene gestured with both hands at the paper around him. “See, that’s what the paper is for. Believe it or not, I have a printout of every department’s budget for each month. So we can look at your budget before and after and see what happened. Now let’s take a look....”

  * * *

  “David, I’m glad I found you.” Mike finally found David in his office, after looking for him all day. He’d been in and out of the office constantly, and looked for him online, but David had somehow made himself scarce. Considering that they worked in neighboring offices, this was quite a feat. Mike plopped himself down in David’s spare chair. “Where were you this morning? I couldn’t find you anywhere. I need to talk to you about some oddities in the performance of ELOPe. Not to mention that you missed the entire hunt for the billiard room.”

  “What kind of oddities?” David gazed off into the distance, ignoring the question, and sounding distracted.

  “I know I told you we couldn’t find any more performance gains, but I couldn’t help trying. I started by establishing a baseline against the current code, to have something to test against. Just as we usually do, I tried to correlate the bulk analysis import with server cycles consumed, and to correlate the real-time suggestions with server cycles consumed, and...” Mike stopped. He realized that David was still staring out the window, and didn’t appear to be paying any attention. Mike looked out the window. It was a pleasant sunny day. Uncommon for Portland in December, but he didn’t see anything other than the ordinary bustle of people walking about on the street.

  He turned back to David. “David, are you listening? Is this, or is it not, critical that this be fixed before Gary’s deadline?”

  “Well, I do have some good news there, but go on.”

  “Well, I tried to establish the correlation, but I couldn’t find any. For months we had a very solid correlation between the number of emails processed and the amount of server resources required, as you remember. For the last two days though, I can’t find any correlation at all. The server resources keep going through the roof even when the logs indicate that nobody is running any tests. It’s as though the system is working on something, but I can’t find any record of it.”

  David was staring out the window again. Mike felt his head start to pound. He’d been struggling with the goddamn performance issues for days. “So then David, I was sleeping with your wife, and she said it would be just fine with you.”

  “Yes, it is fine. Wait, what? What did you just say?”

  Mike planted himself in front of the window to block David’s view. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just tell me what’s going on, since you’re clearly not interested in the fucking performance issues.”

  “Ah, come look at this email from Gary,” David replied, completely ignoring the anger in Mike’s tone, and looking animated for the first time since Mike had entered his office. “It just came in a few minutes ago. We were just allocated five thousand dedicated servers by way of a procurement exception! Because they came through a procurement exception, we get servers that were ready to be put online for some other product. We’ll have access to the computing power by tomorrow morning. We don’t even have to wait for them to be purchased and built.”

  Mike came around the side of the desk to peer over David’s shoulder at his computer screen, and let out a low whistle. “Holy smokes, five thousand servers. How did you get Gary to agree to that?”

  “I sent him an email asking if we could have dedicated servers for the ELOPe project so we wouldn’t be in conflict with the production AvoMail servers.” The statement wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the real reason for the sudden allocation.

  “Wow, what a fantastic reversal,” Mike said, immediately excited b
y the possibilities. He forgot about his anger, and paced rapidly back and forth in front of the window, thinking through the implications. “With five thousand servers... We can move on to the next phase of the project, and scale up to limited production levels. We could start bulk processing customer emails in preparation for a public launch.”

  “Well, I think we should start with Avogadro internal emails,” David suggested. “This way, we won’t adversely affect any customers if anything goes wrong. If we can analyze the internal emails at full volume, I am going to suggest to Sean that we turn this autosuggestion feature on for all Avogadro employees.”

  “That sounds great. So I’ll forget about the performance issues, and just focus on analyzing the internal emails. This is great news David!” Mike did a little dance on his way out the door.

  * * *

  Mike walked out of his office, and David returned to staring out the window. It certainly was great news that they had received the server allocation. So why were the hairs raised on his back?

  He had sent the email to Gary. That part was true. Then there was that minor detail of ELOPe’s involvement he hadn’t mentioned to Mike. David needed to give ELOPe access to Gary Mitchell’s emails, so that it could analyze them. Then, as it turned out, ELOPe needed access to everyone that Gary had sent or received an email from, so that it could do a proper analysis of the messages.

  He wasn’t surprised at all that Mike had uncovered massive processing going on in the background. Because of David’s usage, ELOPe needed to import a massive number of emails. He had obscured his work by ensuring that it wasn’t part of the normal system logs that were created, but he couldn’t prevent the usage monitors from tracking the CPU load.

  David didn’t know what to say to Mike. Eventually Mike would figure it out. He just hoped it was later rather than sooner. Preferably after their resource problems were solved. David didn’t want anyone, not even Mike, to know he was using ELOPe to get the resources to keep it running. It was integrated into the mail servers, and a bug could, in theory, bring down the entire company’s email. If anything bad happened, David and the project would take some heat for it if it got out. But that wasn’t the real cause for the pit of fear in his stomach.

  No, the real issue was the changes David made to the code during his all-night coding marathon. David went deep into the code for the language analysis model, and put in an overarching directive to maximize the predicted sentiment for any email mentioning the project. The effect was that whenever ELOPe was mentioned in any email, from anyone, or to anyone, inside Avogadro, then ELOPe would automatically and silently reword the email in a way that was favorable to the success of the project.

  The resulting emails were indistinguishable in writing style and language from those written by the purported sender, a testament to the skill of his team. While the analysis module determined goals and objectives from the email, the optimization module used fragments from thousands of other emails to create a realistic email written in a voice very similar to that of the sender.

  David relished the success of the team, and wished he could share with them what they had accomplished. Their project was the culmination of nearly three years of dedicated research and development. It had started with David’s work on the Netflix Prize before he was hired at Avogadro, although even that work had been built on the shoulders of geniuses that had come before him. Then there were eight months of him and Mike laboring on their own to prove out the idea enough to justify an entire team. Finally, during the last eighteen months, an entire R&D team worked on the project, building the initial architecture, and then incrementally improving the effectiveness of the system week after week.

  The proof was in the results. ELOPe’s language analysis and modification had resulted in it managing to acquire thousands of servers for itself. David wasn’t sure exactly how. He couldn’t see the modified emails, an unfortunate consequence of removing the logging so that others wouldn’t see what he was doing. Had Gary received a modified email that was convincing enough to make him change his mind? Or had ELOPe taken Gary’s response, and changed that to something more favorable? David found it more than a little unnerving not knowing what was happening. When he dwelled on that, he felt a pit of fear in his stomach.

  But sure enough, his servers were here. Now that was something to dwell on. There was an email from procurement confirming it, and an email from operations showing the time the servers would be available. So whatever ELOPe had done, it worked. It might be the most server-intensive application in the company, if not the world, but by damn, it worked.

  When David thought about that, he was thrilled. The project had become his life. His little baby was all grown up now, doing what it was built to do. Well, maybe a little more besides.

  But he hadn’t realized what it would be like to create such a huge deception, and to have ELOPe working silently behind the scenes. If anyone discovered what he had done, it would be the end of his career. He looked out his office window. Outside in the momentary sunshine, people went about their business, walking, talking, jogging, or, of course, drinking coffee. From his office window, they all looked chillingly carefree to David.

  Chapter 5

  Bill Larry’s foot hovered in the air, while he waited to take a step forward. The data center dropped down. Then it lurched up. Bill waited for a moment more, judged the motion, and then leaped. The data center retreated from him at the last second, but he made the jump onto the adjoining floating barge.

  Bill took a happy breath of ocean air, and felt the barge rock under him. This was his project, his mark on Avogadro. After starting out as an IT system administrator, his skills with people led him into management. After he got his MBA, he took a program management position with Avogadro in their data center facilities organization. Now in his early forties, he found himself riding helicopters to visit the modern pinnacle of high tech data centers: the offshore floating data center.

  In the last decade, Avogadro invested in offshore power generation R&D. That investment had paid off with efficient electricity generation. Avogadro’s Portland Wave Converters, or PWC, were powered by oceanic waves. The waves never got tired, never ran out, and never needed fuel, so it was a very lucrative proposition once the wave generators were built. Gazing off to either side of him, Bill could see the PWC stretching out, a long line of white floats on the surface of the water, anchored to the sea bed below.

  After developing the generation capacity, Avogadro engineers recognized that if electricity was generated offshore, it made sense to put the data centers offshore as well. Ocean real estate was effectively free. Cooling the thousands of servers located within a small space was tricky and expensive on land, but easy in the ocean, where cool ambient temperature sea water made for very effective computer cooling. Now Avogadro had an entire business unit devoted to utilizing the potential of these novel offshore data centers. Avogadro worked to refine the design, with plans to use the offshore data centers existing for their own operations, and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers.

  Directly in front of Bill, the primary floating barge held what appear to be sixteen standard shipping containers. They had in fact originated as standard shipping containers, but Bill’s team had added a thick layer of weather proofing to protect the sensitive electronics contained within.

  Of course, these floating data centers had a few problems that got Bill up in the middle of the night. Resiliency to storms was one big issue. But the weather had been clear last night, so that wasn’t the reason Bill was here this morning to inspect Prototype Offshore Data Center, or ODC, #4. Located 12 miles out from the California coast, ODC #4 was identical to ODC 1 through 3. A quarter mile line of Portland Wave Converters generating 25 megawatts of electricity, divided in the center by two large floating barges.

  The barge behind Bill was surplus, serving simply as a helicopter landing pad. It wasn’t part of Bill’s original design, which had assumed that maintenance wou
ld come by boat. Then again, Bill hadn’t realized how many maintenance trips they would end up needing to make to the prototypes.

  Avogadro had ruggedized the containers, communication equipment, and power generation equipment to the maximum feasible level, and they should have required barely any maintenance at all, even out here in the corrosive salt water environment. In fact, the entire system was designed to require only a single maintenance visit each year to replace servers. Unfortunately, the entirety of ODC #4 went offline the previous night at 4:06am. That’s what required this early morning visit. Bill and his team flew out from the company’s land-based Bay Area site as soon as the sun rose.

  As Bill stepped closer to the cargo containers, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, and it wasn’t caused by the rolling and pitching motion of the barge. He saw burn marks on the side of the containers that could only have been caused by one thing: a welding torch. Bill shook his head in dismay. No hand-held welding torch should ever have touched these specially treated containers.

  A closer inspection confirmed his fears. Bill saw a ragged hole cut into the side of the container. After the first theft three months ago, the cargo container doors had been hardened against possible thievery attempts, but the sides had no special treatment apart from the additional weather proofing.

  While the other members of the team worked on opening the doors, Bill stuck his head in the container through the hole, and pointed his flashlight around. The racks that should have held hundreds of high performance computer servers were mostly empty, wires dangling everywhere, and various bits of low-value electronic equipment haphazardly strewn about.

  Bill took out his Avogadro phone from his overalls to send a message to the email distribution list for the rest of the Offshore Data Center team. It would take more than a small maintenance team to fix ODC #4. The organization would need to kick into high gear to ship out new containers and servers.