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

by William Hertling

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

  At least the offshore data center deployments were back on track. The team had agreed that with the new hardened units and robotics defenses in place, further pirate attacks were unlikely to be successful. Bill had six teams working overtime through the Christmas holiday to deploy additional ODCs that were waiting in storage, pending a resolution to the piracy issues. Getting those ODCs deployed would put the master rollout plan back on track.

  * * *

  Off the coast of India

  Prateet said a silent prayer before he boarded the data center. His company was under contract to Avogadro to service this floating data center, one of the four original prototypes. He always found it unnerving to visit the unmanned high tech island. Although he wasn’t an excessively superstitious man, he always thought the computers here were lonely. To make a bad situation worse, just prior to this trip Avogadro notified him that the floating data center would now have armed robots defending it.

  They provided fifty pages of documentation regarding the robots, noting that Prateet would not need to service the robots himself, as that would be done by the robotics subcontractor. Prateet had been most thorough and exacting when he followed the protocol to disable the robots before he boarded. He preferred it when his only concern had been that the computers seemed lonely.

  A tropical depression offshore caused some communication delays between the robot administrators and the robots, until they finally pronounced it safe for him to board the vessel. The seas were already quite rough, but his company had been given a substantial bonus to install the additional satellite communication system on board the boat. He was unsure why they wanted the additional system. The vessel was, as he knew from having serviced it before, already connected directly to the mainland through two fiber optic cables, and there was already a backup satellite communication system. This would give a third independent system. Well, if now they wanted two satellite communication systems, he would not second-guess rich American companies who were willing to pay him double the normal rate.

  He completed his work as quickly as he could safely finish, given the high seas and unsettling stares of the robots at his back. When he boarded the boat that would take him back to Chennai, he said a few more prayers to Vishnu in thanks that he was finished and on his way home to his family.

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

  * * *

  Gene Keyes was in his office, but he might have been the only one left in the entire building. He noticed one dark, locked office after another on his way to get coffee. When he was a kid, he worked sixty hour weeks and was glad to work more when he was asked to. He still did when he needed to. But the self-entitled kids he was surrounded with took off two weeks for Christmas and didn’t think twice about it, leaving projects half finished and paperwork uncompleted.

  He pulled a two inch thick stack of printouts in front of him. This pile was a record of everything that had been purchased at Avogadro since the start of December. He took a sip of coffee, and prepared to scan through the entire stack of pages.

  When one of his coworkers found him doing this six months ago, they thought it was so funny that it became a joke across the entire department. “Don’t you know that the computer can do that now?” they said, as though he was some kind of prehistoric Cro-Magnon who didn’t know what a computer was. Even Gene’s new manager had come by and told him that it was a “nonproductive expenditure of time” to manually inspect the purchases and budgets.

  So now Gene waited until six o’clock to start his inspection, and only did the work at night when everyone was gone. Despite error after error that occurred electronically, they insisted on trusting the computer. Gene trusted paper print outs. There was a reason they called it a paper trail, damn it. You could trust paper. What was printed didn’t change after you printed it. The same couldn’t be said for computer records.

  As he wrote, he took notes. For minor errors, he jotted off email memos to affected departments. Sometimes it was transcribed billing codes, when something was billed to one department but delivered to another. In other cases, invoice amounts were transcribed or missing digits.

  It was almost eleven o’clock when Gene spotted the first serious discrepancy. At first, he thought it was just a case of Gary Mitchell running out his fiscal year budget. It was improper, of course, but nothing Gene could do anything about. However, as Gene kept looking through the expenditures, he noticed that Mitchell had spent every penny of every budget under his control.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true on a second look. Flipping back and forth through the printouts, Gene realized that Mitchell had actually underspent each budget by exactly one cent. Gene sat up and unconsciously tapped his pencil on the table. If a budget was completely spent or overspent, that generated a memo that went to the responsible manager, their manager, and the finance department. If a budget was underspent, on the other hand, it was unlikely to be reviewed or attract much attention.

  Gene looked again at the paper work. Mitchell had a total of fifty-eight independent projects under his authority, each with their own allocated budget dollars. That was fifty-eight independent projects with one cent remaining in each budget. That kind of careful planning pointed to a deception. The only person in common across those fifty-eight budgets was Gary Mitchell, so it was likely that the responsible person was either Gary or someone who had signature authority for him.

  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 print out. This was a major discovery. What had Gary Mitchell spent that 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 Wireless 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 up-time 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 rates in world, and a significant technology advantage.

  I know that you have the ear of the Minister of Technology. Would you broach this topic with him? Our marketing department is prepared to reach out to other governments. But I know that you’d like to score some points with the Minister, so I’m letting you know early about this.

  Get back to me and let me know what he says.

  Thanks,

  Gary

  Chapter 8

  Gene Keyes waited outside Maggie Reynolds’ office on the first business day of the New Year. He had spent the last ten days confirming his data and validating his conclusions. Well, he could be honest with himself. He had done all that in the first two days, and then spent eight days cooling his heels waiting for anyone in the damn company to get back from holiday vacation.

  Gene glanced
at his watch, saw that it was five minutes to eight, and resumed waiting with only the smallest of sighs. Maggie, a member of the Finance department, assigned to the Procurement group, had authorized several of the charges. So the first action he planned to take was to confirm the data with Maggie in person. He had brought his paper file showing the unusual expenditures: a thick accordion folder, nearly bursting. He wished he could have escalated the issue when he’d found it in the first place, but the established process for investigating these things required him to complete at least a first round of discussions with people who had handled the transactions.

  At eight, he saw Maggie approaching carrying a coffee cup in one hand, with a large purse in her other. As she got closer, her face turned puzzled as she realized that Gene was waiting outside her office door.

  “Hello?” she asked, turning it into a question. She paused outside the door.

  “I’m Gene Keyes. You came to my office for help a few weeks ago.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m investigating some irregularities in purchase orders since I last saw you.”

  “Oh.” She paused, still holding her coffee cup in one hand and purse dangling from the other. “Oh,” she said again, more sharply. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can we go into your office and sit down?” Gene gestured toward her door with the accordion folder.

  “Of course, of course,” Maggie said hurriedly. She handed her coffee cup to Gene, and then swiped her ID badge to unlock the door. “Come in.”

  Gene looked around as they entered the office. Clean, organized. He put the coffee cup down on her desk.

  Maggie went around her desk, then sat down, sitting straight upright, looking like a student trying to impress a teacher. “What is it? Did I sign something I shouldn’t have?”

  “I am hoping you can explain it to me.” Gene methodically took a seat, put his accordion folder in front of him, and took out a single page, the sheet rasping against the other tightly bound papers.

  Maggie nervously fiddled with her hair.

  “Does this look familiar?” Gene finally asked, putting the page in front of Maggie. “It’s from Gary Mitchell’s division. You can see there are multiple purchases. It starts with these charges for the ELOPe project. Then, over the course of the next two weeks, there are thirty four more purchase orders that were outside the normal expenditure range for Mitchell’s expenses. Furthermore, the billing is highly irregular in that they are split across multiple accounts.”

  “I do remember this,” Maggie said, her hands shaking slightly as she took the printout. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I did anything wrong. I was concerned about the purchases when I first saw them. But I talked to John Anderson in Procurement about them. He said they were normal end of the year behavior because departments usually try to spend the leftover money in their budget.”

  “That’s true, but not like this. You can see that the expenditures are distributed against dozens of budgets. This one charge...” Gene paused to remove more paper from his briefcase, this set of printouts showing how the charges were allocated to project budgets. Gene found the relevant line item, pointed it out on the print out, and continued, “This one charge is distributed against forty-nine accounts. You see, not only are they spending all the money left in their budgets, but they’re also ensuring that each expenditure doesn’t take more than one million from any one account — that would trigger an executive level review of the expense.” Gene paused to study Maggie.

  “Sounds like someone deliberately manipulating the system to avoid being detected,” Maggie answered. She leaned forward, and started tracing through the print out with one finger. She went quickly through several pages, unconscious of Gene’s scrutiny.

  “That’s right.” Gene paused to extract another set of papers from his folder. “Here’s another little bit of odd behavior.” Gene turned the papers around and slid them across the desk. “By the end of this reporting period, each budget has exactly one penny left in it.”

  “That’s really bizarre,” Maggie said, her eyes bulging. “A penny? How did whoever did this get the budgets to come out so precisely?” Maggie pawed through the rest of the papers, swiftly going down the rows of purchases. “The individual charges are generally tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” she mused out loud. “Spending precisely the right amount of money to bring the totals in to exactly that amount... Well, it seems impossible.”

  “What is even more unusual,” Gene said, “is why they would do that. Whoever did this was smart enough to stay under the one million dollar limit in a single budget line item, knowing that would trigger the alert I mentioned. And in addition, they were smart enough to keep each account under budget, knowing that even hitting the budget would trigger another alert.”

  Maggie laughed. “That’s true. There are emails from Finance every fiscal quarter about the repercussions of exceeding budgets or going over a million dollars. Anyone in the company who reads their email would know not to exceed their budget, or they would get chewed out by their Finance representative.”

  “Then why would they try to spend every last penny but one?” Gene sat back. Gene liked hard data, but his gut was telling him that Maggie wasn’t in on whatever the deception was.

  “It is contradictory,” Maggie said. “Smart enough to avoid any of the standard alerts, and yet foolish enough to create a suspicious pattern.”

  They both paused for a moment and looked at each other.

  “Gene, I don’t know what to tell you,” Maggie continued on, after a minute spent in reflection. “I agree, the picture you are painting looks suspicious, but I never saw anything unusual in the course of processing these requests. They were mostly for servers, additional hard drives and computer memory, contractors to service them, stuff like that. Nothing out of the ordinary for Gary’s department. Granted, they seemed so innocuous that after the first few, I just rubber stamped them.”

  Gene watched Maggie sit back, her face apologetic, but her body posture relaxed and confident. It wasn’t Maggie, he thought to himself. “Is it typical for Gary Mitchell to approve all the purchases himself?” Gene asked out loud. “I see very few cases where he delegates purchasing authority.”

  “Yes, that’s normal for Gary. Are you thinking that Gary is responsible?”

  “The fact that Gary personally authorized all these orders makes him the first person I’d look at. But...” Gene trailed off.

  “But?”

  Gene pulled a fourth set of papers from his accordion folder. “It turns out that the same behavior is happening in another department. The Offshore Data Center project. Their expenditures exhibit some of the same characteristics. Multiple line items just under one million dollars, budgets coming in at just under one penny less than their limit.”

  “But that’s not under Gary?”

  “No, it’s not. Which makes it more likely that someone has hacked Avogadro’s procurement system.”

  “But to what purpose?” Maggie asked. She scanned the papers again. “Why would someone risk their job and even jail to order servers, satellite communication systems, and hire contractors? It makes no sense.”

  “I agree,” Gene said. “I was hoping that you would be able to shed some light on this, and that maybe there would be an easy answer.” He began to pick up his papers and put them back into the accordion folder. “I’m going to keep investigating this. Please don’t discuss it with anyone.”

  Maggie nodded.

  Gene stood up. “Thanks for your time, Maggie.” He let himself out, leaving Maggie full of questions.

  * * *

  From the time Mike arrived at the airport in Madison for the flight home, and periodically since he arrived back in Portland, he had tried to reach David by phone. Frustratingly, David had been off the grid in New Mexico. Mike knew that David always went to Christine’s family ranch for the holidays, and he knew that the ranch was off the grid, so he couldn’t claim any legitimate reason for
feeling even more suspicious. Yet here he was, feeling manipulated by a software algorithm.

  David had sent Mike a copy of his itinerary by email weeks earlier, so he had David’s flight information. Without even realizing what he was doing, he found himself standing in his living room, holding a printed copy of the itinerary, watching the clock. He had his jacket on, alternating between sitting on the couch tapping his toe and getting up to pace the living room. Finally, with more than an hour left before the flight would arrive, he drove to the airport.

  Mike drove with furrowed brows through a light drizzle, with the streets threatening to ice over. His thoughts were bordering on obsessive. What had David done to ELOPe? What was ELOPe doing? Why was he locked out of the servers? He swore as his front tires spun crossing the light rail tracks, and the car fishtailed. He fought the wheel and recovered halfway through the turn onto Airport Way.

  He sped into the parking garage, circling up the ramp, and parked near the skybridge. He walked across the covered bridge at a high speed, and stalked through the airport. He got to the security gate, and looked at his phone. Still nearly an hour until David’s flight would arrive.

  He checked the flight monitors once, then forced himself to sit down and stay there, trying to squelch his nervous energy. He watched whole families disgorge through the security exit; suitcases, car-seats, and exhausted children in tow. He smiled as he watched a young woman welcome a man home with a single flower and a long embrace. He missed the bittersweet tang of young love.

  Then he saw David and Christine coming through the gate. He walked over and waved. David and Christine were delighted to see him. Christine gave him a big hug, and a bigger smile. Standing in the middle of the stream of exiting passengers, Mike launched into an immediate explanation in a hushed voice. David and Christine leaned closer to listen, and their smiles vanished.