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

by William Hertling

  “Gentlemen, we have an exceedingly difficult task ahead of us,” Sean began. “We need to power down sixty-eight Avogadro sites around the world, and a dozen offshore data centers. We need to do this without email, phones, or any suspicious patterns of behavior that can be tracked by computers. We need people who know the facility designs to tell us how to power them down, and we need to communicate and synchronize our efforts. Any ideas?”

  “We’ll have to avoid commercial airline flights as much as possible,” Gene said. “Those are easy to track because they are in a centralized database. Not to mention that purchasing tickets will leave a trail through credit card transactions and Avogadro’s travel reimbursement system.”

  “Well, some employees would be traveling on business to visit other sites,” Mike said. “If we curtailed all travel activity, that would itself be suspicious. We could look for employees who currently have travel planned, and use them as couriers, and have them hand deliver instructions.”

  “Good idea,” Gene said.

  “Some Avogadro employees are private pilots,” David added. “There’s a woman named Michelle who sits a couple of doors down from me. She’s a private pilot, and she owns her own Cessna. And she’s mentioned there are other pilots at Avogadro. They could fly around the country, and their flights are untracked, right?”

  “Well, the flights themselves are tracked, I think,” Sean said. “But I don’t think they track the passengers on the planes. So that definitely does give us an extra tool to use. Good idea. Any others?”

  Pete jumped up with a glean in his eyes. “If we can get trusted employees to the remote sites, as long as we stay off Avogadro’s computer network, we should be able to communicate using encrypted emails sent over a competitor’s email service.”

  “That’s true,” Mike said. “We can use an isolated computer to generate private and public keys, which we can then copy onto USB drives. With the emails encrypted, ELOPe won’t be able to read them.”

  “But why do we need to use a competitor’s email service?” Gene asked.

  “If we sent them over Avogadro email,” Sean answered, “ELOPe could still see the patterns of email communication. ELOPe would be able to derive not only that something was going on, but exactly who was involved. If the data packets go over our network at all, they can be detected, so we need to be sure not to use wireless on an Avogadro site at all.”

  They brainstormed a list of employees who could help them further develop their plan. The list included people from the facilities team, the travel administration team, the engineers who developed the site plans and the engineers who were responsible for backup and failsafe systems. Sean agreed to spend the next day personally meeting each employee, since he was the one member of their team who was widely known and instantly recognizable.

  * * *

  The next morning David, Mike, Gene, and Pete reconvened at Sean’s house. Sean was at the Avogadro campus finding the employees they had identified the day before. Gene arrived with a huge cardboard box that he struggled to carry in.

  “What the heck do you have in there?” Mike asked.

  “Some old fashioned stuff you fancy computer nerds might not be so familiar with. Let’s see what I have.”

  Gene proceeded to pull out stacks of paper pads, post it notes, pencils and markers, maps of the United States and the World. David and Mike pitched in to help organize it.

  “Do you really think we’re going to need this much?” David asked quizzically.

  “We plan to have about thirty people working here, without computers. Yes, we’re going to need it,” Gene answered. “I’ve got more in the car, come help me unload it. Accordion folders. Sketch books. Flip charts.”

  David and Mike shared a conspiratorial smile.

  “I saw that,” Gene said. “You might think I’m weird, but believe me, people actually did perform office work before they invented computers. And maybe I just happen to know a thing or two about it.”

  “Sorry,” they both said sheepishly.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” Mike said. “It’s just that I’ve never even owned a printer, or had a newspaper subscription. I grew up online. It’s almost like if you pulled out one of those old phones, you know, the one with the round thing on it.”

  “A rotary phone? Are you just pulling my chain?” Gene grumbled in a low breath. “Damn fool kids.”

  David and Mike shared another secret smile. Might as well have fun if they had to work.

  * * *

  A little before lunch the first of the employees that Sean had contacted started arriving. By the end of the day most of the people had shown up. Unfortunately, they accomplished very little productive work, because no sooner would David start his explanation of what had happened so far than another person would show up and David would have to start over.

  Finally, at eight that evening everyone, including Sean, was there. Standing in Sean’s living room, David gazed at the dozens of people around him. Some engineers sat on Sean’s living room furniture, while others were perched on the folding chairs Gene had wisely purchased. Still more cascaded onto the arms of couches, sat on the floor, or stood in the corners of the room. The temperature of the packed room was high, but the group was absolutely silent, waiting for the story to emerge.

  The smell of pizza permeated the house, a recurring odor that they’d smell many more times in the days to come.

  David went through the story for the last time, his throat hoarse from the many partial retellings of the story that day. The crowd erupted into astonished gasps and side conversations from time to time, but then fell silent again. Finally, when David had recapped the technical explanation for the last time, Sean got up to speak.

  “The world I woke up in a few days ago was very different from the world I lived in all my life previously,” Sean began, and the crowd grew even quieter. “For the first time, man shares this world with another intelligence capable of sophisticated planning and actions. Unfortunately, this intelligence is like a cancer — one that will do anything, manipulate anyone, pursue any foe to ensure its own survival. It has control of our computers and our communications.”

  “Our most important weapon is our intelligence and knowledge. I have complete confidence in this group,” and Sean gazed around the room, “to solve this problem, which is inherently a technical one. Our most important defense is our complete and utter discretion. Under no circumstances can word of this go outside this group or be communicated by email or phone, or ELOPe will be warned and take action against us, as it did with Mike and David when David originally planned to remove ELOPe’s modifications.”

  “The executive team will give you any support you need, pay any money necessary, and do whatever it takes in the end to remove this virus from our computers. Now go get started!”

  Then the planning started in earnest. Alternately divided into small groups, led by Sean, David, Mike, or Gene, or gathered into a whole group, they tackled problems small and large — from bringing down computers and defeating backup power supplies to cleaning and restoring the computer software and data afterwards. During the next few days, Gene made several more trips to the local office supply store, almost buying out the store’s entire stock of notebooks, flip charts, sticky notes, and markers. Engineers worked constantly, taking breaks only when exhaustion made it impossible to think. Over the course of three incredible days, the plan emerged.

  On the first day they decided that for each remote site that needed to be powered down, they would send one employee to that site who was in the direct management chain of command, and more over, would command a high level of trust from employees at the remote site. Working hand in hand with the travel department and using printed records of travel plans, they found a combination of previously planned commercial flights, private aviation flights, bus trips, and automotive rentals to get the designated employees to their final destinations.

  Throughout the first two days the site eng
ineers, crisis engineers, and real estate planners identified a site-specific process for each of the many dozens of unique sites and data centers that would effectively kill power to the site and bring all computers down simultaneously. Although the sites shared many common design characteristics, each one had enough small differences that the engineers still needed to create a custom plan tailored to each site. The plan had to overcome stringent safety systems and backup systems that had been designed expressly to keep the sites operating regardless of any natural disasters that might affect power. And all without the primary tools they had been trained to rely on: their computers.

  Once power had been shutdown everywhere, the element of danger from ELOPe would be largely gone. Then the clock would be ticking: it would be a race against time to restore every computer from risk-free backups before customer confidence was lost, jeopardizing the Avogadro brand and business.

  * * *

  Over the course of the first day, several times people had asked what to call their mixed group of real estate planners, programmers, operations engineers, and others. Gradually people picked up the name Emergency Team. It was simple, solemn and accurate.

  Their planning had been stymied in one regard. No one local had sufficient knowledge about the offshore data centers. In the morning of the second day, recognizing this shortcoming, David sent a private pilot to the California Bay Area to fetch Bill Larry and Jake Riley. The pilot came back that afternoon with only Jake Riley.

  Jake remained standing in the doorway when he entered the room full of engineers. His clothes and hair were askew, his shirt hanging out of one side of his pants. Thick stubble on his face and dark circles under his eyes gave him the appearance of a haunted man.

  A hush grew over the room as engineers noticed him standing there.

  He stood in the silence for a moment. “I’m Jake Riley.” He paused. “I didn’t have a clue about what was going on before I got on that plane three hours ago, but Frank here briefed me on the flight. I have bad news. Bill Larry is missing and presumed dead.”

  There were gasps all around the room, and David rushed to the doorway to get closer.

  “He was in a flight to visit an offshore data center, and his helicopter disappeared without any notice. We initially believed there was a helicopter accident,” Jake went on. “On the flight up here, I heard about what’s been going on, and now I think it’s likely Bill Larry was killed by a robot manning an offshore data center.”

  The packed, hot room erupted into a roar of simultaneous discussion. Sean forced his way through the crowd to stand next to Jake and David, and yelled for quiet.

  “Why didn’t we know about this?” Sean asked.

  “You should have known,” Jake pleaded. “I’ve been sending you daily updates on the situation. We had a Coast Guard search party and I hired a private firm to supplement the search for the missing helicopter. We found nothing. We assume now that he’s dead.”

  After this shocking news, it was hours before the assembled team was able to get back to productive work.

  * * *

  On the third day the whole Emergency Team gathered under Jake Riley to debate options for dealing with the offshore data centers. Once more they convened in Sean’s living room, the only space large enough for them. By this time, three solid days of people working around the clock was starting to overwhelm the space. Takeout food littered every surface, and the luxurious, once white carpeting in the living room was slowly turning gray with ground in dirt and food. Sean’s expensive artwork was covered haphazardly with flip chart paper and maps. In the dark of night, an exhausted engineer had mistakenly drawn diagrams of power supply connections directly on the wall, his sleep deprived mind thinking he was writing on a whiteboard.

  “So far we’ve deployed twelve stationary barge-type floating data centers, and six refitted oil tanker type floating data centers,” Jake explained, passing around printed photos of each. “Our original plan used only stationary barges, but the ready availability of tankers, the environmental benefits associated with reusing existing materials, and our rush to get the program back on track made the tankers attractive to use.”

  “Was it your idea or ELOPe’s idea?” Gene called out from the side of the room, behind several rows of engineers.

  “I don’t honestly know,” Jake said, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Regardless of how it happened, the situation we have now is that both platform types have been fitted with automated defenses.” Jake passed another set of photos around the assembled room. These were promotional shots of the robots. “The oil tanker data centers do not have a human crew, despite their mobility. They are piloted by remote control. I called down, and had one of my engineers do a discrete test of the system this morning, and it would appear we still had the ability to direct the tankers, but whether that control is an illusion, I can’t be sure, and we shouldn’t count on it.”

  One of the engineers, a long haired hippie looking fellow, asked “So how the hell do we kill power under these conditions?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake answered. “We’re going to have to be creative. Because all the data centers are armed with robotic defenses, and we believe those defenses are operating either autonomously or under the control of ELOPe, we can’t simply fly people out there to cut power supply cables. Just like the land based data centers, every system has redundant backups. Probably more, because we had to take into account the maritime environment with its accompanying degradation effects, accidents, storms, and equipment malfunction miles from shore. So we need some creative ideas.”

  “What can we do to take control of the robots?” asked Mike. “Or, lacking that, can we incapacitate them in some way?”

  “Can we intercept communications to the robots?” one engineer volunteered.

  “That will send them into autonomous mode, according to these specifications, which doesn’t help us at all,” another answered, as the discussion quickened pace.

  “Let’s just shoot them!” someone called.

  “Won’t work, they are hardened. It would be like shooting a miniature tank. One that shoots back.”

  “As soon as we would try, ELOPe would know.”

  “What about some kind of electric shock to fry their circuits?”

  “With something like a Taser, we could send a hundred thousand volts into them.”

  “They’re probably hardened against that too. We need technical specifications to know what we’re up against.”

  “We need an expert from iRobot, they’ve got to know what their own vulnerabilities are.”

  “We can’t do that,” Sean cut in from where he stood near Jake. “We can’t risk communicating with iRobot, or we might alert ELOPe who could be monitoring communications there. Let’s switch gears for a minute. Does anyone have any ideas that doesn’t involve disabling the robots?”

  “Let’s cut off communications. If we can kill communications, regardless of whether the computers are on or not, ELOPe won’t be able to do anything. It’ll be isolated on the ship.”

  “What are the communication channels on the floating data centers?” Samantha asked. “I assume fiber optic hard lines, right?”

  “Right,” Jake answered. “Primary communications is provided by 4 ten gigabit ports, giving us peak bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second. That’s handled by two separate communication racks, so that if one fails, we still have half our bandwidth. But that’s just the primary. We have ship-to-shore dual microwave transmission, that gives us 750 megabits per second, for another 1.5 gigabits per second backup capacity.”

  “So we cut the fiber optic cables and kill the microwave towers on land that are receiving the backup channel,” one engineer shouted out.

  “It’s not so simple,” Gene added, having joined the group when he overheard the conversation turning to communications capabilities. “Jake, you might not know this, but the purchase orders we found showed that contractors installed additional communication systems over the holida
y shutdown.”

  “The purchase orders included...” Gene trailed off as he pulled out a notebook, and flipped through looking for his notes. “Satellite transmitters. Twenty-five megabit per second capacity. I have the channel frequency data here, maybe you can track down which satellites they are communicating with. Oh, and long distance radio modems, two per platform. The bandwidth is just 150 kilobits per second, but they are good up to 100 kilometers.”

  The engineers collectively groaned.

  “Multiple bandwidths, multiple destinations, including satellites,” Samantha summarized. “Jamming all those frequencies simultaneously will be difficult. There’s no way we’re going to get permission to shut down satellites. We have no idea what the other endpoint is for those long range data modems. We can’t track down every radio within a hundred kilometers.”

  “We’d never be able to shut down everything simultaneously,” another engineer grumbled.

  The conversation continued for hours, as the temperature in the crowded house went up, and tempers flared. When food arrived courtesy of Sean, everyone tumbled over each other to get outside for fresh air. The cold January drizzle sent them in after a while, but everyone felt refreshed.

  After they finished lunch, everyone passed through Sean’s kitchen and refilled from the six coffee pots now lined up in parallel on the counter. Then about half the people split off into subgroups, finding other rooms to work in, while the other half regrouped in the living room.

  “Look, we’re just going to have to blow the data centers with explosives,” one grey-haired engineer said when they were assembled one more. “You’re trying to come up with a fancy solution, but we don’t need fancy. We need guaranteed results. If you blow them up, then boom, all the computers and all the hardware are toast. Total, immediate shutdown.”

  “It’s not that simple though,” Jake explained again. “We still have to get the explosives on board, and to do that, you have to get past the robots.”

  Sean shook his head. “It’s going to be damn costly too, if we completely destroy them. We’ll do it if we have to, but that’s a lot of hardware to lose.”