Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (15 page)

David looked flabbergasted by this explanation. “How do you know all this?”

“
You know, books and stuff,” Christine said, with a sarcastic smile.

“
This is pretty much what I concluded when I was with my parents,” Mike added. “We never explored how far the system could go on its own.” He paused and looking meaningful at David. “So, what do we do?”

“
I think you and I have to go right to Gary Mitchell, and tell him the truth. Even if that means I lose my job as the result of this. We have to get Gary to approve an immediate outage with hard power down. Then we can pull ELOPe off the system, even if that means we rebuild those servers from the ground up. Forget home. Mike, please go straight to the site.”

“
On my way,” Mike replied, as he sped down Alberta Avenue, bypassing the turnoff for David’s block, and heading for the highway to downtown.

* * *

“
Gary Mitchell is still gone. His admin says he was supposed to take a vacation over the holiday break, but he should have been back by now. Tahiti, in case you were wondering.” David had just returned from the building across the street where Gary’s office was located, while Mike and Christine waited in David’s office.

“
I’m picturing him laying on a beach, a cigar in one hand, and a whiskey in the other.” Mike shook his head.

“
I know,” David said, laughing, “I don’t think his admin meant to tell me where he was, but I was a bit demanding.”

“
No word from him?”

“
Nothing. He should have been back in town a couple of days ago. His admin has paperwork waiting for him to sign. She’s sent him emails and left voicemails, but nothing.”

Mike grunted.

“
While you were over there, I spoke to Richard, who was the only member of our development team that worked through the holiday break,” Mike explained. “Remember that email you told me about just after we received the additional servers? You mentioned that we were assigned a team of top notch performance optimization experts to help us work on performance improvements to drive down resource utilization?”

David nodded. “Yeah?”

“
According to Richard, that team showed up on the Monday after Christmas,” Mike said. “They were a bunch of subcontractors he had never met before. They had two guys onsite for the entire Christmas break, and another dozen offsite. He says he had an email from you telling him to grant them access, so he did.”

“
Let me see what changes they made.” David turned to his computer, attempting to pull down the latest source code. He stared in frustration as an error dialog popped up, with an ‘access denied’ message. He tried again, and then pounded the keyboard in frustration.

“
I’m in the same boat you’re in,” he finally said to Mike. “My access to the source code has been removed. I can’t pull down a copy of the latest code to see what they changed. Do you have any ideas?”

“
Well, Richard kept an eye on them the first few days, and then he left for a skiing trip over New Year. If you look in your email inbox, the contractors emailed us both a written report of what they did. It was sent Friday morning, so they finished up just before either of us got back to town. According to the email, they made some major improvements in performance, mostly related to the Bayesian network. Melanie was here at work yesterday, pulled down the latest code and ran the performance tests against it. The new code seems to have taken the import of new emails from x squared to x log x, and quartered the evaluation time.”

“
Woah, are you guys saying you originally had an exponential resource utilization curve?” Christine thought about her own work on massively multiplayer games. She knew that, in the ideal case, when you add users to an internet application of any kind, you want the application to scale linearly. She shook her head and turned to look at David and Mike. “How the hell did you ever expect this to scale?”

“
Scaling the resources has been the major bottleneck all along. It’s why we ran into so many resource constraints, and why the project was in danger. It didn’t appear that there was any way to scale without requiring a massive number of servers.” David shrugged. “I just kept hoping that as long as we kept the project alive, we’d find some way to overcome that limitation. Now it seems that someone has.”

David turned back to his computer. He was still trying to coerce his computer into giving him access to the code. “Damn, how did our project access get revoked? I don’t understand how email could interface with the access rights.” He turned back to Mike. “Do we have any idea what else these contractors did?”

“
I might.”

Everyone turned around to look at the door. There stood an older unshaven man, dressed in rumpled clothes, carrying bundles of paper under his arms.

“
Gene Keyes, Controls and Compliance.” He spoke in a deep rumble. “I’m here to save your ass.”

* * *

Over the course of the next hour, Gene briefed the others on what he had found during his investigation. Like them, he had tried to reach Gary Mitchell, with no success. He had uncovered that while there were unusual charges across the company, the only consistent patterns of unusual behavior were found in three departments. As Gene spoke, he laid printed reports across David’s desk.

The first, of course, was the R&D department in which David’s ELOPe project was housed. According to Gene’s print outs, it had paid for several small allotments of servers and subcontractors to make modifications to ELOPe. The nature of the modifications was not specified, but the budget amounts were sufficient for dozens of engineer-months of work from an outside vendor.

In fact, it was the expenditures in David’s department that had led Gene to them. David’s legitimate order several months earlier of a pool of high performance servers had clued Gene in that all of the later purchases might be somehow tied to the project that first needed additional servers.

“
So does this mean we’re under suspicion?” Mike asked meekly.

“
No, I can see the problem is bigger than you boys. In fact, I can see the problem is bigger than just people,” Gene said, the cryptic answer more puzzling.

“
But where did the money come from?” David asked. “I exhausted our budget weeks ago.”

“
Transferred in from other departments,” Gene answered. “Namely, Gary Mitchell’s Ops group.”

Gene went on to explain that the second department that contained the unusual pattern of purchases was Gary Mitchell’s department, which was responsible for operations for the company’s communication products, including AvoMail, Avogadro Voice, and Avogadro Chat. By virtue of the size of its business, Mitchell’s department had a vast operational budget compared to the relatively small R&D budget for the ELOPe project. Gene’s printed records showed that Gary’s department purchased tremendous quantities of servers, had servers reallocated from other projects, paid for a variety of subcontractors to do programming work, and finally transferred substantial funds to both the ELOPe project and the Offshore Data Center department.

“
Offshore Data Center department? What do they do?” asked Christine.

“
They took the data center in a box concept, which is a standard shipping container filled with racks of computers, and put it on a seaworthy barge,” David answered. “Then they connect the data-center-boxes to wave-action electrical generators. The whole thing is connected back to the data grid with fiber optic cables. Avogadro calls them ODCs for short.”

“
Well, anyone care to guess the third department with the same unusual pattern of purchases?” Gene asked.

“
The Offshore Data Center department?” Mike volunteered.

“
Bingo,” Gene answered, pointing to Mike. “Not every purchase order has all of the details, but from the ones I’ve been able to track down, I’ve found that the data centers have been augmented with satellite communication capability, and line of sight microwave transmission, the kind used for traditional phone and data communications before fiber optics.”

“
If ELOPe has somehow gotten onto an Offshore Data Center,” Mike mused, as he paced across the room, “we wouldn’t be able to kill its communication channel by simply cutting off the fiber optic line. We’d actually have to go out to the ODC and turn off the computers by hand.”

Gene laughed out loud, a harsh, barking noise that startled the others, sending Christine off her perch on David’s desk.

“
What’s so funny?” David asked.

“
Nobody is shutting those machines off,” Gene growled, his face now stern.

“
Why not?”

“
Because you didn’t let me finish. According to the purchase orders, the offshore data centers are armed. They have autonomous robots for self-defense,” Gene said, slowing down and exaggerating each word. “Apparently to protect them from pirates. I heard what you boys were discussing when I came in, and I came to the same conclusion myself: there’s an artificial intelligence in the computer making these purchases. And now the AI has armed itself. So there’s no way we’re going to just walk on board the ODC and turn off the computers. We’re going to have to blow them all up.”

David slumped down in his seat. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. How did we get ourselves into this mess?”

“
You kids trusted the computer with everything,” Gene said, grumbling, “and worse yet, you put no controls in place. No leash, no way to shut it down.”

“
Wait, I don’t understand,” Mike said, pacing by the window again. “How did you conclude it was a computer program making the purchases, and not a person?” He turned and stared hard at Gene.

“
One benefit of being in the audit department — I can access anyone’s emails. And there’s some mighty funny emails going out.” Gene paused, and pulled out another sheaf of papers, this one almost an inch thick. He took a few pages off the top and put them on the desk.

David, Mike, and Christine all gathered around them. The emails were a cryptic combination of English words and HTML, the markup language used for web pages.

David fanned through the pages, then looked up at Gene. “What are we seeing?”

“
You’re seeing emails between your email account and the procurement web application. This page,” Gene said, pointing to one, “is the procurement system displaying a list of accounts you are approved to use, and this one over here, is your email selecting one of the accounts.”

“
It’s the timestamps, isn’t it?” Christine said.

Gene smiled at her. “You’re the smart one.”

She smiled back, then pointed to the printouts. “The timestamps on these emails are too close together.” She arranged the printed pages in pairs. “If you look at the email headers, you can see that every time there’s an incoming email that requires a response, the reply is immediate. There’s not even a one second delay. There’s no way a human could respond to an email that quickly.”

“
Exactly right,” Gene said. “So at first I suspected someone had written a program exploiting a loophole in email authentication, and was using that to embezzle funds. But then I asked around about your project, and everyone started telling me stories about how you were creating an email generator.”

“
Well, that’s not exactly what it’s for,” David protested. Then he sighed. “Well, I guess it is now.”

“
What do we do next?” Mike asked, looking now at David. “David?”

David turned to the windows, fingers steepled, and stared out in silence, ignoring everyone’s eyes on him.

Chapter 9

David tried very hard to ignore everyone watching him. If he could just concentrate, he could figure out a solution to this problem. He needed to shutdown ELOPe and somehow not lose his job and preferably not lose the project. He focused on the trees in Forest Park, sending the hum of the ventilation system, and everyone’s breathing into the background. He watched the wind waving the tops of Douglas Fir trees in the far off distance.