Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (18 page)

As Bill argued with the folks at iRobot in the back seat of the helicopter, George “Punch” Gonzales, today’s helicopter pilot, continued to circle around. He did it more out of boredom than anything else, since he could have just as easily engaged the auto-hover, which would have maintained them at a given location. After twenty years of flying helicopters for the Marines, George wasn’t inclined to engage the auto-hover and tune out. He liked to keep his hands on the stick. On one of these slow rotations around the ODC, George came a little closer to the platform than he had before. He also happened to glance again at the fuel gauge, and noted that they were coming up on their halfway point. George turned to ask Bill how much longer they planned to stay. While he was glancing backwards, the helicopter came just a few dozen feet closer to the platform than it had before. Since he wasn’t looking out the windshield, George, who just might have recognized them for what they were, missed the flash of anti-aircraft missiles launching. Bill was stooped, head down, struggling to hear to the other end of the line, to understand what happened, and how the administration of the robots could have been bungled so badly in the first month of operation.

Within seconds the two heat seeking missiles transited the distance to the helicopter, focusing in on the hot helicopter exhaust. When the first missile detonated, the engine and copter blades exploded apart. The second missile impacted the passenger compartment, bursting the thin shell. Bits of shrapnel screamed through the air in all directions, falling sizzling into the water.

Chapter 10

David and Mike were having coffee in David’s office when Gene came in and dropped heavily into one of the chairs.

Slumped in the chair, Gene related his story. “I’m sorry boys, I never anticipated that I had lost all credibility within my department. If we are going to anyone else in management, and I think we should, then you will have to take point on this. You boys have some credibility with these folks.”

“
I’m sorry Gene,” Mike offered, clapping the older man on the shoulder, his face still lined deeply in dismay. “I appreciate the attempt.”

“
Me too,” David added. “It was a necessary step.”

Mike continued solemnly, “I think the key to this is Gary’s Communication Products Division. Gary might be unreachable, but he’s not the only decision maker.”

“
That’s right. There’s a marketing manager. Her name is... Linda Fletcher,” David said brightly. “She’s Gary’s number two. Hell, let’s find out who the Legal representative is, and bring Legal in. If we can convince them of the risk, maybe they put a stop to the whole project.”

“
Legal just advises the business managers,” Gene pointed out, bringing his expertise to bear, “so technically they can’t enforce a business action. It’s up to the business manager to weigh risks and make a decision. But I agree, it makes sense to involve them. Perhaps the fear of legal risks will cause the lawyers to side with us.”

“
OK, let’s do it.”

It was easier said than done. Trying to avoid the use of phones or emails created all sorts of logistical problems. David walked down the hallway with Mike and Gene in tow. They asked the admin of the next group over to look up the location of Linda Fletcher’s office, and her admin’s name. Then they walked across the campus, traversing sky bridges and elevators to get to Building 7a. They found Linda’s admin, a young guy by the name of Nathan, at his desk outside Linda’s office.

Nathan was more than a little puzzled that they had walked over just to set up a meeting. He grew downright suspicious when they asked him not to put their names in the meeting invitation list. Gene pulled out his badge, showing he worked for Controls and Compliance.

“
This is an extremely sensitive matter,” he impressed on Nathan, leaving the young guy with his jaw open. “Just schedule the meeting.”

“
Also, I need you to invite the Legal rep,” David said.

“
You mean Tim Wright?” Nathan asked, his jaw still hanging open after speaking.

“
Yes,” David said. “What’s the earliest you can set it up?”

The admin checked the calendar. “I can get you a half hour next Tuesday.”

“
No, we need it today.”

Nathan shook his head firmly. “No can do. Linda will kill me. How about Friday?”

“
Look kid,” Gene jumped in, “people’s jobs and more are on the line. Just be straight, what is the earliest possible time we can meet?”

“
I can get you in tomorrow right after lunch,” he admitted. He looked sheepishly at them. “She’s in a meeting with a really important business partner this morning, and with the PR agency tomorrow, and she really will kill me if I try to fit you in.”

“
Fine, set it up for tomorrow,” Gene said. He started to turn away, and then turned back. “Look kid, I can see from your face that as soon as we leave here, you’re gonna walk down the hallway to gossip about this. Don’t do it if you still want to have a job tomorrow.”

Nathan nodded swiftly, and then the group of three turned and headed to David’s office.

“
I’m exhausted,” David admitted on the way back. “I realize how urgent this is, but given that we’re stalled, waiting for Linda, I think I need to go home. I’ve been up since five this morning, to catch our flight back.”

“
Let’s meet tomorrow morning before the meeting,” Mike suggested. “David’s office?”

Gene agreed, and then offered them a ride to David’s place.

* * *

That night, David picked moodily at Lebanese takeout, one of his favorite foods.

“
You better not waste that mjadra,” Christine said with a laugh. She got no answer.

She tried again. “What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

“
We’re going to Linda Fletcher, the marketing manager for Communication Products. She has decision making authority while Gary’s out. We’re going to ask her to approve an outage so we can take down the servers and install clean images without ELOPe.”

“
It sounds like a reasonable plan. What do you think she’ll say?”

“
I think she’ll say yes,” David said, then fell back into silence, staring at his plate.

“
Why so glum then?” she asked gently.

“
What am I going to do?” David said, suddenly stabbing angrily at his food, and then throwing his fork down. “This could be the end of the project almost certainly, maybe the end of my career. They’re going to ask questions about what ELOPe was doing, how these things happened. I was so close. So close to making ELOPe a success, so close to taking the success and leveraging it into something even bigger. Now what’s the best I can hope for? Some kind of damage control.” He rested his head in his hands.

Christine came around the table and rubbed his shoulders.

* * *

The next morning, David, Mike, and Gene reviewed what they’d say at the meeting with Linda, and discussed contingency plans. Then with time to kill, and seeing that everyone could benefit from a little downtime, Gene recommended Kenny and Zuke’s, a sandwich shop a few blocks away, a standby for the Avogadro crowd. The Avogadro cafeteria’s food quality was excellent, and it was well loved by the employees, but eventually the corporate ambience tired out even the enthusiasts. On this particular day, they all felt a little more comfortable a few blocks away from the eyes and ears of the corporation. They enjoyed Reubens and hamburger sliders, and made their way back ten minutes before the planned meeting time.

In the seventh floor meeting room, they started with introductions. Linda was a Scandinavian woman, whose family had lived briefly in Wisconsin when she was a child. She and Mike got off to a great start, laughing together over common experiences growing up in Wisconsin. Tim defied their expectations of what a lawyer would look like, showing up in black pants and a black T shirt. David briefly wondered with fascination if Tim was some new breed of Goth lawyer, but his jovial attitude quickly set them all at ease.

With introductions done, and everyone else sitting at the conference room table, David stood at the front of the room and started the explanation of what brought them to the meeting. Mike contributed details here and there, but let David lead the conversation. As David progressed in his explanation, he couldn’t help noticing that the light-hearted mood they had started with soon disappeared, as Linda and Tim became distinctly uncomfortable. David wasn’t sure if that discomfort reflected the technical nature of the explanation, a sense that they were going to be asked to make a decision without Gary present, or simple disbelief that the software could be acting independently, or some combination of all three. He feared that it wasn’t going to go well.

Finally, David reached the request. “What we’re asking you to do is bring down all the email servers. Then have the designated IT group responsible for the servers re-image those servers with a known good version of the software.” David continued to watch their reactions. “This is a normal action we take when a server has a problem with it. It’s just like reinstalling the operating system and software on your PC, if you’ve ever done that.”

“
David, I hear what you’re asking for, and I want to help. I really do.” Linda fiddled absently with her touchscreen pad on the table. “I’m very uncomfortable making a decision of this magnitude. I’d much rather wait for Gary to return.” Linda leaned back in her chair, and looked up at David. “What you’re asking for, it would cause an email outage, wouldn't it? How long would the outage last, and how many customers would be affected?”

“
Yes, it would cause an outage. The good news is that Avogadro has a process to re-image servers quite quickly. It takes just fifteen minutes or so. The bad news is that we don’t normally re-image all the servers at once, and the backup system that contains the images can only serve up images to a few thousand servers at a time. The result is that the first servers would come back up in fifteen minutes, but it would be approximately three hours before we could have every server back online.”

“
Wait a second,” Linda said, leaning forward. “Are you saying we’d have a full service outage? I thought you were talking about a rolling outage. No, we absolutely can’t have a full service outage right now. We’re about to close some major new partnership deals in the next couple of days. I can’t discuss it until the press release comes out, it’s so sensitive.” She shook her head. “It’s a major coup for Avogadro. We’re talking about a billion dollar revenue opportunity. We can’t put that at risk.” Linda looked to Tim for confirmation.

“
That’s true Linda. These are highly sensitive customers. An outage right now would almost certainly cause us to lose the contracts,” Tim added, in support. “These customers have service level agreements that guarantee a minimum level of uptime. To have an outage right now would create doubt about our ability to meet the service level agreement.”

“
Now wait a minute.” Linda snapped her fingers. “The rolling maintenance windows. Why don’t you just do that? Bring down some of the servers, in small groups, and gradually fix them?”

“
We wish we could,” Mike jumped in, “but we’re afraid that the existing systems would reinfect the new systems as they come up. We will need to bring every email server down simultaneously.”

“
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to say no.” She waggled one pointed finger at them. “Now, if you had come to me, and you had some very specific, hard evidence that the email servers were causing problems for our customers, I might be influenced to make the decision to rebuild those servers. But that’s not what you have. You have a very strange story about a handful of emails being manipulated. It seems to me that it would be far more likely that your particular email accounts have been compromised, than that the entire email system is flawed. I think you need to talk to Security.” She shook her head sadly again.

“
This isn’t a Security problem,” David said. “This is —”