Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  “Wow, I saw this in a movie once,” she said, coming around his desk to fondle a stack of continuous feed paper. She pulled at one end, making the green-and-white-striped paper unfold accordion-style. Her eyebrows went up and her jaw down. “Hey, do you have any punch cards?”

  It rankled Gene to hear almost identical comments from every kid that walked in the door. He sat a little straighter in his wooden office chair, the same one he liberated from the army the day he was discharged. “Some things are better on paper,” he explained, not for the first time. “Paper is consistent. It doesn’t say one thing one day and a different thing the next. And, no, I don’t have punch cards. I’m not preserving this 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. He knew what she’d say next, because he heard a variation of the same thing from every visitor.

  “You know we work for Avogadro, right?” Maggie said, smiling.

  Gene knew. But he worked in Controls and Compliance, 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 a problem. The 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. Finance 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. “That’s what the paper is for. Believe it or not, there’s a printout here of every department’s budget for each month. So we can examine your budget before and after and see what happened. Now let’s take a look...”

  “Dude, you’re here,” Mike said, plopping 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 weird behavior in ELOPe. Not to mention you missed the entire hunt for the billiard room.” Considering that they worked in neighboring offices and were in constant electronic communication, David’s vanishing act was impressive.

  “What kind of weird behavior?” David gazed off into the distance, ignoring Mike’s question.

  “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. I correlated the bulk analysis import with server cycles consumed, and...” Mike stopped.

  David continued to stare out the window, apparently lost in thought.

  Mike glanced outside. 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. “Are you listening? Isn’t it critical this be fixed before Gary’s deadline?”

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

  “I tried to establish a correlation, but I couldn’t find one. You know ELOPe takes a predictable amount of server resources to analyze emails. At least it did, until two days ago. Now I can’t find any relationship at all. The CPU utilization keeps going through the roof even when the logs indicate nobody is running any tests. It’s as though the system is working on something, but I can’t find any record of what.”

  David was again staring outside. Mike’s head start to pound. He’d been struggling with the damn optimization for days. “So then, David, I slept with your wife. She said it would be fine with you.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Mike waited, grinning to himself.

  “Uh, what? What did you just say?” David finally focused on him.

  Mike planted his body in front of the window to block David’s view. “Why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on, since you’re clearly not interested in the performance issues.”

  “Ah, come read this email from Gary,” David said, appearing animated for the first time since Mike entered the office. “The message came in a few minutes ago. We were allocated five thousand dedicated servers by way of a procurement exception. Accelerated deployment and all that. We’ll have access to the computing power by tomorrow morning.”

  Mike came around to peer over David’s shoulder at his screen. He 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 for dedicated nodes for ELOPe so we wouldn’t be in conflict with the production AvoMail servers.”

  “Wow, what a fantastic reversal,” Mike said. “I never would have guessed Gary would change his mind. Any clue why?”

  David got that distant look in his face again. “I don’t know. It is a bit surprising.”

  Excited by the possibilities of the extra computing power, Mike paced back and forth in front of the window. “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, let’s start with Avogadro’s internal emails,” David said. “This way, we won’t adversely affect any customers if anything goes wrong. If we can analyze company emails at full volume, I’ll suggest to Sean we turn the autosuggestion feature on for all employees.”

  “Good plan. I’ll stop work on the performance issues and focus on importing the internal emails. This is great news, David!” Mike did a little dance on his way out the door.

  When Mike left, David returned to staring out the window. The server allocation was great news. So why were the hairs raised on his neck?

  He had sent the email to Gary. That part was true. But he’d neglected to tell Mike about the minor detail of ELOPe’s involvement. Of course Mike would uncover massive background processing.

  ELOPe needed to analyze Gary Mitchell’s emails to optimize David’s message, which meant ELOPe also required access to the inboxes of everyone Gary had emailed with, and then the inboxes of everyone those people communicated with, a spiderweb of relationships spanning many thousands of people. David’s usage and modifications caused ELOPe to import a massive number of emails. He’d obscured his work by ensuring the new behavior wasn’t part of the normal system logs, but he couldn’t prevent system monitors from tracking CPU load.

  David didn’t know what to say. Mike would figure out the mystery behind the CPU utilization eventually. He hoped the discovery would take place later rather than sooner, after they’d solved their resource problems. David didn’t want anyone, not even Mike, to know he was using ELOPe itself to get the resources to keep the project running.

  A bug in the software, deeply integrated into the mail servers, could bring down all of AvoMail. If anything bad happened, David would feel some serious heat from upper management.

  But that wasn’t the cause for the pit of fear in his stomach.

  No, the real issue stemmed from the changes David had made during his all-night coding marathon. He’d gone into the code for language analysis and put in an overarching directive to maximize the predicted sentiment for any message discussing the project. When any email mentioned ELOPe, from anyone or to anyone, then ELOPe would automatically and silently reword the message in a way favorable to the overall success of the program.

  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, whose language assembly algorithm used fragments from thousands of other emails to create a realistic message in the voice of the sender.

  David relished this success, and wished he could share with the team what they had accomplished. The culmination of years of research, the project had started with his efforts towards the Netflix Prize before he was hired, although even that work had been built on the shoulders of geniuses. Then months of him and Mike laboring on their own to prove the idea enough to justify further investment, followed by two years of a full R&D team, building the architecture and incremental
ly improving effectiveness month after month.

  The results proved, beyond doubt, the power of the system. ELOPe’s language optimization had acquired thousands of servers.

  The problem, the unsettling fear, arose because David didn’t understand how. He couldn’t examine the altered emails, an unfortunate consequence of removing the logging so others wouldn’t discover ELOPe’s manipulations. Had Gary received a modified email convincing enough to make him change his mind? Or had ELOPe changed Gary’s response to something more favorable? David found the uncertainty unnerving, and the pit of fear in his stomach throbbed at how little control he had.

  But sure enough, his dedicated servers would arrive tomorrow, an outcome worth dwelling on. An email from procurement confirmed the allocation, and another from operations showed the time the servers would be available. Whatever ELOPe had done, it had worked. It might be the most server-intensive application in the company, if not the world, but by damn, it worked.

  All the hard work, politics, and sacrifices had been worthwhile. The project had become his life, and his little baby was all grown up now, doing what it was built to do.

  Well, maybe a little more besides.

  He hadn’t realized what it would feel like to have ELOPe working silently, behind the scenes. He was perpetuating a huge deception, and if anyone discovered what he had done, it would be the end of his career. He turned to the window again. Outside, in the momentary sunshine, people went about their business, walking, talking, jogging, blissfully unaware of what was going on inside the company. From his office window, they looked chillingly carefree.

  Chapter 5

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

  Bill breathed in the ocean air as the Offshore Data Center 4 rocked beneath 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 position with Avogadro in their facilities organization. Now in his early forties, he found himself riding helicopters to visit the modern pinnacle of high tech data centers: the floating server farm.

  In the last decade, the company had invested in offshore power generation. Avogadro’s Portland Wave Converters, or PWC, were the result. Powered by ocean waves, they created cost-effective and environmentally friendly electricity. The PWC stretched out to either side, a long line of white floats on the surface of the water, anchored to the sea-bed below.

  Once Avogadro had solved the problem of electrical generation, it made sense to locate the data centers offshore as well. Ocean real estate was effectively free. Maintaining the temperature of the thousands of servers packed into a small room was tricky and expensive on land, but easy out here, where cold, ambient-temperature seawater made for effective cooling. Now Avogadro had an entire business unit devoted to utilizing the potential of this novel approach. They refined the design, with plans to use the floating server farms for their own operations and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers.

  The primary barge in front of Bill held sixteen shipping containers heavily modified by Bill’s team with weatherproofing, climate control, and electrical conduits. These modular metal boxes housed racks of standard Avo servers, power supplies, and communication equipment, each one a fully independent data center capable of running Avogadro search, AvoMail, or anything else the engineers back at headquarters wanted to deploy.

  The barge behind him served as a landing pad. It wasn’t part of his original design, which had assumed regular maintenance would come by boat. Then again, Bill hadn’t realized how many emergency trips he’d end up making to the prototypes, located ten miles from land. The switch to helicopters saved hours on each visit.

  Avogadro had extensively ruggedized the containers and electronics equipment. They should have required barely any maintenance at all, even out in the corrosive saltwater environment. In fact, the system was designed to require only a single visit each year to replace faulty servers.

  But unlike their land-based counterparts, the floating data centers had a few problems that tended to get Bill up in the middle of the night. Resiliency to the worst storms was one issue; but the weather had been clear, so that wasn’t the reason Bill was out here this morning.

  ODC 4 had dropped completely offline at 4:06a.m. Within seconds, automated systems detected the outage and provisioned spare capacity in other data centers, seamlessly transitioning the applications to new servers so the barest minimum of customers were affected. Minutes later, the on-duty operations engineers received notice of the downtime and recovery. They took one look at the location and escalated to the ODC team. Bill’s smartphone whooped, and at 4:15 he peered bleary-eyed at the incoming data. There was nothing to suggest the alert was worth ruining everyone’s morning, so he scheduled the maintenance trip for the start of the business day and met his team at the Bay Area helipad at 8a.m.

  He stepped closer to the metal stacks, the sinking feeling in his stomach not caused by the rolling and pitching of the barge. Irregular burns and cuts, the obvious mark of a hand-held cutting torch, covered the sides of the containers. Bill shook his head at the rude treatment of his specially designed data center boxes.

  A closer inspection confirmed his fears: a ragged hole had been cut into the side of each shipping container. After the first theft months ago, they’d redesigned the doors, hardening them against future break-ins. This had the unfortunate side-effect of turning the unprotected sides into the easiest entry point.

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

  Bill extracted his Avogadro phone from his vest pocket and started composing a message to the rest of the ODC team. Forget fixing the problem in place with a small maintenance party. They’d need to tow the whole barge back to shore, then install new containers and servers.

  Bill resisted the urge to bang his head against the wall in frustration. Even if they wanted to defend the barges, the location ten miles offshore and lack of any facilities made it impossible to station security on board twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, anyone here would be at risk from the pirates.

  The piracy problem had put the entire ODC rollout on hold, pending a resolution. It didn’t bode well for Bill’s chance of getting a bonus. He and Jake Riley, the ODC Lead Manager, would meet with senior management later that week to discuss the issue.

  All this hardware sitting out in the middle of the ocean undefended was just too tempting. A full floating data center contained millions in equipment, including tens of thousands of servers, along with their requisite hard drives, power supplies, emergency backup batteries, and extensive communications hardware. Worse, it wasn’t clear yet whether the target of the thieves was the computer equipment itself or the potential customer data on the hard drives.

  As he reviewed the destruction and mentally tallied the cost of repairs and replacement, Jake’s controversial proposal began to make more sense: give the ODCs active deterrents to prevent pirates from boarding them in the first place. Still, he got a chill down his spine just thinking about autonomous armed robots guarding the barge.

  “Mike, what a surprise!” Christine smiled and embraced him in a warm hug. “David didn’t say you were coming for dinner.”

  “How’s the game development going?” he asked.

  “Awesome,” Christine said, singing the word as she hung his coat in the closet. “I spent the last two weeks fine-tuning game play with our alpha players, and we’re shooting for a beta release after th
e holiday. Don’t worry, you’re on the access list. Want a demo later? The visual effects on magic spells are amazing.”

  “Sure, I’d love it.”

  “Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll tell David you’re here.” She tucked a wisp of hair behind one ear and went upstairs.

  Mike strolled around the early twentieth-century Foursquare, a quintessential Portland house, as he waited. Ikea furniture was interspersed with computer equipment everywhere, and Christine’s high end gaming system dominated the family room. Mike wandered the house, just a hint of envy somewhere. Somehow David and Christine managed a classy mix of furnishings, electronics, and art, unlike Mike’s small bungalow which still resembled his college apartment.

  He couldn’t be too jealous of good friends who always made him welcome. Since he lacked family in town, he often dropped in for dinner, especially between girlfriends. Of course, he usually didn’t come unannounced, but he had a pressing reason to talk to David tonight.

  Before he left work, Mike had figured out the mystery of ELOPe’s activity. He deciphered the unexplained activity in the system, and the unexpected and unlikely allocation of dedicated computers. He even understood David’s strange behavior in the office when he’d announced they’d been granted additional servers. David had been less than honest with him, leaving Mike sweaty at the impending confrontation.