Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  He snapped out of his reverie at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. David clasped him on the shoulder, and Christine led them into the kitchen.

  “Vodka martinis, everyone?” Christine suggested, following their longstanding tradition.

  “Sounds great,” Mike and David answered in unison.

  The men took bar stools in the kitchen while Christine grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya and glasses. She turned to Mike. “If you’re available, I’ve got a single coworker.”

  “Oh?” Mike said, raising his eyebrows. “Does she have any secret collections I should be aware of?”

  They laughed at the time Christine had fixed Mike up with an obsessive-compulsive collector of stuffed animals.

  “I think this one is normal. I’ll invite you to coffee with her after the holiday, and then bow out at the last minute.”

  “That won’t be awkward at all, I’m sure.”

  Christine smiled mischievously.

  “I’m glad you came,” David said. “We haven’t gotten together outside of the office since the snowboarding trip.”

  Mike swallowed. It was hard to confront friendly, engaged David. The distracted, vague David of a few days ago was an easier match.

  “But why the unexpected visit?” David asked.

  Christine gave him a funny look as she realized he hadn’t invited Mike over.

  “I want to talk about ELOPe.” Mike clenched his fists under the counter.

  “I heard the good news,” Christine said, wetting glasses with vermouth. “It’s about time you guys got dedicated servers. Now you can move on to the next phase, right? Congrats.”

  “Yes, well…I have this crazy idea how we got those servers.” Mike kept his eyes on David. “I’m guessing ELOPe was turned on a little early.”

  “What makes you think that?” David said, his fingers turning white around his martini glass.

  “You asked me to import all internal emails. Which I did, two days ago.”

  “Any problems?”

  “No, none at all. That’s the problem. There should have been a peak in background processing activity as I gave ELOPe access to accounts across the company.” Mike turned to Christine. “Any time we add new email sources, ELOPe analyzes the backlog. When I added ten thousand employees, with thousands of emails each, I expected a giant processing spike, considering all our performance problems.” He returned to David. “But you know what I found, right? No spike. Hardly any activity. Now why would that be?”

  Christine stopped at Mike’s tone, olive-covered toothpick hovering over a glass. “Come on, the suspense is killing me.”

  David shrugged and slumped in his chair. “Why?”

  “ELOPe had already been given access to everyone’s email.” Mike enunciated carefully. “I didn’t see a jump in activity, because by then it had finished processing their inboxes.”

  He waited, confident it was the only explanation that fit the data, but David didn’t say anything. Mike continued. “You turned on company-wide access days before, so ELOPe could help with the dedicated server proposal, right?”

  “I did…” David looked pained.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s awesome. ELOPe worked! You wrote an email, received suggestions, and the resulting message was persuasive enough to convince Gary to give you the servers! Why did you keep that secret? I’ve been chasing down performance spikes for days for no reason.”

  David let out a big sigh and twiddled his fingers on the countertop. Mike couldn’t figure out if he was embarrassed or relieved. Well, either way the secret was out.

  “I was trying to protect you,” David said after a moment. “We didn’t have permission for ELOPe to analyze live emails on the production servers, and if you knew you might have been held responsible.”

  “We’re in this together,” Mike said. “This is my project just as much as yours. Look, next time, tell me what is going on. I felt like crap when I realized you were keeping secrets.”

  David shook his head. “I didn’t think about it. Sorry.”

  “Okay, now forget moping about.” Mike stood and held his glass out in a toast. “ELOPe works. After two years of building that damn thing, it fucking works! Let’s celebrate!”

  David helped Christine clean up after dinner, he clearing dishes while she loaded the dishwasher. Mike had gone home after a dessert of chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. They joked that Mike and David had the culinary preferences of twelve-year-old boys.

  After Mike had gotten what he thought was the deception out on the table, everything had been fine. Mike was so elated ELOPe worked that he was happy enough to put the other issue behind them.

  “Why so quiet, hon?” Christine asked.

  “Just thinking.”

  “You’re not just thinking. Thinking is when you’re quiet, but snapping your fingers.” She glanced over in time to catch David’s smile. “You’ve been moody all week. If this is about lying to Mike, well, he knows now, and he forgives you. Stop worrying.”

  “There’s more,” David said heavily.

  “More what?”

  “More I didn’t tell Mike. I turned on ELOPe and obscured the system logs as Mike suspected. But I also did something else...” David trailed off.

  “Well, are you going to spit it out, or should I insert bamboo under your fingernails?”

  “I gave ELOPe a hidden objective.”

  “What do you mean?” Christine asked.

  “When any message passes through ELOPe, and that would now be every single company email at Avogadro, the contents are scanned to see if the ELOPe project could be affected. Then ELOPe takes steps to maximize success.”

  “What does that even mean? What can it do?” She stopped washing dishes and stared at him.

  He looked away from her gaze. “ELOPe can’t do anything but rewrite emails,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “But because I turned off the logging, I can’t see the changes. I turned the directive on, and less than twenty-four hours later I received an allocation of five thousand servers. That many servers, built and installed, is close to five million dollars. How did ELOPe get someone to spend five million?”

  David paused to catch his breath. He started to look around and whisper, but realized that was foolish. They were alone in the house. “This afternoon I got another email, saying a team of twenty contractors had been assigned to the project, top-notch performance specialists hired to help us optimize ELOPe. We need the help, but I never asked to hire anyone.”

  “You’re starting to scare me.” Christine threw the sponge down and gave up on the dishes altogether. “There’s no way Sean or Gary would have hired them for you?”

  “No. Sean didn’t know about the extent of our performance issues, and Gary would far rather boot us off the servers. I’m convinced the contractors somehow stem from the override I created.”

  “Why the hell did you do something crazy like this in the first place?”

  “We were a couple days from the whole project being cancelled. Gary Mitchell was going to bounce us off his servers.” David’s shoulders slumped in despair. “ELOPe is a massive consumer of processing resources. We’re not even released, and we’re already consuming almost as many compute cycles as the production Search and Email products. They’re serving hundreds of millions of customers, while we’re in test mode.”

  “Everyone knows this, right? It’s no secret.”

  “Yes and no. I abused Sean’s carte blanche to get way more server resources than he ever intended to give us. If Gary went through with his ultimatum, not only would we have been kicked off his servers, but Sean would have learned I distorted what he said to get those resources. Definitely an end-of-career move.”

  “Jesus, David.” Christine had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot now.

  David was alarmed. The last time she was in this mood, he’d spent the night on the couch.

  “Why did you let everything snowball out of control?” she said.

/>   “I just want the project to succeed.” He tried his puppy-dog eyes on her, but she ignored him.

  “If you’re worried about the override you put in the software, back out the change with Mike. The way you’ve described the situation, resources are being stolen from all over the company, and everything points to you.”

  His spirits lifted. Christine always saw the obvious answers he missed. “You’re right. If I revert the code change before anyone gets wind of what’s happening, the manipulations should stop. I was nervous, afraid I’d crash production trying to patch the code. But Mike’s done it before. You don’t think he’ll freak out when I tell him?”

  “No, you dork. He’s your friend. Of course he’s going to help you.” She shook her head and sighed. “Why do husbands make everything so much more complicated than they need to be? Maybe I should have gotten a dog instead.”

  “At least I don’t shed.” He grabbed her and planted a big kiss on her lips. “Thanks for talking with me about this. Let me go email Mike.”

  Upstairs, David sat down in his office. He tapped impatiently at the touchpad, and started in on the email.

  Hi Mike,

  Thanks for coming over tonight. I’m glad we talked.

  We need to meet early tomorrow morning. There’s something I didn’t tell you. We have to live-patch the email servers to remove part of ELOPe, and I could really use your help since you’ve got experience with production rollbacks. I’ll explain everything tomorrow. - David.

  David relaxed as he hit the send button. With Mike by his side, they could fix anything.

  Jake Riley, the Lead Manager of the Offshore Data Center project, prepared to brief Kenneth Harrison and Rebecca Smith on the piracy problem. He counted himself lucky to get a meeting with the executive team, even if only two-thirds were present and it was nine-thirty at night. Tired from a twelve-hour workday, he forced himself to keep his energy high for the presentation.

  Jake shared a photo of the break-in. “This morning Bill flew out to Offshore Data Center 4, off the San Francisco coast. Pirates used cutting torches to cut holes in the sides of six of the cargo containers onboard ODC 4, and removed the servers from those containers. They left behind server racks and power transformers damaged beyond repair.” He switched to an interior photo showing one of the pillaged containers.

  Jake scanned the virtual conference room, ensuring everyone was with him. Kenneth and Rebecca, in the Portland headquarters, appeared on screens covering the far wall. Bill Larry sat next to Jake. Directional microphones, high definition monitors, and a low-latency network connection created an impressive simulation of a single conference room, even though one half was in Palo Alto and the other half in Oregon. Far beyond ordinary telepresence solutions, it was nearly indistinguishable from being in the same room. Jake figured the technology was the closest to a Star Trek holodeck he’d experience in his lifetime.

  “That brings us to three pirate attacks in as many months,” he said. “Two here, one on the East Coast.”

  Rebecca scanned through photos of the attack, frowning. The issue had caused a holdup in the ODC rollouts and therefore a small but growing hiccup in Avogadro’s master data center rollout plan. Computing requirements doubled every twenty months at Avogadro with no end in sight. Meeting at this time of night was a sure sign of just how critical server capacity was to the company’s growth.

  “Tell us about security measures,” Kenneth said. “You already do some hardening of the physical containers, right? Is there anything more you can do?”

  “The units are ruggedized for the maritime environment,” Jake said. He switched the overhead screen to an exploded diagram of the container design. “A standard cargo container is watertight, even capable of floating for years on its own. Our containers are modified to allow electricity, cooling, and data in and out. Additional weatherization controls humidity and ensures optimum interior conditions given the corrosive nature of the saltwater environment. After the first pirate theft, we modified the design and installed high-security doors.”

  Jake hated sharing bad news. He’d always had outstanding results to report in the past. The offshore project had posed no end of technical challenges, all of which his team had overcome. He had even brought on new employees with specialties in maritime engineering and construction, people who clashed with the culture of Avogadro, but he solved those problems, too. He never expected that old-fashioned piracy, a problem he considered a nineteenth-century issue, would be his biggest challenge. Pirates, damn it. He shook his head at the thought, and went on.

  “No matter what we do, there will always be a weakest link in security. That’s currently the container walls. If we harden those, the vulnerability will simply move. Hell, the thieves could tow the barge away if they had a mind to. These units are sitting out there in the ocean, miles from shore. Even with effective monitoring, if we have to scramble a helicopter, we’re looking at an hour elapsed time. A boat is a two-hour response. That’s if we have people staffed and ready to respond twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Monitoring is difficult as well,” Bill said. “We can monitor the interior of the cargo containers, where the environment is controlled. Outside we’ve got heavy winds, rain, saltwater, sun. We’ve tried three models of security cameras and they’ve all failed. Instead of alerts when the pirates board, we find out only when servers are unplugged.”

  “The rollout plan,” said Rebecca, “calls for twenty additional ODCs around the world within six months to meet capacity requirements. We don’t have the real estate to put them on land. We can’t centralize because of bandwidth and latency issues. The offshore project is critical, Jake. Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us back on track.”

  “Well, this is going to sound controversial, at least initially, but we do have an idea. Hear us out before you make a decision. Do you recall the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia?”

  Rebecca and Kenneth nodded from across the virtual table.

  “The companies shipping freight around Somalia faced similar issues. They couldn’t arm their sailors, civilians with no combat training who can’t be expected to repel a pirate attack.” Jake put another slide up on the overhead screen, showing a small tank-like robot. “iRobot, the company that sells Roomba, also makes robots for commercial and military use. They’d already developed maritime exploration robots and weaponized drones. In Somalia they took the next step, and created weaponized versions of their maritime robots.”

  Rebecca had one eyebrow raised.

  Jake smiled. “You know where I’m going. But hear me out.”

  Rebecca waved a hand for him to continue.

  “They deployed a two-part solution on commercial ships that passed near Somalia. An autonomous submersible bot can attack and disable the pirate ship itself, and an armed robot on deck can repel would-be boarders. They tried the robots on dozens of shipping vessels in the area, and after three successful cases of repelling pirate attacks, there have been no major attempts at piracy in the last six months. We can assume word got around the criminal community about the new defenses.”

  Rebecca and Kenneth glanced at each other. Rebecca’s initial amusement had turned into a concerned frown.

  Jake forced himself to keep going. He switched slides twice more, displaying the submersible unit and tank-like deck robot onboard a freighter. “We talked to iRobot, and I have an initial bid from them. They have recommended a similar package for our offshore data centers. Submersible robots to take out ships, onboard robots to disable boarders.”

  Jake had a hard time meeting Rebecca’s gaze. He was walking a fine line here. Avogadro prided itself on their enlightened culture: it wasn’t exactly an environment welcoming to violence and guns. He could hardly believe he was suggesting putting weapons in a data center. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn’t even a single armed guard in all their land-based facilities. They were an Internet company, not a military contractor.

  Before Rebecca could res
pond, Bill jumped in. “I know this may seem radical to put armed robots in place. But it’s worked off Somalia. In fact, total injuries and deaths are down. The approach will scale to any number of data centers we care to deploy. It’s also cost-effective and risk-reducing because we don’t have to maintain people onboard the barges.”

  Kenneth leaned over, checked in with Rebecca. She shook her head.

  “Keep going,” Kenneth said. “Let’s hear the rest.”

  Jake and Bill covered the entire iRobot proposal, explaining more about the robots to be used and the estimated cost. They spent the greatest amount of time detailing the protocols put in place with the robots to ensure minimum loss of life and risk.

  At the end everyone was quiet. Jake heard the hum of cooling fans in the room. He was sweating under his clothes and desperately wanted to go home. He discreetly glanced at the clock. After eleven now. He’d been working since five in the morning.

  Even Kenneth turned and waited on Rebecca, clearly not willing to stick his neck out on this proposal.

  After a minute, Rebecca started hesitantly. “I wouldn’t risk human life for the mere loss of ten million dollars.” She paused, then went on more strongly. “But the privacy implications of losing the data stored on those servers are huge. A breach opens up the potential for litigation from our users and regulation from the government. More significantly, if we fail to retain the trust of our users, we’re sunk. Our cloud strategy works only as long as our customers have complete confidence in the security and integrity of their personal data.” She stabbed at the table with one finger. “Losing customer trust in this case means billions of dollars of revenue. We can’t afford the loss of one hard drive containing customer information, let alone tens of thousands of hard drives in an ODC.”