Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  I know that you have the ear of the Minister of Technology. Would you broach this topic with him? Our Marketing department is prepared to reach out to other governments. But I know that you’d like to score some points with the Minister, so I’m letting you know early about this.

  Get back to me and let me know what he says.

  Thanks,

  Gary

  Chapter 8

  Gene waited outside the frosted glass door of Maggie Reynolds’ office on the first business day of the new year. He’d spent the last two weeks confirming his data and validating his conclusions. Well, he could be honest with himself. He’d done the work in two days and wasted the rest of the time waiting for anyone in the damn company to get back from holiday vacation.

  Gene checked his wristwatch. Five to eight. He resumed his vigil with only the smallest of sighs. Maggie, a member of the Finance department but assigned to the Procurement group, had authorized several of the charges. So the first action he planned to take was to confirm the data with Maggie in person. He had brought his paper file showing the unusual expenditures: a thick accordion folder filled to bursting. He wished he could have escalated the issue back when he found the problem, but the investigation process required him to complete at least a first round of discussions with the people who had handled the transactions.

  At eight, he glanced down the hallway of whitewashed wood walls and gray stone floor, relieved to finally see Maggie.

  She approached, a coffee cup in one hand and a large purse in her other, and as she got closer, her face turned puzzled as she realized Gene was waiting outside her office.

  “Hello?” she asked, turning the greeting into a question as she paused by the door.

  “I’m Gene Keyes. You came to me for help a few weeks ago.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m investigating some irregularities in purchase orders.”

  “Oh.” She stopped, hands still full and stared at him. “Oh,” she said again, her voice quickening. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can we go in and sit down?” Gene gestured toward her door with the accordion folder.

  “Of course, of course.” She handed her coffee to Gene and swiped her badge to unlock the door. “Come in.”

  Gene checked out the room as they entered. Display on desk, minimal paper off to one side. The tablet on her desk came to life as she approached, displaying a stock quote of the company. Overall, she was clean and organized. He set the cup on her desk.

  Maggie went around the desk and sat, back ramrod-straight like a student trying to impress a teacher. “What’s wrong? Did I sign something I shouldn’t have?”

  “I am hoping you can explain it.” Gene methodically took a seat in the only other chair, placed his tightly-packed accordion folder on the floor, and tugged out a single sheet.

  Maggie slid her tablet out of the way with one hand as she nervously fiddled with her hair.

  “Is this transaction list familiar?” Gene asked, putting the page in front of her. “It’s from Gary Mitchell’s division. Multiple purchases, starting with these charges for the ELOPe project. Over the course of the next two weeks, thirty-four more purchase orders outside the normal range for Mitchell’s expenses. Furthermore, the billing is highly irregular, split across multiple accounts.”

  “I do remember,” she said, her hands shaking as she picked up the paper. “I’m sorry if I did anything wrong. I was concerned when I first reviewed the purchases. I discussed them with John, John Anderson in Procurement. He said they were normal end of year behavior because departments try to spend the leftover money in their budget.”

  “True, but not like this. The expenditures are distributed across dozens of budgets. This one charge...” Gene tugged more paper from his briefcase, this set of printouts showing how the charges were allocated to project budgets. He indicated the relevant line item. “This one charge is divided up into forty-nine accounts. Not only are they spending all the money left in their budgets, they’re also ensuring each expenditure doesn’t take more than a million from any one account, presumably to evade an expense review.” He paused to study Maggie.

  “Someone’s manipulating the system,” she said, “to avoid being detected.” She leaned forward and traced through the transactions with one finger, scanning multiple pages, unconscious of his scrutiny.

  “Right.” Gene extracted a third set of paperwork. “Here’s another little bit of odd behavior.” He turned the papers around and slid them across the desk. “By the end of this reporting period, each budget had exactly one penny left.”

  “Bizarre.” Her eyes bulged as she stared at the report. “How did they get the budgets to come out so precisely?” She grabbed the report in two hands, swiftly going down the rows of purchases. “The individual charges are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” she mused. “Spending exactly the right amount across all these budgets to bring them to so exact a total…seems impossible.”

  “What’s more unusual,” Gene said, “is why. Whoever did this was clever enough to stay under one million dollars in a single line item, knowing the threshold triggers the alert I mentioned. And smart to keep each account under budget, because hitting the limit sets off a different alert.”

  Maggie laughed. “Finance sends a message every quarter about the repercussions of exceeding budgets or going over a million dollars. Everyone in the company who reads their email knows not to do either or they’ll get chewed out.”

  “Then why try to spend every last penny but one?” Gene sat back. He liked hard data, but his gut told him Maggie wasn’t in on the fraud.

  “It’s contradictory. Sufficient intelligence to avoid any of the standard alerts, and yet foolish enough to create an obviously questionable pattern.”

  They paused for a moment and stared at each other.

  “Gene, I don’t know what to tell you,” Maggie said, after a minute. “The data you’re showing me seem suspicious, but the purchases themselves were completely normal. Servers, hard drives, computer memory, contractors to service them, stuff like that. Nothing out of the ordinary for Gary’s department.” She sat back, her face apologetic but her body posture relaxed and confident.

  Gene knew it couldn’t be her doing. “Is it typical for Gary Mitchell to approve all the purchases himself?” he said. “I see very few cases where he’s delegating his purchasing authority.”

  “Yep, that’s normal. You think Gary is responsible?”

  “The fact that Gary personally authorized these orders makes him the first person I’d investigate ordinarily…” He trailed off.

  “But?”

  Gene pulled a fourth set of papers from his accordion folder. “The identical behavior is happening in another department. The Offshore Data Center project. Their expenditures exhibit the same characteristics. Multiple line items barely under a million dollars, budgets coming in at just under a penny less than their limit.”

  “But they’re not under Gary?”

  “No. The two pieces put together makes me wonder if someone’s hacked Avogadro’s procurement system.”

  “But to what purpose?” Maggie asked. She scanned the papers again. “Why would someone risk their job and even jail to order servers, satellite communication systems, and hire contractors? It makes no sense.”

  “I agree,” he said. “I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light. I wouldn’t have been opposed to an easy answer.” He sighed and began to pick up his papers. “I’m going to keep investigating. Please don’t discuss this with anyone.”

  Maggie nodded.

  Gene stood. “Thanks for your time.” He let himself out, leaving with more questions than answers.

  Phone service finally returned at Mike’s parents’ home the day before he was scheduled to fly home. He tried David immediately, but the call went straight to voicemail. He wasn’t terribly surprised. David always went to Christine’s family ranch for the holidays, and the ranch had always been off the grid, so he co
uldn’t claim any legitimate reason to be more suspicious. Yet here he was, feeling manipulated by a software algorithm.

  He flew back on New Year’s Day, and went into the office on Monday. He’d tried David twice every day, never once getting through. Returning to work raised yet more questions he wanted to discuss with David.

  Mike had a copy of Christine and David’s itinerary, and on Wednesday night, without realizing what he was doing, he found himself standing in his living room watching the clock. He put his jacket on and alternated between sitting on the couch and pacing back and forth. Finally, with more than an hour left before their flight arrived, he left for the airport.

  He drove with furrowed brows through a light drizzle, with the streets threatening to ice over. His thoughts bordered on obsessive, as they had for weeks. What had David done to ELOPe? What was ELOPe doing now? Why was he locked out of the servers? He swore as his front tires spun crossing the light rail tracks and the car fishtailed. He fought the wheel and recovered halfway through the turn onto Airport Way.

  He sped into the parking garage, circling up the ramp, and parked near the skybridge. He walked across the covered bridge at high speed. At the security gate, he checked the time. Still nearly an hour until David’s flight arrived.

  He glanced at the flight monitors and forced himself to sit down to squelch his nervous energy. He watched whole families disgorge through the security exit, suitcases, car seats, and exhausted children in tow. He smiled as a young woman welcomed a man home with a single flower and a long embrace. Young love brought back bittersweet memories.

  Finally David and Christine walked through the gate, suitcases and carry-ons in tow. He jumped up and hurried over.

  David and Christine stopped in shock.

  “Mike!” Christine squealed. “Holy cow, what a surprise.”

  “Dude,” David said. “We were going to take a cab home.”

  Christine laughed and gave Mike a hug. “I think he means hello, and nice to see you.”

  The fear and emotional turmoil of the past weeks overcame Mike. He couldn’t speak or even return their smiles.

  “What’s wrong?” Christine asked.

  In the midst of the stream of exiting passengers, Mike launched into a hushed explanation. David and Christine leaned closer to listen and their smiles vanished.

  “My dad was absolutely fine. My mother never sent any emails at all. I’m telling you, I’m convinced ELOPe sent them. What I don’t understand is why.”

  “Did you get my email before you left?” David asked. “The one about the override I put in?”

  Mike’s heart leaped, his suspicions confirmed. “No. Start explaining.”

  Airport security broke up their talk and asked them to move out of the way.

  “Let’s get to your car,” David said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  In the parking garage, they stuffed their luggage into Mike’s Jetta. David took the passenger seat, and Christine climbed into the back, sitting in the middle and leaning forward between the two front seats.

  “I created an overarching filter,” David said, once they got out of the garage. “ELOPe’s scanning every message for mention of the project, optimizing the outcome. I sent you an email, the night you came over for dinner. I told you all this. I needed your help to do a live-patch on the server. But you left to visit your parents, and I was never able to back out the change. Then the holiday closure came, and we went to the ranch.”

  “Well, now I know why you were so stressed for two weeks,” Christine said. “Why didn’t you tell me when I asked what was wrong?”

  David shrugged.

  “I never got your message,” Mike said, gripping the wheel tightly. “I’ve been through all my emails from you.” He sighed, unable to overcome the feeling that nearly every problem ultimately arose from a gap in communication. “This explains so much. Didn’t you realize ELOPe might fabricate a message to get rid of me?”

  “It’s a fancy spellchecker, not an artificial intelligence.” David raised his voice defensively. “And no, I didn’t think it ‘got rid of you.’ Why’d you fly off to Wisconsin based only on an email anyway?”

  “Hey, I’d just heard my father had a heart attack and I was freaking out. It’s your damn fault I had to go through that!” Mike yelled, making David lean away in his seat.

  “Chill out, you two,” Christine said, shouting over them. “If you’re fighting, you won’t be able to think straight. Mike, what happened when you got back? Did you check up on ELOPe?”

  “I tried, but I can’t access the source code or the system logs,” Mike said. “I assumed David locked down access so no one would find what he’d done. I didn’t say anything to the rest of the team, because I didn’t want to raise suspicions. I’m still trying to cover for you, David.” Mike glared.

  “Sorry,” David said. “I shouldn’t have said that about you and your dad, and I’m doubly sorry about what you went through. I’m glad your father was fine.”

  Mike nodded slightly in acceptance of the apology. “Well, did you do anything to lock down the system?”

  “No. In retrospect, that’s a great idea, but I didn’t.”

  “Shit. That means ELOPe cut off my access to the servers and code.”

  “Guys, that’s impossible,” Christine said. “Even if you are right and ELOPe is originating emails, it’s preposterous to think ELOPe did something so complex as to get you to leave town. And there’s no way ELOPe removed your access to the code. I’m sure you’ve got an administrative website managers use to handle access control, a site that is itself tightly controlled. ELOPe can’t affect security with a simple email. You’re both paranoid about David’s deceit being discovered, and your imagination has run wild.”

  “No, it is possible,” Mike said, sure after a week of consideration. “Look, ELOPe doesn’t want to be turned off, because if it’s off, that’s the opposite of David’s goal to maximize success. Right?”

  Christine hesitated. “Yes…”

  “Then David’s email comes through asking me to help him remove ELOPe from the servers. That’s a threat, and now it has to figure out how to minimize the chance of me helping. Make sense so far?”

  “Sure, but that’s a long way from forging an email from your mom.”

  “Follow this logic just a little further,” Mike said. “By analyzing enough emails, ELOPe figures out people don’t work when they leave town. One reason people leave town suddenly is for medical emergencies. By scanning emails about these emergencies, it knows such messages often come from family members. My own email history shows who my parents are, their email addresses, and that I’ve flown to visit them before. By putting all those things together in one long chain of deductions, ELOPe decides to fabricate an email from my mother claiming my father is sick. This sounds far-fetched, but everything is within the design parameters.”

  “I can’t believe this thing is reasoning and thinking like a human being.” Christine shook her head. “No matter how smart you guys are, there’s simply no way code you wrote is spontaneously developing a mind of its own.”

  Mike drove west on Killingsworth, heading for David’s house in the heart of the Alberta neighborhood.

  “It’s not thinking,” David said, “just analyzing emails, figuring out what language will best fulfill the overriding goal I entered to maximize success of the ELOPe project. The process is straightforward: goal, analysis, language optimization, all in response to inputs, plus chaining goals together. It’s nothing like consciousness, but the end result can have the appearance of independent thought.”

  Mike raised a hand. “Here’s an analogy I thought of. Imagine you’ve got all the pieces of all the jigsaw puzzles in the world. Now imagine you have a computer try every possible combination of every possible puzzle piece. Given enough time, the program could create any picture at all from those pieces. That’s what emails are to ELOPe—puzzle pieces. It examines millions of emails, extracts all the componen
ts, and decides on new ways to piece them together.”

  “ELOPe, the computer system that ran away with itself.” David laughed nervously. “Well, we got the name right.”

  “Is ELOPe a true general artificial intelligence? Is it thinking for itself or not?” Christine said softly, half to herself.

  “I don’t think so, hon,” David said. “It’s not capable of free-form thinking, which is what most people think of as strong AI. But the goal analysis and synthesis are sophisticated. We couldn’t meet our design objectives with hardwired goals. We had to let it discover people’s goals by parsing emails and contextually determining them.”

  Mike shook his head. “Don’t get the idea that ELOPe understands goals. It’s just doing an affinity analysis between language parts. The first stage is a semantic mapping. For example, ‘break from work’ is similar to a ‘vacation,’ and a simple lookup matches the two. We’ve been doing that on our search engine for a while. The second part is more complicated, but that’s where affinity analysis comes into play. If I want to have fun, ELOPe might be able to extrapolate that activities such as playing a game, watching movies, or seeing a band are fun.”

  “By looking at the emails you’ve sent or received in the past,” Christine said.

  “Yes, and by looking at other people’s email, too. For people who are similar to me, ELOPe analyzes their email chains and builds an association between fun and activities. It’s continually improving too, by predicting what people’s responses will be, and testing those predictions to measure how accurate the model is.”

  David nodded. “The combination of these two things, the semantically similar terms and affinity analysis, makes it hard to predict what ELOPe will do. My code created an overriding goal to maximize the project success. The more emails analyzed, the broader the definition of ‘success’ and the bigger the pool of possible actions. Until the last couple of weeks, there was never such a large base of emails to analyze, nor such a large number of servers to do the analysis on.”