Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  They brainstormed a list of employees who could help them further develop their plan. The list included people from Facilities, Travel, the engineers who developed the site plans and those who were responsible for backup and fail-safe systems. Sean agreed to spend the next day meeting each employee one-on-one, since he was the only member of their team widely known and instantly recognizable.

  A few days ago, David couldn’t envision a future, couldn’t see a path out of the situation he was in. It had left him with an ever-present, churning chasm at the core of his being, a void filled only with fear and anxiety. Where once he dreamed of the future and aspirations about what he would become or achieve, faced with the specter of ELOPe he’d felt crushed, without hope or will.

  But as they worked that day, the chasm inside David quieted; and by the time he left, he did so with lifted spirits. They finally had a plan, with people and resources to support them. Sean Leonov was on their side. They still had a challenging task ahead, one fraught with the possibility of retribution by ELOPe, but it was just possible they could come out the other side. That chance was enough to give David hope again.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning David, Mike, and Pete reconvened at Sean’s house. Sean left shortly after they arrived, heading to the campus to track down the employees they’d identified the day before.

  A Peugeot belching smoke pulled up as Sean left. Gene parked and started to struggle with a huge cardboard box he extracted from his trunk.

  “What the heck do you have in there?” Mike asked.

  “Some old-fashioned stuff you fancy computer nerds might not be so familiar with. Let’s see what I have.”

  Inside the house, Gene proceeded to pull out stacks of paper pads, sticky notes, pencils and markers, maps of the United States and the world. David pitched in to help organize the material.

  “Do you really think we’re going to need all this?” David asked, puzzled at the sheer quantity of office supplies.

  “We plan to have about thirty people working here, without computers. So, yeah, we’re going to need this,” Gene said. “I’ve got more in the car, come help me unload. Accordion folders. Sketchbooks. Flip charts.”

  David glanced at Mike, raising one eyebrow.

  “I saw that,” Gene said. “You might think I’m weird, but believe me, people actually performed office work before computers. And maybe I happen to know a thing or two about it.”

  “Sorry,” they both said sheepishly.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” David said. “It’s just that I’ve never even owned a printer or had a newspaper subscription. I grew up online. It’s almost like if you pulled out one of those old phones, you know, the one with the round thing on it.”

  “A rotary phone? Are you pulling my chain?” Gene grumbled. “Damn fool kids.”

  David and Mike laughed.

  Before lunch, the first of the employees Sean had contacted started arriving. By the end of the day, most of the people had shown up. They accomplished little, because every time David began his explanation of what had happened so far, another person appeared, and David would have to start over.

  Finally, at eight in the evening, everyone was present. The whole house smelled of pizza, and would for days to come.

  Standing in Sean’s living room, David gazed at the dozens of people around him. Some engineers sat on the living room furniture, while others were perched on folding chairs Gene had purchased; still more cascaded onto the arms of couches, sat on the floor, or stood in the corners. Despite the heat in the packed room, everyone was silent as they waited to be briefed.

  David went through the narrative for the last time, his throat hoarse from many earlier partial retellings. The crowd periodically erupted into astonished gasps and side conversations, only to fall silent again as David resumed his story. When he’d recapped the technical explanation, Sean got up to speak.

  “The world I woke up in a few days ago was very different from the world I lived in all my life previously,” Sean began, and the crowd grew even quieter. “For the first time, man shares this world with another intelligence capable of sophisticated planning and actions. Unfortunately, this intelligence is like a cancer—one that will do anything, manipulate anyone, pursue any foe to ensure its own survival. It has control of our computers and our communications.

  “Our most important weapon is our intelligence and knowledge.” Sean gazed around the room. “I have complete confidence in this group’s ability to solve this problem, which is inherently a technical one. Our most important defense is our complete and utter discretion. Under no circumstances can word of this go outside our group or be communicated by email or phone, or ELOPe will be warned and take action against us, as it did with Mike and David when they first planned to undo ELOPe’s modifications.

  “The executive team will give you any support you need, pay any money necessary, and do whatever is needed to remove this virus from our computers. Now go get started!”

  The planning commenced in earnest. Alternately divided into working groups led by Sean, David, Mike, or Gene, or gathered into a whole, they tackled problems small and large—from bringing down computers and defeating backup power supplies to cleaning and restoring the computer software and data afterwards.

  During the next few days, Gene made several trips to the local office supply store, buying out much of the store’s entire stock of notebooks, flip charts, sticky notes, and markers, before he realized he was creating a pattern ELOPe might detect. After that, he spread his purchases out over several stores.

  Engineers worked around the clock, taking breaks only when exhaustion made it impossible to think. Some went home, but others sacked out in Sean’s spare bedrooms, or even crashed in the middle of the living room. As engineers woke in the morning, they’d take over from those who had pulled all-nighters, the cycle repeating daily.

  Over the course of three incredible days, the plan emerged.

  On the first day, they decided that for each remote site that needed to be powered down, they would send one employee who was not only in the direct management hierarchy but also commanded a high level of trust from employees at the site.

  One group focused solely on getting those people where they needed to be. Working hand in hand with the travel department and using printed records of travel plans, they found combinations of planned commercial and private aviation flights, bus trips, and automotive rentals to get the designated employees to their destinations.

  A second team, composed of facilities designers, crisis engineers, and real estate planners, identified a site-specific process for each of the many unique data centers and offices to reliably kill power to the site and bring all its computers down simultaneously. Although the locations shared many common design characteristics, each one had enough small differences to require the engineers to create a custom-tailored plan. All plans had to overcome stringent safety and backup systems designed expressly to keep the sites operating, regardless of any natural disasters, equipment failures, or other emergencies. And they did all this work without the primary tool they had always relied on: their computers.

  Once power had been shut down everywhere, the element of danger from ELOPe would be largely gone. Then a new clock would start ticking: a race against time to restore every computer from risk-free backups before customer confidence was lost, jeopardizing the Avogadro brand and business.

  Throughout the first day, people asked what to call their mixed group of real estate planners, programmers, operations engineers, and specialists from across the company. Gradually, they settled on a name: Emergency Team. It was simple, solemn, and accurate.

  Their planning had been stymied in one regard. No one present had sufficient knowledge about the offshore data centers. On the morning of the second day, recognizing this shortcoming, David sent a private pilot to the San Francisco Bay Area to fetch Bill Larry and Jake Riley. The pilot came back late that afternoon with only Jake.

&nb
sp; Jake hovered in the doorway, staring at the room full of engineers. His clothes were askew, his shirt hanging out of one side of his pants; his hair was a mess. Thick stubble on his face and dark circles under his eyes gave him the appearance of a haunted man.

  A hush settled over the room as engineers noticed his presence. Pete ran to get David from the office.

  Jake stood in the silence for a long moment, waiting for everyone’s attention. His lips moved as though he was considering what to say. David and Pete arrived in time to hear him speak.

  “I’m Jake Riley. I didn’t have a clue about what was going on before I got on the plane three hours ago, but Frank here briefed me on the flight. I have terrible news, something you should have known, but apparently has been suppressed: Bill Larry is missing and presumed dead.”

  There were gasps around the room.

  “He took a company helicopter to visit an offshore data center,” Jake said, raising his voice to get the attention of the startled, whispering crowd. “The aircraft disappeared without any message, and we assumed an equipment malfunction initially. On the flight up here, I heard about what’s been going on, and now I think the defensive robots stationed onboard the ODC probably killed him.”

  The packed room erupted into a roar of simultaneous discussion. David forced his way through the rest of the crowd to stand next to Jake, and found Sean had already beat him to the front.

  “Quiet, people!” Sean yelled, and the crowd silenced.

  “Why didn’t we know about this?” Sean asked.

  “You do know!” Jake said, his voice pleading, running one hand through his already chaotic hair. “I mean, I thought you knew, but maybe you don’t. I called you, tried to schedule a meeting, but you didn’t respond to either. Only emails got a response. You and I exchanged a hundred messages on the topic—at least, I assumed it was you I emailed. We had a Coast Guard search party and private firm searching for the missing helicopter. We found nothing. We assume he’s dead.”

  The assembled team took hours to get back to productive work after this news. When they did, it was with a mix of fear and grim determination.

  Sean left later for a private meeting with Rebecca and Kenneth to discuss whether to call in the authorities. But Sean and David had already talked and concluded there was nothing local police or FBI could do that the world’s biggest Internet company couldn’t do better themselves.

  After Sean left, David found himself outside on the patio, pacing alone. Had ELOPe really killed Bill? If so, that meant David was responsible. He was suddenly light-headed and couldn’t catch his breath. He sat down hard on a concrete wall. He could go to jail.

  Thoughts tumbled over each other in his mind. Could they handle this? With ELOPe escalating from manipulation to murder, had they already lost control of the situation?

  And if ELOPe had managed to hide a murder from them, what else didn’t they know?

  On the third day, the entire Emergency Team gathered under Jake Riley to debate options for the offshore data centers. Once more they convened in Sean’s living room, the only space large enough for the whole group.

  By this time, three solid days of people working around the clock was overwhelming the house. Takeout food and empty cups littered every surface, and the luxurious, once-white carpeting was turning gray with ground-in food and dirt. Sean’s extensive artwork was covered haphazardly with flip chart paper and maps. In the dark of night, an exhausted engineer had drawn diagrams of power supply connections on the wall, unaware of his mistake.

  “So far we’ve deployed twelve stationary barge type ODCs, and six of the refitted oil tanker model,” Jake said, passing around printed photos of each. “Our original plan used only barges, but the ready availability of tankers, the environmental benefits associated with reusing existing materials, and our rush to get the program back on track made the ships attractive.”

  “Was it your idea or ELOPe’s idea?” Gene called out from the side of the room, behind several rows of engineers.

  “I’m not sure,” Jake said, his shoulders slumped. “We were evaluating both over the last year, and had a couple of tankers in dock for modifications. The decision to deploy them came a few weeks ago.”

  “Sounds like ELOPe, then.”

  Jake nodded in defeat. “Regardless of how it happened, now both platform types have been fitted with automated defenses.” He gave out more photos, promotional shots of the robots. “The converted oil tankers don’t have a human crew, despite their mobility. They’re piloted by remote control. I had one of my engineers do a discreet test of the drive system this morning, and we appear to still be able to direct the tankers, but whether that control is an illusion, I can’t be sure. We shouldn’t count on it.”

  One of the engineers, a long-haired, hippie-looking fellow, asked, “So how the hell do we kill power under these conditions?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “We’re going to have to be creative. All the data centers are armed with robots. Those defenses are operating autonomously or under the control of this AI. We can’t fly people out to cut power supply cables.” He paused to look around. “Worse, every system has redundant backups. More even than traditional data centers, because we planned for extra contingencies.”

  “What can we do to take control of the robots?” asked Mike. “Can we incapacitate them in some way?”

  “Let’s block their communications,” one engineer volunteered.

  “They’ll just enter autonomous mode, according to what we learned, which doesn’t help us at all,” another answered.

  The discussion picked up speed.

  “Let’s shoot them!” someone called.

  “Won’t work, they’re hardened. It’d be like shooting a miniature tank. One that shoots back.”

  “As soon as we tried, ELOPe would know.”

  “What about some kind of electric shock to fry their circuits?”

  “With a Taser, we could send a hundred thousand volts into them.”

  “They’re probably resistant. We need technical specifications to know what we’re up against.”

  “We need an expert from iRobot, they’ve got to know their own vulnerabilities.”

  “We can’t risk communicating with iRobot,” Sean said. “We might alert ELOPe if it’s monitoring communications. Let’s switch gears for a minute. Does anyone have any ideas that doesn’t involve disabling the robots?”

  “Let’s cut off data communication to the ODCs. If we can kill the connection, regardless of whether the computers are on or not, ELOPe won’t be able to do anything. It’ll be isolated to the data center with no ability to affect the outside world.”

  “What’s the hardware like?” Samantha asked. “I assume fiber optic hard lines, right?”

  “Right,” Jake answered. “Primary communications is provided by eight ten-gigabit ports, giving us peak bandwidth of 80 gigabits per second, handled by two separate communication racks, so if one fails, we still have half our connectivity. But that’s just the primary. We also have ship-to-shore dual microwave transmission with 15 gigabits per second backup capacity.”

  “So we cut the fiber optic cables and kill the towers on land receiving the backup channel,” one engineer shouted out.

  “It’s not so simple,” Gene said, yelling to be heard over the engineers. “Jake, you might not know this, but purchasing records showed contractors installed additional comm systems over the holiday shutdown. The orders included...” Gene trailed off as he pulled out a notebook and flipped through looking for his notes. “Satellite transmitters. Twenty-five megabit per second capacity. I have the channel frequency data here, maybe you can track down which satellites they are communicating with. Oh, and long distance radio modems, two per platform, good up to 100 kilometers.”

  The engineers collectively groaned.

  “Multiple frequencies and destinations,” Samantha said. “Jamming everything will be impossible, there’s no way we’re going to get permission to sh
ut down satellites, and we have no idea what the other endpoint is for those long range data modems. We can’t track down every radio within a hundred kilometers.”

  “We’d never be able to shut down everything simultaneously,” another engineer grumbled.

  The conversation continued for hours, the temperature in the crowded house went up, and tempers flared. When food arrived, courtesy of Sean, everyone tumbled over each other to get outside for fresh air. The cold January drizzle sent them in after awhile, feeling refreshed.

  After they finished lunch, everyone passed through Sean’s kitchen and refilled from the six coffee pots now lined up in parallel on the counter. About half the people split off into subgroups and went to work in other rooms, while the remaining half regrouped in the living room.

  “Look, we’ve got to blow up the ODCs,” one gray-haired engineer said, when they were assembled once more. “You’re trying to come up with a fancy solution, but we don’t need fancy. We need results. If we blow them up, then boom, all the computers and all the hardware are toast. Total, immediate shutdown.”

  “It’s not that simple, though,” Jake said. “We still have to get the explosives on board, which requires getting past the robots.”

  Sean shook his head. “It’s going to be damn costly too, if we completely destroy them. We can do it if we have to, but that’s a lot of hardware to lose.”

  “So we hire some mercenaries, people with experience with this sort of thing,” the gray-haired engineer insisted, “and they storm the defenses. I mean, sure, the robots are tough, but they aren’t invincible. They’re light-duty bots, not even military grade. You could take them out with a high powered rifle and armor piercing bullets. Once the mercenaries are onboard, they kill power to the computers.”

  “If we do that,” Jake said, “we’re putting people in harm’s way. We’re asking them to go up against lethal, armed robots, and some of them will die.” He looked at Sean. “Are we okay with that?”