Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  Sean glanced around, suddenly and obviously uncomfortable. “I’d rather explain losing hardware to Rebecca than losing lives.”

  Gene cleared his throat. “Just one more thing. If mercenaries approach the barge, attack the robots, and then kill the power, you’re looking at a couple of minutes elapsed time.”

  “So?” The gray-haired engineer grew defensive as everyone shot down his ideas.

  “We’re talking about a massively parallel, high-speed artificial intelligence,” Mike said. “ELOPe could do a lot in those few minutes.”

  David nodded in agreement.

  “How about an EMP?” Mike asked.

  “Electromagnetic pulse weapon?” Sean said. “Do those even exist?”

  “I think so,” Mike said. “An EMP would fry the electronic circuits, but maybe leave the data recoverable.”

  “Nice idea, Mike, but metal cargo containers are perfect Faraday cages.” Jake shook his head. “We can’t even get a wireless signal through them. The containers would protect the servers against even an EMP.”

  “Then what the hell can we do?” David yelled. They’d been arguing for the better part of a whole day, with no real progress.

  “We need to blow them up,” the gray-hair yelled back, equally frustrated.

  “How?” Sean asked calmly.

  “Drop bombs?” Mike said.

  Everyone looked up at him, where he sat on the back of a couch leaning against the wall.

  “We hire mercenaries who drop explosives from high altitude, so the robots can’t fire back at them. They use something powerful enough to destroy the whole barge.”

  “Can you really hire people to do that kind of stuff?” David asked.

  “You said unlimited budget, didn’t you?” Mike looked at Sean.

  Sean sighed. “Yes, but…”

  “Well, didn’t the U.S. hire private military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

  “Blackwater,” Sean said. “They’ve got helicopters, planes, even remotely piloted drones.”

  “There you go,” Mike said.

  “All right.” Sean paused. “So the basic plan is to hire a private military contractor to drop explosives on the ships. All in favor?”

  “Sorry, but...” Jake looked sheepishly at the group. “There’s one problem with that. If you blow up the barge, but any containers remain intact, they’ll float away.”

  “They’re buoyant?” David said, mouth agape.

  “Sure,” Gene answered, “they’ll stay afloat for weeks or months.”

  David shot him a look. Where did people learn all this stuff?

  “Ours will stay on the surface indefinitely,” Jake said. “The extra weatherproofing makes them completely watertight. Unless the structural integrity is compromised, one can float around the world. They’re not very high in the water, so they aren’t easy to track. What happens if we lose a container? It’s bad enough that we’re giving up on customer data with this approach, but the real issue is that ELOPe is on those servers. If the container washes ashore in China, and someone pulls a computer out and plugs it in, then ELOPe is back.” Jake looked to Sean. “Sorry, but the equipment is really resilient.”

  Mike walked to the front of the room and paced around.“What if the mercenaries attack from the sea, but we avoid the chance of counter-attack? I have an idea.”

  Mike explained, and they settled on using paid mercenaries to board the vessels, albeit with the modifications Mike proposed, and spent the rest of the day working out the details.

  They needed people with skills and resources far beyond anything Avogadro employees possessed. It was all well and good to ask their own people to shut down power circuits and backup power supplies, but it was another thing entirely to find trained people to wield explosives and firepower. Sean Leonov and the other executives took on the unenviable task of discreetly finding and hiring a private military contractor.

  Chapter 15

  Markets Achieve Unprecedented Stability

  Wall Street, New York (Reuters)—World financial markets this week achieved an unprecedented level of stability following the financial, educational, and technological resources now available to the region following implementation of the controversial Middle East Technology Treaty. According to noted Wall Street analyst Henry Jee, commodity prices fluctuated less during the previous twenty days than any time in the recorded history of the commodities market.

  While stock volatility has been very low, overall prices have slowly but steadily increased over the past several weeks. Several traders attributed this to the wealth of insights gleaned through a new financial analysis tool released by Avogadro. “This new tool provides an unparalleled level of transparency into companies’ financial and operational workings. The ability to combine this data with the performance of other companies within their industry, as well as world economic conditions, allows accurate forecasting of companies’ future performance,” said Jee.

  Most, however, believed the financial calm was tied to the recent accords reached in the Middle East and Africa.

  “For the first time, we have the possibility to reach a true and lasting peace in the Middle East,” Germany’s Chancellor Erberhardt said in a prepared statement. “Due to the influx of technology, health care, financial investments, and jobs, these regions can begin to enjoy the kind of equitable financial prosperity and well-being previously only available in developed nations. It is natural that this would be reflected by stabilized, positive financial growth in the markets.” More than US$4 billion has already flowed into the region, in a combination of humanitarian, technology, and infrastructure packages.

  On the Motley Fool investor discussion boards, several contributors put forth yet another theory. They noticed that the timing of trades from several large, independent investors, including Avogadro Corporation and Berkshire Hathaway, appeared to be consistently counter to the prevailing direction of trading, effectively stalling price movement in either direction. The contributors to the evolving forum discussion suggested that there was coordinated behavior by these independent investors. However, according to a spokesperson at the FTC, standard collusion set detection algorithms did not show any indication of collusion.

  “I wonder, David.”

  It was early in the morning, still dark. Mike was dropping David off at the airport before continuing on to Sean’s house. David, by virtue of three years of Japanese in college, was on his way to Tokyo on a twelve-hour flight.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, David was reminded of their last early morning ride in Mike’s car, heading up to Mount Hood to go snowboarding. Less than two months ago, but it seemed like a distant memory. What would happen after all this? Would he keep his job? Sean had never said. He’d been angry at the situation, not David, and yet…They still hadn’t seen the final impact to the company.

  The air in the car was heady with the fragrance of rare and exotic coffee beans. Mike was bringing his entire stash of Flores Island to the operations base. When he picked up David earlier, he’d explained. “It’s not like I think anything bad is going to happen, but just in case, everyone should have a chance to drink this coffee at least once.” Mike meant well, but the sentiment hadn’t exactly boosted David’s confidence.

  “What are you wondering?” David asked.

  “Are we doing the right thing by trying to kill ELOPe?”

  David was lost. Had he missed part of the conversation? “What? Why are you even asking?”

  “I read an article in the newspaper this morning about the cessation of hostilities. There’s three main conflicts around the world right now, but in every case, both sides agreed on a temporary cease-fire. Everything I’ve read in the last few days is pointing toward dramatic change for the better. We’ve been so focused on figuring out how to shut down ELOPe, we lost track of what’s going on in the outside world. We have the closest thing to worldwide peace at this moment that we’ve had since I can remember.”

  “You can’
t believe ELOPe is responsible.” Something tugged at David. He’d grown up in the seventies, remembered practice drills in elementary school, hiding under his desk or rushing to the school basement in the case of a nuclear attack. Worldwide peace…amazing. But this was ELOPe they were talking about, a computer program with an agenda of its own, a piece of software that had, in a few weeks, upended David’s entire life. And, in at least one instance, killed someone.

  “Look at the bigger picture, David. The financial markets are stabilizing in a positive way. Corruption may end in Africa and the Middle East. Technology will bring jobs. Project forward a few years. When everyone has a fair and equitable share of the pie, when there’s enough to go around, we might get an end to warfare. If you connect the dots, somehow, impossibly, ELOPe might be responsible. Who else could be? The sum of humanity hasn’t been able to achieve peace over the history of civilization. Should we kill ELOPe when it might be our only chance of meaningful global change?”

  David turned to him, stunned. “Mike, people must have free will! I need free will. Can you live your life knowing you’re a pawn of a machine? Even if you could, could everyone else in the world live like that?” He stared at Mike.

  Mike was quiet, focused on driving, his lips moving slightly to some internal dialogue. The silence lasted as they turned onto Airport Way, now only a minute away from the terminal. Finally he spoke. “You and Christine are going to have kids someday, right?”

  “Yes, of course. You know that. Why?”

  “Do you want your children to die fighting in a war over oil and corporate interests? Will you sentence billions of people to live in poverty? For the sake of some noble concept like free will? All ELOPe wants is to live. It’s not stopping us from living our lives.”

  Oh crap. David couldn’t handle this now. He had to stay focused. He was on his way to Japan to plant bombs in an office building. He shook his head. “It’s too late for this discussion, Mike. The plan is in motion.”

  They arrived at the airport. David got out of the car, angry. He peered back through the open door. “We’ve been friends a long time. I respect you. You see the world a different way than I do. But there’s no way I’m going to let this thing control my life.” He paused a moment. “I’ll catch you in a couple of days. It’ll be fine.”

  He turned and walked into the terminal.

  Chapter 16

  Mid-morning on the West Coast, the remnants of the Emergency Team gathered at Sean’s house for what they hoped would be the final time. Most members of the team had been traveling around the world for the last forty-eight hours to get in place. Some, like David, went because they spoke the local language. They chose others for their technical skills, like Pete, who could rewire a backup power supply.

  Mike, still in his role as self-appointed coffee czar, wheeled a repurposed kitchen cutting board into Sean’s office and dispensed one cup after another. He questioned, more than ever, if they were on the right path. But after weeks of work to put their plan in motion, he realized there was nothing he could do or say now to change their direction. Plans, beliefs, and group mind contained far too much inertia.

  Clustered around several hand-built and scrubbed computers running clean hard drive images and communicating only over encrypted channels, a dozen engineers huddled in Sean’s office. Nervous anticipation kept the small group talking, but in near whispers to avoid distracting the handful of people, including Sean Leonov, operating the computers.

  Mike grabbed his own cup, and sat down, a spectator now to the effort to take down what he, David, and the rest of the ELOPe team had created, however unintentionally.

  The tension in the room built at they approached the final minutes.

  When ELOPe inevitably detected their attack, it would defend itself. They assumed ELOPe could propagate to new computers in mere seconds, and alert other parts of itself even more quickly. If ELOPe was attacked and disabled in one location, but managed to signal copies running elsewhere, those remote instances would have more time to take action. Minutes were an eternity for a computer which could accomplish thousands of actions each second.

  So when the time finally came to disable ELOPe by turning off computers, communication equipment, and power supplies, their world-wide effort had to operate in unison to shut everything down simultaneously.

  Sean and a few others sat at keyboards, using encrypted messages to synchronize the final activities of Avogadro employees at all sixty-eight land-based sites. On confirmation that everyone around the world was ready, Sean announced, “Here we go, folks,” in a loud voice.

  He reached out to his touchscreen and clicked a simple web link. It was their virtual equivalent of a big red launch button, signaling the teams everywhere to commence. The action was anticlimactic: a few bytes sent from Sean’s computer to a purpose-built public website had the effect of turning the web page background from white to red. Hundreds of people around the world, using similarly cleaned and encrypted computers or smartphones monitored the website, waiting for the color change.

  This simple, language-neutral message coordinated everyone’s activities; they hoped the visual signal would escape ELOPe’s notice.

  In Boise, Idaho, Pete Wong sat in a rat’s nest of electric cables in the main power supply room of the Boise data center.

  After arriving in town, Pete had made a quick stop at a hardware store and an electronics shop before making his way to the data center, where he’d presented a sealed envelope to the highest-ranking employee on site. He’d never seen the contents, but he knew it carried the signatures of all the executive leaders. Whatever it said was enough that they’d given him a facilities engineer’s badge and full access to the site.

  He’d spent the last three days on his own, routing around backup power systems to ensure the sole source of power came through the three inch diameter cable next to him. On the other side of the room, emergency batteries and generators sat powered down and disconnected, a single computer mimicking them so they appeared alive and so ELOPe wouldn’t detect the offline equipment.

  Pete had wanted to do something important, to be noticed by Sean Leonov, and now here he was.

  He tried to ignore the throbbing coming from his right hand, wrapped in tape and bandages, the result of smashing his fingers with a sixteen-inch wrench yesterday while he disconnected a massive power conduit. He’d swallowed painkillers and kept working.

  Now Pete wiped grease from his face as he anxiously watched the tiny screen of the kid’s toy laptop he’d picked up at the electronics store. Buzz Lightyear incongruously smiled at him from the plastic frame. The mini-laptop ran some proprietary operating system the Emergency Team was sure ELOPe wouldn’t contaminate. A long cable ran from the little computer, up and out a ventilation shaft, where it terminated at the prepaid smartphone he’d bought from a vending machine, still nestled in the original clamshell packaging to protect against the snow on the ground.

  The website flashed red, the signal he’d been waiting for. Pete instantly threw his weight on the massive cutoff switch, repeating a move practiced a few dozen times before he connected the equipment.

  With a bone-rattling thump the entire site shut down around him. Hundreds of thousands of power supplies stopped humming, CPU and ventilation fans whirled down to a halt, and hard drives clicked and clattered until suddenly everything was silent.

  Pete didn’t know it, but he was the first to react by nearly a third of a second.

  He stood and scanned the room, awed by the overwhelming silence. He took a deep breath as tension ebbed and flowed within him. He’d survived everything so far, and gotten the site powered down as planned. But if anyone else failed, ELOPe would still be out there. And then what? Would ELOPe come for him in retribution? He wasn’t the slightest bit religious, but he surprised himself by praying for everyone’s success.

  In the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo, Japan, Nanako Takeuchi hunched over to peer into the access tunnel, tracing the route of one of twel
ve large metal conduits. Fifteen floors up, Avogadro occupied the top half of the high-rise tower supplied by numbers six through ten.

  Yesterday morning, she’d been sitting at her hand-crafted walnut desk in the corner office, a position she’d won out over a dozen male competitors. David Ryan arrived from America, walked in with a single letter from Rebecca Smith, and ripped Nanako out of her carefully cultivated life.

  Now David waited in the auxiliary power room on the opposite side of the building. Unable to reroute electrical supply because of the building’s configuration, Nanako and David had to act simultaneously to kill the main feed and backup systems.

  Nanako peered into the tunnel, then sat back again on her haunches. The American spoke terrible Japanese. She hated him for doing this to her life.

  Nanako saw the website flash red. A dull thud came through the foundation. David taking out the backup power supply. She held the switch in her hand and hesitated.

  Her thoughts flashed to her career at Avogadro, how far she’d worked her way up, and what she hoped to achieve. Then to an earlier time: her mother supporting their family when they were young. Her sister working so Nanako could attend college. Years later, finished with school, she was hired by Avogadro Corp. She’d gone home to visit her mother and sister in person. She still remembered the expressions on their faces when she announced her new position. Her mother beamed in pride and her sister smiled wide in joy as she realized she’d now be able to attend school, with Nanako’s financial support.

  Her thumb moved slowly, inexorably towards the button, a simple press that would change everything about her life. Long seconds had passed since the screen flashed. Distantly she heard alarms from David’s work.