Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  He and Nanako split up. She’d fly through Thailand to Bhutan, a country without an extradition treaty, to wait for any legal fallout to dissipate, while David headed back to Portland to assist with recovery.

  Overhead, televisions repeatedly flashed the Avogadro logo and alternated between live video of the company building in Tokyo and an image of a web browser showing the out-of-service website. David was too distracted to listen.

  Conscious of security and cameras, he tried not to glance around and make himself more suspicious, even though he expected, at any moment, a hand on his shoulder, or a gun at his back. When the airline finally announced boarding for his flight, he suppressed a cry of relief.

  The passageway to the plane seemed to go on forever.

  At last the door came into view. His carry-on in one hand, ticket in the other, he was less than ten feet from the airplane. He rushed the final three strides and entered the cabin with a sigh of relief.

  He supposed the police could come rushing in after him, but he felt certain he was free now, just as sure as he’d been ten minutes ago of impending arrest. His shoulders dropped at least an inch as he calmed. He slid into his seat, muscles unwinding.

  He’d survived. After a month of persecution by the machine and weeks of conspiring to overthrow ELOPe, for the first time there was nothing left to worry about. He and the team still had to rebuild the company, but that would be straightforward compared to what they’d gone through.

  He accepted a pillow from the flight attendant, crushed it up against the window, and nestled his head in the corner. His recurrent nightmares wouldn’t visit him anymore. He fell asleep before the plane left the ground.

  Chapter 18

  Bahnhof Data Center, Stockholm, 100 feet below ground

  “Helena, have you seen this?”

  Helena peered over her glasses at her shift partner, Jan. They sat in the monitoring room of Europe’s most secure data center. Located in a converted underground bunker in Stockholm, the massive computer facility was fit for James Bond. At over four thousand square feet, the concrete and stone tomb contained tens of thousands of servers and hard drives. Designed to be secure from a nuclear bomb, and using retired submarine engines for backup power, the facility included an independent air supply, kitchen, food stocks, and office space for the engineers on duty. Armored steel doors protected against merely human incursions.

  Specially-vetted system administrators remained on-site twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, so any issue could be addressed ASAP for the clients paying for the privilege of hosting their applications in the elite facility. The sysadmins worked in a glass-enclosed room with a separate air filtration system, overlooking the data center proper.

  For Jan and Helena, it was just another day at work.

  “Have I seen what?”

  “My sandwich. Those idiots at the grocery put mustard on my sandwich. I never eat mustard.”

  Helena sighed and sipped her coffee. She went back to reading. She was in the middle of the latest sci-fi novel by her favorite writer from Scotland.

  “Holy shit, now look at this!” Jan cried out.

  “No.”

  “Really, come see.”

  “I don’t care about your sandwich,” Helena said, forcing her eyes to remain on her book.

  Seconds later, the shrill beep of an alarm drew Helena’s attention, and she looked up to where Jan stared, dumbfounded, at the dashboard.

  Jan pointed at indicators on the sixty-inch display hanging from the ceiling. “We were humming along at thirty percent of processor utilization all morning, and now we’re above ninety, with almost no spare capacity. Bandwidth under twenty percent until a minute ago, when it spiked to eighty. What is it? A denial of service attack?”

  As Jan spoke, the vibrations of the facility subtly shifted, as cooling fans sped up in response to the heat thrown off by CPUs running full throttle.

  Helena paused to consider his suggestion. A denial of service, or DOS, attack was a technique employed by hackers to bring down servers. The hackers used botnets composed of millions of PCs compromised by specially designed computer viruses. The botnet formed a virtual army of slave computers to send email spam or launch a DOS attack by choking servers with more requests than they could handle.

  “Let’s check the traffic before we jump to conclusions.” Helena set her book down. She silenced the alarm and worked with her main computer to display a list of programs consuming CPU time, while she simultaneously used a second computer to analyze traffic and discover what was saturating the network.

  “What the hell?” She hadn’t seen anything like this before. “The network load is coming from inside. At 2500 hours, we launched an application simultaneously on all servers, on behalf of account 6502530000. That’s...” Helena paused while she found the record in the customer database. “Avogadro Corp? Weird. Let’s check their account history.”

  Jan hung over her shoulder like an eager puppy staring at a ball. He’d started several weeks ago, and had completed training and even possessed a few years sysadmin experience, but it still thrilled him to watch a master like Helena navigate through the myriad control and monitoring systems they used. Surrounded by two large displays, and her personal MacBook Pro on the side, she had dozens of applications open, reviewing everything from accounting databases to system logs to routers. Before Jan could grok what Helena was doing with one application, she’d move on to the next. His head started to hurt.

  “We have a service level agreement in place to give Avogadro top preemptive priority. I guess they wanted an emergency backup in case their data centers were affected.”

  Even Jan knew Avogadro had more servers than any other company in the world. “Why would they want to use us? We’re tiny compared to them.”

  “Maybe they anticipated a problem,” Helena said. “According to this, we signed the contract less than a month ago.”

  “So what are we running? Their email servers? Their search engine?” Jan wondered aloud.

  “Not any customer-facing apps. If you check the network profile,” Helena gestured to the second display, “the majority of traffic is outbound. Based on the ports and addresses, Avogadro’s code is sending a ton of emails, big ones. They’re getting some inbound, but not enough to account for all of their customers. It’s puzzling. Could they be remotely restoring their servers via email?” Helena shook her head at the improbable notion.

  She turned to the third computer on her desk, her personal Mac. “Let’s see what happens when we visit Avogadro.” She launched two web browser windows, going to the Avogadro search page in one, and her email in the other. “Both are returning not reachable errors. Avogadro has a major outage.”

  “What do we do?” Jan asked.

  Helena thought for a moment. “The application and traffic is legitimate. Avogadro paid us for top priority, including the ability to preempt anything else we’re running. They must want this to run in the event of an outage at their own data centers. I can’t peek at the code or traffic without violating customer privacy. So I think we just babysit and hope the servers don’t melt down under the load.”

  She glanced at the dashboard, which showed processing pegged at a hundred percent. Glancing out the glass window of their enclosure, the indicator lights on every rack-mount server and router was a solid red. She’d never seen loads like this.

  “There’s a few standby racks not powered up yet,” Helena said, heading for the door. “I’m going to turn on every piece of hardware I can find. You to go into the admin tool and throttle back any application that isn’t Avogadro. We’ve got to free up some capacity here.”

  Helena headed out into the main room.

  Jan swallowed hard, and sat down in front of Helena’s computer. His hands trembled slightly as he rested them on Helena’s keyboard. He summoned up his courage and got to work.

  On the third day since the operation to take ELOPe down, everyone across the compan
y worked around the clock to restore services and data.

  With no opportunity to alert employees ahead of time to the downtime and with communications largely absent after the outage, the initial response was pure chaos. The best the Emergency Team could do was to position a point person at each site to meet with the highest ranking manager, providing a signed letter giving them the authority to oversee the restoration. They used the excuse of a computer virus attack from a foreign government seeking to steal data, and told everyone to avoid existing virus containment processes because the company itself had been compromised by foreign intelligence agents. The point person provided new instructions on the process to restore computers to known good backups free of ELOPe.

  Marketing managers replaced hard drives as administrative assistants ran restorations from USB. Towers of cardboard pizza boxes sprung up throughout hallways like teetering skyscrapers. Electricians and engineers repaired electrical power circuits and communication hardware damaged in the operation. Employees worked sixteen- and eighteen-hour shifts, some sleeping under desks.

  Yesterday, Gary Mitchell finally showed up at headquarters after being missing for more than three weeks. David heard through the rumor mill that Gary screamed bloody murder at the travel department. On vacation in Tahiti, Gary arrived at the airport on the last day of his trip to discover he’d been bounced to a flight the following day. With the Christmas holiday ending, homeward bound vacationers filled every seat, and no amount of yelling or bargaining could get Gary onto the plane. He went back to his hotel to find his mobile phone dead and his computer refusing to connect to the Avogadro network. When he returned the next day, his reservation had been moved out again. The process repeated until ELOPe was eliminated, and only then did Gary finally get a seat. Back in Portland, he walked into the biggest operations nightmare the company had ever faced.

  David laughed, and even now found himself smiling at Gary’s experience.

  In a small silo of relative calm and isolation, David and Gene worked together in David’s office, part of the team carefully monitoring data traffic for any new signs of ELOPe.

  David slid a plate to the side, to join a sloppy pile of used dishes and cups, and returned to his computer, blinking his eyes in exhaustion. When had he last been home? Two days ago, on his last shift away from the office. He’d been so nervous something critical would happen while he was gone that he climbed out of bed, briefly fell asleep putting his shoes on, and came back to the campus. Now he and Gene alternated turns taking brief cat naps on the couch they’d dragged over from the common room.

  He clicked through pages of the latest report, and tried not to think about Christine. She’d understood his sudden trip to the East Coast and been accommodating when he worked sixteen-hour days during the emergency planning. Her gaming company had its own deadlines, and she’d pulled plenty of all-nighters before new releases, so it was nothing unexpected in their marriage. She even helped out and brought food over to Sean’s several times. But now, almost four weeks in, her patience with David had run out.

  There were no more deliveries from home, and David suspected he was slowly destroying their relationship. Damn it all! He was tired of the crappy takeout and dirty clothes. His office chair had turned into a modern-day prison cell.

  “David! Look at this.”

  David tiredly rolled over to the small side table where Gene had set himself up to work and peered at Gene’s screen. After so much time of Gene using only paper records, it felt odd to watch the older man with a computer. But for all his talk, Gene was a quick, competent user. David had come to appreciate Gene’s suspicion of technology, because he possessed an uncanny ability to spot gaps where data might be altered. Gene distrusted their electronic systems, but he understood them well.

  Gene pointed to a heat map displaying network traffic, generated by a tool they wrote to analyze emails for signs of tampering. Through a heavily encrypted secondary channel, the program sampled packets to see if originating messages differed from the received text.

  With a few clicks, Gene displayed a list of emails, drilling into details of the records. He paused on one screen and glanced meaningfully at David.

  David’s couldn’t suppress an “Oh, shit!”, which elicited puzzled expressions from passing coworkers. The members of the Emergency Team were back in Avogadro offices now that ELOPe was disabled, but most employees didn’t know the truth of what happened, and never would.

  “Damn. You understand what this means?” David said, a crushing pressure on his chest.

  Gene nodded.

  David’s panic summoned ragged reserves of energy and he rushed out, Gene following in his footsteps. He grabbed Mike from the next room over, explaining in hushed tones as they ran to Sean Leonov’s office.

  It was a luxury to have offices and computers again, but the tradeoff was a lack of privacy to discuss the real events and a lengthy haul to get to the executive building. When they arrived, David walked past the administrative assistant and entered Sean’s office without even a knock.

  His suite was many times larger than any other on campus, long walls covered with whiteboards and screens, a conference table near the door, and expansive floor-to-ceiling windows. David absent-mindedly realized it was identical in layout to Sean’s home office.

  Sean, sitting by the window, a phone cradled to one ear, looked up in surprise.

  David rushed across the distance between door and desk and forced out the words he dreaded saying. “Gene found new evidence of tampered emails.” His voice was shrill with rising panic. “ELOPe’s running again.”

  “I have to go,” Sean said into the handset and hung up, his expression dark. “I’ll get Kenneth and Rebecca.”

  Chapter 19

  Rebecca and Kenneth arrived, harried and frustrated. Rebecca still had a phone headset on, and ended the call with a tap of a finger only after she entered the room. She stood and slapped her headset against her leg. Already obviously tense, she’d explode when he gave her the news.

  David launched into an explanation of what they’d discovered. He tried to treat the discussion like any another presentation. Calm, collected, logical. But despite good intentions, he rushed over words, repeated himself, and generally botched the whole thing, adding to his nervousness.

  “ELOPe is back. We discovered a consistent pattern of email changing between our Asian and American offices. The tampering covers topics from personnel assignments, to the order of restoring computers, to which disk images to use. Gene tracked the changes. We need to triangulate the position of ELOPe’s servers, to launch a new attack. We’ll have to shut everything down again.”

  The three company executives stared at him. Sean slowly shook his head.

  “We’re susceptible to reinfection,” David said. “We’re going to figure out how to prevent ELOPe from getting back onto our servers. We need a longer downtime to make sure we’ve got the right safeguards in place.”

  “I have more bad news,” Gene said. “Some emails are originating from a data center outside Avogadro. We have to shut down their servers. We’ll need to persuade them to work with us and keep the news of what’s going on contained.”

  No one spoke, and the uncomfortable silence lingered on. David heard a rasping noise, realized he was wheezing. He took a deep breath which caught in his chest.

  Everyone displayed raw emotions in reaction to the news. Shock, defeat, and anger rose to the surface, the unguarded expressions of people worn to the bone with ongoing stress.

  Rebecca leaned forward, the motion startling David. “I need to explain to shareholders the billions we lost in expected revenue. We’re hiding from auditors the millions we paid for mercenaries and illegal explosives. The plan was supposed to fix the damn problem!” She jabbed the table with a finger. “We are not having a repeat performance. This company would not survive. We’re in the web-fucking-services business—nothing is more important than uptime. Accountants, auditors, and federal investigators
are crawling all over this company. We lost half the Avogadro Gov accounts.” Rebecca slumped in her chair and continued in a soft voice. “We bombed our own data centers. I’m lying to analysts. No way we’re doing that again.”

  The pit in David’s stomach grew into a chasm that threatened to engulf him.

  “We agreed we must get rid of ELOPe,” he said. “There are costs, but you can’t consider allowing this thing to take control.” He looked around for support. Gene was the only person nodding in agreement.

  “You have no clue of the business demands and pressures involved in running this company,” Rebecca said. “Especially in the wake of what we’ve just been through. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t consider.” She glared at him.

  Mike stood and cleared his throat. David gratefully sank into his chair. Good old Mike would have his back.

  “I don’t think we should,” Mike said. “My reasons aren’t about uptime or profits.”

  David’s blood ran cold. Surely Mike wasn’t going to bring up his crazy idea about ELOPe helping everyone. He couldn’t still believe that, could he?

  “Before we shut down ELOPe,” Mike said, “in the weeks since the start of the year, we saw evidence around the world of amazing progress made on peace talks, financial stability, and international cooperation. We’ve got groups talking to each other that never did before, and in a year or two we might achieve world peace. Meanwhile, I read a newspaper article about the stock markets behaving so calmly we could be entering a new period of prosperity.”

  “Come on, Mike,” David said. “This is delusional. There is no way a bunch of emails can change centuries-old conflicts.”

  “We might not be able to prove ELOPe was the cause,” Mike said, raising his voice. “Then we blew it up, and what happened? The market is down fifteen percent. The African nations talks started to destabilize.”