The Genesis Code

by Lisa von Biela

  He was falling behind.

  His day-to-day activities, combined with the stress of high-alert monitoring for that elusive bug in OMTrade, were more than enough to keep him busy during long days. He didn’t have the energy—the capacity—to deal with the Venezuela project as well.

  Maybe Sheila had been right last night after all. She’d implied he wasn’t keeping up. And he wasn’t. Maybe it was time to consider his alternatives. If something didn’t change, he’d lose Sheila, or his job. Or both.

  Mark turned the list face-down on his desk, then picked up the phone and called Sheila. He fidgeted as he listened to it ring on the other end, then he caught himself, chagrined. Every particle of time had become so carefully allocated, he couldn’t even stand to wait for her to pick up the phone.

  After the fourth ring, the voicemail kicked in.

  Hi, you’ve reached Mark and Sheila! If you don’t know what to do after the beep, then we can’t help you!

  Mark frowned. He’d rather talk to her than leave a message. But he’d be in meetings for the next few hours straight.

  “Hey, ah, Sheila. I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about last night. I want to make it up to you somehow. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”

  He hung up, feeling lame. And wondering when he could make it up to her, because he’d probably be at work even later tonight—and for the foreseeable future.

  Mark considered talking to Toni Hanson about his workload. Did he dare admit to needing assistance, or would that put a red flag on his file? He wondered what pull she might have with Reyes to help him out.

  His mind wandered back to his prior meeting with her, and the marked contrast between her persona and her choice of artwork. What kind of person was she, anyway, and could he really trust her?

  CHAPTER 21

  Terry peered more closely at his computer screen. The blip had been so fleeting, he’d nearly missed it. So fleeting, he wondered if he’d really seen it at all.

  He suppressed his blink reflex as best he could and stared at the real-time performance graph as the blue line moved across the monitor. He quickly selected several other measurements, and the chart became a weave of blue, red, green and yellow lines, all marching left to right. All showing normal activity.

  There it is again!

  The connection pool count spiked so briefly that any cumulative report would have missed the problem.

  “Mark? You over there?” Terry shouted over the cube wall.

  No answer.

  He stood and looked. Mark wasn’t at his desk. Terry quickly accessed the scheduler and checked Mark’s calendar. In a meeting. He dialed the conference room number and told the person who answered to send Mark right away.

  Terry checked which OMTrade processes were running and arranged all the monitor windows in panes on his computer screen. As he looked at the list of processes and the system resources used by each, he realized he knew what each of those processes did. If he could sort through and monitor only those whose functions could affect the connection pool count, he’d have his short list of suspects.

  “What’s going on? You called me out of a meeting? Is OMTrade down again?” Slightly breathless, Mark stood just outside his cube.

  “No, not yet anyway. But I’m seeing some interesting things.”

  “Not yet? How far is it from the threshold measure?” Mark shifted from foot to foot as if he were ready to dash somewhere to take action, but didn’t know which way to go.

  “Nowhere near the threshold. Normal.”

  “Then why did you call me out of the meeting? Shit. Now I’m going to have to get the rundown from someone for what I missed.”

  “I’m seeing extremely brief spikes—flickers, really—in the connection pool count. Just long enough to spot on the real-time graph, if you’re watching. They don’t sustain at that level, and so your monitoring script wouldn’t catch them. I think this is the key.”

  “Any measurement can have a quick spike—if there are no errors and the problem doesn’t persist measurably, then are you really seeing anything significant?”

  “I am. I know I am.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Terry. You’ve been staring at that stuff too long. I need to either get back to the meeting or work on the Venezuela project. I don’t have time for micro-spikes,” he said in a sarcastic tone, then headed for his cube.

  “Mark, get back here. I think these micro-spikes are an early warning. If we watch the right things now, I think we can finally find the problem. I want you to see one firsthand, so you’ll know what I’m talking about. We need to see if there’s a pattern, if the frequency is increasing—anything.”

  Mark brought in his chair and sat beside Terry. “All right.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  Terry pointed to where the spike had previously appeared. “Watch right through here. It’s very quick, and it shoots all the way to the top of the graph.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes while the graph showed nothing but normal activity. Then Terry pointed at the screen and shouted, “There! Did you see that?”

  “Yeah, but then it’s gone. Maybe it resolves itself.”

  “No, this is the signature. Here. I’m emailing the last twenty minutes’ history of this to you. Now that you’ve seen what the spike looks like, play the history back, note the timestamps when it happens and look for a pattern. I need to know the rate of occurrence—it’s hard to tell while I’m staring at it like this.”

  Mark took his chair back into his cube to do the calculations at his computer.

  Terry quickly set up an additional trap to snapshot the processes running during the next micro-spike in the connection pool count. Then he waited.

  A few minutes later, the count spiked again. “Just did it again!”

  Mark shouted over the cube wall, “The frequency is increasing, best I can tell. But this isn’t a big sample of data points, so I’m not sure I trust it enough to indicate a trend.”

  “I’ll bet what happens is the spiking increases in frequency to the point where it does become constant, and that’s when we have the meltdown. I don’t know how fast that happens, whether the rate of increase is straight-line or geometric or what. So we could be minutes or hours away from another crash here.”

  White-faced, Mark came back into his cube. “But I don’t see how we can stop it. Reyes’ll have our asses. I can’t believe they went and signed up Venezuela for this thing. We don’t have this problem under control, and I haven’t even had time to get the planning started! We don’t need even more strain on the system.”

  “Just stay focused on this for now. I have some ideas, and we’ve got some time—we just don’t know how much—before it crashes. Here. I captured the processes running at that last spike.” Terry displayed the list and scrolled through it. “Now, I’ll just start by eliminating the ones that don’t affect connection pooling—”

  “How the hell do you know that kind of detail? You couldn’t possibly have gotten through all that technical doc yet!”

  Terry frowned. “I don’t know. I’ve been reading so much of that stuff, maybe I skipped through and read that part out of sequence. I just don’t know.”

  He shrugged and scrolled through the list, highlighting certain process names as he went. “It’s one of these.” He deftly set up a real-time monitor for each of the eight suspect processes, then arranged the minimized windows so he could observe them all when the next spike hit.

  Terry sat and waited, eyes trained on the screen, afraid to blink. Mark stood next to him and fidgeted. Neither spoke.

  “There it went again! It is happening more frequently! That was only a couple of minutes.” Mark paced in Terry’s cube. “We’re going to crash again. Oh, shit!”

  “Stop that! I’m trying to concentrate. There it is.” Terry pointed at one of the process mini-monitors on his screen. “That’s the one. See what it did when the spike happened—the rest just stayed normal.”

  He clicked
on the image to get further detail of the resources used by the rogue process. “Yep, it looks like it deadlocked itself. That’ll do it. Mark, you monitor the threshold pool counts while I get this all packaged up for the applications team. I want them to start working on a hotfix right away. Meanwhile, we’re still in danger of crashing.”

  “Got it.” Mark dashed back to his own cube.

  Terry prepared an electronic request form for the hotfix and attached the pertinent data. Then he called Reyes.

  “Jeff? Terry here. We found it, and I’ve started Applications working on a hotfix.”

  “That’s great news! How long before we have the fix?”

  “They haven’t had a chance to estimate that. I’ll let you know as soon as they tell me. Meanwhile, we have a choice to make.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m sure we’re headed for another crisis; I just don’t know how long before it happens. We can wait, and hope the fix arrives in time, or we can take OMTrade down briefly now so it can refresh, and then we’ll have more time for the fix to get in. If we’re going to go down anyway, I much prefer a clean takedown than a crash. The overall downtime and recovery is shorter.”

  “Yes, but if we wait, the fix may be in before we hit the crisis level, and then we have zero downtime. Let’s wait for the estimate from Applications, and go from there. If they think they can fix it pretty quickly, I’m leaning toward taking the chance.”

  “OK. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thanks, Terry. Good work.”

  Terry hung up, then shouted over at Mark, “How’s it looking?”

  “Still safely below threshold for now. What did Reyes say?”

  “Monitor it for now, then decide based on Applications’ estimate.”

  “Figures. I say down it now, get it over with. I’m way behind on the Venezuela project, and I don’t have time to watch and sweat over this, too.”

  “But I can see Reyes’ point—if we’re not near threshold and Applications can get this fix out fast, then why take any downtime? Oh, just got an email from them. They say in under four hours. Let’s hang on. Let me know if it does get close to threshold, OK? I’ll update Reyes.”

  “Yeah. Maybe Reyes would like to set up two thousand frickin’ user accounts for Venezuela.”

  Terry paused a moment to savor his victory before calling Reyes. He thought he’d never figure out what was causing the crashing. He wondered how he’d gotten so lucky this time; he’d only gotten through a fraction of the dense system documentation.

  Now that it looked like this problem was conquered, maybe he could help Mark out with the Venezuela project. They should be celebrating, but the poor guy seemed about to fall apart.

  CHAPTER 22

  “The gamble paid off. Applications got out the hotfix in three hours—faster than they promised. The installation went fine, without a second of downtime.” Simmons leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly.

  “Has the fix been in for twenty-four hours yet?” asked Jeff Reyes.

  “Yes, just over twenty-four hours now. And not a hint of a recurrence, even with today being a heavy trading day. I know we got it.”

  Jeff sat silent at his desk for a moment, observing Simmons and Weston. His unvoiced objections against Genesis certainly seemed unwarranted. Simmons had solved the elusive problem with apparent ease—now that he had the implant. He sat there beaming, ready for a new challenge. The ultimate OneMarket employee.

  And then there was Weston.

  He hadn’t said one word during the entire post-mortem meeting. He just sat there and trembled. It looked like he was trying to hide it by gripping the arms of his chair.

  “This is great news. We’re all relieved to put this problem behind us, especially with Venezuela coming online soon. Mark, how are the preps coming?” asked Jeff.

  Weston flinched. “I’ve started a list.”

  Jeff waited for Weston to continue, but he did not. “That’s it? You haven’t started any of the actual work, you’ve just made a list?”

  Weston turned even whiter. “That’s all I’ve had time to do. The monitoring before and after the hotfix kept me from making much progress.”

  “The contract has already been signed. And the Venezuela users will be expecting full functionality available to them as promised. Terry can pick up the monitoring work for now. Schedule some time with me tomorrow to review your project plan.”

  Weston started to say something, then held himself back.

  “You can go now. Consider that plan your highest priority. Terry, you stay. I need to talk to you.”

  Weston stood, nearly tripping on his chair. He left the room without speaking. As soon as he’d closed the door behind him, Jeff turned to Simmons. “How far behind is he?”

  “About as he described. He’d just started his planning when I pulled him in on the monitoring and some of the diagnostic steps. Now that we’re out of the woods on that problem, I can pitch in and help.”

  “Concentrate on the post-hotfix monitoring for now. I’ll let you know how we’ll divide the work after I meet with him tomorrow. I want to see what he comes up with on his own first.”

  “No problem. Just let me know.”

  “Thanks. Terry, you did a great job solving this problem. You held up your end of the bargain, so now I’d like to congratulate you on your new promotion. Your salary will be raised to $200,000, effective immediately. See Fred Cline about the paperwork for your mortgage allowance.”

  “Thank you. This is great news. Honestly, a couple of weeks ago, I really didn’t think I was going to be able to solve this one. I must have been absorbing the tech doc better than I realized. When the system started acting up, I knew just what to do, where to look.” He chuckled. “Like I was in the zone.”

  Harris had scheduled an afternoon meeting to discuss Simmons’ post-implant performance. Jeff sat at his desk, trying to sort out his feelings ahead of time, so he wouldn’t appear indecisive or ambivalent in front of Harris. On the one hand, Simmons’ triumph—and the contrast with Weston—seemed to be clear evidence that Genesis did just what Tyler had promised. Simmons seemed unchanged in any way—except for being sharper and faster at his job.

  Still, the idea of something planting information in your brain… Jeff shivered at the thought. Despite its effectiveness, the whole thing still had a disturbing, Orwellian feel about it. And he couldn’t help but worry how far Harris would decide to take the program once he saw how well it worked for Simmons. Would I be subjected to Genesis some day, and what would Harris put in it?

  But given what he’d seen, he could think of no defensible reason to not go ahead with Weston. Hell, he’d be doing him a favor. Simmons had looked just about as defeated only a couple of weeks ago. And a lot was riding on a smooth implementation for Venezuela…he couldn’t allow Weston to fail, no matter the cost.

  Simon Harris spoke into his intercom. “Send them in, Madeleine.”

  Jeff Reyes, Fred Cline, Josh Tyler, and Maria Jenkins filed in and sat, expectant, in front of Simon’s desk.

  “Good afternoon, everyone. I understand Simmons diagnosed the OMTrade problem yesterday. Since this constitutes our first real test of Genesis, I want to review how the implantation went, mental and physical impacts on Simmons, everything. Coming out of this meeting, I want a short-term and a long-term plan for where we go from here. So, let’s get to it. Jeff, tell us more about how Simmons solved the problem.”

  Reyes leaned forward. “It went about as Josh predicted. When I gave Simmons the assignment, he seemed pretty overwhelmed. And to his credit, it was extremely difficult. I wasn’t sure he could pull it off, no matter what…assistance…he might receive. But he got in there, isolated some very subtle system behaviors, then knew just what to do.”

  Tyler cut in, “What did he say about it? Did he describe the experience?”

  “Yes, he did. He said he’d started reviewing the technical documentation, but when the need arose, he felt as if he�
��d absorbed more than he thought he’d actually studied. Said it was like being in the zone.”

  “Perfect. And he made no mention of the procedure or any memory of it?” asked Tyler.

  “That’s right. He was just genuinely relieved and amazed that he’d found the problem,” said Reyes.

  “How’d he seem?” asked Cline. “Did he seem…different…in any way?” He pursed his lips while Reyes answered.

  “Seemed perfectly normal. Pleased with his accomplishment, as he should be. And remarkably unstressed about it. Unlike Weston,” said Reyes.

  “What’s with Weston? He was the other candidate we’d discussed, right? The one who’d only been here about six months?” asked Simon.

  “Yes. I’d assigned him the prep work for the Venezuela project. It’s fast-track, as you know. He looked very stressed, and is likely behind already on the work. I’m meeting with him tomorrow to assess the situation,” said Reyes.

  “All right, let’s finish with Simmons first. Everything I’ve heard indicates a success. Anyone see any reason not to proceed with a second recipient?” Simon watched everyone’s faces as he waited for their responses.

  Tyler was the first to speak. “No, no reason not to proceed. Simmons’ procedure went smoothly, and Weston’s exam results show no contraindications.”

  “As long as we make sure to guard against possible leaks as effectively as we did this time, I’m fine with it,” said Maria.

  “Since there’s no apparent behavioral change, and we have the legal and medical aspects covered, I have no objections,” said Cline.

  “Let’s proceed. Weston needs the same boost as Simmons to succeed, and he needs it soon, or the Venezuela project is at risk,” said Reyes.

  Simon noticed the turnaround in Reyes’ attitude toward Genesis. Seeing must be believing. Reyes knew Simmons better than anyone else in the room. His lack of hesitation told Simon all he needed to know. “Josh, how soon could we implant Weston?”

  “Same as before. I’ll need specifics from Jeff on what information he wants to download to Weston.” He hesitated. “But we need to decide how to approach him to do the procedure.”