Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (Singularity Series)

by William Hertling

  Gary sauntered down the hallway whistling.

  * * *

  John Anderson gratefully let his heavy messenger bag slide to the floor. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, hanging it behind his desk. Dropping heavily into his chair, the pneumatic shock absorber took his weight without complaint. He sighed at the thought of another day in the Procurement department processing purchasing requests. Tentatively peeking at his inbox, he saw more than a hundred new email messages. His shoulders slumped a little, and he reached for his coffee.

  This week John had the kids, which meant dropping them off at school before work. Portland’s crazy school system meant that the best public schools were all elective. He and his ex-wife had to choose among a dozen different schools, and they ended up with the Environmental School in Portland’s southeast section. John’s kids loved the school, and so did he. Unfortunately, they lived in Northeast Portland, the school was in the Southeast quadrant, and work was across the river in Northwest Portland. His normal twenty minute commute turned into well more than an hour drive on the days he dropped the kids off, and he was always late getting into the office. By the time he arrived at work, his smartphone had been beeping and buzzing for an hour as emails arrived. He loathed the backlog of email he started his day with. The only consolation was that the kids’ school was right next to a Stumptown Coffee. John sipped at the roasted Ethiopian brew. The dark, bittersweet warmth of the coffee brought a smile to his face.

  As the coffee gradually brought his brain into gear, he regained his will to tackle his inbox. He was brought up short by a puzzling email from Gary Mitchell. Sent earlier this morning, the email asked him to divert 5,000 servers. John read the email three times in its brief entirety.

  From: Gary Mitchell (Communication Products Division)

  To: John Anderson (Procurement)

  Subject: ELOPe Project

  Time: 6:22am

  Body:

  Hi John,

  Sean Leonev has asked me to help out the ELOPe guys. They need additional servers ASAP, and we’re running out of extra capacity here. Can you accelerate 5,000 standard Avogadro servers out of the normal procurement cycle, and give them to IT for immediate deployment? Please assign asset ownership directly to David Ryan.

  Thanks, Gary Mitchell

  John thought briefly about the exception process. Normally when a department wanted new servers, they put in a purchase request. Then parts were purchased, shipping to Avogadro data centers, assembled into the custom servers Avogadro used, and installed onto racks. Next, another group took over and installed the operating system and applications used on the servers. In all, depending on the size and timing of the order, it would take anywhere from six to twelve weeks from the time they were requested before the servers were available for use. The lag was the result of the time necessary to ship the hardware, receive it, install it into racks, install the software, configure it, and then run a burn-in test.

  When a department needed additional servers in a rush, then they could request an exception. The exception process would take servers that had already been bought for another group, and were already in the processing pipeline, and divert them to the department that needed them urgently. Then replacement computers would be ordered for the first group, who would have to wait a little longer.

  Diversion requests were not the norm, but certainly they weren’t uncommon either. No, the puzzling part was not the request itself, but that Gary would submit such a request in email. Only the official procurement application could be used to order, expedite, or divert servers. Gary should know that.

  He put his hand on the phone to call Gary, and then took it away. A call to Gary would eat up at least fifteen minutes. He had learned over time that regardless of what the procurement rules were, whenever John tried to explain them to anyone, they would just argue with him. The higher up in the company they were, then the more they would argue as though their lofty organizational heights carried with it some kind of potential energy that could just roll over the rules. A quick email would save John from getting his ear chewed out.

  To: Gary Mitchell (Communication Products Division)

  From: John Anderson (Procurement)

  Subject: Email Procurement Forms

  Gary,

  We can’t do a server reallocation exception based on an email. I couldn’t do that for 5 servers, let alone 5,000 servers. Please use the online Procurement tool to submit your request: http://procurement.internal.avogadrocorp.com, or have your admin do it for you. That’s the only process for procurement exceptions we can use. We can easily approve your reallocation exception if you follow the existing process, and provide appropriate justification.

  Thanks,

  John

  John worked through his backlog of emails as he gradually drained his coffee cup. The hundreds of new messages in his inbox would give the casual observer the impression he had been gone from work for a week, rather than just the late start he had gotten dropping off his kids. He took another sip of coffee, and continued to work through emails. The rest of his day, like every other, would consist of endless cups of coffee and endless emails. Gary’s email might have been a little unusual, but it was quickly forgotten amid the deluge of other issues.

  * * *

  A few hours later, on the other side of the campus from John Anderson, Pete Wong brought his lunch from the cafeteria in Building Six diagonally across to Building Three, pausing briefly on the windowed sky bridge. The sun had come out, and he raised his face to it for a few moments. Looking down, he saw the light glisten on wet streets, perhaps one of his favorite parts of the rain. He remembered as a kid he would run outside on rainy days when the sun broke through the clouds, pretending that fairies had covered the street with magic dust. A crowd of laughing people, marketing folk from their attire, entered the skybridge, distracting him from his memories. He continued through the sky bridge, and then down four flights of stairs to his office. Out of the sun, and into the fluorescent gloom of basement offices.

  At one department meeting after another, Pete had been assured that his Internal Tools team, responsible for delivering the IT tools used inside the company, would be relocated just as soon as there was available above ground office space again. Pete shook his head thinking about it. It was no surprise to Pete that the Internal Tools team was stuck in what effectively amounted to the dungeons of Avogadro Corp. Everyone in the company used their tools every day to get their jobs done, from ordering office supplies to getting more disk space to filling out their timecards. But because they didn’t develop the sexy customer-facing products, they were the absolute runts of the company. No executives or research and development engineers would ever be sentenced to the basement offices. It was enough to make him gnash his teeth sometimes.

  When Pete got back to his desk, he took solace in his lunch. His office space might suck, and his job might be unappreciated, but at least the food was good. Fresh gnocchi in a butter sauce, mixed salad greens, and a cup of gelatto in a special vacuum insulated cup that kept it cold while he ate his lunch. All organic and locally sourced, of course. The coffee wasn’t bad either, though it came from Kobos. Pete preferred Ristretto Roasters over Kobos, but of course only a few of Portland’s coffee roasters were big enough to supply Avogadro’s headquarters. Ristretto was one of the best micro-roasters in town. Pete’s wife, who was a tea drinker, couldn’t understand the Portland obsession with coffee.

  While he ate, Pete looked over his inbox. A new email caught his eye, and he opened it.

  To: Pete Wong (Internal Tools)

  From: John Anderson (Procurement)

  Subject: Email Procurement Forms

  Hi Pete,

  This is John Anderson. I work over in Procurement. Even though we’ve got a procurement web application that I know you guys created, we still get hundreds of email requests into the procurement department. Part of the problem is that we’ve got sales people in the field who can send emails from their sm
artphone, but have a hard time getting a secure VPN connection to the internal web sites. Is it possible to create an email-to-web bridge that would allow people to email us, and get a return form by email that they could submit to make requests? I mentioned this to Sean Leonov, and he said you guys could whip up something like this in a day or two.

  Thanks,

  John

  Pete Wong stared at this strange email. John Anderson, some guy in Procurement, was buddies with Sean Leonov, cofounder of Avogadro? Sean was a living legend at Avogadro. Pete hadn’t met anyone who knew Sean Leonov directly.

  Pete pondered the email. Why did Sean think that Internal Tools could implement this in a day? Was Sean Leonov even aware that there was an Internal Tools department at Avogadro? How had they gotten his email address? It all seemed so unlikely.

  It was a bizarre request, but it was true that he could pull it together easily. He imagined a salesperson working in the field, using their smartphone to access internal sites. Small screen, low bandwidth. The justification for the request made sense. And if doing this impressed Sean Leonov, well, that couldn’t hurt his career. Maybe he could get onto one of the real R&D project teams instead of being stuck in the dead-end Internal Tools department. Daydreaming of an office with sunlight pouring in big windows, he spent a few minutes lost in thought imagining what his office would look like with a big window overlooking the street, or even better, the river.

  With a start, he sat up straight and decided he could definitely spend a few minutes looking into the request. He eagerly put his fingers on the keyboard and starting searching. When his first Avogadro search for ‘email to web service’ within seconds turned up an existing design posted by some IBM guys, his excitement grew. After reading through the design, he realized he could implement it all in a couple of hours.

  His other work forgotten, Pete started in on the project. He used the existing Internal Tools servers, and created a new Ruby on Rails web application that converted web pages to emails, and emails into web page form submissions. It was easier than expected, and by lunch he had a simple prototype running.

  He tried the prototype on the Internal Tools Request tool, and discovered some bugs. Puzzling over the details in his head, he mindlessly rushed down the hall to the coffee station for a refill.

  * * *

  Mike left his office, nodded to a few teammates he passed, and headed downstairs for the nearest outside door. After banging his head against the same problem for two hours and becoming increasingly frustrated, he needed to clear his mind and get a fresh perspective. The damn performance issues were becoming the insurmountable obstacle.

  Once outside, Mike wandered around Avogadro’s South Plaza, an open amphitheater and park. Just one of the many perks that Avogadro employed to keep their everyone happy. The ground was wet from early morning rains, but the sky was blissfully clear now. He waved to a couple of engineers he knew that he saw jogging.

  He thought back to his discovery. What he found that morning was even more puzzling than the issues he expected to run into.

  Mike thought about the two distinct parts of the ELOPe system. The part that users saw, of course, was the front-end process that ran in real-time to evaluate emails that were being written by users and to offer suggested improvements. The piece that was troubling Mike was the other half, the backend process that analyzed historical emails to generate the language analysis and recommendation clusters.

  While the performance of ELOPe was horrible by anyone’s measure, at least it was predictably horrible. In the course of attempting to improve the efficiency over the past months, Mike learned that each new email fed into ELOPe required roughly the same number of processor cycles to process the data.

  This morning, nothing was predictable. According to the system logs, nobody was using ELOPe last night, and yet the load metrics were pegged — a sure indication that a ton of computer processing time was being spent on something. But what? ELOPe was in closed prototype mode. Mike knew that only the members of the development team had access. That meant software coders, interaction designers, and the linguistics experts particular to their project. Everyone’s activities were logged. Yet the someone or something was consuming processing resources, while the logs didn’t indicate any activity.

  Mike hoped the fresh air and a walk around the Plaza would help him figure out the problem. The last thing he needed was additional performance problems when what they were looking for was a massive improvement in performance. He sat on the amphitheater steps, and rested his head on his hands. He watched another set of joggers go by. For someone who prided himself on taking things easy, the world was sure weighing heavy on his shoulders right now.

  Chapter 4

  Pete Wong was damn proud of himself. In less than a day he had successfully implemented a working email to web bridge. Well, maybe implemented was a strong word. He had cut and pasted code from a dozen different websites, and wrapped it all up with some virtual duct tape. It was a real kludge that he wouldn’t want to show off in a coding style contest. On the other hand, it worked, by golly! He tested it against the Internal Tools web service, the Procurement web application, and have a dozen other web sites. It seemed to work for everything.

  He drummed his thumbs excitedly against the desk. Using off the shelf libraries that other people had written for Ruby on Rails, his favorite programming environment, he had been able to glue together the relevant pieces quickly. The ability to do in hours what would have once taken weeks in an old language like Java was the magic of modern programming environments like Ruby. It was easy to understand why startups built products in a weekend now and were launched on shoestring budgets when they had such powerful tools. He wondered for the hundredth time if he shouldn’t leave Avogadro to go start his own company.

  Pete pulled his keyboard closer and wrote an email to John Anderson, the guy in Procurement who had requested the email bridge. In a bold move, he cc:’ed Sean Leonov, just so that he could see exactly who it was in the Internal Tools department that had implemented it. Pete explained in the email what he had implemented, and how to use it. By the time he was done, he had written five pages of detailed instructions. Perhaps it was a little more complicated than the guys in sales could cope with. Pete didn’t know any guys in sales, but he didn’t think that they would be very technically adept. Well, at least what he had provided was complete, even if it was a little rough around the user interface edges.

  He hit send on the email, then sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. He basked in the glow of his accomplishment, an ear to ear grin on his face. He had good kung fu.

  Pete wondered who he could brag to about his achievement, when it suddenly hit him that perhaps there was something a little irregular about what he had done. He sat forward, and let his cup thump onto his desk as it dawned on him that he had forgotten to mention to the rest of his own team what he was planning to do. This request should have come through the normal process like everything else. Not only that, but it also should have been subject to a peer review by his team members before he implemented anything, and certainly before he deployed code. He had been so concerned with impressing Sean Leonov that he didn’t stop to think about the usual process for doing this. Well, no one could really blame him for taking some initiative.

  Despite this, some bigger issue was nagging him. What was it? Suddenly, he jumped out of his seat. Shit, he had just implemented an off the radar system that could interface with a dozen different business critical web services inside the company. He had probably violated all sorts of security policies. Not probably, he definitely had. It suddenly felt really hot in his cramped office.

  Then just as quickly as he became alarmed, he relaxed a little and sat down. If Sean Leonov had thought the Internal IT team could implement the request within twenty-four hours, he clearly meant that they should pull out all the stops. Pete couldn’t very well go back to pull the application down off the servers now that he had told John Anderso
n and Sean Leonov it was available. He shook his head. He was worried about nothing. The system was secure. His tool relied on email credentials to validate user logons for websites, and if any product in the company was secure, clearly AvoMail was secure.

  If he told his boss and the rest of his team, he would undoubtably get his wrist slapped. The best course of action would be to just not mention it until he had gotten some kind of email kudos from Sean. Once he showed that to the team, any skipping of due process would be easily forgiven. With a plan in place, one in which he didn’t take too much heat, he relaxed a little.

  Just then, he heard a ruckus coming down the hall, rapidly getting closer. He grew alarmed. Had they already found out what he’d done? Then a group of his coworkers passed by his open office door. A few seconds later, the Internal IT technical lead stuck his balding head in Pete’s doorway and said, “We just heard a hot tip that the billiard room has shown up on the fourth floor of Building Two. Want to come help look for it?”

  With relief, Pete smiled and leaped up from his desk. He’d never seen the mysterious Avogadro billiard room that supposedly roved from building to building and floor to floor. “Absolutely!” he called, as he ran from his office, following the gang of geeks.

  Work temporarily forgotten, Pete joined the happy hunt for the billiard room. Laughter rang out as other groups heard the rumor and joined the hunt. The billiard room would only accept the keycards of the first few dozen people to find the room’s new location. As teams ran through the halls, they told each other outright lies about the location of the billiard room, all part of the game surrounding the mystery.