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

by William Hertling

  Bill wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration. The ODCs were located about ten miles offshore. Between the distance, and the lack of facilities for people, it was impossible for them to station anyone on board twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, anyone stationed on board would be at risk from pirates. Bill knew that he and Jake Riley, the ODC Lead Manager, would be meeting with senior company management later that week to address the piracy issue. The entire ODC rollout plan was on hold pending a resolution. It didn’t bode well for Bill’s chance of getting a bonus or a raise.

  It was a damn tough problem. A full floating data center could contain almost eighty-thousand servers along with their requisite hard drives, power supplies, emergency backup batteries, and communications equipment. Although none of the prototype floating data centers had been at full capacity yet, they still had about twenty-thousand servers onboard worth close to ten million dollars. That was a substantial target. Worse, it wasn’t clear yet whether the target truly was the computer equipment or whether it was the potential customer data on the server hard drives.

  When Bill saw the destruction the pirates caused and reflected on the amount of work it was going to generate, even he could see the sense in Jake’s controversial proposal to give the ODCs deterrents that would prevent pirates from boarding them. That didn’t stop a chill from running through him when he thought about autonomous robots with guns being stationed on board the data center.

  * * *

  “Hi Mike, what a surprise!” Christine smiled at Mike, then hugged him warmly. “David didn’t mention you were coming over for dinner. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll let David know you’re here.”

  She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear, and turned to walk upstairs to fetch David.

  Mike admired Christine as she walked up the stairs, and then turned to look around at the house while he waited. Lucky David. The early twentieth century home was an American Four Square: a classic, stylish, and desirable Portland house. The Four Square, so called because each of the four outside walls was a near perfect square, was larger than Mike’s own bungalow. On the other hand, like many other Portland Four Squares, David and Christine’s house had been extended by the previous owners to include a large family room on the main level. As a result, and because of David and Christine’s tastes, their interior was now a mixture of modern design and pure geek. Ikea furniture was interspersed with computers, and dominated by a high end gaming system in one room. Mike looked on admiringly. He tried, but his own place just looked like his college apartment.

  Mike gazed at a photo of David and Christine on the mantel. Single and lacking family in town, it wasn’t unusual for Mike to drop in for dinner with Christine and David, especially when he was between girlfriends. Of course, he usually didn’t drop in unannounced, but he had a pressing reason to talk to David tonight. Mike had figured out just that afternoon what was going on with ELOPe. He now understood the unexplained activity in the ELOPe system, and the unexpected and unlikely allocation of dedicated servers. It even explained David’s strange behavior in the office when David announced that they had been granted additional servers. His hands were sweaty at the thought of confronting David. It was the first time that he’d ever known David to be less than totally honest with him.

  Mike snapped out of his reverie at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. David clasped Mike on the shoulder warmly, and led him into the kitchen, with Christine following them.

  “Vodka martinis everyone?” Christine suggested, following their long standing tradition.

  “Sounds great,” Mike and David answered simultaneously. They smiled at each other. For a moment, Mike felt the strong camaraderie he had shared for years now with David.

  Mike and David sat in bar stools on the opposite side of the counter from Christine. Christine grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya and glasses.

  “It’s good to see you,” David said, still smiling.

  Mike swallowed. It was harder to confront David now that he was back to being himself. It would have been easier if David was still distracted and vague.

  “So why the unexpected visit?” David asked.

  Christine gave David a funny look as she realized that he hadn’t invited Mike over.

  “It’s about ELOPe.” Mike clenched his fists.

  “Oh, I heard the good news from David,” Christine said, wetting glasses with vermouth. “You guys finally got dedicated servers. That’s exactly what you needed to move on to the next phase, right? Congratulations.”

  “Yes, well, I have an idea how we got those servers.” Mike kept his eyes on David. “It seems ELOPe was turned on a little early. Like a few days ago.”

  David smiled, and responded “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, you asked me to turn on ELOPe for all internal Avogadro emails. Which I did, two days ago.”

  “Were there any problems?” David asked.

  “No, none at all. That’s the problem. I expected a big spike in background processing activity as I gave ELOPe access to emails across the company.” Mike turned to Christine. “That is what happens any time we add new email sources to ELOPe. It has to start analyzing the backlog of emails. People typically have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of emails in their inboxes, so when we add them to ELOPe, there is a massive increase in system activity. So when I added ten thousand Avogadro email inboxes, I expected a giant spike in activity, especially considering all of our performance problems.”

  Mike turned back to David. “But you know what I found, right David? No spike. Hardly any activity at all. Now why would that be?”

  Christine stopped at Mike’s tone, olive covered toothpick hovering over a glass.

  David shrugged, and slumped down in his chair. “Why?”

  “The only explanation is that ELOPe had already been given access to everyone’s email across Avogadro.” Mike jabbed at the counter and raised his voice despite himself. “I didn’t see a jump in activity, because it had already processed all the email for all those people.”

  Mike paused, but David didn’t say anything. “You already turned it on, so it could help you with the proposal for the dedicated servers,” Mike prompted, guessing at David’s motivation.

  David wasn’t smiling anymore. “I did.”

  “But David, why didn’t you tell me?” Mike paused. “It’s fucking awesome that ELOPe works. You typed out a message, and the system gave you suggestions, and those suggestions were persuasive enough to persuade Gary to give you the server allocation! Why would you keep that secret? I’ve been chasing down performance spikes for days for no reason.”

  David twiddled his finger on the countertop, clearly awkward. “I was trying to protect you. You know we didn’t have permission to have ELOPe analyze live customer emails on Gary’s servers. I could have been fired. Now that we have our own dedicated servers, it’s no problem, of course. But I didn’t want you to be worried, or worse, implicated in what I was doing.”

  “We are in this together. This is my project just as much as yours.” Mike paused, and relaxed. “Look, next time, just tell me what is going on? Do you know how I felt when I realized you were keeping secrets from me?”

  David shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ok, now forget all that moping about.” Mike’s expression transformed to one of delight. “ELOPe works. After two years of building that damn thing, it fucking works! Let’s celebrate.”

  Mike grabbed his glass, and raised it in a toast.

  David looked up to see a big smile on Mike’s face, and smiled himself.

  The three chinked glasses.

  * * *

  David helped Christine clean up after dinner. Mike had gone home after a dessert of chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. They had joked that David and Mike had the culinary preferences of twelve year old boys. David cleared dishes and plates while Christine loaded the dishwasher.

  David thought about the evening. After they had
gotten the deception out on the table, everything had been fine. Mike had been elated that ELOPe was working so well, and seemed happy enough to put the other issue behind them.

  “Why so quiet hon?” Christine asked.

  “Just thinking.”

  “You’re not just thinking. Thinking is when you’re quiet, but snapping your fingers.” Glancing over, she saw her husband smile. “You’ve been moody all week. If this is about lying to Mike, well, he knows now, and he forgives you. Let it go.”

  “There’s more,” David said heavily.

  “More what?”

  “More that Mike doesn’t know. I didn’t just turn on ELOPe. I did turn it on, and I obscured what it was doing, so it wouldn’t show up in the system logs. But I also did something else...” David trailed off.

  “Well, are you going to tell me, or do I have to put bamboo under your fingernails?”

  “I gave ELOPe a hidden objective.”

  “What do you mean?” Christine asked.

  “It means that when any email goes through ELOPe, and that would now be every single internal email at Avogadro, it checks to see if the ELOPe project could be affected by the contents of the message. Then ELOPe will do what it can to maximize the success of the project.”

  “What does that even mean David? What can it do?” Christine stopped washing dishes and stared at David.

  David looked away from her accusatory gaze. “Well, it can’t do anything but rewrite emails,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “But because I turned off the logging, I can’t see exactly what changes it makes to those emails. I turned the system on, and the very next day, I got an allocation of five thousand servers. Sheesh, I would have been happy with five hundred servers, never mind five thousand. Five thousand servers, built and installed, is close to five million dollars. How did ELOPe get someone to spend five million dollars? And that’s not all.”

  David paused to catch his breath. He started to look around and whisper, but he realized that was foolish. It was only he and Christine in the house. “This afternoon I got an email that we just had a team of contractors assigned to the project. They hired some topnotch performance specialists to help us optimize ELOPe. God knows we need the help to try to fix performance, but I never even asked anyone for help.

  “That sounds damn freaky.” Now Christine had given up on the dishes, and was standing with her hands on her hips. “Why the hell did you do any of that in the first place?”

  “We were just a couple days from the whole project getting cancelled. Gary Mitchell was going to bounce us off his production servers.” David’s shoulders slumped in despair. “You know, ELOPe is a massive consumer of processing resources. We’re not even production-ready, and we’re already consuming almost as many compute cycles as the production Search and Email products that are serving hundreds of millions of customers. Hell, I abused Sean’s blessing in the first place to get way more server resources than he ever intended to give us. Gary would have bounced us off his servers, Sean would have found out just how many resources we were consuming, and that I distorted what he said to get those resources, and that would have been it for the project and me.”

  “Jesus David.” Christine had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot now, which alarmed David. The last time she did that he had spent on the night on the couch. “How the hell did you let it snowball like this? If you’re so worried about the override you put in the software, take it out. Or have Mike take it out for you. The way you make it sound, it’s like resources are being stolen from all over the company, and everything is going to be pointing back at you.”

  David brightened. “Yeah, we just need to take out the override before anyone gets wind of it. I was nervous about doing it myself now that the code is live on the new servers. I didn’t want to crash a live server by trying to do it myself — I could potentially bring down the entire Avogadro Mail system. But with Mike’s help, we could do it live.”

  He gave Christine a big kiss. “Thanks for talking with me about this. Let me go send an email to Mike.”

  Christine heard David’s footsteps running up the stairs to their office. She sighed and turned back to the dishes. Husbands made everything so much more complicated than they needed to be. Maybe she should have just gotten a dog instead.

  Upstairs, David sat down in his office. He tapped impatiently at the touchpad, and started in on the email.

  Hi Mike,

  Thanks for coming over tonight. I’m glad we talked.

  But we need to meet early tomorrow morning. There’s something I didn’t tell you about ELOPe. We need to live-patch the production internal email systems to remove a part of ELOPe. You’re the only one with the experience to do it. I’ll tell you the details tomorrow morning. - David.

  David relaxed as he hit the send button. With Mike by his side, they could fix anything.

  * * *

  Jake Riley, graying around the temples, but dressed sharply, put up a photo of the data center breaking. He was tired, having worked a twelve hour day, but he forced himself to keep his energy high for the presentation. They were lucky to get this meeting with the executive team, even if it was scheduled for 9:30 pm. “This morning Bill flew out to Offshore Data Center #4, off the San Francisco coast. Pirates used welding equipment to cut holes in the sides of six of the cargo containers onboard ODC #4, and removed the servers from those containers. The server racks and power transformers were left behind, but they were effectively destroyed.” He switched to an interior photo showing the pillaged container.

  Jake paused to look around at everyone in the virtual conference room. “That brings us to three pirate attacks in as many months. Two on the West coast, one on the East coast.”

  Jake Riley was the Lead Manager of the Offshore Data Center project. With the help of Bill, they were briefing Kenneth Harrison and CEO Rebecca Smith on the piracy problem. The issue had caused a hold up in the ODC rollouts and therefore caused a small but growing hiccup in the Avogadro’s master data center rollout plan. Server capacity requirements doubled every thirty months at Avogadro, and were expected to continue to grow at that rate. That they were meeting at 9:30 at night was a sure sign of just how critical server capacity was to the company’s growth.

  “Tell us about hardening the units. You already do some hardening, right? Is there anything more you can do?”

  This question came from Kenneth Harrison. Kenneth and Rebecca Smith were located in the Oregon virtual conference room, while Jake and Bill Larry were in the Palo Alto virtual conference room. Each room included high fidelity, directional microphones and speakers, high definition video screens and cameras, and all the processing power to link them up. All together the technology created an immersive simulation of a single conference room. To Jake and Bill, it felt like Kenneth and Rebecca were sitting across the conference table from them, instead of seven hundred miles away. Jake got a kick out of using the virtual conference rooms. He thought the conference rooms were the closest to a Star Trek holodeck he’d experience in his lifetime.

  Jake could see Rebecca Smith scanning through the photos of the attack, a frown on her face. “The units are ruggedized for the maritime environment. In fact, a standard cargo container is watertight, and more than capable of floating for years on its own. Our container boxes are of course modified to allow electricity, cooling, and data in and out. But we also apply an additional weatherization layer to control humidity, and ensure optimum interior conditions given the corrosive nature of the salt water environment. After the first pirate theft, we modified the design and installed high security doors on the units in production, and retrofitted those doors to the existing containers,” Jake explained. While he spoke, he switched the overhead screen to a slide showing an exploded diagram of the container design.

  Jake hated bad news presentations. He liked to be the guy who had only good news to report when he met with the executives. When he first heard about the offshore data center project, he knew it wou
ld be wrought with technical challenges, but he was comfortable with those. He knew that he’d have to bring on new employees with specialties in maritime engineering and construction, people who would clash with the culture of Avogadro, and that might present people management challenges, but he was comfortable with that too. He never expected that old-fashioned piracy would be his biggest challenge. Well, not quite old-fashioned, these had blowtorches after all. Pirates, damn it. He shook his head subtly at the thought, and went on.

  “No matter what we do, there will always be a weakest link in security. The weakest link with ODC #4 was the container walls. Even if we harden those, there will be another weakest link. Hell, they could tow the whole thing away if they had a mind to. The reality is that the units are sitting out there in the ocean, miles away from shore and any possible response. Even with effective monitoring, if we have to scramble a helicopter to fly out, we’re looking at a one hour response time. If we have to scramble a boat, it’s a two hour response time. Those times are only if we have people staffed and ready to respond twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Monitoring is very difficult as well,” Bill said. “We can of course easily monitor the interior of the cargo containers, where the environment is controlled. However, the exterior is subject to heavy winds, rain, salt water. We’ve tried three different models of security cameras, and they’ve all failed. Instead of finding out when pirates board, we find out only when servers are unplugged.”

  Rebecca broke in. “The roll out plan for data centers calls for twenty additional offshore data centers within the next six months. Those ODCs are intended to be spread around the world to meet capacity requirements. We don’t have the real estate to put them on land where they are needed. We can’t centralize them because of bandwidth and latency issues. The ODC project is critical, as you well know Jake,” Rebecca emphasized. “Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us back on track.”