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

by William Hertling

  “Well, I know this is going to sound controversial, at least initially, but we do have a proposal. I hope you’ll hear us out before you make a decision. Do you recall the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia?”

  Jake saw nods from Rebecca and Kenneth across the virtual table, and then he continued. “You may know that iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, also makes robots for military use?” More nods. “Well, the companies that were shipping freight around Somalia couldn’t just arm their sailors. The sailors of course have no training in hand to hand combat, and couldn’t reasonably be expected to repel a pirate attack.”

  Jake put another slide up on the overhead screen, showing a small tank-like robot. “iRobot already had weaponized land robots, and exploratory maritime robots. They took the next step, which was to develop weaponized versions of their maritime robots. They deployed the robots on the ships that needed to pass near Somalia. There were two parts to their solution. An automated submersible robot that can attack and disable the pirate ship itself, and an automated robot on the deck of the ship that can repel would-be boarders. They deployed the robots on dozens of commercial ships in the area, and after three successful cases of repelling pirate attacks, there have been no major attempts at piracy in the last six months.”

  Jake looked up at the screen. Rebecca and Kenneth were glancing at each other, and Rebecca’s frown had grown. Jake forced himself to keep going. He switched slides again, showing the submersible robot, and then the submersible robot and tank-like robot onboard a freighter. “We talked to iRobot, and I have an initial bid from them. They have recommended a similar package for our offshore data centers. Submersible robots to disable ships, onboard robots to disable boarders.”

  It was hard for Jake to look Kenneth and Rebecca in the eye. He knew that he was walking a fine line here. Avogadro prided itself on their open, sustainable, fair culture. It wasn’t exactly a culture that was welcoming to the idea of violence and guns. He could hardly believe he had suggested putting weapons in a data center. There wasn’t even a single armed guard in all the land-based facilities to the best of his knowledge. They were, after all, an internet company, not a military contractor.

  Before Rebecca could respond, Bill jumped in. “I know this may seem radical to put armed robots in place. But look at the facts. First, it has worked off Somalia. Second, it will scale to any number of data centers we care to deploy. Third, it’s cost effective because we don’t have to maintain people on board the data centers.”

  “Go on, we’ll hear you out,” Kenneth replied, waving his hand to tell them to keep the details coming.

  Jake and Bill went on to cover the iRobot proposal in detail. Jake displayed slides, as he and Bill took turns explaining the types of robots that would be used, and the quote that iRobot had put together in response to their explanation of the problem they were facing. They spent the greatest amount of time explaining the protocols put in place with the robots to ensure minimum loss of life and risk.

  At the end of the presentation everything was quiet. Jake could hear the hum of cooling fans in the room. He felt sweaty under his clothes. He desperately wanted to go home. He discreetly glanced at the clock on screen. It was after eleven now. He’d been working since five in the morning.

  Even Kenneth turned to look at Rebecca, clearly not willing to stick his neck out on this proposal.

  After a minute, Rebecca finally responded hesitantly. “I would not risk human life for the mere loss of ten million dollars.”

  She paused, and then went on more strongly. “However, the data privacy implications of losing the data stored on those servers are huge. Data loss opens up the potential for litigation from our users, and regulation from the government. Even more significantly, if we lose the confidence of our users, we’re sunk. Our cloud application strategy works only as long as our users have complete confidence in the security and integrity of their personal data.” She stabbed at the table with her pointed finger. “Losing customer trust in this case means billions of dollars of revenue. We cannot afford the loss of even one hard drive containing customer data, let alone the tens of thousands of hard drives in an ODC.”

  Jake nodded, and went to respond, but Rebecca held up a hand to indicate she still wanted to speak.

  “We are lucky that the ODC thefts have thus far been limited to non-sensitive search data,” she said, anticipating Jake’s input, “But we must migrate our email servers and document servers to offshore data centers within a few months, or we risk capacity outages. It’s not acceptable to allow confidential emails and documents to be stolen by pirates.”

  Bill and Jake turned to look at each other. It sure sounded to them as though Rebecca was about to approve the proposal. Neither of them would have guessed that going into the meeting.

  Rebecca cleared her throat before she spoke. “I want you to proceed with your proposal. That said, I want this to be structured that we pay iRobot for security, and have them own and control the hardware that does it. I don’t want Avogadro Corporation to own weaponized robots. Am I clear?”

  A few minutes later, Jake left the virtual conference room. Even though it was his own proposal, or perhaps especially because it was his own proposal, he felt stunned. Within a few weeks, the ODCs would have their own automated self-defense capability. It felt like something out of the movie Terminator. Somehow he was the person responsible for it. He was definitely outside his management comfort zone.

  Chapter 6

  “Hi David. It’s Mike. Listen, I have to rush to Madison. I just got a message from my mom that my father had a heart attack. I’m flying home. I’m sorry I won’t be there. After our discussion last night, I’m sure things will go fine. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  David numbly put his phone down, as much distressed by the content of the message as well as the way Mike’s voice sounded: shaky and stressed. The contrast with Mike’s usual easy-going and joking manner was enough to make his throat tight.

  David couldn’t remember Mike talking about his dad much, other than a few comments after his usual trips home, but David assumed he was healthy.

  He was glad that Mike could fly out to be home with his parents. He felt lingering guilt, because he had seen Mike’s incoming call on his mobile phone this morning as he was rushing out of the house, and he didn’t answer. Only later when he was in the office did he listen to the voicemail, and now he regretted not answering the call. After a moment’s thought, he tried to call Mike back, but now it went directly to voicemail without even ringing. Likely, Mike was in the air, en route to Wisconsin.

  Still shaken, he sat behind his desk, wondering what to do. He called Christine to let her know the bad news. She seemed equally shocked, hardly saying anything, beyond “I’m sorry,” and “I’m so sorry.”

  He sat quietly behind his desk for a while, doing nothing at all. When had he and Mike gotten so old that they had parents with health issues? He did the math, surprised to realize that his own parents were going on sixty.

  A knock on the door startled David.

  Melanie stuck her head in. “Team standup. Mike’s not here. You want to lead it, or should I?”

  He slowly nodded his head, and said softly, “I’m coming.”

  By the time the team meeting was done, David had inherited a fiasco with the Test department. When that was taken care of, he had sixty emails to deal with. It wasn’t until midmorning that he had time to get another cup of coffee. He felt lonely getting coffee by himself, a ritual he always shared with Mike, who would frequently drag him on a trip halfway across town chasing down an elusive coffee bean. He realized suddenly that Mike had always been there with him. He couldn’t remember one occasion over the last two years when he had gone on vacation or taken a sick day.

  Then it hit him that, with Mike gone, he couldn’t rely on his help to remove the ELOPe changes. Trembling nervously, he rushed back to his office, and pounded the carpet pacing back and forth in front of the window, p
ondering his options. He was so sure he was going to have Mike’s help, and now he was on his own. The coffee sat forgotten, fear-generated adrenaline giving him all the stimulation he could handle.

  He wasn’t sure if he could live-patch the email servers to remove the ELOPe override module by himself. Under ideal conditions, server changes were rolled out during specified maintenance times or through a rolling downtime. In a rolling downtime they might take five percent of the servers offline at a time, patch and test them, then do the next five percent until all the servers were done. He had been lucky that rolling downtime had been scheduled the night he released the override module.

  However, maintenance windows and rolling downtime were both processes that needed to be scheduled ahead of time. David sat down at his desk, and pulled up his calendar. The next planned maintenance window wasn’t until after the New Year. He slammed his fist down on the table. Tux the penguin wobbled with the sudden movement.

  He stood back up. He could get a special exception to get a one-off maintenance window scheduled, but that would require paperwork, and submitting the changes ahead of time, and altogether far too much attention. He sat back down. He looked toward the door to see if anyone was observing his nervous antics, but the door was firmly closed.

  That brought him back to the live patch, if he didn’t wait for a maintenance window. During a live-patch, the server stayed up, the code change would be made silently, and the entire operation should only take a few seconds. It was usually done for minor changes that wouldn’t affect the way applications run. For example, if they just want to change the logo or styling of a page, then they could do a live-patch. A live-patch that was more complicated than just changing images or styling could be risky, and was usually reserved for the most critical updates. More than one outage was due to a live-patch code change gone wrong. Changing the ELOPe code, which was now tightly integrated into the mail servers, one of the companies primary products, was definitely not a small change. A botched live-patch would attract even more attention, and an investigation into the code being deployed.

  David considered whether he should attempt the live-patch on his own, or watch for the next maintenance window. Mike not only had far more experience with live-patches than David, he also had the legitimate authorization to perform a live-patch. He thought that the safer, lower risk option would be to just wait. He took a cautious sip of his coffee, and carefully leaned back in his chair. After all, whatever it was that ELOPe was doing didn’t seem to be causing any problems.

  * * *

  John Anderson was working his way through the queue of procurement requests when he came upon yet another request from Gary Mitchell’s department. He was happy to see that Gary Mitchell was now using the online procurement app for submitting procurement requests rather than sending him emails, but now he was shocked to see the volume of requests coming from Gary’s communication products group. There had been three reallocation requests that took servers out of the normal pipeline of delivery and directed them to the ELOPe program, whatever that was. There were several additional requests from Gary’s group to purchase the latest, highest performance servers Avogadro could procure, in unusually large quantities. John thought Gary’s division must be expecting massive increases in load.

  This last request was a bid for software contractors to work over the holiday break. It was hard for John to understand — wasn’t he surrounded by thousands of software developers? And it was damn short notice for a bid of this complexity. John wouldn’t even have time to submit it to multiple contractors the way he normally would. John made a quick decision: he’d just send it out to Nonstop InfoSystems, since they were one of the better subcontractors they used.

  From: John Anderson (Procurement)

  To: Beth Richards (Nonstop InfoSystems)

  Subject: Software contractors needed over holiday

  Body:

  Hi Beth

  We have a a critical project that needs additional engineering resources over the holiday shutdown here. As you know, we take a two week vacation break. We need to hire engineers to fix some server performance issues. We’re looking for the following skill sets:

  - server administration (6 headcount)

  - database administration and performance tuning (6 headcount)

  - software performance tuning (12 headcount)

  - general software engineering (12 headcount)

  We need experts in high performance, high scalability systems, who can put in 12 hour days over the holiday. Cost is not a factor, as we have leftover budget dollars. We need six people onsite, and the remainder can work remotely. Can you please put together a bid, and email it back to me?

  On acceptance of the bid, I will email you with the details of the work to be done.

  Thanks, John

  If Gary’s recent department purchases were a bit unusual, they were nothing compared to the iRobot procurement requests from the Offshore Data Center department that had come in that morning. The requests were labelled at the highest level of company confidentiality, but he was still so puzzled that he called Bill Larry, an old college buddy, to get the inside scoop. When Bill learned that he was reviewing the procurement request, he confirmed that Avogadro was indeed going to be arming the ODCs! Imagine, automated robotic defenses on an Avogadro data center. Even after the phone call, he could hardly believe that they were buying armed robots. He shook his head in disbelief.

  Shortly after he finished the call with Bill, he stopped working through the queue of requests in alarm at the specter of an empty coffee cup. Had he already had his allotted four cups? Could he have another? He had just decided against one when Maggie Reynolds knocked on the open door of his office. “You busy?”

  Maggie Reynolds was technically in the Finance department, not Procurement, but they worked together so often that John felt closer to Maggie than most of the people on his own team. She had just started at Avogadro six months earlier. John thought she was fun, and wished he could think of an excuse to ask her out, but the timing never seemed right. “Sure, come in.”

  “I’m concerned about the way some of this last batch of purchases are being funded out of Gary Mitchell’s group,” she said, getting right to the point as she sat down.

  John watched the way her earrings dangled as she spoke. Her hair looked different. Had she gotten a haircut? Would it be inappropriate to comment on her hair?

  “Gary submitted a purchase order over his budget limit, and I kicked it back to him saying he couldn’t do that. Then he sent me this email. He divided up the purchase order among a bunch of individual project budgets. Shouldn’t it all have to come from one budget? It seems suspicious.” She wedged a tablet in front of his face to show him the email.

  From: Bryce Cooper (Gary Mitchell’s Executive Assistant)

  To: Maggie Reynolds (Procurement Finance)

  Subject: re: updated billing code for reallocation exception

  Body:

  Maggie,

  Gary has asked me to split this across the following billing codes:

  9004-2345-01: $999,999.99

  9002-3200-16: $999,999.99

  9009-5387-60: $999,999.99

  9009-6102-11: $999,999.99

  9015-2387-19: $999,999.99

  9036-1181-43: $109,022.23

  Thanks,

  Bryce

  John waved his hand dismissively at the tablet. “Normally, I’d agree with you. I’m up to my armpits in requests from Gary’s department. But you’ve got to consider the effect of the end of the fiscal year. Departments often have leftover money, and anything they don’t spend before the end of the year just evaporates. So at the end of the year, they start ordering servers they might need for the next year, new monitors for the employees, sudden urgent contracts with vendors, anything really, just to make use of the money before it disappears. And if they need to make big purchases, like Gary buying these servers, then he’d have to pool leftover money from many different budgets. We’
re just two weeks away from the end of the year, and most everyone will be gone during the Christmas holiday. So you’re going to see a lot of purchases in these last few days.”

  “That rewards gross financial mismanagement!” Maggie exclaimed in frustration.

  She arched her neck as she said this, looking a little like Chewbacca from Star Wars. John wasn’t sure what it said about him, but he found it both endearing and sexy.

  “If the money rolled over from one year to the next, it would reward saving money,” Maggie went on, growing more strident. “This just causes irresponsible spending.”

  “I know, I know,” he said hurriedly, trying to placate her. “It’s contrary to every shred of common sense, but it’s just business as usual. Everyone plays the budget game to some degree.” He had to change the subject somehow before she grew any more angry. He looked down at his coffee cup, thumped his fingers on the table and gulped. “Do you want to get a cup of coffee sometime?”

  Maggie looked down at the tablet with a sigh, and turned it off. “Sure, how about now?” she answered.

  It wasn’t quite what John had in mind, but it was better than nothing. He happily picked up his mug, and they made their way together to the cafeteria.

  * * *