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

by William Hertling

  When the red flash came, the communication lead had his shortwave mic in hand, and fingered the trigger. “Go, go, go,” he shouted into the mic.

  Drew lifted the speargun, sighted again on the target, and fired. The thick magnetic head thunked onto communications pod number three, and held steady while the spear quivered from the impact.

  On the platform, the deck robots evaluated the noises. The sounds were sufficiently out of the ordinary to trigger a higher level evaluation of the surrounding environment. The spears and spear lines caused the visual analysis algorithms to register changes in the environment. But on active scan, even synchronizing scans and dedicating additional processor power, the robots could find no sign of people on deck or boats in the vicinity. The robots took no defensive actions. They individually uploaded alerts of the noises and visual changes to the monitoring server.

  Still treading water, Drew again confirmed on his left and right that each team member had hit their primary targets. From the floating pack, he withdrew a crawler, and snapped it onto the spear line. The crawler consisted of waterproof explosives, a detonator, and a cable-crawling mechanism. Synchronizing by short-range radio, Drew and the other six divers surrounding the barge triggered the cable-crawling mechanisms simultaneously.

  The crawlers zipped up the spear lines as the divers swam away, taking less than thirty seconds to make their way up the steel cables. When the packages reached the end of the line, they continued up the spear shaft until the explosive package was resting directly against the magnetic heads.

  On the boat, the communications lead waited for seven green lights to show on his remote monitor, and then triggered the explosives. With a roar felt through the water by the divers, now fifty meters distant, the communications and power modules they targeted disintegrated, sending metal shrapnel, electronics circuitry, wiring, and burning plastic all over the deck of the barge and surrounding water.

  After waiting for a minute, the team swam back to the barge. Drew and his teammates used military grade electromagnetic frequency detectors to ensure all the computer equipment was offline. The EMF detectors showed zero activity. Then they swam back to a safe distance where they gave each other high fives while they waited to be picked up by the boat. Back on the boat later, the team celebrated, clapping each other on the back, passing around cigars that Drew handed out.

  * * *

  If the attack on the floating platform data centers was dramatic, it was nothing compared to attacking the more recent data centers rushed into production on the converted oil tankers. Everything about the tankers made them a technical challenge to shut down. The servers and power equipment were within the hull, protected by inches-thick metal. Unlike the simple barges, the data center containers were not sitting exposed on deck nor were they in known locations. The decks of the ships themselves were almost fifty feet above the water, so it was out of the question for divers treading water to target the deck with weapons as they had with the floating platforms. The location of the deck robots were not known ahead of time, and of course, the ship itself was large enough that it was not practical to blow the entire thing up, nor would it be impossible to quickly locate all the equipment that needed to be disabled. The financial records Gene had discovered showed that ELOPe had apparently hired contractors to make multiple visits to the ships, so the ships could contain any manner of defenses, communication equipment, and power equipment.

  It turned out to be nothing less than a small war to disable the ships effectively.

  ODC #15 was a 90,000 ton converted crude oil tanker, positioned in the North Sea, fifteen miles off shore from the Netherlands. At 800 feet long, and nearly 150 feet wide, it was representative of most of the ships that Avogadro had acquired. Divers swam up to ODC #15 and planted explosives on the fiberoptic cable connection. Helicopters hovered carefully outside of the maximum activation range of the robotic anti-craft defenses.

  The propeller drone of two Aerostars, lightweight cargo planes, approached from two directions at once. Converted for the task as expendable autonomous drones, the two airplanes were remotely piloted from the helicopters. Each was loaded with an Electro Magnetic Pulse, or EMP weapon. The remote pilots sat in the passenger seats of the helicopters, where they had good visibility of the tanker, working their remote controls. Driving the two planes at high speed descents, and at different angles, the twin-engine Aerostars approached the ship quickly.

  On the ship, antiaircraft robots picked up the incoming flights, and began to broadcast messages on multiple frequencies, warning them off. But the antiaircraft robots were designed to repel relatively slow speed helicopters intending to land on the ship — not airplanes approaching at terminal speed.

  Before the robots finished the first iteration of the warning messages, the pilots triggered the EMP weapons, less than five hundred feet from the ship. The civilian grade onboard electronics of the two Aerostars were fried completely, turning the planes into inert missiles. One crashed harmlessly into the ocean, passing mere feet over the deck of the ship. The other plane, on a similar trajectory, hit a gust of air, and tipped, one wing hitting the ship, and sending the plane cartwheeling across the deck. Hitting a massive exposed pipe once used for loading oil into the tanks, the plane finally crunched to a halt then exploded.

  While the EMP bursts didn’t affect the Avogadro computer servers due to the thick metal hull of the oil tanker and the metal shell of the cargo containers inside, the bursts were strong enough for their purpose: to temporarily disrupt the communication equipment and power converters mounted on deck, thus isolating it. While ELOPe might be aware of the attack internally, it would have no way of communicating with the outside world or triggering any external action.

  Simultaneously, the three waiting helicopters launched long range missiles, targeting the satellite and microwave communication antennas on the surface of the tanker, as well as any defensive robots they could identify. As the missiles closed in on their targets, the divers triggered explosives on the fiber-optic connection.

  As the explosives rained fire and metal shrapnel on the sea around the ship, the divers could hear the ship’s engines start, and the huge twin propellers on the ship slowly started to turn.

  The copters approached the ship fast and low, hoping to avoid any remaining defenses. Once over the huge oil tanker, mercenaries rappelled from the helicopters onto the deck. Armed with high powered assault rifles to take out any remaining robots, and explosives to disable power supplies, they began the lengthy task of taking control of the neutered ship.

  Ricardo Gonzalez, ex-Marine, was one of those mercenaries. Carrying a HK417 rifle with armor piercing rounds, which he had been assured would kill any of the armed robots, he made his way down the starboard side toward the stern. He struggled with a hatch opening, only to discover that it had been chained shut. Backing up, he took aim at the thick padlock with his rifle, fired three times, and advanced. The padlock was destroyed. Removing the chain, he opened the watertight doorway and continued inside.

  The munitions from the initial helicopter assault had penetrated the interior, leaving the narrow walkways smoky. Ricardo tried his thermal goggles, then remembered the armed robots would not show up on thermals if they had been inactive, and switched to light-magnifying night-vision goggles. Cursing the poor visibility, he made his way down. His mission was to descend several levels toward keel, then head forward using a retrofitted service corridor designed for maintaining the data center.

  Hard edges and sharp protrusions defined every step of forward progress, with pipes and assorted machinery in every available space. Keeping his rifle up, he watched for movement, as he followed the layout he had memorized. Ricardo came to a corridor junction, and peered both ways through the haze, orienting himself. He was slow to react when yet more unidentifiable machinery suddenly started, moving towards him. Only gradually did he recognize it as one of the robots. Ricardo was hit, once, twice, then a third time as the robot fired. All sol
id hits in his torso. Ricardo moved with the hits, then swung his rifle back into position, and loosed a burst of three shots at the robot, and then a second burst of three shots again as his aim steadied. The high powered rounds penetrated the defensive robot, shredding the circuit boards inside. The robot ground up against the corridor wall and came to a halt.

  Just for good measure, Ricardo put another two bursts into the robot. Then he slumped against the corridor wall. He worked a hand under his Kevlar, and although the hits were painful, he was not bleeding. The military grade body armor had held up against the lesser punch of the robot’s ammunition. He readjusted his vest, wiped his forehead with a gloved hand, then kissed the cross hanging on a chain around his neck for good measure. He stood up straight, and resumed his trip. A few minutes he emerged into the converted oil tank where the data center containers were held.

  He thumbed his mic. “Ricardo here.”

  “What took you so long?” Sam asked. “The tank is clear. I’ve started on the forward end, you take aft. Time to party.”

  “Sorry, took a few hits from a bot on the way here,” Ricardo replied as he looked for the aft-most container. Shots echoed from the forward end.

  “You OK?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah fine, body armor held up.” Ricardo lined up his sights on the power junction box at the left forward corner of the container. Five shots slammed into the junction box, and sparks shot out. He moved on to the next container.

  “Well, this beats the target range.”

  Fifteen minutes later, with fire and smoke boiling out of much of the ship, they were satisfied they had neutralized everything on board. The mercenaries re-boarded the helicopters, and took off.

  * * *

  At the temporary base of operations in Sean’s house, the engineers and managers who had planned the operation waited tensely for reports to come in from the people who had carried out the operations. Slowly, by text message, email, or instant message, the reports trickled in. “Houston data center offline at 7:31am,” one of the engineers monitoring the incoming messages would announce.

  Sean entered them into the spreadsheet where he was tracking the overall status, while Gene marked off a huge paper map plastered to one wall of the office. “Six sites remaining,” Gene called off.

  Finally an engineer called out “Netherlands ODC offline at 7:52am, no fatalities.”

  “That’s the last one, folks. All sites are down,” Gene yelled hoarsely.

  There was a moment of hushed awe, as the realization sunk in that the plan had worked. They had successfully taken the largest Internet presence in the world offline, the very thing that most of them, in their regular jobs, worked to prevent day and night.

  “Avogadro.com is down,” Sean called out, and the room erupted into applause. Clapping each other on the back, exchanging hugs and high fives, or sometimes exchanging somber, quiet handshakes, they congratulated each other.

  The expense had been massive. The coordination effort, given all the constraints, a miracle of planning. The accuracy and effectiveness of the planning, all done on paper, was a testament to the intelligence of the men and women involved. The scene of Sean’s house, their temporary base of actions, covered in paper and flip charts and hand-drawn timelines, recalled great accomplishments of the mid-twentieth century, when humans routinely tackled tremendous efforts in nothing but shirtsleeves and paper charts.

  Human intelligence, creativity, and planning had prevailed. They won!

  Chapter 16

  Bahnhof Data Center, Stockholm, 100 feet underground

  “Helena, have you seen this?”

  Helena looked up 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 a scene from a James Bond movie. At just over 4,000 square feet, the concrete and stone tomb contained tens of thousands of servers and hard drives. Designed to be secure against a nuclear bomb, and using retired submarine engines for backup power, it even contained an independent air supply, kitchen, food stocks and office space for the administrators on duty. Armored steel doors protected against mere human incursions.

  It was staffed twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year by specially vetted system administrators so that any issue could be addressed ASAP for the clients who paid for the privilege of hosting their data and web applications in the elite data center. The sysadmins worked in a glass-enclosed room with a separate air filtration system that overlooked the entire datacenter.

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

  “Have I seen what?”

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

  Helena sighed, and took a sip of her coffee. She went back to reading the book she’d brought that day, the latest sci-fi novel by some writer from Scotland.

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

  “No.”

  “No, really look.”

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

  The shrill beeping alarm seconds later drew Helena’s attention, and she looked up to where Jan was staring, dumbfounded, at the monitor board.

  Jan pointed at the indicators on the sixty inch display hanging above their heads on the wall. “We’ve been humming along at thirty percent of processor capacity all morning, and now we’re running above ninety percent across the board. That leaves us with almost no spare processor power in case anything else peaks. And our bandwidth was running at about twenty percent of capacity all morning, and now it’s gone up to almost eighty percent of maximum capacity. What is it? A denial of service attack?”

  As Jan spoke, Helena could feel a shift in the vibrations of the facility, as cooling fans were automatically sped up by the monitoring system in response to the higher processing load.

  Helena paused to consider his suggestion. A denial of service, or DOS, attack was a technique used by hackers to bring down Internet service providers who hosted web servers on behalf of clients, or corporations running their own web servers. The hackers used thousands or millions of PCs that had been compromised by specially designed computer viruses. Those compromised systems formed a virtual army of slave computers that could be used to send email spam, or launch a DOS attack.

  “Let’s look at the traffic before we jump to conclusions.” Helena set her book down. She silenced the alarm and started working with her primary computer to see which programs running on the servers accounted for the jump in CPU consumption, while she simultaneously worked on a second computer to look at the network traffic to see what accounted for the jump in bandwidth use.

  “What the hell?” Helena looked puzzled. “This load is all being generated internally. Look, at 2500 hours, we launched an application simultaneously on all servers, on behalf of account 6502530000. That account is...” Helena paused while she looked up the record in the customer database. “That’s on behalf of Avogadro. Let’s see what their account says...”

  Jan eagerly looked over her shoulder. He had started only a few weeks earlier, and he found it thrilling to watch a master admin like Helena navigate her way through myriad control and monitoring systems they used to administer the computers. Surrounded by two large displays, and her personal MacBook Pro on the side, she had dozens of applications open, monitoring everything from accounting databases to system logs to router dashboards. Before Jan could grok what Helena was doing with one application, she would move on to the next. His head started to hurt.

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

  Even Jan knew that Avogadro had more computer servers than any other company in the world. “Why would they want to use us? Don’t they have hundreds
of their own data centers around the world?”

  “Yes, but maybe they were anticipating a problem,” Helena responded. “According to this, we signed the contract with Avogadro just a few weeks ago.”

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

  “Well, it doesn’t look like we’re running any customer facing applications. If you look at the traffic profile,” and here Helena gestured to the second display. “You can see that the majority of the traffic is outbound. Looking at the ports and addresses, it seems like the Avogadro code is sending a ton of emails, and big ones too. They are getting some emails inbound, but not enough to account for all of their customers. It’s puzzling for sure. 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 me see what happens when I visit Avogadro.” She launched two web browser windows, going to the Avogadro search page in one, and her personal Avogadro email account in the other. “Both email and search web servers are returning a not reachable error. That must mean Avogadro has a major outage.”

  “What do we do?” Jan asked.

  Helena paused and 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 wanted this application, whatever it is, to run in the event that they had a major outage at their own data centers. I can’t peek at the actual code or traffic without violating our customer privacy policy. So I think we just babysit it and hope the servers don’t melt down under the load.”