* * *
Gene Keyes ground his teeth. He forced himself to stop.
He had tried to meet Gary Mitchell’s manager, but her admin claimed she was traveling on business and couldn’t be reached, even for an emergency.
So Gene had gone to his own manager, Brett Grove, to get the issue escalated. Brett hadn’t believed the evidence Gene presented. Every time that Gene thought back to the meeting, he felt his blood begin to boil and his vision cloud over.
They had been in Brett’s office, just a half hour ago. Naturally, Brett’s office had windows, a spotless desk, and a single large screen monitor. A fancy Mont Blanc pen stood in the center of the desk, an obvious show piece since not a single piece of paper, not even a sticky note, was to be seen anywhere.
After Gene had explained what he found, he had expected Brett to understand and endorse the line of investigation. A word or two of praise would not have been out of order either. Instead, his arguments were met with disbelief, even disregard.
“Look Gene, I can see you think you’ve found something here. However, you’re not even coherent. You’ve been raving for years about not trusting computers, and now you come to me with some kind of story about an artificial intelligence in the computer. Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“Are you going to look at these print outs?” asked Gene, who had come carefully prepared with the same meticulous collection of paper based data he had used to present his evidence to Maggie Reynolds in Finance, and then later with Mike and David.
“No, I am not going to wade through hundreds of pages of print outs.” He sat back, waving his hand dismissively at the accordion folder. If you want to convince me, summarize the evidence you have, put together a presentation that explains it, and present it in the staff meeting on Friday. That’s just the way we do things here.”
“Fuck you Brett. Listen to me son, there is a god damn monster in the fucking machine!” Gene snarled, leaping to his feet. “This thing is buying machine guns and torpedos. We don’t have time to put together a fucking Powerpoint presentation. We’ll be lucky to still be alive on Friday!” He held himself back, but he wanted to reach across the desk and grab the kid by the shirt collar.
“No, you listen to me Gene. This is typical of you. You think because I’m thirty years old that makes me an idiot. You’re an incompetent bastard.” Brett stood up on his own side of the desk, leaning forward and punctuating his every point with a jab of his finger. “You ignore your emails, you don’t follow the processes you’re supposed to follow. We’re the number one Internet company in the world, and the only thing you even use a computer for is to print stuff out. My grandmother is more computer literate, and she’d have more credibility around here. You would have been out of here, but I promised my predecessor I’d keep you around. He made me swear I’d keep you on my staff before he would give me this job. I don’t know what the hell he saw in you, but I don’t see it. Now why don’t you go take a shower, shave yourself, and put on some clean clothes for God’s sake, and then put together a fucking Powerpoint presentation if you have to buy a book to learn how to use it.”
Gene came back to the present moment in his office, shaking his head. He opened the bottom desk drawer, and poured himself an inch of whiskey. On second thought, he poured two inches. Then he swigged the whole cup. He shouldn’t have cursed at the kid, he realized that now, but he was just so damn infuriating. Jesus, he was going to give himself a heart attack if he replayed that conversation in his head again. He looked down at his rumpled, slept-in clothes, and rubbed a hand over his face, feeling his multiple day stubble. Fuck. He was a mess, that was true. Damn it though, competence wasn’t a matter of clothes and fancy presentation. Competence was looking at data, whether out there in the real world, or on his sheets of paper, and drawing insights. Goddamn-it-all, he was still competent and relevant.
Gene shook his head again. He had to focus on something productive. It was time to meet back up with Mike and David. He dragged himself out of his chair, locked his office door on the way out, and began the journey back to the R&D building.
* * *
Bill Larry jostled along on yet another helicopter ride out to the coast. In this case, it was because he had gotten a call from Maggie Reynolds in the Finance department asking him to verify delivery of purchases. Bill sighed, thinking about the confusing call.
Maggie had a hard time understanding that Facility location code ODC0004 was not just a walk down the hallway for Bill, but was instead a floating platform ten miles off the shore of the United States, and required Bill to make a helicopter reservation and two hours of driving and flying to get to.
If it was confusing to Maggie, it was doubly so for Bill, because Maggie went through a litany of items that didn’t make sense. He had not ordered backup satellite communication hardware or microwave communication equipment. Yes, they had ordered equipment from iRobot, but that was before the holiday break, and no, there wasn’t a second round of deliveries to all the ODCs from iRobot. In any case, there could be no visits to install anything on the ODCs without approval from Bill. It simply wasn’t possible to have installed all the items Maggie described, because only Bill, Jake, and a handful of employees that Bill was in day to day contact with, had the authority to stand down the iRobot defenses. Bill would have been personally advised if anyone authorized a stand-down. He shook his head. From Maggie’s inventory of purchase orders, it made the ODCs sound like virtual beehives of activity. Impossible.
However, it was clear that the shit had hit the fan back in the main office, because Maggie said she had folks from the Controls and Compliance office doing some kind of internal investigation. She sounded worried but trying to hide it, and Bill had felt sorry for her. Bill reluctantly reserved a helicopter, packed a bag with his satellite phone, access key cards, and headed for the heliport.
That’s how Bill ended up thirty minutes out from ODC #4 on one of the company’s Bell helicopters to do a hands on inspection and lay to rest the question of exactly what equipment was or was not installed. With a sudden jolt, he realized that in the rush, he had forgotten to schedule the deactivation for the defense robots.
Bill nervously struggled to plug his satellite phone into the helicopter headset, a clumsy, insulated thing. Fuck, he could have gotten himself killed. He placed the call to the iRobot system administrators.
“Hello, this is Bill Larry at Avogadro. My deactivation passcode is O-S-T-F-V-3-9-4-1.” Bill had to speak up over the helicopter noise. “I need to shutdown the robots at ODC4.
“I’m sorry, but can you please repeat that passcode.”
“O-S-T-F-V-3-9-4-1. I’m Bill Larry at Avogadro. I need to shutdown the defense robots so I can land at my facility.
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have any records with that passcode. Can you please give us your vendor ID?”
Bill sighed in exasperation, and wondered what more could go wrong with his day. He provided their vendor ID, and waited.
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have a listing for your vendor ID. Are you sure you have a contract with us?”
After more unhelpful back and forth discussion in this vein with the phone agent, Bill asked for a supervisor, and was shortly transferred over to a Ms. Nancy Claire.
“I’m sorry Mr. Larry,” Ms. Claire explained after a few minutes of research, “but we’re no longer under contract to administer your iRobot defenses. Of course we provided the hardware, and we were administering it up through December thirty-first, but as of the first of this year, we turned administration over to you.”
“That’s not possible,” Bill objected.
It took another fifteen minutes on the phone with Ms. Claire for Bill to gradually puzzle out that iRobot thought someone at Avogadro had renegotiated the iRobot contract. Bill was sure this couldn’t be the case, but he couldn’t help wracking his head wondering if someone had gone around him. They had just put the contract in place a few weeks earlier. It didn’
t make any sense. Bill had to figure all this out while yelling over the sound of the helicopter. He was getting one hell of a headache. The pilot asked him whether it was OK to proceed, and he shook his head no.
Then Bill checked his phone and found the number for a vice president, Bob O’Day, at iRobot, one of the guys that he and Jake had spoken to when negotiating the contract. Bill hung up with Nancy Claire, and called Bob. Bill remembered Bob as being intensely focused and wickedly smart. Bob would get this issue resolved. Bob’s administrative assistant said Bob was already on an urgent call, but offered that Bob could call Bill back within 10 minutes.
So Bill waited over the Pacific ocean, a thousand feet up, a hundred and five decibel engine a few feet above his head, burning a gallon a minute of high performance aviation fuel.
Seven minutes later, the phone rang, and Bill punched the button to answer. It was Bob, the iRobot VP. Bill struggled to keep his voice under control as he demanded to know what was going on. While the pilot had the helicopter circling around ODC #4 in gentle circles, Bob confirmed that indeed, iRobot had installed additional defenses, and then turned the administration of those defenses over to Avogadro.
Craning his head to look at the floating barge, Bill could see additional satellite communication and microwave communication antennas, and what looked like some kind of turrets. Bill wondered why he hadn’t brought binoculars. While the pilot circled (and why the hell couldn’t he keep the damn helicopter stable?), Bill yelled over the noise of the helicopter to ask if there was any kind of override that iRobot could still execute. Bob assured him that for security reasons, of course, there wasn’t any kind of override. The point of handing off administration to Avogadro was to insure that full security resided in the hands of Avogadro. The control over the robots now rested with the computer software that iRobot had provided to Avogadro.
As Bill argued with the folks at iRobot in the back seat of the helicopter, George “Punch” Gonzales, today’s helicopter pilot, continued to circle around. He did it more out of boredom than anything else, since he could have just as easily engaged the auto-hover, which would have maintained them at a given location. After twenty years of flying helicopters for the Marines, George wasn’t inclined to engage the auto-hover and tune out. He liked to keep his hands on the stick. On one of these slow rotations around the ODC, George came a little closer to the platform than he had before. He also happened to glance again at the fuel gauge, and noted that they were coming up on their halfway point. George turned to ask Bill how much longer they planned to stay. While he was glancing backwards, the helicopter came just a few dozen feet closer to the platform than it had before. Since he wasn’t looking out the windshield, George, who just might have recognized them for what they were, missed the flash of anti-aircraft missiles launching. Bill was stooped, head down, struggling to hear to the other end of the line, to understand what happened, and how the administration of the robots could have been bungled so badly in the first month of operation.
Within seconds the two heat seeking missiles transited the distance to the helicopter, focusing in on the hot helicopter exhaust. When the first missile detonated, the engine and copter blades exploded apart. The second missile impacted the passenger compartment, bursting the thin shell. Bits of shrapnel screamed through the air in all directions, falling sizzling into the water.
Chapter 10
David and Mike were having coffee in David’s office when Gene came in and dropped heavily into one of the chairs.
Slumped in the chair, Gene related his story. “I’m sorry boys, I never anticipated that I had lost all credibility within my department. If we are going to anyone else in management, and I think we should, then you will have to take point on this. You boys have some credibility with these folks.”
“I’m sorry Gene,” Mike offered, clapping the older man on the shoulder, his face still lined deeply in dismay. “I appreciate the attempt.”
“Me too,” David added. “It was a necessary step.”
Mike continued solemnly, “I think the key to this is Gary’s Communication Products Division. Gary might be unreachable, but he’s not the only decision maker.”
“That’s right. There’s a marketing manager. Her name is… Linda Fletcher,” David said brightly. “She’s Gary’s number two. Hell, let’s find out who the Legal representative is, and bring Legal in. If we can convince them of the risk, maybe they put a stop to the whole project.”
“Legal just advises the business managers,” Gene pointed out, bringing his expertise to bear, “so technically they can’t enforce a business action. It’s up to the business manager to weigh risks and make a decision. But I agree, it makes sense to involve them. Perhaps the fear of legal risks will cause the lawyers to side with us.”
“OK, let’s do it.”
It was easier said than done. Trying to avoid the use of phones or emails created all sorts of logistical problems. David walked down the hallway with Mike and Gene in tow. They asked the admin of the next group over to look up the location of Linda Fletcher’s office, and her admin’s name. Then they walked across the campus, traversing sky bridges and elevators to get to Building 7a. They found Linda’s admin, a young guy by the name of Nathan, at his desk outside Linda’s office.
Nathan was more than a little puzzled that they had walked over just to set up a meeting. He grew downright suspicious when they asked him not to put their names in the meeting invitation list. Gene pulled out his badge, showing he worked for Controls and Compliance.
“This is an extremely sensitive matter,” he impressed on Nathan, leaving the young guy with his jaw open. “Just schedule the meeting.”
“Also, I need you to invite the Legal rep,” David said.
“You mean Tim Wright?” Nathan asked, his jaw still hanging open after speaking.
“Yes,” David said. “What’s the earliest you can set it up?”
The admin checked the calendar. “I can get you a half hour next Tuesday.”
“No, we need it today.”
Nathan shook his head firmly. “No can do. Linda will kill me. How about Friday?”
“Look kid,” Gene jumped in, “people’s jobs and more are on the line. Just be straight, what is the earliest possible time we can meet?”
“I can get you in tomorrow right after lunch,” he admitted. He looked sheepishly at them. “She’s in a meeting with a really important business partner this morning, and with the PR agency tomorrow, and she really will kill me if I try to fit you in.”
“Fine, set it up for tomorrow,” Gene said. He started to turn away, and then turned back. “Look kid, I can see from your face that as soon as we leave here, you’re gonna walk down the hallway to gossip about this. Don’t do it if you still want to have a job tomorrow.”
Nathan nodded swiftly, and then the group of three turned and headed to David’s office.
“I’m exhausted,” David admitted on the way back. “I realize how urgent this is, but given that we’re stalled, waiting for Linda, I think I need to go home. I’ve been up since five this morning, to catch our flight back.”
“Let’s meet tomorrow morning before the meeting,” Mike suggested. “David’s office?”
Gene agreed, and then offered them a ride to David’s place.
* * *
That night, David picked moodily at Lebanese takeout, one of his favorite foods.
“You better not waste that mjadra,” Christine said with a laugh. She got no answer.
She tried again. “What’s your plan for tomorrow?”
“We’re going to Linda Fletcher, the marketing manager for Communication Products. She has decision making authority while Gary’s out. We’re going to ask her to approve an outage so we can take down the servers and install clean images without ELOPe.”
“It sounds like a reasonable plan. What do you think she’ll say?”
“I think she’ll say yes,” David said, then fell back into silence, staring at his plate.
“Why so glum then?” she asked gently.
“What am I going to do?” David said, suddenly stabbing angrily at his food, and then throwing his fork down. “This could be the end of the project almost certainly, maybe the end of my career. They’re going to ask questions about what ELOPe was doing, how these things happened. I was so close. So close to making ELOPe a success, so close to taking the success and leveraging it into something even bigger. Now what’s the best I can hope for? Some kind of damage control.” He rested his head in his hands.
Christine came around the table and rubbed his shoulders.
* * *
The next morning, David, Mike, and Gene reviewed what they’d say at the meeting with Linda, and discussed contingency plans. Then with time to kill, and seeing that everyone could benefit from a little downtime, Gene recommended Kenny and Zuke’s, a sandwich shop a few blocks away, a standby for the Avogadro crowd. The Avogadro cafeteria’s food quality was excellent, and it was well loved by the employees, but eventually the corporate ambience tired out even the enthusiasts. On this particular day, they all felt a little more comfortable a few blocks away from the eyes and ears of the corporation. They enjoyed Reubens and hamburger sliders, and made their way back ten minutes before the planned meeting time.
In the seventh floor meeting room, they started with introductions. Linda was a Scandinavian woman, whose family had lived briefly in Wisconsin when she was a child. She and Mike got off to a great start, laughing together over common experiences growing up in Wisconsin. Tim defied their expectations of what a lawyer would look like, showing up in black pants and a black T shirt. David briefly wondered with fascination if Tim was some new breed of Goth lawyer, but his jovial attitude quickly set them all at ease.
With introductions done, and everyone else sitting at the conference room table, David stood at the front of the room and started the explanation of what brought them to the meeting. Mike contributed details here and there, but let David lead the conversation. As David progressed in his explanation, he couldn’t help noticing that the light-hearted mood they had started with soon disappeared, as Linda and Tim became distinctly uncomfortable. David wasn’t sure if that discomfort reflected the technical nature of the explanation, a sense that they were going to be asked to make a decision without Gary present, or simple disbelief that the software could be acting independently, or some combination of all three. He feared that it wasn’t going to go well.
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