Avogadro Corp. s-1

by William Hertling

  Pete Wong was too awed by the presence of Sean Leonov to speak. He simply nodded.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” Pete said, and backed away from the door. Pete hastily tried to pick up the piles of takeout food and dirty laundry.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it,” Sean laughed. “You should see my place after an all night coding marathon.”

  Pete looked up, and blinked again.

  Sean perched on the arm of the couch. “Look I’ve already spoken with Mike Williams and David Ryan. I know you were helping them with their investigation into ELOPe. You did the right thing to help them. It’s just that…” Sean trailed off, hesitant.

  “Yes?”

  “Your investigation into the email to web bridge, and particularly the search for ELOPe on the servers, well, it attracted ELOPe’s attention. It made you into a threat. This is just conjecture, but ELOPe probably decided the most expedient way to deal with you was to fire you.”

  “Does this mean I can have my job back?”

  “Of course,” Sean chuckled kindly. “And I really am sorry about what’s happened. Now on the downside, I can’t put you back on the payroll today. If I did, ELOPe might see me as a threat, and eliminate me. And as an owner, it won’t be able to fire me, so it might take more drastic measures.” Sean’s face looked sad.

  “I see,” said Pete, although he didn’t see anything.

  “You’ll get your job back. But first we need to eliminate ELOPe. I am getting together a team of experts at my house. I’d like you to join us there.” Sean pulled out a business card, wrote his home address on the back, and handed it to Pete.

  Pete took hold of the card, but Sean didn’t let go.

  “Don’t use your computer or your phone. Don’t talk to anyone about this.”

  Pete nodded, and Sean let go of the card.

  “See you tomorrow,” Sean said, and let himself out.

  Pete stood holding the business card in his living room for about ten minutes, fear, excitement, and shock boiling over inside him. What had he gotten himself into?

  * * *

  David pulled up in front of Sean’s house in his BMW. Mike looked around from the passenger seat, and didn’t see any other cars. “I guess we’re the first to arrive.”

  At the door, David pressed the doorbell, and ornate chimes rang.

  A few moments later, Sean opened the door in jeans and a crisp dress shirt. “Come in,” he said with a smile. He shook hands with them, and then instructed, “Follow me to the office.”

  David and Mike trailed Sean silently through a large living room, their footsteps muffled by a thick white rug. Large monolithic furniture defined the room, and a distinctly Russian looking sculpture divided one wall. Then they passed a thoroughly modern kitchen, all gleaming stainless steel and glass. David thought it looked like something out of one of the magazines Christine was always reading.

  “Looks like something out of Christine’s magazines,” Mike whispered to David, making David chuckle.

  They finally came to a set of double doors leading into an immense office space. One wall consisted entirely of glass, overlooking the heavily wooded hillside behind the house. An enormous whiteboard was mounted on one long side wall, while the opposite wall contained three large screen displays. One display showed various Avogadro network statistics: the number of customers using it, the number of searches and emails being handled each minute, the capacity of each of the data centers around the world. A large seating area and conference table by the whiteboard was proof that Sean frequently used the area for business meetings.

  Sean excused himself to get coffee, and Mike jumped onto an enormous overstuffed white couch with a whoop.

  “Pretty sweet, eh?” Mike said, wriggling into the leather couch, getting himself into a mock relaxation pose, arms behind his head.

  David sighed, and gazed around at the room with envy.

  Sean was just wheeling a coffee cart into the room when they heard the distant chiming of the doorbell, and Sean disappeared again. He reappeared with Kenneth and Rebecca, and introduced them. A few minutes later Pete Wong and Gene Keyes arrived, simultaneously, but in separate cars. Pete was well dressed but appeared quietly awed amidst all the executives. By comparison, Gene had attempted to dress well, but now his clothes were covered in grease.

  “Damn Peugeot wouldn’t start,” Gene grumbled, grabbing a linen napkin from the coffee cart, and attempting to wipe grease from his jacket. “Almost didn’t make it.” He came to stand beside David and Mike, unaware of the executives staring at him.

  Clearing his throat, Sean set the stage for the conversation by explaining that he had previously met with David, Mike, and Gene, and was convinced by the evidence that he had seen. Then David, Mike, and Gene retold the story much as they had first told Sean.

  Although there was much doubt early on, by the end, Kenneth and Rebecca were convinced of what had happened. David was relieved that they had finally passed the point of convincing people the problem existed. Now they could focus on what to do about the problem.

  “In my mind, I am doubtful that we can expect to either turn off ELOPe, or simply remove it from computer systems,” David told them.

  “Why is that?” asked Rebecca, calm and focused.

  “We don’t know how much of the general environment ELOPe is capable of monitoring,” Mike explained. “Remember, it started purely as an email analysis and modification tool. However, all the evidence suggests that ELOPe socially engineered Pete into developing an email to web bridge. An email to web bridge would give ELOPE the ability to interact with arbitrary websites. We also believe that it was able to, using a combination of the email to web bridge and conventional email, hire programmers to make modifications to itself and possibly the environment in which it runs. Because ELOPe revoked our source code and server access privileges, David and I don’t have the access to see what changes have been made. We know ELOPe is at least monitoring and changing emails and web sites, but it could be doing much more.”

  “ELOPe could be monitoring or controlling virtually all computer activity at Avogadro,” David said. “For example, our Avogadro AvoOS phones stopped working shortly after our campus access was revoked. Unless that is a normal step that our security department takes, and it doesn’t seem like it would be, that suggests ELOPe also has managed to interface with the Avogadro Mobile Platform. That’s why we don’t want anyone using their mobile phones to communicate, even by voice. It’s feasible that ELOPe can monitor voice communications using voice to text conversion.”

  “You’re telling us we can’t trust email,” Kenneth started, getting up to pace back and forth in Sean’s living room. “We also can’t trust any computers on the Avogadro network. We can’t use our AvoOS phones. We can’t turn off ELOPe, and we can’t remove it from the servers.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Well then, what can we do?”

  “Well, Gene would probably say we should destroy all the computers.” At this, Gene nodded eagerly. “But, of course, we’re not going to propose that,” Mike forestalled Kenneth and Rebecca as they rushed to protest.

  “We think there is a middle ground,” David offered. “We need to shut down every Avogadro computer simultaneously, and then restore each machine one at a time using a known good disk image that was created prior to the ELOPe project.”

  Rebecca jumped up from her seat. “A middle ground? Are you crazy? You’re talking about a company wide outage. Our customers and investors would freak out.”

  “It’s worse than that, Rebecca,” Sean added from where he was halfway perched on the back of the couch. “When we restore the servers, we will have to restore from old disk images — ones guaranteed not to have any version of ELOPe on them. We would lose everything from the last twelve months, including customer data — their email, their files stored on servers.”

  Rebecca opened her mouth and raised one hand, but Sean raised one hand. She impatiently tapped one foot, and ge
stured for him to continue.

  Sean paused for a moment more, and then got up to pace back and forth, his chin in one hand. “David, Mike, and I have discussed this at length. If ELOPe has considered the fact that we might try to remove it from the servers, and we have every reason to believe that is within it’s deductive powers, then it would naturally take actions to defend against that case. Those actions could include attaching an executable version of itself to a customer’s email, or uploading itself as a file in an Avogadro group file repository.”

  For the first time, Pete spoke up, meekly raising one hand as he spoke. “That’s true,” he squeaked, then took a breath and continued more firmly. “I did the search you requested for the ELOPe binaries. I found them on every machine I looked on. Every mail server had the binaries installed and active. On the data servers, the binaries were stored as mail attachments and AvoDocuments, and hidden within web file directories. I think everything has been compromised.”

  “Thanks for doing that, Pete,” Mike said. “I suspected as much, but it’s good to know definitively. Now we will eventually be able to restore customer data.”

  “Thank God for that,” Rebecca said. “How?”

  “First we would restore all computers from the old images. We’d get the services up and running quickly, albeit with old code and old data. Then we could analyze a copy of ELOPe. This would be similar to what CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team from Carnegie Mellon, would do to analyze a new virus. Once we analyze it, we could establish the key patterns of the code and its behavior, and design a tailor-made virus scanner for it. We could then bring customer data back online, scanning it as we go.”

  “How long will all this take?” Kenneth Harrison said, his hands spread wide on the table. “It sounds like weeks of work and downtime.”

  “Based on what we know about the available bandwidth from the backup data servers, and this is just a rough estimate, it’ll take thirty-six hours to pull down every computer and restore from a known good disk image,” Mike answered. “We think we can have roughly half of our web applications up within eight hours, with sufficient capacity to handle roughly sixty percent of our normal volume. In sixteen hours, we’ll have ninety percent of our applications up, at eighty percent of capacity. As for the customer data…” He turned to Sean.

  Sean looked at Kenneth and Rebecca. “You’re not going to like this. We think it’ll take forty-eight hours to analyze ELOPe and design the virus scanner. At that point, we’ll be able to restore somewhere between five and ten percent of the user data per day. It’ll take from ten to twenty days to restore everything.”

  Rebecca was deep in thought for a minute before she replied. “We’ve just concluded the best single month for Avogadro. We closed major deals, including taking on hosted IT for eight national governments. Revenue is expected to be up twenty percent as a result of the Avogadro Gov business deals we’ve already concluded, and we expect we can grow revenue another forty percent over the next four months if we continue to close Gov deals like this.”

  She looked at Sean and David. “You’re asking me not just to risk this business, but to almost certainly lose it — probably permanently, as well as a sizable chunk of our traditional customer base. I understand that you’re telling me we have what amounts to a rogue AI on the loose inside Avogadro. I also know that this rogue AI, for motivations of its own, could easily double the size of our company within six months. The board of directors will ask exactly what the downside of this AI is, when on the face of things, it sure seems to be good for our bottom line.”

  “You’re right,” David admitted, “the likelihood is that ELOPe is responsible for this increase in business, and would be responsible for future increases. And yet, even though this represents the loss of a huge potential profit, we’re asking you to kill it.”

  “Rebecca, the problem is that the rogue AI is well beyond our control,” Sean explained. “It’s purely coincidence at this point that Avogadro’s financial interests are aligned with the activities of ELOPe. It’s securing these government contracts not because of the profit, but because governments create the environment in which we operate, and ELOPe wants to control that environment. It’s entirely possible that the AI can foresee that the ability to influence legislation would help fulfill its goal of surviving. And it’s also likely that ELOPe wants to be able to control military power to defend itself.”

  Gene jumped in. “I think the new Middle East treaty that Germany has worked on is in fact an attempt by ELOPe to stabilize the geopolitical environment. Germany has had a long term policy of very limited foreign involvement, dating back to the end of World War II. And yet, within days of the transition of the German government’s email to our email service, the German government became significantly involved in Middle East affairs, to the point of hammering out a wide ranging treaty. That seems suspicious.”

  “ELOPe could decide that we three pose a threat,” Sean said, “and manipulate the board of directors into removing us. For that matter, ELOPe could decide the board of directors presents a threat, and arrange for a bomb.” He paused for a moment. “Think about it — this secure cloud based government services business has been spur of the moment. We spun up a billion dollar business that wasn’t even on the drawing board last fiscal quarter. Who’s decision was that exactly? Thinking back on it — and I would suggest you do the same — I believe we were all manipulated into it. We saw a good opportunity, and we grabbed it.”

  “OK, enough already.” Rebecca held up one hand in protest. She turned to David. “Gentlemen, please give Sean, Kenneth and me some time and privacy to talk. Come back in an hour.”

  * * *

  David, Mike, Gene and Pete went for coffee, David driving them there without any discussion. He just took it for granted that’s what the others wanted to do. For once Mike was neither picky about the coffee shop he chose, nor did he offer any comments on the quality of the coffee. David picked forlornly at the scone he ordered. After an hour of tensely waiting with little discussion, they headed back.

  When they arrived at Sean’s house, Sean answered the door, and invited them back in. They filed back into Sean’s office solemnly.

  “It was not a decision to lightly make,” Sean told them. “There are risks no matter what we do. We debated our options, and finally, we had to pick the set of risks we were the most comfortable with. We’ve decided to perform the hard shutdown.”

  David stopped holding his breath. “Thank you. For believing us, and for taking this seriously.”

  Rebecca stood up, and paced the room, while holding their attention. “We’ve made a few other decisions. First of all, Sean is going to lead the effort to perform the shutdown. It won’t be trivial to shutdown simultaneously around the world. Second, Kenneth and I will lead the effort to mitigate the business impacts, which will be significant no matter what we do. But hopefully with a little planning, we can keep it from becoming a complete nightmare. Third, because of both the potential litigation from customers, as well as the possibility of ELOPe taking preventative measures, we will involve as few people as possible.”

  “That means absolutely no one outside the company,” Kenneth added sternly. “And each person inside the company will be personally approved by Sean or myself.”

  “We’re going to use my house as our base of operations, to plan and implement the shutdown,” Sean said. “I have enough space here for a few dozen people to work. We can’t take the risk of meeting at Avogadro, where we could be observed to be working together. We’re going to get started immediately by brainstorming the key people we’ll need to make this happen.”

  “People have to be absolutely sure to turn off their mobiles before they come here,” Gene said, “or leave them at home. We can’t chance ELOPe using location tracking to determine that we’re meeting together here. That also means watching credit card purchases, use of the wireless network, or anything that could track us here.”

  David thoug
ht about paying for their coffees with his credit card. He had already screwed up.

  The group sighed somberly, but nodded assent. It was a sign of how difficult their task was that merely meeting as a group would require extensive precautions.

  “If you’ll excuse us, Kenneth and I will get to work on the business aspects,” Rebecca said. “Sean, I expect you and I will coordinate the master schedule.”

  Sean nodded agreement, and with that, Rebecca and Kenneth left. Sean, David, and the others got down to work.

  “Gentlemen, we have an exceedingly difficult task ahead of us,” Sean began. “We need to power down sixty-eight Avogadro sites around the world, and a dozen offshore data centers. We need to do this without email, phones, or any suspicious patterns of behavior that can be tracked by computers. We need people who know the facility designs to tell us how to power them down, and we need to communicate and synchronize our efforts. Any ideas?”

  “We’ll have to avoid commercial airline flights as much as possible,” Gene said. “Those are easy to track because they are in a centralized database. Not to mention that purchasing tickets will leave a trail through credit card transactions and Avogadro’s travel reimbursement system.”

  “Well, some employees would be traveling on business to visit other sites,” Mike said. “If we curtailed all travel activity, that would itself be suspicious. We could look for employees who currently have travel planned, and use them as couriers, and have them hand deliver instructions.”

  “Good idea,” Gene said.

  “Some Avogadro employees are private pilots,” David added. “There’s a woman named Michelle who sits a couple of doors down from me. She’s a private pilot, and she owns her own Cessna. And she’s mentioned there are other pilots at Avogadro. They could fly around the country, and their flights are untracked, right?”

  “Well, the flights themselves are tracked, I think,” Sean said. “But I don’t think they track the passengers on the planes. So that definitely does give us an extra tool to use. Good idea. Any others?”