“Mike, I hope your dad is OK. Christine and I have been thinking about you guys, and our prayers are with you and your family. I was hoping to hear back from you by now, but we’ve seen the weather report, and know that phone and power lines are out across half of Wisconsin. That’s one hell of a storm. I think you know that Christine and I are going to visit her parents in New Mexico for the holiday. I’ll keep my phone with me. Please give me a call when you get this message. I’ve got something important to discuss with you. I’m worried about ELOPe. I’m going to be somewhat incommunicado while we’re at Christine’s parents’ place, but keep trying me.”
David hung up, and looked over to where his wife waited with their suitcases. In truth, he normally loved going to the ranch Christine grew up on in New Mexico for the holidays. He had grown up as a city boy, but found deep pleasure in the outdoors. Going to their ranch was one of the highlights of his year. Especially in the middle of the rainy Portland winter.
Unfortunately, he was far from joy at the moment. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that ELOPe was somehow originating emails on its own. He still hoped that he and Mike could take care of it without telling anyone else. He was becoming more afraid for his career by the minute. If he did anything that materially affected the Avogadro Mail service on top of the deceptions he’d already done, he’d never work there or at any of the other big Internet companies again. It was no wonder his throat felt tight, and his stomach a boiling pit of despair.
He hadn’t been able to remove the code changes without Mike’s help. And now, to top it off, David was headed out of town. He couldn’t cancel his trip with Christine on an unconfirmed fear, nor did he really want her to know how worried he was.
The only consolation, and it was a small one, was the holiday break. Most people at Avogadro would be out of the office. With a little luck, there wouldn’t be that much that ELOPe could do with so little email moving around. But he still hoped that it was just his own worries running away with themselves.
Christine was gesturing at him from the terminal gate, and he could see people boarding the plane. Reluctantly, he got up and went over to her, managing a weak smile. He gripped his luggage tightly and followed Christine toward the plane.
He tried to tell himself that when they got back from New Mexico, everything would be fine, just perfectly normal. He’d be able to laugh at everything that he was so worried about now. Meanwhile, a stiff drink, or better yet, two stiff drinks, would be really nice.
Bill Larry flew out by helicopter to visit ODC #4 again. Since his last visit, the standard “data center in a box” cargo containers had been replaced with specially hardened units, and iRobot had delivered their automated defenses.
On this visit, for the first time, in order to land on the floating helicopter pad, Bill had to authorize their visit via the iRobot services administrator before the helicopter took off. It unnerved Bill to step onto the deck of the ODC knowing that robots with lethal force were onboard the vessel. He realized that part of his unease came from the lack of positive feedback. Unlike with a person, there was no obvious way to know that the robots were in stand-down mode. They just stood there like any other piece of machinery.
He inspected one of the deck robots, more than a little terrified that it would suddenly lurch into motion and kill him. The robot looked like a miniature tank. It was about four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet tall. It had treads like a tank on either side of a small lower chassis that contained the motors and power supply. A rectangular box on a hinged and rotating scissor arm extended up another three feet. The rectangular box look incongruously like a box of roses he had once bought for his ex-wife.
He ran his fingers over the glass panes that he knew covered the optical and infrared sensors. Small metal covers would presumably retract to expose the armament. Peering around it, he looked for the directional acoustic sensors that must be there, somewhere. He knew infrared lighting and cameras, as well as sonar, allowed the robot to see in 3D even when normal visibility was obscured. Speakers allowed the robot to instruct would-be attackers to back off. If they failed to obey, the robot had several non-lethal deterrents. It could emit pepper spray in a 60 degree arc and it could fire taser-like electrical shocks directly in front of it. The same speakers that would tell attackers to back off could deliver a 18.9Hz acoustic blast that would vibrate the eyeballs of anyone within thirty feet. It was supposed to be incredible painful and disorienting. Should the non-lethal defenses fail to be sufficient deterrent, as a last resort, the robot was armed with two hundred 10mm, body-armor piercing rounds that were more compact than traditional rifle rounds, yet powerful enough to stop anyone they hit.
In theory, all of this would be under the control of a trained iRobot handler. The handlers had a central location from which they monitored defensive robots around the world for a variety of civilian customers. Bill had seen videos, and it was not dissimilar to what contracted security companies did for old fashioned corporate security, except that the handlers were mostly pimple-faced kids who looked like they spent most of their time playing video games.
When the robots sounded the alarm, the handlers could take immediate action from their remote location to deter the pirates. That was the normal course of action, and it didn’t scare Bill too badly. Knowing that there was a human being on the other end of the camera, well that wasn’t too bad, even if they were teenage video gamers.
Bill took his hand away from the metal casing of the bot and stepped back. If an iRobot handler didn’t take control of the robot — if their signal were actively jammed, if increment weather interfered with that signal, or if the handlers were swamped with too many simultaneous intrusions, well, in that case, the robots could act on their own.
Bill remembered the protocol. If the robots detected an intrusion, and the handlers didn’t take control, and the robots hadn’t been put in stand-by mode, and any would-be attackers didn’t back down, then the robots operated in autonomous mode. They’d broadcast a verbal alarm, escalation to non-lethal measures, and if all else failed, start shooting. The robots would coordinate together to cover all aspects of the deck and back each other up. Thinking through all of that, Bill was practically freaking out now that he was standing next to one of them. He backed further away, and carefully avoided the business end of the robot’s armament.
With one eye on them the entire time, Bill hastily finished his inspection of ODC #4. He boarded the helicopter, running the last few steps, and signaled for the pilot to take off. Only once they were in the air did he relax just a bit.
As the pilot circled back toward land, Bill watched the sea for some evidence of the underwater robots, but he couldn’t spot anything under the chop. The underwater robots used sonar to detect boats approaching the offshore data center. They would broadcast across all radio spectrums to warn the boats off. They would share intelligence data with the on deck robots. They too had weapons. Each had two torpedos that could sink a boat, and as a last resort, the submersible robots themselves could attach to the hull of a boat, either to track the boat or blow it up.
If the deck robots were unnerving, well, at least they could be seen. The thought of the hidden underwater robots brought back terrifying childhood memories of seeing the movie Jaws. The photos he’d seen of them, with side-mounted torpedos and maneuvering fins, only strengthened the fear. Bill made a mental point to ensure he would never take a boat to visit the ODCs.
At least the offshore data center deployments were back on track. The team had agreed that with the new hardened units and robotics defenses in place, further pirate attacks were unlikely to be successful. Bill had six teams working overtime through the Christmas holiday to deploy additional ODCs that were waiting in storage, pending a resolution to the piracy issues. Getting those ODCs deployed would put the master rollout plan back on track.
Prateet said a silent prayer before he boarded the data center. His company was under contract to Avogadro to service this floating data center, one of the four original prototypes. He always found it unnerving to visit the unmanned high tech island. Although he wasn’t an excessively superstitious man, he always thought the computers here were lonely. To make a bad situation worse, just prior to this trip Avogadro notified him that the floating data center would now have armed robots defending it.
They provided fifty pages of documentation regarding the robots, noting that Prateet would not need to service the robots himself, as that would be done by the robotics subcontractor. Prateet had been most thorough and exacting when he followed the protocol to disable the robots before he boarded. He preferred it when his only concern had been that the computers seemed lonely.
A tropical depression offshore caused some communication delays between the robot administrators and the robots, until they finally pronounced it safe for him to board the vessel. The seas were already quite rough, but his company had been given a substantial bonus to install the additional satellite communication system on board the boat. He was unsure why they wanted the additional system. The vessel was, as he knew from having serviced it before, already connected directly to the mainland through two fiber optic cables, and there was already a backup satellite communication system. This would give a third independent system. Well, if now they wanted two satellite communication systems, he would not second-guess rich American companies who were willing to pay him double the normal rate.
He completed his work as quickly as he could safely finish, given the high seas and unsettling stares of the robots at his back. When he boarded the boat that would take him back to Chennai, he said a few more prayers to Vishnu in thanks that he was finished and on his way home to his family.
Unknown to Prateet, other subcontractors were performing similar work on the newly deployed ODCs off the coasts of Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands.
Gene Keyes was in his office, but he might have been the only one left in the entire building. He noticed one dark, locked office after another on his way to get coffee. When he was a kid, he worked sixty hour weeks and was glad to work more when he was asked to. He still did when he needed to. But the self-entitled kids he was surrounded with took off two weeks for Christmas and didn’t think twice about it, leaving projects half finished and paperwork uncompleted.
He pulled a two inch thick stack of printouts in front of him. This pile was a record of everything that had been purchased at Avogadro since the start of December. He took a sip of coffee, and prepared to scan through the entire stack of pages.
When one of his coworkers found him doing this six months ago, they thought it was so funny that it became a joke across the entire department. “Don’t you know that the computer can do that now?” they said, as though he was some kind of prehistoric Cro-Magnon who didn’t know what a computer was. Even Gene’s new manager had come by and told him that it was a “nonproductive expenditure of time” to manually inspect the purchases and budgets.
So now Gene waited until six o’clock to start his inspection, and only did the work at night when everyone was gone. Despite error after error that occurred electronically, they insisted on trusting the computer. Gene trusted paper print outs. There was a reason they called it a paper trail, damn it. You could trust paper. What was printed didn’t change after you printed it. The same couldn’t be said for computer records.
As he wrote, he took notes. For minor errors, he jotted off email memos to affected departments. Sometimes it was transcribed billing codes, when something was billed to one department but delivered to another. In other cases, invoice amounts were transcribed or missing digits.
It was almost eleven o’clock when Gene spotted the first serious discrepancy. At first, he thought it was just a case of Gary Mitchell running out his fiscal year budget. It was improper, of course, but nothing Gene could do anything about. However, as Gene kept looking through the expenditures, he noticed that Mitchell had spent every penny of every budget under his control.
Well, that wasn’t quite true on a second look. Flipping back and forth through the printouts, Gene realized that Mitchell had actually underspent each budget by exactly one cent. Gene sat up and unconsciously tapped his pencil on the table. If a budget was completely spent or overspent, that generated a memo that went to the responsible manager, their manager, and the finance department. If a budget was underspent, on the other hand, it was unlikely to be reviewed or attract much attention.
Gene looked again at the paper work. Mitchell had a total of fifty-eight independent projects under his authority, each with their own allocated budget dollars. That was fifty-eight independent projects with one cent remaining in each budget. That kind of careful planning pointed to a deception. The only person in common across those fifty-eight budgets was Gary Mitchell, so it was likely that the responsible person was either Gary or someone who had signature authority for him.
Gene prepared himself for a late night. He wouldn’t be done until he had gone through every one of the three hundred and fifty pages of the budget print out. This was a major discovery. What had Gary Mitchell spent that money on?
In spite of Gene’s vigil, through the abandoned hallways of Avogadro, Christmas lights twinkled, and all was silent.
From: Gary Mitchell (Communications Products, Avogadro)
To: Oliver Weinstein (Department of Technology, Germany)
Subject: Avogadro Wireless Program
Hello Oliver,
How are you? It’s been a long time since my last visit to Germany. I still remember our last get together fondly. Maybe a little less beer next time?
I am writing to give you the inside scoop on a new project we have. Avogadro is developing a new technology product suite targeted at national governments.
The new service we’re offering is our cloud-based application architecture: comprehensive email, chat, web servers, cloud-based documents, online backup. As you know, Avogadro has the highest up-time and reliability in the industry.
If Germany is willing to be the poster child for our new services, we’re prepared to offer free national wireless internet access for all of Germany. This would give Germany the highest internet connection rates in world, and a significant technology advantage.
I know that you have the ear of the Minister of Technology. Would you broach this topic with him? Our marketing department is prepared to reach out to other governments. But I know that you’d like to score some points with the Minister, so I’m letting you know early about this.
Get back to me and let me know what he says.