Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (13 page)

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.

ELOPe Override

Chapter 8

Gene Keyes waited outside Maggie Reynolds’ office on the first business day of the New Year. He had spent the last ten days confirming his data and validating his conclusions. Well, he could be honest with himself. He had done all that in the first two days, and then spent eight days cooling his heels waiting for anyone in the damn company to get back from holiday vacation.

Gene glanced at his watch, saw that it was five minutes to eight, and resumed waiting with only the smallest of sighs. Maggie, a member of the Finance department, assigned to the Procurement group, had authorized several of the charges. So the first action he planned to take was to confirm the data with Maggie in person. He had brought his paper file showing the unusual expenditures: a thick accordion folder, nearly bursting. He wished he could have escalated the issue when he’d found it in the first place, but the established process for investigating these things required him to complete at least a first round of discussions with people who had handled the transactions.

At eight, he saw Maggie approaching carrying a coffee cup in one hand, with a large purse in her other. As she got closer, her face turned puzzled as she realized that Gene was waiting outside her office door.

“
Hello?” she asked, turning it into a question. She paused outside the door.

“
I’m Gene Keyes. You came to my office for help a few weeks ago.”

She nodded.

“
I’m investigating some irregularities in purchase orders since I last saw you.”

“
Oh.” She paused, still holding her coffee cup in one hand and purse dangling from the other. “Oh,” she said again, more sharply. “What can I do for you?”

“
Can we go into your office and sit down?” Gene gestured toward her door with the accordion folder.

“
Of course, of course,” Maggie said hurriedly. She handed her coffee cup to Gene, and then swiped her ID badge to unlock the door. “Come in.”

Gene looked around as they entered the office. Clean, organized. He put the coffee cup down on her desk.

Maggie went around her desk, then sat down, sitting straight upright, looking like a student trying to impress a teacher. “What is it? Did I sign something I shouldn’t have?”

“
I am hoping you can explain it to me.” Gene methodically took a seat, put his accordion folder in front of him, and took out a single page, the sheet rasping against the other tightly bound papers.

Maggie nervously fiddled with her hair.

“
Does this look familiar?” Gene finally asked, putting the page in front of Maggie. “It’s from Gary Mitchell’s division. You can see there are multiple purchases. It starts with these charges for the ELOPe project. Then, over the course of the next two weeks, there are thirty four more purchase orders that were outside the normal expenditure range for Mitchell’s expenses. Furthermore, the billing is highly irregular in that they are split across multiple accounts.”

“
I do remember this,” Maggie said, her hands shaking slightly as she took the printout. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I did anything wrong. I was concerned about the purchases when I first saw them. But I talked to John Anderson in Procurement about them. He said they were normal end of the year behavior because departments usually try to spend the leftover money in their budget.”

“
That’s true, but not like this. You can see that the expenditures are distributed against dozens of budgets. This one charge...” Gene paused to remove more paper from his briefcase, this set of printouts showing how the charges were allocated to project budgets. Gene found the relevant line item, pointed it out on the print out, and continued, “This one charge is distributed against forty-nine accounts. You see, not only are they spending all the money left in their budgets, but they’re also ensuring that each expenditure doesn’t take more than one million from any one account — that would trigger an executive level review of the expense.” Gene paused to study Maggie.

“
Sounds like someone deliberately manipulating the system to avoid being detected,” Maggie answered. She leaned forward, and started tracing through the print out with one finger. She went quickly through several pages, unconscious of Gene’s scrutiny.

“
That’s right.” Gene paused to extract another set of papers from his folder. “Here’s another little bit of odd behavior.” Gene turned the papers around and slid them across the desk. “By the end of this reporting period, each budget has exactly one penny left in it.”

“
That’s really bizarre,” Maggie said, her eyes bulging. “A penny? How did whoever did this get the budgets to come out so precisely?” Maggie pawed through the rest of the papers, swiftly going down the rows of purchases. “The individual charges are generally tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” she mused out loud. “Spending precisely the right amount of money to bring the totals in to exactly that amount... Well, it seems impossible.”

“
What is even more unusual,” Gene said, “is why they would do that. Whoever did this was smart enough to stay under the one million dollar limit in a single budget line item, knowing that would trigger the alert I mentioned. And in addition, they were smart enough to keep each account under budget, knowing that even hitting the budget would trigger another alert.”

Maggie laughed. “That’s true. There are emails from Finance every fiscal quarter about the repercussions of exceeding budgets or going over a million dollars. Anyone in the company who reads their email would know not to exceed their budget, or they would get chewed out by their Finance representative.”

“
Then why would they try to spend every last penny but one?” Gene sat back. Gene liked hard data, but his gut was telling him that Maggie wasn’t in on whatever the deception was.

“
It is contradictory,” Maggie said. “Smart enough to avoid any of the standard alerts, and yet foolish enough to create a suspicious pattern.”

They both paused for a moment and looked at each other.

“
Gene, I don’t know what to tell you,” Maggie continued on, after a minute spent in reflection. “I agree, the picture you are painting looks suspicious, but I never saw anything unusual in the course of processing these requests. They were mostly for servers, additional hard drives and computer memory, contractors to service them, stuff like that. Nothing out of the ordinary for Gary’s department. Granted, they seemed so innocuous that after the first few, I just rubber stamped them.”

Gene watched Maggie sit back, her face apologetic, but her body posture relaxed and confident. It wasn’t Maggie, he thought to himself. “Is it typical for Gary Mitchell to approve all the purchases himself?” Gene asked out loud. “I see very few cases where he delegates purchasing authority.”

“
Yes, that’s normal for Gary. Are you thinking that Gary is responsible?”

“
The fact that Gary personally authorized all these orders makes him the first person I’d look at. But...” Gene trailed off.