Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (17 page)

Pete looked at them for a moment, and then nodded. “It should be easy. The bridge app is running on our Internal Tools servers,” he said. “I can kill the application from my console.”

Pete turned back to his computer, and turned the display sideways so Mike and David could watch. He ran through various command line tools to log into the servers, query the status of running processes, and then kill the relevant program. “OK, I stopped the bridge. I also changed the permissions on the directory, so it can’t be run again until we’ve gotten to the bottom of this.”

“
OK, now please do me one more favor,” David said. “Can you test it? Send an email, and verify that it’s off?”

“
Sure, that’s easy. I still have the test suite I wrote. It will send an email to make a procurement request, and then check the procurement database to look for the request. Since the bridge is off, it should report that the database didn’t change.”

Pete worked his keyboard and mouse for another minute, then paused, a puzzled look on his face. He typed again, faster and more furiously.

“
What is it?” Mike asked, perched on Pete’s desk, watching him work.

“
Well, this is even more odd. I ran the test, and even though the bridge is down, the database was still changed. So I checked again, and the bridge is definitely down. But something took the email and routed it to the procurement app, and it was accepted. That can only mean there is some other email to web bridge somewhere in the company.”

Mike and David glanced at each other again. More puzzles.

Pete thought for a minute. “There were some subcontractors in here over the holidays. I thought they were here doing some routine maintenance, but now I guess I don’t know what they touched. Maybe they mistakenly propagated the bridge onto some other servers in the company.”

“
We need to figure out which ones, and get them shut down,” David said. “Pete, you’re the only one with access right now. Can you write a program that would check every server to see which ones are running the email to bridge web?”

“
Holy cow. We have over a million servers. That’s one heck of a search you want me to do.”

“
Do you even have the access to do it? Do you have administrative rights on those machines?” asked Mike.

“
Sure, as part of Internal Tools, we can utilize administrative accounts that have full root access, so we can run maintenance checks on all the servers.”

“
Alright, then we have one other thing for you to look for. There’s a program called ELOPe, and we need to know what servers it is running on.” Mike gave Pete a USB drive. “Here is a list of checksums for the files, so you know what to look for. We developed ELOPe. It’s an add-on to the AvoMail server. I know this sounds crazy, but we think ELOPe is acting independently.”

“
Independently?” Pete asked.

“
Yes, an AI that is acting independently. Making decisions and buying things and manipulating people.”

Pete looked doubtful, but he stuck his hand out and took the USB drive.

“
Now just one thing,” Mike said. “Whatever you do, don’t email anyone about this, and don’t trust any suspicious emails. We’ll check in with you in-person.”

Pete’s eyes went wide. “But...”

“
Can you do it?” David asked, drawing himself upright, forestalling Pete’s objections.

“
I’ll do it,” Pete said, gripping the USB drive tightly in his fist.

* * *

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.