Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (21 page)

Hours later, glad to be out of the plane, David waited in line with Gene for a rental car at the Dulles airport feeling out of sorts. David normally carefully planned everything in his life. Now he was on the opposite side of the country after a spontaneous flight, getting ready to drive to New York. He had never felt so adrift in his life. He thought back to last night, Christine holding him in her arms.

Mike rejoined them, carrying coffees on a tray and the New York Times, interrupting David’s introspection. “Guys, you are never going to believe this!”

“
They still print paper newspapers?” David said sarcastically. “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

“
Be nice, kid,“ Gene said. “If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have any news at all right now.”

Mike just ignored David’s comments and went on. “You have to read these stories. On page one, the lead story is about how Germany has suddenly changed their international policy. When was the last time Germany involved itself in international affairs?”

David shook his head. “I don’t know, when?”

“
Never. That’s when. Not since World War II. Now, out of the blue, they’re negotiating a disarmament and peace treaty in the Arab world. And they apparently traded away the sum total of their intellectual property to get it. Then on page two, there’s a story about how Germany just adopted Avogadro’s AvoMail. How can no one connect the dots with these two stories side by side?”

David and Gene stared at Mike and the paper, their faces a mixture of fatigue, astonishment, and disbelief. “I just don’t know whether to react with alarm or resignation at this point,” David finally replied.

“
Not only that, but it looks like we moved on past floating barges for our offshore data centers,” Mike said, moving onto another page two story. “There’s a sidebar article on Avogadro, saying that in order to support the new secure government cloud services, Avogadro is purchasing a fleet of twenty recently retired oil tankers to use as the floating bases for our new offshore data centers.”

“
Great, the bastard will be mobile now,” Gene got out in his usual growl. “Smarter than us, distributed, in control of the communication system, invisible, and mobile. Wars have been lost with fewer disadvantages than this.”

After they paid for and finally obtained the rental car, Gene drove the four hours north to New York City. They were mostly silent. Nobody was in the mood for small talk. Once in the New York area, Gene headed to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. There, he dropped David and Mike off at their hotel.

“
Let me do this by myself, guys. I’ve never done detective work with partners, and the three of us will make folks nervous. I’ll meet you tonight at the hotel.”

David and Mike watched Gene drive off. They were travel-weary but nervous, and decided to get a drink at a bar across the street. The bar looked like the neighborhood watering hole, friendly but plain. David ordered two whiskeys.

“
What do you think is going to happen?” David asked, hunched over his drink, staring into the wood bar. “Is it going to be like the
Terminator
movies? Or
The Matrix
?”

“
I don’t know, David.” Mike shook his head. “I know most of science fiction does deal with artificial run amok, but then there’s also been plenty that’s been written about how artificial intelligence and humankind would have cooperative relationships.”

“
Really, like what?” David asked, turning to look at him.

“
Well, nothing is coming to mind right now.” Mike paused. “I was just thinking about how they turned the earth into pure computronium in one book. The humans had to move out to Jupiter or be assimilated into computing matter.”

“
Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be the optimist.”

Mike shrugged.

“
I always thought that an A.I. would be more, well, human,” David started. “That it would be something we could relate to. This thing, whatever it is, it’s more like an insect in its intelligence. It does things to promote its own survival, very sophisticated things, but we can’t talk to it or understand how it reasons. We can’t have a conversation about what constitutes good behavior, or a conversation about how we can collaborate together.”

They both mused on that for a moment.

“
Remember Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics?” Mike asked. “Asimov thought we would give robots immutable rules to safeguard human life. He assumed that creating those robots would be a deliberate, conscious act. We never thought we were creating an A.I., so we never thought through the implications.”

“
Yeah, in hindsight, giving an expert algorithm unfettered access to and control over the single most used email system in world does seem to have some risks,” David said wryly.

The two of them made their way back to the hotel room around eleven. They had decided to pay cash for everything in Brooklyn to avoid any credit card trail pointing to their presence there. Their cash on hand was limited, so the three collaborators shared one hotel room. Just after one in the morning, a tired Gene Keyes showed up at the hotel room.

“
Anything?” David asked.

“
Yes, I’ve got some leads. Please, let’s talk in the morning.” With no more words than that, Gene laid down on the bed, put the pillow over his head, and said no more.

After a glance at each other, David and Mike decided to turn in too.

* * *

David hurried down the hallway and opened the first door, only to find a closet. He walked a little further, opened another door, and found another closet. Behind him, he heard the sound of a machine. He picked up his pace, and ran, opening one door after another. Closet, closet, closet. Where was his office? The sound of the machine was getting closer and closer. He ran to another door and opened it. Closet. He was approaching the end of the hallway. The machine was right behind him. “Run, run, RUN!” he screamed at himself, failing to understand why he couldn’t make his feet go faster.

David sat up suddenly, sweating, heart beating fast. In the dim light, the room seemed off, and the smells were wrong. Then he remembered he was in New York, in a hotel with Mike and Gene. He got up, quietly to not disturb the others, and went into the bathroom. Turning on the light, he stared at the dark circles under his eyes, his unnaturally pale face. It was the third time he had that nightmare.

He wished he could say that he didn’t understand the dream, because understanding it somehow just made it worse. He was afraid of ELOPe. In the dream, David always knew that if he could just find his office, and sit in front of his computer, he’d have the power to do something. But ELOPe somehow made him powerless.

David sat down on the toilet and lowered his forehead on the cool porcelain sink. He’d give anything to erase the last two months and do it all over. Oh god, he didn’t want to be known as the monster who unleashed ELOPe on the world. Please, please, God, let them find a way to turn it off.

* * *

At six o’clock the next morning, Gene yelled out “Get up. Get showered. We’ve got to go.”

“
Huh, what?” Mike replied groggily.

“
Come on, let’s go. Wake up lazy boys.” Gene sounded as chipper as could be. “We’ve got ourselves one hour to get to the King’s Plaza Diner. This is where Sean’s parents have breakfast on Saturday morning. If Sean is in town, he’ll be there with them. Go, go, go” Gene shouted the last bit like a drill sergeant.

Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in office clothes, they were on their way. Having learned their lesson from earlier interactions, they knew that what they had to say was hard enough for people to believe. They agreed that they needed to look as presentable and normal as possible, to lessen the chance of being perceived as being crazy. Even Gene was clean shaven, and well dressed in a pressed suit, shirt and tie.

After a short drive, they arrived at the King’s Plaza Diner. Across the street was the diner’s namesake, a large shopping mall known as King’s Plaza. They entered the diner, and were greeted by the hostess.

“
Three for the counter,” Gene said to the hostess. He turned and said quietly to Mike and David, “We can keep an eye on the entrance, but avoid looking like stalkers.”

David and Mike stared with wide eyes at the gold tinted mirrors and six foot chandeliers throughout the restaurant. “This is some diner,” David commented.

“
According to the folks I talked to last night, the Kings Plaza Diner is famous among Brooklynites, and that includes the Russian population. If nothing else, they said to get a cup of coffee and a piece of cheesecake.”

“
Wow, look at these pickles,” Mike burst out, when the waitress brought an enormous silver bowl brimming with pickles of all kinds.

“
Come on guys, let’s stay focused. We are not here for the food,” David implored.

“
Hey, when in New York, do like the New Yorkers,” Gene said to David. Turning, he said to the approaching waitress, “Coffee and cheesecake for me.”

“
Sure, sweetheart.” The platinum haired waitress had a coffee pot in one hand, and started pouring coffees. She stared smiling at Gene the whole time, but somehow managed to fill each cup perfectly.

“
Coffees all around,” Mike said.

“
What’ll you kids have to eat?” She kept her eyes on Gene as she took their order.

Mike ordered an omelet plate, while David picked a bagel with lox and cream cheese.

After the waitress left, Mike turned to Gene. “Didn’t know you had such a way with the ladies.”

Gene just rumbled under his breath, but the corners of his mouth turned up a little.

They had finished eating and were on their second cups of coffee when Mike observed Sean coming into the restaurant with two older people.

“
Here they are,” said Mike, gesturing discretely towards the entrance.

David turned his head, and seeing Sean, he stood up, and walked over. Mike and Gene followed slightly behind.

“
Hello Sean,” David called as he approached.

Sean blinked for a moment, as he tried to place the face out of context. “David? David Ryan? What are you doing here?”

“
We came to meet you. We have a critical issue with the ELOPe program.”

Sean took a step backwards. “David, I’m here with my parents. Please don’t tell me you tracked me down here for work. That would be a terrible violation of my privacy. Why didn’t you just schedule a meeting with my admin?”

“
We’re here with Gene Keyes, one of the members of the Controls and Compliance department because we have an issue of the utmost seriousness. I hate to sound alarmist, but the issue is very sensitive, and we couldn’t risk talking with your admin.”

As David spoke, Mike and Gene walked up, and Gene introduced himself.

“
Contacting your assistant was unfortunately not an option, though we would have preferred to do that if we could have,” David continued, thinking about the email which resulted in them getting kicked off the Avogadro campus. Shaking aside the unwanted memory, he continued. “Please may we have five minutes of your time to explain? Get a cup of coffee here at the counter with us, and by the time you’ve finished it, we’ll have explained everything we know.”

Sean thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Fine, if you believe it is so serious, I’ll hear you out.”

Sean walked over to his parents, who had been waiting patiently, and spoke quietly with them for a moment. When the maitre’d escorted his parents to a table, Sean rejoined the three men.

“
Go ahead David, I want to hear about this issue. I’ll give you ten minutes. I know you’re a smart guy. I’m guessing you didn’t fly three thousand miles for nothing.”

Sean perched on a barstool at the counter, and accepted a cup from the waitress. As they drank coffee, David told the story starting at the beginning.

“
In early December, Gary Mitchell was ready to kick ELOPe off the AvoMail production server pool. Even in our limited development and testing, the computationally intensive parts of our code were consuming so many resources that it caused AvoMail to dip into their reserve capacity on several occasions. This was around the same time that I was presenting to you, Kenneth, and Rebecca,” David explained, referring to the other members of the executive leadership team.

“
We had tried everything we could to get performance improvements, but we didn’t think any other big gains were possible. I realized that if Gary was going to kick us off his servers because we couldn’t improve performance, then we needed to find other servers, or get new ones, and I didn’t think Gary would be willing to help us with either. So I resorted to the only option I could think of.”