Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (5 page)

“
Are you sure?” Mike asked quizzically, eyebrows raised.

“
Yes, I’m sure. I’ll get the resources we need.” David sounded confident.

Mike left feeling puzzled. The deadline was a couple of days away. What could David possibly have in mind?

* * *

After Mike left, David stood up and wandered over to his office window. He looked out at the wet streets, glistening in the street lights. The Portland Streetcar stopped outside the building across the street, picking up a few last stragglers.

On the one hand, Gary Mitchell, Vice President of Communication Products Division, was an idiot with no vision. The irony was that the ELOPe project was intended as a feature to run on the very product that Gary had responsibility for, Avogadro’s email service. AvoMail would gain a killer feature when ELOPe was ready, and though David would gain accolades for developing it, it would be Gary’s group who would benefit financially through added users and additional business. All Gary had to do was support the project in the most minor way possible, and he’d accumulate all the credit.

On the other hand, David grudgingly admitted that if he was in Gary’s shoes, he would be worried about outages too. Damn it though, some things were worth a risk.

David thought through the apparent conflict. Gary wouldn’t approve running ELOPe on the current email server pool because it was consuming too many resources. The R&D server pool was out of the question because it was way too small. So either ELOPe had to consume less resources, which didn’t seem possible, or they needed a new server pool to run on, or they needed the email server pool to be bigger.

Consuming less resources was a technical problem. Getting more or different servers, that was a people problem. Namely, convincing the right people of what was needed. He could do something about that.

He sat back down at his computer. He stretched his arms, moved a few scraps of paper out of the way, and prepared to get to work. He opened up an editor, and started coding.

* * *

Hours passed in a blur. David looked at the time display on his screen and groaned. Christine was going to kill him. It was almost four in the morning. She was forgiving about his all consuming work habits, but she gave him hell for pulling all nighters. He’d be grumpy for two days until he made up the sleep, and she’d be pissed at him for being grumpy.

Trying again to milk the last drop from his coffee cup, he debated the merits of another coffee right now. Well, he had nothing to lose at this point. He stood up, a painful unbending of his spine after hours of hacking code. It had been more than six hours since his discussion with Mike, and he thought he had almost solved their resource problem.

He padded down the eco-cork floored hallway in his socks carrying his mug. He filled the mug and added sugar and cream, then stood for a few minutes half dazed from lack of sleep, letting the coffee warm him. He glanced up and down the hallway, black and tan patterns on the floor swimming in his fatigued eyes. The drone of the late evening vacuum cleaners was a distant memory, and now it was eerily quiet in the office, the kind of stillness that settled over a space only when every living person had been gone for hours. David wasn’t sure what that said about him. He shuffled back to his desk.

Hunched over his keyboard, David peered again at the code. The changes he made were subtle, oh so subtle. It was masterful programming, the kind of programming he hadn’t done since the early days of the project when it was just him and Mike. He needed to be extremely careful about each line of code he changed. A single bug introduced now would be the end of the project, if not his career.

A little more than an hour later, he carefully reviewed the code for the last time. Finally satisfied, David committed his changes to the source code repository. It would be automatically deployed and tested. He smiled for the first time in hours. Problem solved.

Chapter 3

Gary Mitchell took the Avogadro exit ramp off the Fremont bridge, and pulled up to the parking gate, headlights bouncing off the reflective paint on the barrier in the early morning darkness. He waved his badge triumphantly at the machine. The barrier rose up, and Gary drove into the nearly empty parking garage, a broad smile on his face.

It was two days before the deadline to pull ELOPe off the server. David and Mike hadn’t done anything to drop usage. Gary gleefully looked forward to sending an email to Sean Leonov letting him know he was going to kill ELOPe. He’d been looking forward to this day for months.

He would have liked to have pulled the plug first, and then send the email, but he knew Sean would be angry if he didn’t get a heads up before Gary shut it down.

It was the first time in a while he’d arrived at the office this early. Gary found the empty building oddly disquieting. He pushed the feeling aside and thought about sending the email, which brought a smile back to his face again. A few minutes later, Gary passed his secretary’s empty desk and went into his own office. His desk computer came to life, and Gary went straight into his email to type the message to Sean.

Email finished, Gary sat and gloated for a minute. Then he heaved himself back up, and headed out to find a coffee shop and a newspaper. Naturally, it was too early to do any real work. He’d read the paper and come back in a couple of hours.

Gary sauntered down the hallway whistling.

* * *

John Anderson gratefully let his heavy messenger bag slide to the floor. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, hanging it behind his desk. Dropping heavily into his chair, the pneumatic shock absorber took his weight without complaint. He sighed at the thought of another day in the Procurement department processing purchasing requests. Tentatively peeking at his inbox, he saw more than a hundred new email messages. His shoulders slumped a little, and he reached for his coffee.

This week John had the kids, which meant dropping them off at school before work. Portland’s crazy school system meant that the best public schools were all elective. He and his ex-wife had to choose among a dozen different schools, and they ended up with the Environmental School in Portland’s southeast section. John’s kids loved the school, and so did he. Unfortunately, they lived in Northeast Portland, the school was in the Southeast quadrant, and work was across the river in Northwest Portland. His normal twenty minute commute turned into well more than an hour drive on the days he dropped the kids off, and he was always late getting into the office. By the time he arrived at work, his smartphone had been beeping and buzzing for an hour as emails arrived. He loathed the backlog of email he started his day with. The only consolation was that the kids’ school was right next to a Stumptown Coffee. John sipped at the roasted Ethiopian brew. The dark, bittersweet warmth of the coffee brought a smile to his face.

As the coffee gradually brought his brain into gear, he regained his will to tackle his inbox. He was brought up short by a puzzling email from Gary Mitchell. Sent earlier this morning, the email asked him to divert 5,000 servers. John read the email three times in its brief entirety.

John thought briefly about the exception process. Normally when a department wanted new servers, they put in a purchase request. Then parts were purchased, shipping to Avogadro data centers, assembled into the custom servers Avogadro used, and installed onto racks. Next, another group took over and installed the operating system and applications used on the servers. In all, depending on the size and timing of the order, it would take anywhere from six to twelve weeks from the time they were requested before the servers were available for use. The lag was the result of the time necessary to ship the hardware, receive it, install it into racks, install the software, configure it, and then run a burn-in test.

When a department needed additional servers in a rush, then they could request an exception. The exception process would take servers that had already been bought for another group, and were already in the processing pipeline, and divert them to the department that needed them urgently. Then replacement computers would be ordered for the first group, who would have to wait a little longer.

Diversion requests were not the norm, but certainly they weren’t uncommon either. No, the puzzling part was not the request itself, but that Gary would submit such a request in email. Only the official procurement application could be used to order, expedite, or divert servers. Gary should know that.

He put his hand on the phone to call Gary, and then took it away. A call to Gary would eat up at least fifteen minutes. He had learned over time that regardless of what the procurement rules were, whenever John tried to explain them to anyone, they would just argue with him. The higher up in the company they were, then the more they would argue as though their lofty organizational heights carried with it some kind of potential energy that could just roll over the rules. A quick email would save John from getting his ear chewed out.

John worked through his backlog of emails as he gradually drained his coffee cup. The hundreds of new messages in his inbox would give the casual observer the impression he had been gone from work for a week, rather than just the late start he had gotten dropping off his kids. He took another sip of coffee, and continued to work through emails. The rest of his day, like every other, would consist of endless cups of coffee and endless emails. Gary’s email might have been a little unusual, but it was quickly forgotten amid the deluge of other issues.