Considering that they worked in neighboring offices, this was quite a feat. Mike plopped himself down in David’s spare chair. “Where were you this morning? I couldn’t find you anywhere. I need to talk to you about some oddities in the performance of ELOPe. Not to mention that you missed the entire hunt for the billiard room.”
“What kind of oddities?” David gazed off into the distance, ignoring the question, and sounding distracted.
“I know I told you we couldn’t find any more performance gains, but I couldn’t help trying. I started by establishing a baseline against the current code, to have something to test against. Just as we usually do, I tried to correlate the bulk analysis import with server cycles consumed, and to correlate the real-time suggestions with server cycles consumed, and…” Mike stopped. He realized that David was still staring out the window, and didn’t appear to be paying any attention. Mike looked out the window. It was a pleasant sunny day. Uncommon for Portland in December, but he didn’t see anything other than the ordinary bustle of people walking about on the street.
He turned back to David. “David, are you listening? Is this, or is it not, critical that this be fixed before Gary’s deadline?”
“Well, I do have some good news there, but go on.”
“Well, I tried to establish the correlation, but I couldn’t find any. For months we had a very solid correlation between the number of emails processed and the amount of server resources required, as you remember. For the last two days though, I can’t find any correlation at all. The server resources keep going through the roof even when the logs indicate that nobody is running any tests. It’s as though the system is working on something, but I can’t find any record of it.”
David was staring out the window again. Mike felt his head start to pound. He’d been struggling with the goddamn performance issues for days. “So then David, I was sleeping with your wife, and she said it would be just fine with you.”
“Yes, it is fine. Wait, what? What did you just say?”
Mike planted himself in front of the window to block David’s view. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just tell me what’s going on, since you’re clearly not interested in the fucking performance issues.”
“Ah, come look at this email from Gary,” David replied, completely ignoring the anger in Mike’s tone, and looking animated for the first time since Mike had entered his office. “It just came in a few minutes ago. We were just allocated five thousand dedicated servers by way of a procurement exception! Because they came through a procurement exception, we get servers that were ready to be put online for some other product. We’ll have access to the computing power by tomorrow morning. We don’t even have to wait for them to be purchased and built.”
Mike came around the side of the desk to peer over David’s shoulder at his computer screen, and let out a low whistle. “Holy smokes, five thousand servers. How did you get Gary to agree to that?”
“I sent him an email asking if we could have dedicated servers for the ELOPe project so we wouldn’t be in conflict with the production AvoMail servers.” The statement wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the real reason for the sudden allocation.
“Wow, what a fantastic reversal,” Mike said, immediately excited by the possibilities. He forgot about his anger, and paced rapidly back and forth in front of the window, thinking through the implications. “With five thousand servers… We can move on to the next phase of the project, and scale up to limited production levels. We could start bulk processing customer emails in preparation for a public launch.”
“Well, I think we should start with Avogadro internal emails,” David suggested. “This way, we won’t adversely affect any customers if anything goes wrong. If we can analyze the internal emails at full volume, I am going to suggest to Sean that we turn this autosuggestion feature on for all Avogadro employees.”
“That sounds great. So I’ll forget about the performance issues, and just focus on analyzing the internal emails. This is great news David!” Mike did a little dance on his way out the door.
Mike walked out of his office, and David returned to staring out the window. It certainly was great news that they had received the server allocation. So why were the hairs raised on his back?
He had sent the email to Gary. That part was true. Then there was that minor detail of ELOPe’s involvement he hadn’t mentioned to Mike. David needed to give ELOPe access to Gary Mitchell’s emails, so that it could analyze them. Then, as it turned out, ELOPe needed access to everyone that Gary had sent or received an email from, so that it could do a proper analysis of the messages.
He wasn’t surprised at all that Mike had uncovered massive processing going on in the background. Because of David’s usage, ELOPe needed to import a massive number of emails. He had obscured his work by ensuring that it wasn’t part of the normal system logs that were created, but he couldn’t prevent the usage monitors from tracking the CPU load.
David didn’t know what to say to Mike. Eventually Mike would figure it out. He just hoped it was later rather than sooner. Preferably after their resource problems were solved. David didn’t want anyone, not even Mike, to know he was using ELOPe to get the resources to keep it running. It was integrated into the mail servers, and a bug could, in theory, bring down the entire company’s email. If anything bad happened, David and the project would take some heat for it if it got out. But that wasn’t the real cause for the pit of fear in his stomach.
No, the real issue was the changes David made to the code during his all-night coding marathon. David went deep into the code for the language analysis model, and put in an overarching directive to maximize the predicted sentiment for any email mentioning the project. The effect was that whenever ELOPe was mentioned in any email, from anyone, or to anyone, inside Avogadro, then ELOPe would automatically and silently reword the email in a way that was favorable to the success of the project.
The resulting emails were indistinguishable in writing style and language from those written by the purported sender, a testament to the skill of his team. While the analysis module determined goals and objectives from the email, the optimization module used fragments from thousands of other emails to create a realistic email written in a voice very similar to that of the sender.
David relished the success of the team, and wished he could share with them what they had accomplished. Their project was the culmination of nearly three years of dedicated research and development. It had started with David’s work on the Netflix Prize before he was hired at Avogadro, although even that work had been built on the shoulders of geniuses that had come before him. Then there were eight months of him and Mike laboring on their own to prove out the idea enough to justify an entire team. Finally, during the last eighteen months, an entire R&D team worked on the project, building the initial architecture, and then incrementally improving the effectiveness of the system week after week.
The proof was in the results. ELOPe’s language analysis and modification had resulted in it managing to acquire thousands of servers for itself. David wasn’t sure exactly how. He couldn’t see the modified emails, an unfortunate consequence of removing the logging so that others wouldn’t see what he was doing. Had Gary received a modified email that was convincing enough to make him change his mind? Or had ELOPe taken Gary’s response, and changed that to something more favorable? David found it more than a little unnerving not knowing what was happening. When he dwelled on that, he felt a pit of fear in his stomach.
But sure enough, his servers were here. Now that was something to dwell on. There was an email from procurement confirming it, and an email from operations showing the time the servers would be available. So whatever ELOPe had done, it worked. It might be the most server-intensive application in the company, if not the world, but by damn, it worked.
When David thought about that, he was thrilled. The project had become his life. His little baby was all grown up now, doing what it was built to do. Well, maybe a little more besides.
But he hadn’t realized what it would be like to create such a huge deception, and to have ELOPe working silently behind the scenes. If anyone discovered what he had done, it would be the end of his career. He looked out his office window. Outside in the momentary sunshine, people went about their business, walking, talking, jogging, or, of course, drinking coffee. From his office window, they all looked chillingly carefree to David.
Chapter 5
