Christine gave David a funny look as she realized that he hadn’t invited Mike over.
“It’s about ELOPe.” Mike clenched his fists.
“Oh, I heard the good news from David,” Christine said, wetting glasses with vermouth. “You guys finally got dedicated servers. That’s exactly what you needed to move on to the next phase, right? Congratulations.”
“Yes, well, I have an idea how we got those servers.” Mike kept his eyes on David. “It seems ELOPe was turned on a little early. Like a few days ago.”
David smiled, and responded “What makes you think that?”
“Well, you asked me to turn on ELOPe for all internal Avogadro emails. Which I did, two days ago.”
“Were there any problems?” David asked.
“No, none at all. That’s the problem. I expected a big spike in background processing activity as I gave ELOPe access to emails across the company.” Mike turned to Christine. “That is what happens any time we add new email sources to ELOPe. It has to start analyzing the backlog of emails. People typically have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of emails in their inboxes, so when we add them to ELOPe, there is a massive increase in system activity. So when I added ten thousand Avogadro email inboxes, I expected a giant spike in activity, especially considering all of our performance problems.”
Mike turned back to David. “But you know what I found, right David? No spike. Hardly any activity at all. Now why would that be?”
Christine stopped at Mike’s tone, olive covered toothpick hovering over a glass.
David shrugged, and slumped down in his chair. “Why?”
“The only explanation is that ELOPe had already been given access to everyone’s email across Avogadro.” Mike jabbed at the counter and raised his voice despite himself. “I didn’t see a jump in activity, because it had already processed all the email for all those people.”
Mike paused, but David didn’t say anything. “You already turned it on, so it could help you with the proposal for the dedicated servers,” Mike prompted, guessing at David’s motivation.
David wasn’t smiling anymore. “I did.”
“But David, why didn’t you tell me?” Mike paused. “It’s fucking awesome that ELOPe works. You typed out a message, and the system gave you suggestions, and those suggestions were persuasive enough to persuade Gary to give you the server allocation! Why would you keep that secret? I’ve been chasing down performance spikes for days for no reason.”
David twiddled his finger on the countertop, clearly awkward. “I was trying to protect you. You know we didn’t have permission to have ELOPe analyze live customer emails on Gary’s servers. I could have been fired. Now that we have our own dedicated servers, it’s no problem, of course. But I didn’t want you to be worried, or worse, implicated in what I was doing.”
“We are in this together. This is my project just as much as yours.” Mike paused, and relaxed. “Look, next time, just tell me what is going on? Do you know how I felt when I realized you were keeping secrets from me?”
David shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry.”
“Ok, now forget all that moping about.” Mike’s expression transformed to one of delight. “ELOPe works. After two years of building that damn thing, it fucking works! Let’s celebrate.”
Mike grabbed his glass, and raised it in a toast.
David looked up to see a big smile on Mike’s face, and smiled himself.
The three chinked glasses.
David helped Christine clean up after dinner. Mike had gone home after a dessert of chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. They had joked that David and Mike had the culinary preferences of twelve year old boys. David cleared dishes and plates while Christine loaded the dishwasher.
David thought about the evening. After they had gotten the deception out on the table, everything had been fine. Mike had been elated that ELOPe was working so well, and seemed happy enough to put the other issue behind them.
“Why so quiet hon?” Christine asked.
“Just thinking.”
“You’re not just thinking. Thinking is when you’re quiet, but snapping your fingers.” Glancing over, she saw her husband smile. “You’ve been moody all week. If this is about lying to Mike, well, he knows now, and he forgives you. Let it go.”
“There’s more,” David said heavily.
“More what?”
“More that Mike doesn’t know. I didn’t just turn on ELOPe. I did turn it on, and I obscured what it was doing, so it wouldn’t show up in the system logs. But I also did something else…” David trailed off.
“Well, are you going to tell me, or do I have to put bamboo under your fingernails?”
“I gave ELOPe a hidden objective.”
“What do you mean?” Christine asked.
“It means that when any email goes through ELOPe, and that would now be every single internal email at Avogadro, it checks to see if the ELOPe project could be affected by the contents of the message. Then ELOPe will do what it can to maximize the success of the project.”
“What does that even mean David? What can it do?” Christine stopped washing dishes and stared at David.
David looked away from her accusatory gaze. “Well, it can’t do anything but rewrite emails,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “But because I turned off the logging, I can’t see exactly what changes it makes to those emails. I turned the system on, and the very next day, I got an allocation of five thousand servers. Sheesh, I would have been happy with five hundred servers, never mind five thousand. Five thousand servers, built and installed, is close to five million dollars. How did ELOPe get someone to spend five million dollars? And that’s not all.”
David paused to catch his breath. He started to look around and whisper, but he realized that was foolish. It was only he and Christine in the house. “This afternoon I got an email that we just had a team of contractors assigned to the project. They hired some topnotch performance specialists to help us optimize ELOPe. God knows we need the help to try to fix performance, but I never even asked anyone for help.
“That sounds damn freaky.” Now Christine had given up on the dishes, and was standing with her hands on her hips. “Why the hell did you do any of that in the first place?”
“We were just a couple days from the whole project getting cancelled. Gary Mitchell was going to bounce us off his production servers.” David’s shoulders slumped in despair. “You know, ELOPe is a massive consumer of processing resources. We’re not even production-ready, and we’re already consuming almost as many compute cycles as the production Search and Email products that are serving hundreds of millions of customers. Hell, I abused Sean’s blessing in the first place to get way more server resources than he ever intended to give us. Gary would have bounced us off his servers, Sean would have found out just how many resources we were consuming, and that I distorted what he said to get those resources, and that would have been it for the project and me.”
“Jesus David.” Christine had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot now, which alarmed David. The last time she did that he had spent on the night on the couch. “How the hell did you let it snowball like this? If you’re so worried about the override you put in the software, take it out. Or have Mike take it out for you. The way you make it sound, it’s like resources are being stolen from all over the company, and everything is going to be pointing back at you.”
David brightened. “Yeah, we just need to take out the override before anyone gets wind of it. I was nervous about doing it myself now that the code is live on the new servers. I didn’t want to crash a live server by trying to do it myself — I could potentially bring down the entire Avogadro Mail system. But with Mike’s help, we could do it live.”
He gave Christine a big kiss. “Thanks for talking with me about this. Let me go send an email to Mike.”
Christine heard David’s footsteps running up the stairs to their office. She sighed and turned back to the dishes. Husbands made everything so much more complicated than they needed to be. Maybe she should have just gotten a dog instead.
Upstairs, David sat down in his office. He tapped impatiently at the touchpad, and started in on the
