At least the offshore data center deployments were back on track. The team had agreed that with the new hardened units and robotics defenses in place, further pirate attacks were unlikely to be successful. Bill had six teams working overtime through the Christmas holiday to deploy additional ODCs that were waiting in storage, pending a resolution to the piracy issues. Getting those ODCs deployed would put the master rollout plan back on track.
Prateet said a silent prayer before he boarded the data center. His company was under contract to Avogadro to service this floating data center, one of the four original prototypes. He always found it unnerving to visit the unmanned high tech island. Although he wasn’t an excessively superstitious man, he always thought the computers here were lonely. To make a bad situation worse, just prior to this trip Avogadro notified him that the floating data center would now have armed robots defending it.
They provided fifty pages of documentation regarding the robots, noting that Prateet would not need to service the robots himself, as that would be done by the robotics subcontractor. Prateet had been most thorough and exacting when he followed the protocol to disable the robots before he boarded. He preferred it when his only concern had been that the computers seemed lonely.
A tropical depression offshore caused some communication delays between the robot administrators and the robots, until they finally pronounced it safe for him to board the vessel. The seas were already quite rough, but his company had been given a substantial bonus to install the additional satellite communication system on board the boat. He was unsure why they wanted the additional system. The vessel was, as he knew from having serviced it before, already connected directly to the mainland through two fiber optic cables, and there was already a backup satellite communication system. This would give a third independent system. Well, if now they wanted two satellite communication systems, he would not second-guess rich American companies who were willing to pay him double the normal rate.
He completed his work as quickly as he could safely finish, given the high seas and unsettling stares of the robots at his back. When he boarded the boat that would take him back to Chennai, he said a few more prayers to Vishnu in thanks that he was finished and on his way home to his family.
Unknown to Prateet, other subcontractors were performing similar work on the newly deployed ODCs off the coasts of Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands.
Gene Keyes was in his office, but he might have been the only one left in the entire building. He noticed one dark, locked office after another on his way to get coffee. When he was a kid, he worked sixty hour weeks and was glad to work more when he was asked to. He still did when he needed to. But the self-entitled kids he was surrounded with took off two weeks for Christmas and didn’t think twice about it, leaving projects half finished and paperwork uncompleted.
He pulled a two inch thick stack of printouts in front of him. This pile was a record of everything that had been purchased at Avogadro since the start of December. He took a sip of coffee, and prepared to scan through the entire stack of pages.
When one of his coworkers found him doing this six months ago, they thought it was so funny that it became a joke across the entire department. “Don’t you know that the computer can do that now?” they said, as though he was some kind of prehistoric Cro-Magnon who didn’t know what a computer was. Even Gene’s new manager had come by and told him that it was a “nonproductive expenditure of time” to manually inspect the purchases and budgets.
So now Gene waited until six o’clock to start his inspection, and only did the work at night when everyone was gone. Despite error after error that occurred electronically, they insisted on trusting the computer. Gene trusted paper print outs. There was a reason they called it a paper trail, damn it. You could trust paper. What was printed didn’t change after you printed it. The same couldn’t be said for computer records.
As he wrote, he took notes. For minor errors, he jotted off email memos to affected departments. Sometimes it was transcribed billing codes, when something was billed to one department but delivered to another. In other cases, invoice amounts were transcribed or missing digits.
It was almost eleven o’clock when Gene spotted the first serious discrepancy. At first, he thought it was just a case of Gary Mitchell running out his fiscal year budget. It was improper, of course, but nothing Gene could do anything about. However, as Gene kept looking through the expenditures, he noticed that Mitchell had spent every penny of every budget under his control.
Well, that wasn’t quite true on a second look. Flipping back and forth through the printouts, Gene realized that Mitchell had actually underspent each budget by exactly one cent. Gene sat up and unconsciously tapped his pencil on the table. If a budget was completely spent or overspent, that generated a memo that went to the responsible manager, their manager, and the finance department. If a budget was underspent, on the other hand, it was unlikely to be reviewed or attract much attention.
Gene looked again at the paper work. Mitchell had a total of fifty-eight independent projects under his authority, each with their own allocated budget dollars. That was fifty-eight independent projects with one cent remaining in each budget. That kind of careful planning pointed to a deception. The only person in common across those fifty-eight budgets was Gary Mitchell, so it was likely that the responsible person was either Gary or someone who had signature authority for him.
Gene prepared himself for a late night. He wouldn’t be done until he had gone through every one of the three hundred and fifty pages of the budget print out. This was a major discovery. What had Gary Mitchell spent that money on?
In spite of Gene’s vigil, through the abandoned hallways of Avogadro, Christmas lights twinkled, and all was silent.
From: Gary Mitchell (Communications Products, Avogadro)
To: Oliver Weinstein (Department of Technology, Germany)
Subject: Avogadro Wireless Program
Hello Oliver,
How are you? It’s been a long time since my last visit to Germany. I still remember our last get together fondly. Maybe a little less beer next time?
I am writing to give you the inside scoop on a new project we have. Avogadro is developing a new technology product suite targeted at national governments.
The new service we’re offering is our cloud-based application architecture: comprehensive email, chat, web servers, cloud-based documents, online backup. As you know, Avogadro has the highest up-time and reliability in the industry.
If Germany is willing to be the poster child for our new services, we’re prepared to offer free national wireless internet access for all of Germany. This would give Germany the highest internet connection rates in world, and a significant technology advantage.
I know that you have the ear of the Minister of Technology. Would you broach this topic with him? Our marketing department is prepared to reach out to other governments. But I know that you’d like to score some points with the Minister, so I’m letting you know early about this.
Get back to me and let me know what he says.
Chapter 8
