seem a little risky to you? Didn’t it have to go through some kind of security review?” Mike asked the questions rapid fire.
Pete visibly wilted under the onslaught of questions.
“Sorry,” Mike started again. “I’m just trying to understand. I’m not judging anything.”
Pete nodded in acceptance. “Well, I feel embarrassed saying this. Sean Leonov had asked me to do it. I thought that if it was for Sean, well, I should pull out all the stops and get it done. I mean, I’m stuck down here in Infernal Tools.” He gestured at the cinderblock basement wall behind him, in stark contrast to Mike and David’s wall-to-wall windowed offices. “How often do I get to impress someone?” Pete shook his head. “So, no, I didn’t get it reviewed. It’s totally off the radar.”
“Sean Leonov actually asked you, in person?” Mike asked.
“Well, no, not exactly,” Pete said. “I think John, from the Procurement Department, said in his email that Sean had asked for it.”
“Yeah, well I got an email saying my father was in the hospital. Don’t believe everything you read in an email anymore.” Mike jumped up from his seat, furious. He stalked back and forth in the tiny office. “Look, I’m not mad at you. But ELOPe is playing us all for fools.” He looked pointedly at David, as though he expected David to solve everything immediately.
“Let’s stay calm and focus on what’s important right now.” David tried to keep his voice level and reasonable to calm Mike down. He rarely saw Mike angry, and at least one of them had to stay levelheaded. Turning to Pete, he explained, “I know this is going to sound strange, but we believe that the email system is no longer secure. Someone, or something has hacked the email system. Can you shut down this email to web bridge?”
Pete had an uncomfortable expression on his face, and looked as if he was able to say no.
“Look, we need you to trust us on this.” David leaned forward, closer to Pete. “If we’re wrong, you’ve just inconvenienced a couple of guys in procurement for a day or two, right? If we’re right, you’re going to help save the company from a major security breach.”
Pete looked at them for a moment, and then nodded. “It should be easy. The bridge app is running on our Internal Tools servers,” he said. “I can kill the application from my console.”
Pete turned back to his computer, and turned the display sideways so Mike and David could watch. He ran through various command line tools to log into the servers, query the status of running processes, and then kill the relevant program. “OK, I stopped the bridge. I also changed the permissions on the directory, so it can’t be run again until we’ve gotten to the bottom of this.”
“OK, now please do me one more favor,” David said. “Can you test it? Send an email, and verify that it’s off?”
“Sure, that’s easy. I still have the test suite I wrote. It will send an email to make a procurement request, and then check the procurement database to look for the request. Since the bridge is off, it should report that the database didn’t change.”
Pete worked his keyboard and mouse for another minute, then paused, a puzzled look on his face. He typed again, faster and more furiously.
“What is it?” Mike asked, perched on Pete’s desk, watching him work.
“Well, this is even more odd. I ran the test, and even though the bridge is down, the database was still changed. So I checked again, and the bridge is definitely down. But something took the email and routed it to the procurement app, and it was accepted. That can only mean there is some other email to web bridge somewhere in the company.”
Mike and David glanced at each other again. More puzzles.
Pete thought for a minute. “There were some subcontractors in here over the holidays. I thought they were here doing some routine maintenance, but now I guess I don’t know what they touched. Maybe they mistakenly propagated the bridge onto some other servers in the company.”
“We need to figure out which ones, and get them shut down,” David said. “Pete, you’re the only one with access right now. Can you write a program that would check every server to see which ones are running the email to bridge web?”
“Holy cow. We have over a million servers. That’s one heck of a search you want me to do.”
“Do you even have the access to do it? Do you have administrative rights on those machines?” asked Mike.
“Sure, as part of Internal Tools, we can utilize administrative accounts that have full root access, so we can run maintenance checks on all the servers.”
“Alright, then we have one other thing for you to look for. There’s a program called ELOPe, and we need to know what servers it is running on.” Mike gave Pete a USB drive. “Here is a list of checksums for the files, so you know what to look for. We developed ELOPe. It’s an add-on to the AvoMail server. I know this sounds crazy, but we think ELOPe is acting independently.”
“Independently?” Pete asked.
“Yes, an AI that is acting independently. Making decisions and buying things and manipulating people.”
Pete looked doubtful, but he stuck his hand out and took the USB drive.
“Now just one thing,” Mike said. “Whatever you do, don’t email anyone about this, and don’t trust any suspicious emails. We’ll check in with you in-person.”
Pete’s eyes went wide. “But…”
“Can you do it?” David asked, drawing himself upright, forestalling Pete’s objections.
“I’ll do it,” Pete said, gripping the USB drive tightly in his fist.
Gene Keyes ground his teeth. He forced himself to stop.
He had tried to meet Gary Mitchell’s manager, but her admin claimed she was traveling on business and couldn’t be reached, even for an emergency.
So Gene had gone to his own manager, Brett Grove, to get the issue escalated. Brett hadn’t believed the evidence Gene presented. Every time that Gene thought back to the meeting, he felt his blood begin to boil and his vision cloud over.
They had been in Brett’s office, just a half hour ago. Naturally, Brett’s office had windows, a spotless desk, and a single large screen monitor. A fancy Mont Blanc pen stood in the center of the desk, an obvious show piece since not a single piece of paper, not even a sticky note, was to be seen anywhere.
After Gene had explained what he found, he had expected Brett to understand and endorse the line of investigation. A word or two of praise would not have been out of order either. Instead, his arguments were met with disbelief, even disregard.
“Look Gene, I can see you think you’ve found something here. However, you’re not even coherent. You’ve been raving for years about not trusting computers, and now you come to me with some kind of story about an artificial intelligence in the computer. Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“Are you going to look at these print outs?” asked Gene, who had come carefully prepared with the same meticulous collection of paper based data he had used to present his evidence to Maggie Reynolds in Finance, and then later with Mike and David.
“No, I am not going to wade through hundreds of pages of print outs.” He sat back, waving his hand dismissively at the accordion folder. If you want to convince me, summarize the evidence you have, put together a presentation that explains it, and present it in the staff meeting on Friday. That’s just the way we do things here.”
“Fuck you Brett. Listen to me son, there is a god damn monster in the fucking machine!” Gene snarled, leaping to his feet. “This thing is buying machine guns and torpedos. We don’t have time to put together a fucking Powerpoint presentation. We’ll be lucky to still be alive on Friday!” He held himself back, but he wanted to reach across the desk and grab the kid by the shirt collar.
“No, you listen to me Gene. This is typical of you. You think because I’m thirty years old that makes me an idiot. You’re an incompetent bastard.” Brett stood up on his own side of the desk, leaning forward and punctuating his every point with a jab of his finger. “You ignore your emails, you don’t follow the processes you’re supposed to follow. We’re the number one Internet company in the world, and the only thing you even use a computer for is to print stuff out. My grandmother is more computer literate, and she’d have more credibility around here. You would have been out of here, but I promised my predecessor I’d keep you around. He made me swear I’d keep you on my
