staff before he would give me this job. I don’t know what the hell he saw in you, but I don’t see it. Now why don’t you go take a shower, shave yourself, and put on some clean clothes for God’s sake, and then put together a fucking Powerpoint presentation if you have to buy a book to learn how to use it.”
Gene came back to the present moment in his office, shaking his head. He opened the bottom desk drawer, and poured himself an inch of whiskey. On second thought, he poured two inches. Then he swigged the whole cup. He shouldn’t have cursed at the kid, he realized that now, but he was just so damn infuriating. Jesus, he was going to give himself a heart attack if he replayed that conversation in his head again. He looked down at his rumpled, slept-in clothes, and rubbed a hand over his face, feeling his multiple day stubble. Fuck. He was a mess, that was true. Damn it though, competence wasn’t a matter of clothes and fancy presentation. Competence was looking at data, whether out there in the real world, or on his sheets of paper, and drawing insights. Goddamn-it-all, he was still competent and relevant.
Gene shook his head again. He had to focus on something productive. It was time to meet back up with Mike and David. He dragged himself out of his chair, locked his office door on the way out, and began the journey back to the R&D building.
Bill Larry jostled along on yet another helicopter ride out to the coast. In this case, it was because he had gotten a call from Maggie Reynolds in the Finance department asking him to verify delivery of purchases. Bill sighed, thinking about the confusing call.
Maggie had a hard time understanding that Facility location code ODC0004 was not just a walk down the hallway for Bill, but was instead a floating platform ten miles off the shore of the United States, and required Bill to make a helicopter reservation and two hours of driving and flying to get to.
If it was confusing to Maggie, it was doubly so for Bill, because Maggie went through a litany of items that didn’t make sense. He had not ordered backup satellite communication hardware or microwave communication equipment. Yes, they had ordered equipment from iRobot, but that was before the holiday break, and no, there wasn’t a second round of deliveries to all the ODCs from iRobot. In any case, there could be no visits to install anything on the ODCs without approval from Bill. It simply wasn’t possible to have installed all the items Maggie described, because only Bill, Jake, and a handful of employees that Bill was in day to day contact with, had the authority to stand down the iRobot defenses. Bill would have been personally advised if anyone authorized a stand-down. He shook his head. From Maggie’s inventory of purchase orders, it made the ODCs sound like virtual beehives of activity. Impossible.
However, it was clear that the shit had hit the fan back in the main office, because Maggie said she had folks from the Controls and Compliance office doing some kind of internal investigation. She sounded worried but trying to hide it, and Bill had felt sorry for her. Bill reluctantly reserved a helicopter, packed a bag with his satellite phone, access key cards, and headed for the heliport.
That’s how Bill ended up thirty minutes out from ODC #4 on one of the company’s Bell helicopters to do a hands on inspection and lay to rest the question of exactly what equipment was or was not installed. With a sudden jolt, he realized that in the rush, he had forgotten to schedule the deactivation for the defense robots.
Bill nervously struggled to plug his satellite phone into the helicopter headset, a clumsy, insulated thing. Fuck, he could have gotten himself killed. He placed the call to the iRobot system administrators.
“Hello, this is Bill Larry at Avogadro. My deactivation passcode is O-S-T-F-V-3-9-4-1.” Bill had to speak up over the helicopter noise. “I need to shutdown the robots at ODC4.
“I’m sorry, but can you please repeat that passcode.”
“O-S-T-F-V-3-9-4-1. I’m Bill Larry at Avogadro. I need to shutdown the defense robots so I can land at my facility.
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have any records with that passcode. Can you please give us your vendor ID?”
Bill sighed in exasperation, and wondered what more could go wrong with his day. He provided their vendor ID, and waited.
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have a listing for your vendor ID. Are you sure you have a contract with us?”
After more unhelpful back and forth discussion in this vein with the phone agent, Bill asked for a supervisor, and was shortly transferred over to a Ms. Nancy Claire.
“I’m sorry Mr. Larry,” Ms. Claire explained after a few minutes of research, “but we’re no longer under contract to administer your iRobot defenses. Of course we provided the hardware, and we were administering it up through December thirty-first, but as of the first of this year, we turned administration over to you.”
“That’s not possible,” Bill objected.
It took another fifteen minutes on the phone with Ms. Claire for Bill to gradually puzzle out that iRobot thought someone at Avogadro had renegotiated the iRobot contract. Bill was sure this couldn’t be the case, but he couldn’t help wracking his head wondering if someone had gone around him. They had just put the contract in place a few weeks earlier. It didn’t make any sense. Bill had to figure all this out while yelling over the sound of the helicopter. He was getting one hell of a headache. The pilot asked him whether it was OK to proceed, and he shook his head no.
Then Bill checked his phone and found the number for a vice president, Bob O’Day, at iRobot, one of the guys that he and Jake had spoken to when negotiating the contract. Bill hung up with Nancy Claire, and called Bob. Bill remembered Bob as being intensely focused and wickedly smart. Bob would get this issue resolved. Bob’s administrative assistant said Bob was already on an urgent call, but offered that Bob could call Bill back within 10 minutes.
So Bill waited over the Pacific ocean, a thousand feet up, a hundred and five decibel engine a few feet above his head, burning a gallon a minute of high performance aviation fuel.
Seven minutes later, the phone rang, and Bill punched the button to answer. It was Bob, the iRobot VP. Bill struggled to keep his voice under control as he demanded to know what was going on. While the pilot had the helicopter circling around ODC #4 in gentle circles, Bob confirmed that indeed, iRobot had installed additional defenses, and then turned the administration of those defenses over to Avogadro.
Craning his head to look at the floating barge, Bill could see additional satellite communication and microwave communication antennas, and what looked like some kind of turrets. Bill wondered why he hadn’t brought binoculars. While the pilot circled (and why the hell couldn’t he keep the damn helicopter stable?), Bill yelled over the noise of the helicopter to ask if there was any kind of override that iRobot could still execute. Bob assured him that for security reasons, of course, there wasn’t any kind of override. The point of handing off administration to Avogadro was to insure that full security resided in the hands of Avogadro. The control over the robots now rested with the computer software that iRobot had provided to Avogadro.
As Bill argued with the folks at iRobot in the back seat of the helicopter, George “Punch” Gonzales, today’s helicopter pilot, continued to circle around. He did it more out of boredom than anything else, since he could have just as easily engaged the auto-hover, which would have maintained them at a given location. After twenty years of flying helicopters for the Marines, George wasn’t inclined to engage the auto-hover and tune out. He liked to keep his hands on the stick. On one of these slow rotations around the ODC, George came a little closer to the platform than he had before. He also happened to glance again at the fuel gauge, and noted that they were coming up on their halfway point. George turned to ask Bill how much longer they planned to stay. While he was glancing backwards, the helicopter came just a few dozen feet closer to the platform than it had before. Since he wasn’t looking out the windshield, George, who just might have recognized them for what they were, missed the flash of anti-aircraft missiles launching. Bill was stooped, head down, struggling to hear to the other end of the line, to understand what happened, and how the administration of the robots could have been bungled so badly in the first month of operation.
Within seconds the two heat seeking missiles transited the distance to the helicopter, focusing in on the hot helicopter exhaust. When the first missile detonated, the engine and copter blades exploded apart. The second missile impacted the passenger compartment, bursting the thin shell. Bits of shrapnel screamed through the air in all directions, falling sizzling into the water.
Chapter 10
