The smell of pizza permeated the house, a recurring odor that they’d smell many more times in the days to come.
David went through the story for the last time, his throat hoarse from the many partial retellings of the story that day. The crowd erupted into astonished gasps and side conversations from time to time, but then fell silent again. Finally, when David had recapped the technical explanation for the last time, Sean got up to speak.
“The world I woke up in a few days ago was very different from the world I lived in all my life previously,” Sean began, and the crowd grew even quieter. “For the first time, man shares this world with another intelligence capable of sophisticated planning and actions. Unfortunately, this intelligence is like a cancer — one that will do anything, manipulate anyone, pursue any foe to ensure its own survival. It has control of our computers and our communications.”
“Our most important weapon is our intelligence and knowledge. I have complete confidence in this group,” and Sean gazed around the room, “to solve this problem, which is inherently a technical one. Our most important defense is our complete and utter discretion. Under no circumstances can word of this go outside this group or be communicated by email or phone, or ELOPe will be warned and take action against us, as it did with Mike and David when David originally planned to remove ELOPe’s modifications.”
“The executive team will give you any support you need, pay any money necessary, and do whatever it takes in the end to remove this virus from our computers. Now go get started!”
Then the planning started in earnest. Alternately divided into small groups, led by Sean, David, Mike, or Gene, or gathered into a whole group, they tackled problems small and large — from bringing down computers and defeating backup power supplies to cleaning and restoring the computer software and data afterwards. During the next few days, Gene made several more trips to the local office supply store, almost buying out the store’s entire stock of notebooks, flip charts, sticky notes, and markers. Engineers worked constantly, taking breaks only when exhaustion made it impossible to think. Over the course of three incredible days, the plan emerged.
On the first day they decided that for each remote site that needed to be powered down, they would send one employee to that site who was in the direct management chain of command, and more over, would command a high level of trust from employees at the remote site. Working hand in hand with the travel department and using printed records of travel plans, they found a combination of previously planned commercial flights, private aviation flights, bus trips, and automotive rentals to get the designated employees to their final destinations.
Throughout the first two days the site engineers, crisis engineers, and real estate planners identified a site- specific process for each of the many dozens of unique sites and data centers that would effectively kill power to the site and bring all computers down simultaneously. Although the sites shared many common design characteristics, each one had enough small differences that the engineers still needed to create a custom plan tailored to each site. The plan had to overcome stringent safety systems and backup systems that had been designed expressly to keep the sites operating regardless of any natural disasters that might affect power. And all without the primary tools they had been trained to rely on: their computers.
Once power had been shutdown everywhere, the element of danger from ELOPe would be largely gone. Then the clock would be ticking: it would be a race against time to restore every computer from risk-free backups before customer confidence was lost, jeopardizing the Avogadro brand and business.
Over the course of the first day, several times people had asked what to call their mixed group of real estate planners, programmers, operations engineers, and others. Gradually people picked up the name Emergency Team. It was simple, solemn and accurate.
Their planning had been stymied in one regard. No one local had sufficient knowledge about the offshore data centers. In the morning of the second day, recognizing this shortcoming, David sent a private pilot to the California Bay Area to fetch Bill Larry and Jake Riley. The pilot came back that afternoon with only Jake Riley.
Jake remained standing in the doorway when he entered the room full of engineers. His clothes and hair were askew, his shirt hanging out of one side of his pants. Thick stubble on his face and dark circles under his eyes gave him the appearance of a haunted man.
A hush grew over the room as engineers noticed him standing there.
He stood in the silence for a moment. “I’m Jake Riley.” He paused. “I didn’t have a clue about what was going on before I got on that plane three hours ago, but Frank here briefed me on the flight. I have bad news. Bill Larry is missing and presumed dead.”
There were gasps all around the room, and David rushed to the doorway to get closer.
“He was in a flight to visit an offshore data center, and his helicopter disappeared without any notice. We initially believed there was a helicopter accident,” Jake went on. “On the flight up here, I heard about what’s been going on, and now I think it’s likely Bill Larry was killed by a robot manning an offshore data center.”
The packed, hot room erupted into a roar of simultaneous discussion. Sean forced his way through the crowd to stand next to Jake and David, and yelled for quiet.
“Why didn’t we know about this?” Sean asked.
“You should have known,” Jake pleaded. “I’ve been sending you daily updates on the situation. We had a Coast Guard search party and I hired a private firm to supplement the search for the missing helicopter. We found nothing. We assume now that he’s dead.”
After this shocking news, it was hours before the assembled team was able to get back to productive work.
On the third day the whole Emergency Team gathered under Jake Riley to debate options for dealing with the offshore data centers. Once more they convened in Sean’s living room, the only space large enough for them. By this time, three solid days of people working around the clock was starting to overwhelm the space. Takeout food littered every surface, and the luxurious, once white carpeting in the living room was slowly turning gray with ground in dirt and food. Sean’s expensive artwork was covered haphazardly with flip chart paper and maps. In the dark of night, an exhausted engineer had mistakenly drawn diagrams of power supply connections directly on the wall, his sleep deprived mind thinking he was writing on a whiteboard.
“So far we’ve deployed twelve stationary barge-type floating data centers, and six refitted oil tanker type floating data centers,” Jake explained, passing around printed photos of each. “Our original plan used only stationary barges, but the ready availability of tankers, the environmental benefits associated with reusing existing materials, and our rush to get the program back on track made the tankers attractive to use.”
“Was it your idea or ELOPe’s idea?” Gene called out from the side of the room, behind several rows of engineers.
“I don’t honestly know,” Jake said, shoulders slumped in defeat. “Regardless of how it happened, the situation we have now is that both platform types have been fitted with automated defenses.” Jake passed another set of photos around the assembled room. These were promotional shots of the robots. “The oil tanker data centers do not have a human crew, despite their mobility. They are piloted by remote control. I called down, and had one of my engineers do a discrete test of the system this morning, and it would appear we still had the ability to direct the tankers, but whether that control is an illusion, I can’t be sure, and we shouldn’t count on it.”
One of the engineers, a long haired hippie looking fellow, asked “So how the hell do we kill power under these conditions?”
“I don’t know,” Jake answered. “We’re going to have to be creative. Because all the data centers are armed with robotic defenses, and we believe those defenses are operating either autonomously or under the control of ELOPe, we can’t simply fly people out there to cut power supply cables. Just like the land based data centers, every system has redundant backups. Probably more, because we had to take into account the maritime environment with its accompanying degradation effects, accidents, storms, and equipment malfunction miles from shore. So we need some creative ideas.”
“What can we do to take control of the robots?” asked Mike. “Or, lacking that, can we incapacitate them in some way?”
“Can we intercept communications to the robots?” one engineer volunteered.
“That will send them into autonomous mode, according to these specifications, which doesn’t help us at all,” another answered, as the discussion quickened pace.
“Let’s just shoot them!” someone called.
“Won’t work, they are hardened. It would be like shooting a miniature tank. One that shoots back.”
