There was bratwurst of course, and mashed potatoes, and after dinner his mother pulled out a warm kringle from somewhere. Trust his mother to make all his favorites, and with less apparent effort than Mike exerted making himself spaghetti. Not for the first time, he wondered how his mother did it.
Then they ate and then sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and reminiscing. Mike looked around at his parents’ dining room, the wood and glass china cabinet looking unchanged since he was a teenager. During one of his father’s stories about getting stuck on a rural dirt road with a couple of his lodge buddies, Mike started thinking about the emails again. He abruptly thought about what David had told him about turning on ELOPe.
It had been in David’s kitchen, just last night. David admitted that he had turned on ELOPe to help get support for the servers they needed. They toasted the success of the project, how persuasive ELOPe had been. But what exactly had David done?
Was there some chance that ELOPe could have sent the emails? Chills raised the hair on the back of Mike’s neck as he thought about it. The idea seemed preposterous. Was ELOPe sending spurious emails to everyone with an AvoMail account? Surely that would have been noticed. The alternative was even more shocking, that somehow ELOPe would have intentionally targeted him. Why would it send him on a wild goose chase halfway across the country to a land-locked town with downed phone lines and lousy cell phone service?
Mike had meant the question as a joke to himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized just how out of touch he was. He palmed his phone, which still had no signal, desperately wanting to log into Avogadro’s network so he could verify the log files, and lacking that, to talk to David to find out in detail just what he had done.
He looked up to see his parents staring at him, his mother with a little frown for him taking out his phone at the table. He apologized, and asked to borrow his parent’s house phone just to find that indeed, the lines were out. That meant no internet service, either. And there was no mobile phone signal.
Pacing back and forth in the privacy of the kitchen, Mike thought about the design of ELOPe. The intended real-world use of ELOPe would be to offer language optimization suggestions to the Avogadro’s AvoMail customers. But in fact, the suggestions could be automated — there was code in there to do just that. In fact, they had used the automated suggestions during their human factors testing to automatically modify preexisting emails. Not only had the human factors testing shown that the recipients preferred the emails modified by ELOPe substantially, they also had not been able to tell the difference between a genuine human generated email and an ELOPe modified email, even when they knew one had been modified by a computer.
In fact, it was after that experiment that one of the guys on the team had given ELOPe the ability to generate emails without any human based text. It was just for the development team to have fun with, and so it could only be triggered from a hidden module. You could put any goal into the module parameters and it would generate emails. It was surprisingly good and around April Fools Day there had been no end of practical jokes among the team.
Stranded now in a snowstorm in the middle of Wisconsin with no connection to the outside world, Mike found himself wondering if ELOPe had just social engineered him into this situation. If so, to what end?
Chapter 7
“Mike, I hope your dad is OK. Christine and I have been thinking about you guys, and our prayers are with you and your family. I was hoping to hear back from you by now, but we’ve seen the weather report, and know that phone and power lines are out across half of Wisconsin. That’s one hell of a storm. I think you know that Christine and I are going to visit her parents in New Mexico for the holiday. I’ll keep my phone with me. Please give me a call when you get this message. I’ve got something important to discuss with you. I’m worried about ELOPe. I’m going to be somewhat incommunicado while we’re at Christine’s parents’ place, but keep trying me.”
David hung up, and looked over to where his wife waited with their suitcases. In truth, he normally loved going to the ranch Christine grew up on in New Mexico for the holidays. He had grown up as a city boy, but found deep pleasure in the outdoors. Going to their ranch was one of the highlights of his year. Especially in the middle of the rainy Portland winter.
Unfortunately, he was far from joy at the moment. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that ELOPe was somehow originating emails on its own. He still hoped that he and Mike could take care of it without telling anyone else. He was becoming more afraid for his career by the minute. If he did anything that materially affected the Avogadro Mail service on top of the deceptions he’d already done, he’d never work there or at any of the other big Internet companies again. It was no wonder his throat felt tight, and his stomach a boiling pit of despair.
He hadn’t been able to remove the code changes without Mike’s help. And now, to top it off, David was headed out of town. He couldn’t cancel his trip with Christine on an unconfirmed fear, nor did he really want her to know how worried he was.
The only consolation, and it was a small one, was the holiday break. Most people at Avogadro would be out of the office. With a little luck, there wouldn’t be that much that ELOPe could do with so little email moving around. But he still hoped that it was just his own worries running away with themselves.
Christine was gesturing at him from the terminal gate, and he could see people boarding the plane. Reluctantly, he got up and went over to her, managing a weak smile. He gripped his luggage tightly and followed Christine toward the plane.
He tried to tell himself that when they got back from New Mexico, everything would be fine, just perfectly normal. He’d be able to laugh at everything that he was so worried about now. Meanwhile, a stiff drink, or better yet, two stiff drinks, would be really nice.
Bill Larry flew out by helicopter to visit ODC #4 again. Since his last visit, the standard “data center in a box” cargo containers had been replaced with specially hardened units, and iRobot had delivered their automated defenses.
On this visit, for the first time, in order to land on the floating helicopter pad, Bill had to authorize their visit via the iRobot services administrator before the helicopter took off. It unnerved Bill to step onto the deck of the ODC knowing that robots with lethal force were onboard the vessel. He realized that part of his unease came from the lack of positive feedback. Unlike with a person, there was no obvious way to know that the robots were in stand-down mode. They just stood there like any other piece of machinery.
He inspected one of the deck robots, more than a little terrified that it would suddenly lurch into motion and kill him. The robot looked like a miniature tank. It was about four feet long, three feet wide, and three feet tall. It had treads like a tank on either side of a small lower chassis that contained the motors and power supply. A rectangular box on a hinged and rotating scissor arm extended up another three feet. The rectangular box look incongruously like a box of roses he had once bought for his ex-wife.
He ran his fingers over the glass panes that he knew covered the optical and infrared sensors. Small metal covers would presumably retract to expose the armament. Peering around it, he looked for the directional acoustic sensors that must be there, somewhere. He knew infrared lighting and cameras, as well as sonar, allowed the robot to see in 3D even when normal visibility was obscured. Speakers allowed the robot to instruct would-be attackers to back off. If they failed to obey, the robot had several non-lethal deterrents. It could emit pepper spray in a 60 degree arc and it could fire taser-like electrical shocks directly in front of it. The same speakers that would tell attackers to back off could deliver a 18.9Hz acoustic blast that would vibrate the eyeballs of anyone within thirty feet. It was supposed to be incredible painful and disorienting. Should the non-lethal defenses fail to be sufficient deterrent, as a last resort, the robot was armed with two hundred 10mm, body-armor piercing rounds that were more compact than traditional rifle rounds, yet powerful enough to stop anyone they hit.