In theory, all of this would be under the control of a trained iRobot handler. The handlers had a central location from which they monitored defensive robots around the world for a variety of civilian customers. Bill had seen videos, and it was not dissimilar to what contracted security companies did for old fashioned corporate security, except that the handlers were mostly pimple-faced kids who looked like they spent most of their time playing video games.
When the robots sounded the alarm, the handlers could take immediate action from their remote location to deter the pirates. That was the normal course of action, and it didn’t scare Bill too badly. Knowing that there was a human being on the other end of the camera, well that wasn’t too bad, even if they were teenage video gamers.
Bill took his hand away from the metal casing of the bot and stepped back. If an iRobot handler didn’t take control of the robot — if their signal were actively jammed, if increment weather interfered with that signal, or if the handlers were swamped with too many simultaneous intrusions, well, in that case, the robots could act on their own.
Bill remembered the protocol. If the robots detected an intrusion, and the handlers didn’t take control, and the robots hadn’t been put in stand-by mode, and any would-be attackers didn’t back down, then the robots operated in autonomous mode. They’d broadcast a verbal alarm, escalation to non-lethal measures, and if all else failed, start shooting. The robots would coordinate together to cover all aspects of the deck and back each other up. Thinking through all of that, Bill was practically freaking out now that he was standing next to one of them. He backed further away, and carefully avoided the business end of the robot’s armament.
With one eye on them the entire time, Bill hastily finished his inspection of ODC #4. He boarded the helicopter, running the last few steps, and signaled for the pilot to take off. Only once they were in the air did he relax just a bit.
As the pilot circled back toward land, Bill watched the sea for some evidence of the underwater robots, but he couldn’t spot anything under the chop. The underwater robots used sonar to detect boats approaching the offshore data center. They would broadcast across all radio spectrums to warn the boats off. They would share intelligence data with the on deck robots. They too had weapons. Each had two torpedos that could sink a boat, and as a last resort, the submersible robots themselves could attach to the hull of a boat, either to track the boat or blow it up.
If the deck robots were unnerving, well, at least they could be seen. The thought of the hidden underwater robots brought back terrifying childhood memories of seeing the movie Jaws. The photos he’d seen of them, with side-mounted torpedos and maneuvering fins, only strengthened the fear. Bill made a mental point to ensure he would never take a boat to visit the ODCs.
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.