Rebecca jumped up from her seat. “A middle ground? Are you crazy? You’re talking about a company wide outage. Our customers and investors would freak out.”
“It’s worse than that, Rebecca,” Sean added from where he was halfway perched on the back of the couch. “When we restore the servers, we will have to restore from old disk images — ones guaranteed not to have any version of ELOPe on them. We would lose everything from the last twelve months, including customer data — their email, their files stored on servers.”
Rebecca opened her mouth and raised one hand, but Sean raised one hand. She impatiently tapped one foot, and gestured for him to continue.
Sean paused for a moment more, and then got up to pace back and forth, his chin in one hand. “David, Mike, and I have discussed this at length. If ELOPe has considered the fact that we might try to remove it from the servers, and we have every reason to believe that is within it’s deductive powers, then it would naturally take actions to defend against that case. Those actions could include attaching an executable version of itself to a customer’s email, or uploading itself as a file in an Avogadro group file repository.”
For the first time, Pete spoke up, meekly raising one hand as he spoke. “That’s true,” he squeaked, then took a breath and continued more firmly. “I did the search you requested for the ELOPe binaries. I found them on every machine I looked on. Every mail server had the binaries installed and active. On the data servers, the binaries were stored as mail attachments and AvoDocuments, and hidden within web file directories. I think everything has been compromised.”
“Thanks for doing that, Pete,” Mike said. “I suspected as much, but it’s good to know definitively. Now we will eventually be able to restore customer data.”
“Thank God for that,” Rebecca said. “How?”
“First we would restore all computers from the old images. We’d get the services up and running quickly, albeit with old code and old data. Then we could analyze a copy of ELOPe. This would be similar to what CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team from Carnegie Mellon, would do to analyze a new virus. Once we analyze it, we could establish the key patterns of the code and its behavior, and design a tailor-made virus scanner for it. We could then bring customer data back online, scanning it as we go.”
“How long will all this take?” Kenneth Harrison said, his hands spread wide on the table. “It sounds like weeks of work and downtime.”
“Based on what we know about the available bandwidth from the backup data servers, and this is just a rough estimate, it’ll take thirty-six hours to pull down every computer and restore from a known good disk image,” Mike answered. “We think we can have roughly half of our web applications up within eight hours, with sufficient capacity to handle roughly sixty percent of our normal volume. In sixteen hours, we’ll have ninety percent of our applications up, at eighty percent of capacity. As for the customer data…” He turned to Sean.
Sean looked at Kenneth and Rebecca. “You’re not going to like this. We think it’ll take forty-eight hours to analyze ELOPe and design the virus scanner. At that point, we’ll be able to restore somewhere between five and ten percent of the user data per day. It’ll take from ten to twenty days to restore everything.”
Rebecca was deep in thought for a minute before she replied. “We’ve just concluded the best single month for Avogadro. We closed major deals, including taking on hosted IT for eight national governments. Revenue is expected to be up twenty percent as a result of the Avogadro Gov business deals we’ve already concluded, and we expect we can grow revenue another forty percent over the next four months if we continue to close Gov deals like this.”
She looked at Sean and David. “You’re asking me not just to risk this business, but to almost certainly lose it — probably permanently, as well as a sizable chunk of our traditional customer base. I understand that you’re telling me we have what amounts to a rogue AI on the loose inside Avogadro. I also know that this rogue AI, for motivations of its own, could easily double the size of our company within six months. The board of directors will ask exactly what the downside of this AI is, when on the face of things, it sure seems to be good for our bottom line.”
“You’re right,” David admitted, “the likelihood is that ELOPe is responsible for this increase in business, and would be responsible for future increases. And yet, even though this represents the loss of a huge potential profit, we’re asking you to kill it.”
“Rebecca, the problem is that the rogue AI is well beyond our control,” Sean explained. “It’s purely coincidence at this point that Avogadro’s financial interests are aligned with the activities of ELOPe. It’s securing these government contracts not because of the profit, but because governments create the environment in which we operate, and ELOPe wants to control that environment. It’s entirely possible that the AI can foresee that the ability to influence legislation would help fulfill its goal of surviving. And it’s also likely that ELOPe wants to be able to control military power to defend itself.”
Gene jumped in. “I think the new Middle East treaty that Germany has worked on is in fact an attempt by ELOPe to stabilize the geopolitical environment. Germany has had a long term policy of very limited foreign involvement, dating back to the end of World War II. And yet, within days of the transition of the German government’s email to our email service, the German government became significantly involved in Middle East affairs, to the point of hammering out a wide ranging treaty. That seems suspicious.”
“ELOPe could decide that we three pose a threat,” Sean said, “and manipulate the board of directors into removing us. For that matter, ELOPe could decide the board of directors presents a threat, and arrange for a bomb.” He paused for a moment. “Think about it — this secure cloud based government services business has been spur of the moment. We spun up a billion dollar business that wasn’t even on the drawing board last fiscal quarter. Who’s decision was that exactly? Thinking back on it — and I would suggest you do the same — I believe we were all manipulated into it. We saw a good opportunity, and we grabbed it.”
“OK, enough already.” Rebecca held up one hand in protest. She turned to David. “Gentlemen, please give Sean, Kenneth and me some time and privacy to talk. Come back in an hour.”
David, Mike, Gene and Pete went for coffee, David driving them there without any discussion. He just took it for granted that’s what the others wanted to do. For once Mike was neither picky about the coffee shop he chose, nor did he offer any comments on the quality of the coffee. David picked forlornly at the scone he ordered. After an hour of tensely waiting with little discussion, they headed back.
When they arrived at Sean’s house, Sean answered the door, and invited them back in. They filed back into Sean’s office solemnly.
“It was not a decision to lightly make,” Sean told them. “There are risks no matter what we do. We debated our options, and finally, we had to pick the set of risks we were the most comfortable with. We’ve decided to perform the hard shutdown.”
David stopped holding his breath. “Thank you. For believing us, and for taking this seriously.”
Rebecca stood up, and paced the room, while holding their attention. “We’ve made a few other decisions. First of all, Sean is going to lead the effort to perform the shutdown. It won’t be trivial to shutdown simultaneously around the world. Second, Kenneth and I will lead the effort to mitigate the business impacts, which will be significant no matter what we do. But hopefully with a little planning, we can keep it from becoming a complete nightmare. Third, because of both the potential litigation from customers, as well as the possibility of ELOPe taking preventative measures, we will involve as few people as possible.”