Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling

left in our budget for the fiscal quarter, but our purchase orders keep getting denied. The finance department says we spent our money, but I know we didn’t. They said you would be able to help.”
    Gene gestured with both hands at the paper around him. “See, that’s what the paper is for. Believe it or not, I have a printout of every department’s budget for each month. So we can look at your budget before and after and see what happened. Now let’s take a look....”
    * * *
    “ David, I’m glad I found you.” Mike finally found David in his office, after looking for him all day. He’d been in and out of the office constantly, and looked for him online, but David had somehow made himself scarce. Considering that they worked in neighboring offices, this was quite a feat. Mike plopped himself down in David’s spare chair. “Where were you this morning? I couldn’t find you anywhere. I need to talk to you about some oddities in the performance of ELOPe. Not to mention that you missed the entire hunt for the billiard room.”
    “ What kind of oddities?” David gazed off into the distance, ignoring the question, and sounding distracted.
    “ I know I told you we couldn’t find any more performance gains, but I couldn’t help trying. I started by establishing a baseline against the current code, to have something to test against. Just as we usually do, I tried to correlate the bulk analysis import with server cycles consumed, and to correlate the real-time suggestions with server cycles consumed, and...” Mike stopped. He realized that David was still staring out the window, and didn’t appear to be paying any attention. Mike looked out the window. It was a pleasant sunny day. Uncommon for Portland in December, but he didn’t see anything other than the ordinary bustle of people walking about on the street.
    He turned back to David. “David, are you listening? Is this, or is it not, critical that this be fixed before Gary’s deadline?”
    “ Well, I do have some good news there, but go on.”
    “ Well, I tried to establish the correlation, but I couldn’t find any. For months we had a very solid correlation between the number of emails processed and the amount of server resources required, as you remember. For the last two days though, I can’t find any correlation at all. The server resources keep going through the roof even when the logs indicate that nobody is running any tests. It’s as though the system is working on something, but I can’t find any record of it.”
    David was staring out the window again. Mike felt his head start to pound. He’d been struggling with the goddamn performance issues for days. “So then David, I was sleeping with your wife, and she said it would be just fine with you.”
    “ Yes, it is fine. Wait, what? What did you just say?”
    Mike planted himself in front of the window to block David’s view. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just tell me what’s going on, since you’re clearly not interested in the fucking performance issues.”
    “ Ah, come look at this email from Gary,” David replied, completely ignoring the anger in Mike’s tone, and looking animated for the first time since Mike had entered his office. “It just came in a few minutes ago. We were just allocated five thousand dedicated servers by way of a procurement exception! Because they came through a procurement exception, we get servers that were ready to be put online for some other product. We’ll have access to the computing power by tomorrow morning. We don’t even have to wait for them to be purchased and built.”
    Mike came around the side of the desk to peer over David’s shoulder at his computer screen, and let out a low whistle. “Holy smokes, five thousand servers. How did you get Gary to agree to that?”
    “ I sent him an email asking if we could have dedicated servers for the ELOPe project so we wouldn’t be in conflict with the production AvoMail servers.”