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

entire R&D team worked on the project, building the initial architecture, and then incrementally improving the effectiveness of the system week after week.
    The proof was in the results. ELOPe’s language analysis and modification had resulted in it managing to acquire thousands of servers for itself. David wasn’t sure exactly how. He couldn’t see the modified emails, an unfortunate consequence of removing the logging so that others wouldn’t see what he was doing. Had Gary received a modified email that was convincing enough to make him change his mind? Or had ELOPe taken Gary’s response, and changed that to something more favorable? David found it more than a little unnerving not knowing what was happening. When he dwelled on that, he felt a pit of fear in his stomach.
    But sure enough, his servers were here. Now that was something to dwell on. There was an email from procurement confirming it, and an email from operations showing the time the servers would be available. So whatever ELOPe had done, it worked. It might be the most server-intensive application in the company, if not the world, but by damn, it worked.
    When David thought about that, he was thrilled. The project had become his life. His little baby was all grown up now, doing what it was built to do. Well, maybe a little more besides.
    But he hadn’t realized what it would be like to create such a huge deception, and to have ELOPe working silently behind the scenes. If anyone discovered what he had done, it would be the end of his career. He looked out his office window. Outside in the momentary sunshine, people went about their business, walking, talking, jogging, or, of course, drinking coffee. From his office window, they all looked chillingly carefree to David.
     

 
    Chapter 5
    Bill Larry’s foot hovered in the air, while he waited to take a step forward. The data center dropped down. Then it lurched up. Bill waited for a moment more, judged the motion, and then leaped. The data center retreated from him at the last second, but he made the jump onto the adjoining floating barge.
    Bill took a happy breath of ocean air, and felt the barge rock under him. This was his project, his mark on Avogadro. After starting out as an IT system administrator, his skills with people led him into management. After he got his MBA, he took a program management position with Avogadro in their data center facilities organization. Now in his early forties, he found himself riding helicopters to visit the modern pinnacle of high tech data centers: the offshore floating data center.
    In the last decade, Avogadro invested in offshore power generation R&D. That investment had paid off with efficient electricity generation. Avogadro’s Portland Wave Converters, or PWC, were powered by oceanic waves . The waves never got tired, never ran out, and never needed fuel, so it was a very lucrative proposition once the wave generators were built. Gazing off to either side of him, Bill could see the PWC stretching out, a long line of white floats on the surface of the water, anchored to the sea bed below.
    After developing the generation capacity, Avogadro engineers recognized that if electricity was generated offshore, it made sense to put the data centers offshore as well. Ocean real estate was effectively free. Cooling the thousands of servers located within a small space was tricky and expensive on land, but easy in the ocean, where cool ambient temperature sea water made for very effective computer cooling. Now Avogadro had an entire business unit devoted to utilizing the potential of these novel offshore data centers. Avogadro worked to refine the design, with plans to use the offshore data centers existing for their own operations, and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers.
    Directly in front of Bill, the primary floating barge held what appear to be sixteen standard shipping containers. They had in fact originated as standard shipping containers, but