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

me, or do I have to put bamboo under your fingernails?”
    “ I gave ELOPe a hidden objective.”
    “ What do you mean?” Christine asked.
    “ It means that when any email goes through ELOPe, and that would now be every single internal email at Avogadro, it checks to see if the ELOPe project could be affected by the contents of the message. Then ELOPe will do what it can to maximize the success of the project.”
    “ What does that even mean David? What can it do?” Christine stopped washing dishes and stared at David.
    David looked away from her accusatory gaze. “Well, it can’t do anything but rewrite emails,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “But because I turned off the logging, I can’t see exactly what changes it makes to those emails. I turned the system on, and the very next day, I got an allocation of five thousand servers. Sheesh, I would have been happy with five hundred servers, never mind five thousand. Five thousand servers, built and installed, is close to five million dollars. How did ELOPe get someone to spend five million dollars? And that’s not all.”
    David paused to catch his breath. He started to look around and whisper, but he realized that was foolish. It was only he and Christine in the house. “This afternoon I got an email that we just had a team of contractors assigned to the project. They hired some topnotch performance specialists to help us optimize ELOPe. God knows we need the help to try to fix performance, but I never even asked anyone for help.
    “ That sounds damn freaky.” Now Christine had given up on the dishes, and was standing with her hands on her hips. “Why the hell did you do any of that in the first place?”
    “ We were just a couple days from the whole project getting cancelled. Gary Mitchell was going to bounce us off his production servers.” David’s shoulders slumped in despair. “You know, ELOPe is a massive consumer of processing resources. We’re not even production-ready, and we’re already consuming almost as many compute cycles as the production Search and Email products that are serving hundreds of millions of customers. Hell, I abused Sean’s blessing in the first place to get way more server resources than he ever intended to give us. Gary would have bounced us off his servers, Sean would have found out just how many resources we were consuming, and that I distorted what he said to get those resources, and that would have been it for the project and me.”
    “ Jesus David.” Christine had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot now, which alarmed David. The last time she did that he had spent on the night on the couch. “How the hell did you let it snowball like this? If you’re so worried about the override you put in the software, take it out. Or have Mike take it out for you. The way you make it sound, it’s like resources are being stolen from all over the company, and everything is going to be pointing back at you.”
    David brightened. “Yeah, we just need to take out the override before anyone gets wind of it. I was nervous about doing it myself now that the code is live on the new servers. I didn’t want to crash a live server by trying to do it myself — I could potentially bring down the entire Avogadro Mail system. But with Mike’s help, we could do it live.”
    He gave Christine a big kiss. “Thanks for talking with me about this. Let me go send an email to Mike.”
    Christine heard David’s footsteps running up the stairs to their office. She sighed and turned back to the dishes. Husbands made everything so much more complicated than they needed to be. Maybe she should have just gotten a dog instead.
    Upstairs, David sat down in his office. He tapped impatiently at the touchpad, and started in on the email.
     
    Hi Mike,
     
    Thanks for coming over tonight. I’m glad we talked.
     
    But we need to meet early tomorrow morning. There’s something I didn’t tell you about ELOPe. We need to live-patch the