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

old-fashioned piracy would be his biggest challenge. Well, not quite old-fashioned, these had blowtorches after all. Pirates, damn it. He shook his head subtly at the thought, and went on.
    “ No matter what we do, there will always be a weakest link in security. The weakest link with ODC #4 was the container walls. Even if we harden those, there will be another weakest link. Hell, they could tow the whole thing away if they had a mind to. The reality is that the units are sitting out there in the ocean, miles away from shore and any possible response. Even with effective monitoring, if we have to scramble a helicopter to fly out, we’re looking at a one hour response time. If we have to scramble a boat, it’s a two hour response time. Those times are only if we have people staffed and ready to respond twenty-four hours a day.”
    “ Monitoring is very difficult as well,” Bill said. “We can of course easily monitor the interior of the cargo containers, where the environment is controlled. However, the exterior is subject to heavy winds, rain, salt water. We’ve tried three different models of security cameras, and they’ve all failed. Instead of finding out when pirates board, we find out only when servers are unplugged.”
    Rebecca broke in. “The roll out plan for data centers calls for twenty additional offshore data centers within the next six months. Those ODCs are intended to be spread around the world to meet capacity requirements. We don’t have the real estate to put them on land where they are needed. We can’t centralize them because of bandwidth and latency issues. The ODC project is critical, as you well know Jake,” Rebecca emphasized. “Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us back on track.”
    “ Well, I know this is going to sound controversial, at least initially, but we do have a proposal. I hope you’ll hear us out before you make a decision. Do you recall the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia?”
    Jake saw nods from Rebecca and Kenneth across the virtual table, and then he continued. “You may know that iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, also makes robots for military use?” More nods. “Well, the companies that were shipping freight around Somalia couldn’t just arm their sailors. The sailors of course have no training in hand to hand combat, and couldn’t reasonably be expected to repel a pirate attack.”
    Jake put another slide up on the overhead screen, showing a small tank-like robot. “iRobot already had weaponized land robots, and exploratory maritime robots. They took the next step, which was to develop weaponized versions of their maritime robots. They deployed the robots on the ships that needed to pass near Somalia. There were two parts to their solution. An automated submersible robot that can attack and disable the pirate ship itself, and an automated robot on the deck of the ship that can repel would-be boarders. They deployed the robots on dozens of commercial ships in the area, and after three successful cases of repelling pirate attacks, there have been no major attempts at piracy in the last six months.”
    Jake looked up at the screen. Rebecca and Kenneth were glancing at each other, and Rebecca’s frown had grown. Jake forced himself to keep going. He switched slides again, showing the submersible robot, and then the submersible robot and tank-like robot onboard a freighter. “We talked to iRobot, and I have an initial bid from them. They have recommended a similar package for our offshore data centers. Submersible robots to disable ships, onboard robots to disable boarders.”
    It was hard for Jake to look Kenneth and Rebecca in the eye. He knew that he was walking a fine line here. Avogadro prided itself on their open, sustainable, fair culture. It wasn’t exactly a culture that was welcoming to the idea of violence and guns. He could hardly believe he had suggested putting weapons in a data center. There wasn’t even a single armed guard in all the