Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling Read Free Book Online Page A

five pages of detailed instructions. Perhaps it was a little more complicated than the guys in sales could cope with. Pete didn’t know any guys in sales, but he didn’t think that they would be very technically adept. Well, at least what he had provided was complete, even if it was a little rough around the user interface edges.
    He hit send on the email, then sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. He basked in the glow of his accomplishment, an ear to ear grin on his face. He had good kung fu.
    Pete wondered who he could brag to about his achievement, when it suddenly hit him that perhaps there was something a little irregular about what he had done. He sat forward, and let his cup thump onto his desk as it dawned on him that he had forgotten to mention to the rest of his own team what he was planning to do. This request should have come through the normal process like everything else. Not only that, but it also should have been subject to a peer review by his team members before he implemented anything, and certainly before he deployed code. He had been so concerned with impressing Sean Leonov that he didn’t stop to think about the usual process for doing this. Well, no one could really blame him for taking some initiative.
    Despite this, some bigger issue was nagging him. What was it? Suddenly, he jumped out of his seat. Shit, he had just implemented an off the radar system that could interface with a dozen different business critical web services inside the company. He had probably violated all sorts of security policies. Not probably, he definitely had. It suddenly felt really hot in his cramped office.
    Then just as quickly as he became alarmed, he relaxed a little and sat down. If Sean Leonov had thought the Internal IT team could implement the request within twenty-four hours, he clearly meant that they should pull out all the stops. Pete couldn’t very well go back to pull the application down off the servers now that he had told John Anderson and Sean Leonov it was available. He shook his head. He was worried about nothing. The system was secure. His tool relied on email credentials to validate user logons for websites, and if any product in the company was secure, clearly AvoMail was secure.
    If he told his boss and the rest of his team, he would undoubtably get his wrist slapped. The best course of action would be to just not mention it until he had gotten some kind of email kudos from Sean. Once he showed that to the team, any skipping of due process would be easily forgiven. With a plan in place, one in which he didn’t take too much heat, he relaxed a little.
    Just then, he heard a ruckus coming down the hall, rapidly getting closer. He grew alarmed. Had they already found out what he’d done? Then a group of his coworkers passed by his open office door. A few seconds later, the Internal IT technical lead stuck his balding head in Pete’s doorway and said, “We just heard a hot tip that the billiard room has shown up on the fourth floor of Building Two. Want to come help look for it?”
    With relief, Pete smiled and leaped up from his desk. He’d never seen the mysterious Avogadro billiard room that supposedly roved from building to building and floor to floor. “Absolutely!” he called, as he ran from his office, following the gang of geeks.
    Work temporarily forgotten, Pete joined the happy hunt for the billiard room. Laughter rang out as other groups heard the rumor and joined the hunt. The billiard room would only accept the keycards of the first few dozen people to find the room’s new location. As teams ran through the halls, they told each other outright lies about the location of the billiard room, all part of the game surrounding the mystery.
    While people played and laughed, thousands of servers hummed and exchanged data. A few servers allocated to Internal IT spiked in usage, but nobody was around to notice.
    * * *
    Gene Keyes walked back to his office with another cup of coffee,