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

During one of his father’s stories about getting stuck on a rural dirt road with a couple of his lodge buddies, Mike started thinking about the emails again. He abruptly thought about what David had told him about turning on ELOPe.
    It had been in David’s kitchen, just last night. David admitted that he had turned on ELOPe to help get support for the servers they needed. They toasted the success of the project, how persuasive ELOPe had been. But what exactly had David done?
    Was there some chance that ELOPe could have sent the emails? Chills raised the hair on the back of Mike’s neck as he thought about it. The idea seemed preposterous. Was ELOPe sending spurious emails to everyone with an AvoMail account? Surely that would have been noticed. The alternative was even more shocking, that somehow ELOPe would have intentionally targeted him. Why would it send him on a wild goose chase halfway across the country to a land-locked town with downed phone lines and lousy cell phone service?
    Mike had meant the question as a joke to himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized just how out of touch he was. He palmed his phone, which still had no signal, desperately wanting to log into Avogadro’s network so he could verify the log files, and lacking that, to talk to David to find out in detail just what he had done.
    He looked up to see his parents staring at him, his mother with a little frown for him taking out his phone at the table. He apologized, and asked to borrow his parent’s house phone just to find that indeed, the lines were out. That meant no internet service, either. And there was no mobile phone signal.
    Pacing back and forth in the privacy of the kitchen, Mike thought about the design of ELOPe. The intended real-world use of ELOPe would be to offer language optimization suggestions to the Avogadro’s AvoMail customers. But in fact, the suggestions could be automated — there was code in there to do just that. In fact, they had used the automated suggestions during their human factors testing to automatically modify preexisting emails. Not only had the human factors testing shown that the recipients preferred the emails modified by ELOPe substantially, they also had not been able to tell the difference between a genuine human generated email and an ELOPe modified email, even when they knew one had been modified by a computer.
    In fact, it was after that experiment that one of the guys on the team had given ELOPe the ability to generate emails without any human based text. It was just for the development team to have fun with, and so it could only be triggered from a hidden module. You could put any goal into the module parameters and it would generate emails. It was surprisingly good and around April Fools Day there had been no end of practical jokes among the team.
    Stranded now in a snowstorm in the middle of Wisconsin with no connection to the outside world, Mike found himself wondering if ELOPe had just social engineered him into this situation. If so, to what end?

 
    Chapter 7
    “ Mike, I hope your dad is OK. Christine and I have been thinking about you guys, and our prayers are with you and your family. I was hoping to hear back from you by now, but we’ve seen the weather report, and know that phone and power lines are out across half of Wisconsin. That’s one hell of a storm. I think you know that Christine and I are going to visit her parents in New Mexico for the holiday. I’ll keep my phone with me. Please give me a call when you get this message. I’ve got something important to discuss with you. I’m worried about ELOPe. I’m going to be somewhat incommunicado while we’re at Christine’s parents’ place, but keep trying me.”
    David hung up, and looked over to where his wife waited with their suitcases. In truth, he normally loved going to the ranch Christine grew up on in New Mexico for the holidays. He had grown up as a city boy, but found deep pleasure in the