Hands on the Wheel Ch. 02

Now he was racing against the deadline. His laptop would run Kimberly almost as fast as the three-server cluster at Patriot partners, and he could run it without interference from Pilot's IT staff. He would check in with them at least twice a day, primarily to reassure them he was working on the problem. Now he had only nine days. He was pretty sure he could fix it, just as soon as he knew where to look. He went to bed before midnight, figuring that it might be his last chance to get a decent night's sleep.

His laptop was delivered a few minutes before 10:00 the next morning. By noon he had it set up, linked to their cloud library, and started running projects from the test suite. As before, sometimes it yielded the anticipated ("correct") result, sometimes it didn't. He watched as carefully as he could as each project ran, but as the night wore on it got harder and harder to keep alert.

By the next morning he had run more than 60 projects, but couldn't finding any pattern in the failures. He deleted the beta version installed on his laptop and replaced it from a 32 gig USB drive with the development version he usually ran. But now it no longer worked correctly, either. The system was behaving as if it had a virus, but anti-virus programs said the system was clean.

By noon he was on the phone with Jeremy, breaking the news that the development version that had worked fine previously was now failing just like the beta version. Jeremy asked if he had installed a task monitor to see if it might reveal a clue to what was going on. Ivan said he hadn't because he wanted to keep the task environment as clean and consistent as possible, but now he would do that. Jeremy repeated—unnecessarily, Ivan thought—the doom in store for them if they couldn't find and fix the problem.

After a quick lunch he installed the task monitor from Brian's toolkit on his laptop and started running the test suite. After a dozen straight successful runs, he grabbed a beer and went out on the balcony of his hotel room. He pondered the situation for a while, then went back in, closed the task monitor, and ran the test suite again. A dozen runs randomly yielded random errors. He reinstalled the monitor and, as he expected, the next dozen runs were all successful.

He grabbed another beer and went back out on the balcony. By this time it was dark. He watched the cars on Route 128 and did some more pondering. It appeared that the beta version somehow infected a system with a virus that caused Kimberly to fail randomly. Further, the virus was smart enough to know when the system was being monitored, and protected itself by not running as long as the monitor was active. If the monitor goes away, the virus resurrects itself. Time to talk to Brian again.

When he described what he had discovered, Brian didn't say anything for a few seconds, then muttered as if he were talking to himself. "Gimme a minute. I think I can figure something out." After a few minutes, he said he could write a task monitor that would avoid detection but still report all task activity. When he was satisfied it was correct, he would upload the program to Golkonda's encrypted vault in the cloud.

Ivan stayed on the balcony for another half hour, then crashed without undressing. He figured he would need all the rest he could get. He woke at 5:30 the next morning, starting the first workathon he had pulled in several years.

After downloading and installing the new task monitor—he snickered at Brian's naming it EPHEMERAL.EXE—he set up a job to run the entire test suite against the beta version of Kimberly. He showered and went downstairs for breakfast; the task monitor's output would be captured so he could examine it later. He stayed almost an hour and a half, taking the time to finish his breakfast and read the Globe over a couple more cups of coffee.

No longer hungry and fortified with strong coffee, he went back to his room and turned to the challenge of trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It was tough to get a clear picture. All Brian was able to get his quick-and-dirty snooper to record without risking detection was the name of a task, where it originated, the time, and whether it started or completed; real-time observation wasn't possible. Ivan had to read through thousands of lines of reports and figure out what the tasks were and speculate about their purpose.

When he had spent more than half an hour poring through the records before he came to the one that recorded completion of the main task—thus marking the end of the first test—he realized a couple of things. It would take something between a long time and forever for him to read through all the output files, and he had no idea which tests had succeeded or failed because he didn't watch. He had no idea, therefore, where to look for something he wasn't sure he would recognize. He was tempted to call Brian to brainstorm a plan of action, but decided to hold off for an hour to see if he could come up something himself.

It didn't take an hour, it took only about 15 minutes or so for him to realize the answer was fairly simple: run the first project in the test suite by itself over and over until one succeeded and one failed, then compare the monitor output files for the successful and failed runs and note any differences. It took him a little over an hour to write and test a Python app to compare the files and print any records that differed. He then set up a job that created a file to keep track of whether a project run yielded the "correct" result, then ran the first project in the test suite until one succeeded and one failed.

While the job was running, he drove to a Staples about 3 miles away and bought a printer; it was simpler and quicker than driving to Patriot Partners and borrowing one. When he got back, he had to wait almost an hour for the job to finish. He called Brian and left a long voice mail explaining what he was doing, then welcomed the opportunity to take a beer out on the balcony again and try to relax.

He hadn't programmed the app to signal when it completed, but could see his laptop's display from his chair on the balcony. When the job ended, he installed the printer and ran the app to compare the two output files. He hadn't tested the print function with the printer attached, so of course it blew up. It took him half an hour to find his error and correct it.

While he was testing his fix, Brian called to tell him that he and Jean were coming back to Newton and would arrive around six the next morning (yet another red-eye). Ivan finished the corrections and ran the compare app again. This time it ran fine and printed 9 pages of differences. He puzzled over the results, testing and discarding one hypothesis after another, until Brian and Jean arrived. They made him go to breakfast with them. He explained what he had done, but after he had babbled on about why this or that hypothesis didn't account for this or that behavior, Brian told him to shut up because he wasn't making any sense.

When they learned he hadn't slept for almost 48 hours, they frog-marched him to the elevator, then to his room, made him take a quick shower ("you smell like a jock strap that's never been washed"), and threw him into bed. He was asleep in minutes and didn't wake for 13 hours.

By the time he staggered from the bed into the hotel bathroom, Brian and Jean had tied up just about every loose end. Shortly after bundling Ivan off to bed, Brian called Woodley and told her to have one of the engineers make two copies of Kimberly on USB drives, one from the development system and one from the distro duplication system, then compare the two.

Two hours later Jeremy called back and told Brian that he was right: the distro version was corrupted and engineers were trying to figure out what the differences meant. In the meantime, he had scheduled a meeting with the engineer responsible for the distro duplication system. Six hours later Jeremy called back with answers to most of their questions.

It turned out that the engineer responsible for distributing the beta versions was the son of the chair of Ivan's dissertation committee who taught, among other things, a seminar in Advanced Data Structures and Techniques that Jeremy had taken. The father claimed that Kimberly was based on techniques that Jeremy had copied from him and used without attribution; two years later, he died of pancreatic cancer. Believing that Jeremy had cheated his father, the son had planned and carried out his revenge by sabotaging the beta test.

Using entries in his engineering notebooks and patent applications—all of which were dated—Jeremy was able to convince the son that his father was mistaken, but he understood the anger. The young man explained that whenever the altered version of Kimberly was run the first time, it created a hidden function on the host system that would be activated each time Kimberly ran, then it called the hidden function whose first task was to delete the nefarious code that had been added to Kimberly, restoring it to its original form. Then it simply waited for the next instance of Kimberly to start.

When it was alerted, the first thing it did was check to see if a task monitor was running. If so, it reverted to waiting without doing anything else; if not, it made random, minor changes to Kimberly's output stream. If the corrupted version were replaced by an uncorrupted version, the hidden function would continue to operate, altering Kimberly's output whenever a task monitor wasn't running, so the hidden function was behaving as a virus.

The young man's confession upon learning he had been misled by his father convinced Jeremy of his integrity, and his clever design and coding skills convinced him of his skill. Jeremy asked if he would be interested in taking the position of Director of Security at Golkonda, freeing Brian to concentrate on his responsibilities as Chief Technical Officer. He would report to Brian, subject to Brian's approval of Jeremy's proposal.

When Jeremy explained all this, Brian quickly agreed to the change in duties. He and Jeremy decided to replace the firmware in the USB duplicator to restore its original purpose, have copies made for each beta site, then overnight them to Brian in Newton. He and Jean would resume their red-eye travels, installing the clean version and reassuring both the IT staff and boardroom-fearing C-levels at each beta site that everything was jake.

Brian told Ivan to spend a week in Iowa with his family talking about old times, getting laid, and doing whatever folks do in Iowa for relaxation. But his father was dead, his mother was in extended care, and his siblings were scattered. When he visited his mother, she wasn't quite sure who he was, so he spent a couple of days in Ames hanging out with his professors and friends, then went back to Palo Also.

_________

Two weeks after Ivan returned from Iowa (he didn't get laid), Golkonda threw a blowout awards banquet at the Stanford Park Hotel to celebrate Kimberly's apparently successful beta test. Geeks and geekettes gathered, most of them uncharacteristically decked out (as "requested" by Woodley) in tuxedos and ball gowns (mostly rented).

Brian, Vicki, and Ivan were sitting at the table for eight where they found their place tags. Brian and Ivan, each in a rented tux, had their obligatory beers, but Vicki, wearing an eye-catching little black number, pearls, and 5-inch Jimmy Choos she found at the Episcopal Church Thrift Shop in San Mateo, had chosen scotch and water instead of her usual chardonnay. They chatted and people-watched, waiting for the others at their table.

Ivan was looking over his shoulder trying to spot Jeremy and didn't notice Jean when she walked up to Brian and Vicki. She was stunning in a pale lemon floor-length sheath with a deep scoop that revealed a dazzling display of décolletage. Her deep brown hair—it was actually black with mahogany overtones—was piled high, fetchingly rebellious tendrils spiraling down past her temples and ears. Both the dress and hair complemented her rich honey complexion; the bottom of the gold ankh dangling from its matching chain barely nestled itself between the swellings at the top of her cleavage. Her heels weren't quite as precipitously high as Vicki's, but still brought her eye-to-eye with most men in the room, all of whom had noticed her fashionably late entrance and were still gazing at her.

When Ivan noticed people staring at their table, he turned and saw Jean. He slowly rose, as if in a trance, and stared. She walked over to him, put the ball of her perfectly manicured index finger with its blood-red nail under his chin, and gently closed his mouth. "You look pretty good yourself, Ivan." She spoke quietly enough that only Ivan heard, although Brian and Vicki watched with great interest.

She walked past him and paused. Remembering his manners, Ivan pulled her chair out, then collapsed in his own chair next to her. He managed a weak "Hi," but was afraid to say anything else for fear of embarrassing himself; he had no idea Jean would be so beautiful in something other than her usual business wear.

As dinner was served, people began talking about how well Kimberly seemed to be doing. Pre-release buzz was picking up online, leaked comments from beta sites were breathless in their praise, and talk of a possible IPO had picked up steam. After the dishes had been cleared and everyone had their after-dinner coffee or drink, Jeremy went to the podium.

"You all know why we're here," he began, then proceeded to tell them why they were there, which, as he had said, they already knew. When the grumbling started after a couple of minutes, he grinned and stopped talking about how successful Kimberly was going to be and what a great beta test they were having. "Now let me tell you why we're really here.

"Only a few here knew just how serious a problem we faced early in the beta test. Some of our most important potential customers were getting ready to drive nails in Golkonda's coffin by reporting that Kimberly wasn't just deficient, it was downright dangerous. We sent out a task force to solve the problem, which they did. Brian Greene and Jean FitzHenry did great jobs, but most of the credit goes to Ivan Wolfe, who figured out what the problem was and how to solve it. It's no exaggeration to say that Ivan saved Golkonda."

When Jeremy called Ivan to the podium, everyone leaped to their feet, cheered, stamped, whistled, and generally did everything they could to embarrass him. They kept it up when he got to the mic, until he finally lost his patience. "Oh please shut up!" That only encouraged them to add laughter to the noise, until Woodley stood up (she was one of the few who eschewed the formal wear, sticking with her all-black ensemble) and rapped vigorously on a wine glass. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. People quickly sat and stilled.

"Thanks, Woodley. Jeremy, you're full of it. Brian and Jean worked just as hard as I did—harder, even, because they earned a jillion frequent-flyer miles on red-eyes and I just hung out in the hotel. Like everything else we do at Golkonda, it was a team effort. I was just doing my part." His smile didn't succeed in disguising his discomfort at being singled out.

Jeremy returned to the mic. "Brian and Jean disagree with you, Ivan. In fact, it was their idea that I present you with this." Brian pushed a serving cart bearing something shrouded in a crimson cloth bordered in gold up to the podium, trailed by Jean; she approached the mic and pulled a scroll from her cleavage, then waited with a knowing smile for the hoots and whistles to die off before starting to read.

"WHEREAS the program formerly know as Kimberly is vital to the continued success of Golkonda Corporation, and WHEREAS widespread and puzzling beta test failures threatened its acceptance in the marketplace, and WHEREAS the random nature of the failures thwarted usual techniques of correcting program errors, and WHEREAS Ivan Wolfe used his supreme powers of observation and indefatigable energy to find and solve the problem, BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that from this day forward the flagship product of Golkonda shall be known as...Wolfram."

As she said "Wolfram," Brian whisked away the shroud, revealing a two-foot bronze of Harry Potter wielding his wand. Closer inspection would reveal that Harry Potter bore a striking likeness to Ivan, and the lion in the Gryffindor badge on his cloak had been replaced with a W. After a brief, stunned silence, the DJ began blasting John Williams's iconic Harry Potter theme and everyone leaped to their feet. Their response made the previous ovation sound like a fart in a windstorm.

The remainder of the formal program passed quickly. Ivan blushed, then cursed himself because he couldn't keep from tearing up; he stumbled through some near-incoherent protests and thanks and sat down. Jeremy announced that Ivan was promoted to be the first Golkonda Fellow, and said that all three members of the rescue mission would receive bonuses of an undisclosed amount. Jeremy closed by announcing that the beer and wine were free and dancing would commence immediately.

The first song was "At Last" by Etta James. Jean was reaching for Ivan's hand before the opening swell of strings. "Come on, hero, they're playing our song." She all but dragged Ivan onto the dance floor, where they were joined by Brian and Vicki. Ivan rested his hand lightly on her waist and held her hand as if he was afraid he would break it, but Jean was having none of that. She snuggled up against him. "I'm not fragile. Just relax and pretend that you're enjoying this." Her whisper raised a ribbon of goosebumps along his spine.

No one there was old enough to remember James' original 1960 recording of the standard, let alone its debut as an instrumental by Glenn Miller in 1941. A few remembered James' rendition from more contemporary sources like the movies Rain Man or American Pie, but it was achingly familiar to Ivan. Her original version had been his father's favorite song; he played it hundreds of times while Ivan was growing up; it was played at his funeral just two years ago. Ivan knew the lyrics word-for-word, and wondered if Jean did, too. He steeled himself against imagining that such an exotically beautiful woman would feel that way about him, but couldn't resist his own attraction to her.

The next few dances were faster, currently popular songs. Ivan never enjoyed that style of dancing, but Jean found herself the target of several young men eager for her attention. She accepted each request and obviously enjoyed flaunting her sensual moves, but turned to Ivan when the next slow one started. "Please?" she mouthed. After one more fast dance, she turned down all requests from others. His fight-or-flight instincts warred the entire evening as they danced each slow dance, getting closer to each other each time

She asked if he would walk her to her car in the parking garage next door. He did, of course, a wish that the night wouldn't end fighting with his fear of setting himself up to be disappointed. She unlocked her Porsche 911, opened the door, and turned to him. Instead of leaning for a kiss, as he hoped/feared, she just smiled. "Why don't we stop for a drink after work tomorrow? Tonight was...fun."

Relieved, Ivan quickly said yes. He didn't know it, but they had taken the first steps that would lead to marriage less than a year later.

The next day he went by Jean's desk and waited as she got her purse from the desk drawer and locked up. She was surprised when they didn't go into the structure where both their cars were parked and continued to the Starbuck's just past it. They sat and talked for an hour and a half, then he walked her back to her car. Despite his misgivings, he found himself asking this gorgeous, funny woman if she wanted to do it again tomorrow. She nodded enthusiastically, then hopped into her Porsche and roared down the ramp onto the street.