Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 7

I knew what the kid meant when he told me to find him in the Woods. "The Woods" was the nickname for Ancien's developer ecosystem. He was on the platform. All I had to do was find him, which wasn't going to be easy. There were over a hundred thousand developers working in the Woods, so it would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

The first thing I needed to do was get to a computer. If I went back to my hotel room, someone would almost assuredly try to bother me, and I needed some time to focus. A kid had risked his life and ruined his reputation to get my attention, and I needed to find out why. It wasn't like Ancien needed me anymore anyway.

So as soon as I was cleared by the police from Wall Street, I wandered the city aimlessly until I stumbled upon an Apple Store. It was big enough and busy enough to hang out for a while without being noticed.

Ancien was a platform for analyzing big data using every method of machine learning available. Linear regression, analysis of covariation, gradient descents, neural networks, and support vector machines. All built into a cloud operating system that had instant access to digital representations of much of the world's information, both historical and real-time.

Put simply, Ancien was the smartest supercomputer in the world, and anyone could build an application on it.

And this kid desperately wanted me to see his app.

So, I logged into the web portal and started searching. Since the IPO was interrupted, I was still technically CEO. This meant I my account was still privileged, and I could browse freely. Of the hundred thousand developers in the Woods, the majority of them would still be kicking the tires. Most of them hadn't even deployed their first live application yet. So that narrowed down the list to about twenty thousand accounts.

I was guessing this guy wasn't acting as part of a company, so when I took out corporate accounts, I was able to narrow down the list to ten thousand. Still unmanageable. Maybe if I had my laptop, I could build a program to search for me. But not here.

I opened another browser and loaded CNN. Maybe the news would tell me the kid's name. No such luck. The police are not releasing any information at this time.

Then my computer pinged. When you logged into the Woods, you could chat with other developers. Evidently, someone wanted to speak with me.

Phillip: Hey, where are you?

Luna: Hiding out at an Apple Store

Phillip: You ok?

Luna: Yeah. Scared but ok

Phillip: Thor's taken over

Luna: What do you mean?

Phillip: Just held an emergency board meeting, named himself acting CEO

Luna: Douche

Phillip: He wants me to revoke all your privileges

Luna: Why?

Phillip: He says it's for corporate security

Luna: Can you stall them?

Phillip: You know what, I think I am coming down with something. Maybe I better see the doctor before I do any more work for the day

Luna: You're the best, Phillip

Phillip: Be safe

Luna: You too

I had to act quickly. Phillip was my chief operating officer and second in command. We went way back. He was my twelfth hire, and one of my best. He was my friend and coach—not just an employee. I didn't want to get him in trouble.

What else did I know? Okay, the kid was young. I could use that. When we implemented the chat functionality, we had to start collecting years of birth to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. If I had to guess, I would say he was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five.

That limited my search to one thousand. Then, I tried people between eighteen and twenty. Three hundred. It was incredible to me that there were three hundred college students around the world with production applications deployed on Ancien.

I could search through three hundred apps in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully, I'd find an account that stood out to me in some way. Since the kid had told me to find him in the Woods, he had to have left me some kind of trail. Some digital equivalent of breadcrumbs. It would take a little time, but nobody was going to be interrupting me here.