KINDRED - Transmission 06
A ghost in the GPUs.
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“What is this shit?”
Nik threw the documents on the table. Two hours searching the Innovation Centre archives. Nothing but marketing jargon and meaningless statistics.
Nik looked across at Tim, crunching through a mountain of figures at a wide wooden desk. Facing the Innovation Centre’s glass curtain wall.
He had to find something.
Anything.
Advertising revenue had been cratering. That’s what his analysis had shown. The obvious smoking gun for that was the Campfyre user base declining, disengaging. But the platform usage logs on the desk in front of him showed a community that was healthier than ever.
He’d known the analysis was skewed. Missing key data, other important dimensions. Frankly, what he’d been given by Mike was dressed up to blame the advertisers themselves.
‘Lack of creativity.’
‘Irrelevant products & services.’
Bullshit.
A cover story—obviously—invented to cover up something else. But… invented by whom? Trent Robinson? And for what purpose?
More importantly, what else could cause such a decline?
The problem was, without some kind of an evidence trail, it wouldn’t have mattered whether he’d lied to Mike or not. The investors and stakeholders would be looking for their fall guy. Mike’s off-hand words: “Don’t sweat it…”
Don’t fucking sweat it.
He was sweating it now.
Nik looked through the window across the prairie. Low cloud grazed the bare tree line. He shut his eyes tight, and immediately it was there, right in front of him. The torn school report card, a smudged boot-print scuffed over his name. His young throat gasped for air.
He forced his eyes open. The spindly upper branches of the young beech reached in a swirling gust. No.
Break it down, Nik.
Campfyre was famous for their advertising algorithms. The investment they’d made over the years—in personnel and technology—had driven massive revenue growth.
So what could reverse this?
Nik shuffled the papers he’d thrown on the desk. He thumbed through staffing records, advertising team allocations. The teams were fully staffed; key people were still in place. At least, they were last week.
So the problem wasn’t the personnel. But that left—the tech.
How could the algorithm go backwards? How could it get dumber?
An AI algorithm fed on two things. Data—but… Platform usage was healthy, ad teams were fully staffed. That wasn’t the problem.
So that leaves…
“Uh, Tim…”
Tim didn’t look away from his screen, mouse hand feverishly scrolling through a large datasheet.
“Yeah, Nik—what’s up?”
“Could you give me a hand with finding some data on compute allocation?”
“Compute?”
Nik put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. It was a long shot. But the only shot he had at the moment.
“Yeah, so—a lot of things could cause low ad revenue. One of the things is the advertising algorithms performing poorly because they have access to less compute. I mean, they can’t crunch the numbers as well—they’re… dumber.”
Tim leaned back, looked at Nik.
“Advertising revenue Nik? Campfyre is cooked, mate, it’s inevitable—there’s no turning that ship around.”
Tim blinked.
“I… I think we should really concentrate on what Mike asked us to do. The assets, the IP…”
“This is important, mate.”
Nik brought his head down, eyes level with Tim’s.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Tim. On Friday, Mike asked you to help him out with something. It—wasn’t to do with an analysis I’d done a few months ago was it?”
“I don’t know, Nik, he only asked me to run some numbers—check over a report. I don’t think it’s anything—”
“But have you managed to take a close look at it yet?”
Tim flicked to another window on his screen, another datasheet.
“Not yet, Nik—I’ve been—”
“The data Mike gave me was skewed, Tim. Loaded. The analysis was meaningless. It was like… he was diverting, or—hiding something.”
Tim’s eyes scanned the screen.
“I don’t see…”
“Look Tim; I think I’ve been… set up. I need to get to the bottom of this. I need your help… Please.”
Tim’s brow furrowed. He paused a moment.
Nik drew close to his colleague, lifted his eyebrows. Tim’s eyebrows raised a notch.
“Compute allocation data, you said?”
Nik nodded. Tim clicked around his screen, through different windows, folders—hunting. After twenty seconds, he stopped.
“This… might be of help?”
On the screen, a datasheet titled ‘GPU compute allocation log’. Its cells filled with a day-by-day account of computing power allocated to different initiatives. Percentages of the total, and absolute values.
Nik wheeled a chair closer and perched beside Tim.
“Okay… so—take that and load it into FleurusGPT for me.”
A series of clicks.
“Great, now isolate the compute percentage allocated to advertising and cross it with the ad revenue data…”
Tim clicked away again then prompted their analytics AI to perform a general pattern recognition. A point graph appeared on the screen. Tim leaned back in his chair.
“That… doesn’t look right.”
The two lines diverged starkly. Advertising revenue dropping—the compute allocation remaining roughly steady. Even increasing in recent months.
This is what Nik had seen last time.
But…
“Wait, Tim, go back to the allocation log, I just want to—”
Tim brought the log file up again.
“Scroll right… There! See, Tim? The percentages are more or less steady—it’s the absolute values that are going down. Do the same thing, run the numbers again, but this time with the absolute values.”
Five clicks and a flurry of keystrokes from Tim. Nik slammed his palm down on the desk.
“They match! Exactly.”
Nik let out a slow breath. How could he have missed this last time?
He stared at the matching lines on the graph. One lousy piece of analysis. Now hundreds—maybe thousands—would be out of a job, a livelihood.
But here the numbers were—and the numbers didn’t lie.
The data slipped through the cracks—and probably satisfied the exec dashboards—because they’d been analysing the percentages, not the absolutes. Meanwhile someone at Campfyre had been pulling hidden levers, cutting off the air supply. They’d been using his analysis to cover their tracks. And he now had to find out why.
Nik rubbed his eyes; a moment of silence.
Compute capacity didn’t just disappear. Not without whole datacentres being decommissioned.
No, this was deliberate. But for what end?
“Wait, Tim. That compute—for the advertising algorithms—that’s specialised GPU compute, right?”
“Huh? Uh, Nik, that’s more your domain—”
“It must be—it is specialised compute. Only useful for AI workloads. And—if they’re taking it off the advertising, then… what are they doing with it?”
Tim looked at him, a raised eyebrow.
“Well, they might have been shutting the GPUs down. Those things suck up power like nothing else.”
“Nah, they wouldn’t intentionally ruin themselves for a few quid off their power bill… Tim, can you flick back to that compute data again?”
Tim turned back to his computer, tabbed between a few open windows.
Nik jabbed his finger at the screen.
“There’s something missing from this report. They’ve been using the compute elsewhere… And they’ve been intentionally hiding it. If it was going down here—where was it going up?”
Tim scrolled, squinting: his eyes inches from the screen. Nik stood back.
So, they’d killed the advertising. If it wasn’t suicide—then what? The only way to monetise a social network was prediction and influence. Make the users consume. But if the goal wasn’t consumption, what could it be… connection?
Nik shook his head. He looked across the open-plan working area, buzzing with Campfyre employees. Packing up desks—emptying the drawers of anything sensitive. Or incriminating.
Humans. Complex, messy humans.
The compute had to have been used somewhere. But how could they…
“Tim—do you have access to server time records for the Innovation Centre?”
“Server time logs… Yes—I should have that here…”
Tim clicked around again. Opened up another data sheet.
“Here’s October.”
Both leant in close as Tim scrolled slowly down a long list of records. The lines blurred into each other. It was hard to tell one item from another. Nik blinked.
Shit, we’re going down another blind alley.
Tim could be right. Maybe they had simply been decommissioning their servers—
“This… This project, Nik—Kindred. What do you know about it?”
Tim’s uncharacteristic monotone brought Nik back to the present.
Kindred?
“Sorry, I—what about it??”
Tim didn’t look away from his laptop, his blond eyebrows furrowed as he flipped through pages of figures; a slow indrawn breath.
“The compute budget… It’s—this is where it’s going.”
“What?”
Nik stood up and leaned over Tim’s shoulder to see data sheets flashing past.
“... You can see it. From about 4 months ago. I mean, there are some big spikes in server time… But—overall it’s getting more and more of the budget.”
Tim motioned to a series of numbers in the middle of the spreadsheet on the screen.
“Yeah, see here, the budget goes down for the advertising algorithms… And here, it goes up for Kindred. Simultaneously.”
Nik leaned in closer, squinting at the grey grid-work on his friend’s computer screen.
“You’re sure?”
Tim looked at Nik, and nodded. Nik’s pulse quickened.
So—this is what they were sacrificing their seven hundred billion pound business for. One project. Truly massive GPU compute usage. Artificial Intelligence—that much was obvious—but for what?
That’s the question that bails me out.
Mike had known. Trent was hiding something. Something worth putting the whole damn company on the line.
Kindred.
Nik sat back down, fixed Tim, and took a long breath.
“We’re going to have to look into that one.”
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