Everyone Russell and Edmund could see around the office was young. Henry Green at least affected the look of a businessman with his dress slacks and dark shirt, but his messy hair was at least two inches too long in back. The numbers geeks, dressed in black, looked like they had just come in from an all-night party. Statistical Solutions was gaining a reputation for all kinds of data collection and algorithm solving, and a lot of their employees did indeed go on and work for Silicon Valley giants that paid for their dry cleaning and accommodated their dogs at work. To keep them, Henry Green had to be equally tolerant and generous. As long as they gave him six months of hard work, Henry Green didn’t mind. Statistical Solutions was strongly in the black.

Anticipating that Russell wanted to speak, Edmund dove right in, addressing Isabel and Tom directly.

“What do you know about stem cell research in relation to the treatment of diabetes?”

“I know what stem cells are,” Isabel Lee said.

“Did you build it into your projections?”

“Build what in?”

“The fact that a professor up at Columbia is making strides toward creating human pancreases outside the body to be used as transplants. If he succeeds, he’ll be prolonging the life of diabetes patients.”

“Which is a good thing, of course,” Isabel said. Neither Isabel nor her colleague Tom Graham enjoyed working on mortality statistics for LifeDeals, even less when they found out what LifeDeals was doing with them. They’d mentioned their misgivings to Green, but he’d waved them off, saying they were not being paid to make ethical value judgments. Yeah, the concept of making money from people’s deaths is creepy, but the pay is good.

“Yes, it’s a wonderful day for medicine and fat people, less good for my investors,” Edmund said.

“Listen, we gave you full license to draw up parameters for us, using actuarial data and cross-referencing it with our cash-flow projections, and nowhere did we see any information about this,” Russell said, getting a nod of agreement from Edmund.

“Russell, we built in increases in life expectancy and added tolerances for unexpected developments, but they were capped at five percent,” Henry said. “As we discussed, as you agreed. If there is about to be a major breakthrough like custom-made transplantable pancreases from stem cell research or fallout from the human genome project, we can’t be held responsible. You can’t anticipate once-in-a-century events.”

“Then all this fucking statistical research is useless,” Edmund snapped, throwing up his hands in frustration. “It’s all nothing but mental masturbation.”

“Na-ha,” Isabel said, not at all intimidated. “It’s good data for what we had. If there’s a paradigm shift, then numbers change and graphs have to be adjusted to reflect it. Simple as that.” She shrugged and sat back in her chair.

Tom Graham was looking at a fingernail and didn’t respond.