TechnoLalia, SeeNet’s major rival, insisted on labeling Henry Buzzo “the revered guru of trans-millennial physics” – and frequently implied that he should retire as soon as possible, leaving the field open to younger colleagues who rated more dynamic clichés: wunderkinder und enfants terrible “surfing pre-space’s infinite-dimensional nouvelle vague .” (Lydia dismissed TL as a guccione, “all hip and no brain.” I couldn’t argue with that, but I often feared that SeeNet was heading for a similar fate.) Buzzo had shared the Nobel back in 2036, with the seven other architects of the Standard Unified Field Theory – but he, too, was now trying to demolish, or at least supersede, it. I was reminded of two early twentieth-century physicists: J.J. Thomson, who’d established the existence of electrons as distinct particles, and George Thomson, his son, who’d shown that they could also behave like waves. It was an enlargement of vision, not a contradiction – and no doubt Buzzo was hoping to perform a similar feat in a single generation.

Buzzo was a tall, bald, heavily wrinkled man, eighty-three years old but showing no signs of frailty. He was a lively speaker, and he seemed to strike sparks off the audience of ATM specialists … but even his arcane jokes, which left them in stitches, went over my head. His introduction contained plenty of familiar phrases, and plenty of equations which I’d seen before – but once he started doing things with those equations, I was completely out of my depth. Every now and then he’d display graphics: knotted gray-white tubes, with green-gridded surfaces and bright red geodesic lines snaking across them. Triplets of mutually perpendicular arrowed vectors would blossom from a point, then move around a loop or a knot, tipping and twisting along the way. No sooner would I start to feel that I was making sense of these diagrams, though, than Buzzo would wave a hand at the screen dismissively and say something like: “I can’t show you the most crucial aspect – what’s happening in the bundle of linear frames – but I’m sure you can all picture it: just imagine embedding this surface in twelve dimensions…”

I sat two (empty) seats to the left of Violet Mosala, but I hardly dared glance her way. When I did, she kept her eyes on Buzzo, but her expression became stony. I couldn’t imagine what means she suspected I’d employed to win the contract for the documentary. (Bribery? Extortion? Sex? If only SeeNet could have been so divertingly Byzantine.) It didn’t really matter how I’d done it, though; the injustice of the end result was self-evident, regardless.