As she walked down the hallway to Solly’s office, she could hear two men laughing and talking through the half-open door. No noisy open-office environment, this. Solly had enough pull to set himself up with an interdisciplinary gig, endowment funded, not tied to any one department. He hung out in an old pseudo-Gothic building on the Princeton campus, within striking distance of both neuroscientists and computer geeks. His office looked out over one of the campus’s many green quadrangles. It was big, book lined, and quiet.

She pushed at the open door and found Solly sitting there chatting with Corvallis Kawasaki and Enoch Root, both of whom had joined via videoconference on a flat-panel screen. This kind of thing was getting a little antiquated, but people still used it. “Hi, Sophia!” called C-plus when he saw her entering the frame.

“Am I late?”

“You’re early!” said Solly. He was a tiny guy, deeply embedded in a leather chair, like a mouse in a baseball mitt.

“Okay. Fyoosh!”

“We hopped on a little early,” C-plus explained. “We had some other things to talk about.”

“In Latin?”

There was an awkward pause, and then they all laughed. “I am sorry you heard my butchered Latin,” C-plus said. “How embarrassing.”

“I wouldn’t know butchered from non-butchered,” Sophia said. “But why?”

“It’s a running gag between me and Enoch,” C-plus explained. “He walked up to me once in a bar near the foundation and hailed me in conversational Latin.”

“Because he knew you spoke it,” Sophia guessed. “Because of the Roman-legion stuff you do.”

“Yes. It made quite an impression on all of the Amazon employees hanging out there.”

“And on you,” Enoch said. His face was sharing the screen with a pint of amber fluid, topped with foam.

“I didn’t know Enoch at the time. So, yes! It came as quite a surprise,” C-plus admitted. “Anyway, we practice our Latin sometimes. His is much better than mine.”

“Hi, Enoch!” said Sophia. “Where are you?”

Enoch reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding the beer and moved the camera around, giving them a blurred panorama of what seemed to be a very charming pub.

“England?” Sophia guessed. “Ireland?”

“No,” Enoch answered. “The independent, sovereign nation of . . . wait for it . . .” With utmost gravity, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a passport. He held it up to the camera. It looked newly minted. Embossed in gold letters on the front, it claimed, in French, Dutch, and English, to be an official document from Zelrijk-Aalberg.

“You’re printing passports now!?” C-plus exclaimed.

“It’s just a piece of paper,” Enoch said with a shrug. “You know El. He is fascinated by nation-states. Always hacking the system.”