In normal circumstances, some watchdog process running on their system would have brought this cash flow spike to the attention of the Forthrast Family Foundation’s comptroller. In this case it had been swamped and masked by bigger trends. The ecosystem of computational activity that had begun five years ago, with Sophia launching Dodge’s Brain at Hole in the Wall, and that had since grown to encompass thousands of such processes running on an unknown number of quantum computing server farms that El had sprinkled all over the world like a digital Johnny Appleseed, had of late shunted itself into a mode they hadn’t seen before. The only thing they really knew about this new mode of operation was that it was expensive. And it was expensive in a new and different way. An understanding of what these processes were thinking and doing was, as ever, maddeningly elusive. All they could do was fall back on some of the tools that various ACTANSS attendees had devised and made available to the research community over the years: tools that sucked in such data as could be gleaned from message traffic and server loads, analyzed them in clever ways, and displayed the results in three-dimensional visualizations. Those now came in many flavors, but the most widely used were the original LVU—the Landform Visualization Utility—and the network mapping scheme that had emerged from one of Elmo Shepherd’s research institutes. Corvallis, or any other qualified token holder, could pull these up at any time and view them through wearables. The apps were social, which meant that, if you wanted to, you could turn on a feature that would display the avatars of all other people who were looking at the same visualization at the same time. You could hide yourself from the user community or let them know you were around. That community was an exclusive club, with no more than a hundred token holders spread around the world. The only people who got to look at these things were researchers and administrators belonging to the Big Three foundation clusters: Waterhouse, Forthrast, and Shepherd.

A couple of weeks ago, Forthrast’s comptroller had let the board members and the top administrators know that trouble was brewing and that they needed to pay attention. Since then Corvallis had left the visualizations running in his peripheral vision all the time, and checked in on them a few times a day.