“How could they? How could anyone?” The system administrator looked around suspiciously, despite the audio and video recording she had been warned about. “We can’t control the network. It comes and goes. We just ride it. But tell them that, they don’t understand.”

“Help me understand. Is this…Are you being hacked?”

Charen laughed bitterly. “What even is hacking? Is there some crazy kid out there playing WarGames with our system? No. Is there a black hat sending us denials of service? No. Nobody steals our passwords and tries to get at the money. Any problems are down to the network. Mr. Swayne designed the system to read data and generate predictive patterns. It just needed better data. The network has all the data, all of it.”

At this point, Alison knew she was rabbit-holing far too hard, and that her remit probably only extended to passing Volkovska on to her peers. The woman was plainly a little off balance, and that couldn’t be connected to SFI’s bouts of prescience. And yet…

This, as Alison explained to Julian, was where she decided to sidestep personal ethics. “The system’s still running,” she noted to Charen.

“I keep it running, only me.” The woman clearly wanted to go back to it. “It needs to stay on.”

“If they turned it off…?” Invoking that nebulous they that everyone fears in their own way.

“They can’t. It would never…It can’t be off. We’d never get the connection back. They’d be killing something, never to be seen again,” Charen almost shouted at her. “They wouldn’t. They promised!”

Alison had swallowed down her repugnance at what she was about to do. “You have to show me what’s so special, Charen. And if I can understand it, I can sell it to the others. I can make them see why it needs to be kept on. But right now I don’t understand.” And she had no authority, not even an advisory role. SFI was dead, and its assets were going to be split up and sold to pay the fees of its liquidators.

But Charen seized on any small chance, as Alison knew she would. Two days later they were back in the deserted Schoen Fayre offices. Everything valuable from the trading part of the operation had been stripped out by then. But in the chill room below, the servers kept on turning; they would last as long as the investigation, because they were still the primary source of intelligence for just what the hell SFI had been doing.

“Here, you sit, put Wi-Fi on, I will show you everything.” Charen seated Alison at a folding desk with her laptop, then shrugged into a heavy coat and vanished into the server room.