“Can’t you just…?” Because surely whatever needed to be tweaked could be done as easily from a terminal? But apparently Charen needed to be close to the object of her obsession. Priest and temple was the comparison that flowered in Alison’s mind. A one-woman cult.

Her laptop screen began to display some familiar data formats: the trading instructions from the computer below. Thanks to Charen, it was still running its inexhaustible analysis of the markets. If Alison had the ability to act on this information, could she become an overnight millionaire? Or would they lead off a financial cliff? She wondered what the temperature was down there, as a general indicator of the machine’s powers of prognostication.

Her phone rang: “You see now?” Charen’s staticky voice. “You’re seeing this now?”

“I don’t see anything new.” And even as she said it, Alison realized she hadn’t given her number to the woman.

“Look!” And then more distantly, Charen speaking to someone or something else, “Show her, please!”

Or maybe she is just crazy, Alison remembered thinking, just before it happened.

Her screen began throwing up windows like errors, except each contained more data. Every layer seemed to encapsulate the previous data in a perfect, instantly graspable and yet utterly inexplicable equation. Then she was seeing networks, complex webs of if and then. There were models, fractal patterns, geometry and telemetry that sought to describe impossible spaces extending in unknowable directions.

She saw everything. In that moment she came perilously close to becoming the second convert to Charen Volkovska’s cult. For perhaps thirty seconds she saw what the woman had called the “network,” a vast frozen ocean of computation in which SFI was encysted like a parasite. She saw the godlike perspective that turned the chaotic complexities of the stock market into a child’s peg-and-hole game, where all you needed to do was match the shapes to dominate the markets.

At this point in her retelling, Alison obviously saw that she’d lost Julian, which was always the problem with the indescribable.

“You ever read Abbott’s Flatland?” she asked. “A 3D, regular human encounters a 2D world, basically. 2D people can’t conceive of 3D space, but he considers what he’d be able to do to their world. He sees their entire universe spread out in front of him, all at once. Walls and barriers are like lines on a page; nothing’s secret from him. One more dimension is all you need to be a god. Well it was like that, only we’re the 2D people and this network was seeing us from somewhere else, seeing all of us.”

“You’re saying…outside time? That’s the fourth dimension?” Julian was doing his best to keep his objections buried for the duration.