That Mhari used to work for this agency in her pre-banking days is perhaps an anomalous coincidence, but the revelation that magic is a branch of higher dimensional algebraic group theory is just plausible enough to explain why she ended up in Oscar’s circle, and why the PHANG syndrome emerged from the particular algorithms Alex and the pigs had been told to work on, like an exotic poisonous spider tumbling from a box of bananas on a supermarket shelf.

The past several days have been a trial and an ordeal for Alex, even though the institutional feel of the organization he’s been drafted into gives him persistent déjà vu flashbacks to encounters with the more arcane nooks and crannies of university administration.

“I’m Donald Paulson, and I’m part of our in-house professional skills development wing—staff training, if you like, or perhaps more accurately in-house higher education.” Paulson has an indefinable air about him that instantly puts Alex in mind of staff common rooms and polite but distant quizzing by his dissertation supervisor’s sanity monitors. Paulson smiles, apparently in an attempt to put Alex at his ease, but Alex finds the pulsing of his carotid artery too distracting. “I asked you here because as part of all staff induction processing we’re required to administer a set of aptitude tests.”

“Oh? What for?” Alex asks, leaning forward slightly, interested despite himself. “I mean, what traits are you examining?”

Paulson coughs into his fist. “Well, as an agency tasked with providing intelligence and countermeasures against paranormal threats, obviously we take a keen interest in computational demonology, inductive oneiromantic ontology, and the geometry of Riemannian manifolds, to say nothing of the applications of Kolmogorov complexity theory to topological . . .”

Alex realizes that Paulson is closely watching his expression while he reels off a list of everyday topics of discussion over the Scrum’s coffee machine. So Alex nods, encouragingly. “And?”

“Well, I need to ask you to take a couple of multiple-choice tests. To see if you have an aptitude for the necessary abstract reasoning skills that we’d need to develop in order to train you up as an, ah, magician.”

“Oh, that’s all right then!” Alex says brightly. Alex likes puzzle challenges. “Out of curiosity, if your tests show I’ve got what it takes, what happens then?”

“Well, then we send you on a six-week training course. It’s actually fun, if you’re into that kind of thing; it’s a boot camp for higher mathematics, taught by some of our brightest people. They start with an introduction to set theory and first order predicate calculus, then tackle the lambda calculus and the halting problem. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them—”

Alex blinks. Words are coming out, but they don’t make sense. This is training-wheels stuff, taken for granted at his level. “You’re talking about a first-year undergraduate curriculum, yes?”

Paulson focusses on him. “Really?”