Mhari turns away dismissively, focusses on Janice instead, eyes gleaming. “The cleaners are a bad idea, Janice. We might—have you ever watched Buffy?—end up tearing them limb from limb. Or losing control and killing them. Cleaners have team leaders and contract management. Families, even. It could get messy, unless we know exactly what we’re doing. I think we need to deal with this in a businesslike way. Oscar . . . ?”

Until now, Oscar has been sitting in his office at the far end of the boardroom, door flung wide so he can watch from afar. It’s a pose he has: one ankle crossed over the other knee, brooding in his super-villain’s swivel chair (a horribly expensive luxury item modeled after a Blofeldian excess from one of the earlier Bond movies). Now he stands.

Forty-ish, bald and skinny and intensely animated, Oscar is both the Scrum’s leader and their interface to the institution they are embedded in. They all know it, and as soon as he steps forward they all look towards him. “Okay, people. Here’s what I’m hearing: we have a huge opportunity, but it doesn’t mesh with our deliverables list. And it certainly doesn’t play to any of the user stories I’m seeing here.” He looks at Mhari. “It comes with certain costs attached, the stomach ache and sunburn. But it also comes with some remarkable value-proposition increments”—Mhari had sold him on it the instant she regurgitated Alex’s get lost anecdote—“and I think it constitutes a net benefit that we should add to our core skills matrix for all personnel.” Everyone nods, glassy-eyed, unable to look away. Oscar in full flow was charismatic even before they sat him down in front of Alex’s tracer bullet demo and turned him into one of them. Now he’s positively mesmerizing, able to turn the driest of spreadsheet statements into a Shakespearean soliloquy.

“We need to explore the envelope of this new capability immediately, then determine how to apply it to our core production targets. We need to learn what it takes to deal with the stomach ache. We need to explore ways and means of minimizing daylight exposure. We need to identify the existential threats we face and develop procedures that maximize our chances of surviving them. You’ve all seen the movies: you know what happens to the unprepared, the unfit? We are not going to be unfit. We are going to confront this challenge and surmount it together.