He’s assigned her the job of covering the exits, lest any of the cattle try to flee.

It has been an interesting month since Alex’s accidental flash of insight and their subsequent week-long scramble to research and define the potentials and pitfalls of their new condition. Mhari has been working eighty-hour weeks, and she’s not alone—not that there’s anyone waiting back home for her since Alan fucked off last year. (Or, if you want to be truthful, since she fired him for being an insufficiently supportive partner.) Oscar is similarly, if not single, then moderately unencumbered: his wife Pippa seems content to play the role of arm-candy on demand, keep their two children out of his hair, and look after the house in return for her annual Mercedes SLC and the Royal Opera House season ticket.

As the managerial side of the Scrum, they’ve barely been out of each other’s presence for the past few weeks as they organized the office move, pushed their people through the planning and early execution stages of what they have come to call the Big Pivot, arranged the tiresome but entirely necessary in-house dental visits for the team, and attended to all the other necessary minutiae of the operation.

And now it’s time for Oscar’s big pitch.

“Good evening, Sam, Steph, Ari, and thank you for making time in your crowded schedule, Sir David.” Oscar rolls into his warm-up while Mhari waits at one side of the table, within easy grabbing distance of the laptop and the projector, playing the glamorous assistant to Oscar’s stage magician. “This isn’t a routine report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Five weeks ago one of our theoreticians made a conceptual breakthrough and I decided to put regular work on hold for a week while we explored its potential to revolutionize our operations. I don’t use that word lightly, and I wouldn’t have pulled my entire team off their normal workload if the value proposition represented by the new paradigm wasn’t extreme, with a payback curve that will reach break-even within a single quarter. However, to continue in this new direction I need to confirm that all stakeholders are fully invested. Basically, gentlemen and lady, I need your consent to pivot the Scrum . . .”

Mhari strokes the remote lighting controller that she holds out of sight behind her back. She’s been dimming the meeting room lights slowly since the four senior execs arrived, taking her cue from Oscar. She’s got no idea how he managed to winkle Sir David out of his oak-paneled penthouse nest, but he’s a prize—the Bank’s director of quantitative trading. The others are all lower-level executives, from the head of the London Stock Exchange IT group to the Lord (or rather, Lady) High Executioner of the regulatory compliance team: but they’re all critically important, because any one of them can spike Oscar’s attempt to change his team’s operation remit if they withhold their consent. Furthermore they’re already beginning to look uneasy at what Oscar is telling them.