“Fingers in ears,” I said, and a second or two later a blue flash of lightning descended from the simulator, followed a millisecond later by a loud crack. For a moment I thought the shield had held, but then the spinning copper dome disintegrated into thousands of fragments, some of which were thrown hundreds of feet in the air. Millon and I ducked behind the golf buggy as the worthless shrapnel fell to the ground around us.

“She’ll be disappointed,” I said.

“Always expect a kick in the teeth,” said Millon, “so that when you get a slap in the chops, it seems like a triumph.”

“Listen,” I said, “what do you know about a Goliath employee named Jacob Krantz?”

Before his days as a hermit, Millon de Floss had been editor of Conspiracy Theorist magazine, a position that necessitated he keep a somewhat lower profile these days, as some of his wackier “exclusives” had turned out to be far truer than expected— much to the displeasure of Goliath, who was implicated in almost every conspiracy you cared to invent.

“Krantz?” said Millon. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Does he have a Laddernumber?”

“It’s 673.”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed. He might be working in the Synthetic Human Division.”

“According to Goliath, there is no Synthetic Human Division. Let me make a few calls.”

He disappeared back into his hermitage, and I watched as the observers trailed out of the bunker to stare sadly at the remains of the defense shield. They had all been driven away by the time I got down there, and I found Tuesday in the bunker, trying to make sense of the vast amount of telemetry generated by the test.

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea,” I said. “It must be a huge disappointment.”

She turned to glower at me. “If you hadn’t sent me to school this morning to prove I was a real teenager, then I might have made this bloody thing work.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. This is me being angry and you being gullible and sensitive when reacting negatively to my wild accusations.”

Tuesday could be very direct when angry—but also quite honest.

“I can think of three things at once, so school isn’t usually a problem,” she said as she calmed. “I’ve just got to fine-tune the algorithm to better predict the Madeupion Field. Do it right and we have over twenty gigawatts of free energy and a vexed deity. Get it wrong and we’ve got seven tons of the most expensive scrap on record.”

“Will you be able to get it finished by Friday?” I asked. “I’m not keen to see Swindon’s downtown disappear in a flash of blue wrath.”

“I’ll figure it out, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “You should have seen their faces. That mockup cost them sixty million to build, and it’s the tenth I’ve destroyed.”