Ralina kicked open the door of the men's bathroom with one painful flick of her
converse pumps. "God," she prayed as she crossed the threshold, "Save me from
amateurs."

Before her stood her boss, caught in much the same pose as the stick figure on
the door behind. His thin legs stood slightly astride, pale and pantless. His
trunk was in a branded t-shirt wrapped in a too-small leather jacket. His right
arm held a bleeping smartphone away from him as though it a small animal after
his kidneys; his left hand reached out to independently and symmetrically root
around in a small dish beside a pile of cotton handtowels.  

His blank face with its wet fringe looked straight at her. In slow motion, his
lower jaw slowly slid sideways. A small wood shaving fell from his lips onto his
shirt, as though trying to escape Ralina's imminent custody.  

"Bradley, we have less than thirty seconds to you to find your pants, read my
briefing notes on how to best address the thirty furious and, worse, hungry
journalists I've barely held from rioting in this hotel, re-adopt your public
persona of distracted but conscientious genius CEO of a startup for that
purpose, and then leave this restroom - and, as, your public relations advisor,
I cannot overstress this enough, with your pants on, and without indicating that
you've just spent the last hour munching on restroom pot pourri.  Would it help
you if I counted down?" 

Bradley Sams blinked once as he parsed her sentence, and then looked at his
left hand with less than perfectly plausible deniability. "You're not supposed
to eat this? I thought it was like those little seeds they give you when you
leave Indian restaurants." 

Ralina found the pants in a paper towel bin. "Thirty.  Twenty-Nine." 

"All right, all right, I'm coming!" said Bradley, visibly pained, "Stop with
the divisibles!" 

--

Bradley's theoretical new guardian, Sam, was an enthusiastic, but untrained
follower of his, who had come straight from home-school and some sort of
permanent post-grad math camp commune after answering a suitably obscure but
heavily-hinted Craig's List ad. She knew a lot about cellular automata and had
intimated in her resume that she would follow Bradley to the end of the earth,
but had apparently drawn the line at following him into the gent's toilet. 

They both now sat in Scansion!'s cramped office, and Sam was staring up at
Ralina with what have been might be contempt, but was probably emotional
incomprehension. The press conference had gone off without a hitch, but there
was zero follow-up happening until this was sorted. A good half of Ralina's job
since the Great Exiling was spent handling Bradley himself. The people around
her were supposed to even up that balance, but ended up being just another set
of semi-autistic monkeys on her back. Anyone who wanted to work with Bradley
had problems of their own.

"Melly, I can't actually sack you", Ralina conceded, "since we are not, in
fact, paying you anything. But when I say that I need you to keep by Bradley's
side for the whole of the next week's event planning, I really mean that. It's
a tight schedule, and I can't have him fugue out on us again. Especially when
you can't even tell me where he is, and his damn phone won't tell me either."

"I told you, he said he was going to the bathroom."

"And that, in this case, you proved to be correct, Sam. But Bradley's
predictions about his own future behavior are," she struggled to work out some
metaphor that would become clear to this fast-blinking, twitchy girl, "Well,
they are *heuristics* with poor predictive power. And they're for his own
guidance, not for our benefit. Also, you need to tell me when he's in a
bathroom for over an hour. You don't know what he might be up to."

"What was he up to?"

"It's hard to back-derive from here, but I think he spilled some sinkwater on
his jeans, took them off, then got overly fascinated in how they were stitched
together. He also ate the pot-pourri under the assumption that a fancy-schmancy
hotel would provide snacks for its restroom attendees. He's busy writing a
blog-post about knot theory applied to sewing leather now."

Sam pressed her lips together, and frowned. "Well then, I quit. I thought I'd
be helping work on development projects. I came here for the knot theory, not
to babysit."

Sam had been the twelth intern in as many months. You and me both, thought
Ralina. "Sam, this is the practice of the theory. Bradley wouldn't survive in an
academic environment, you know that, and he's grown up working with the
protections and flattery of his formerly large research budget. Now he's on his
own, and he needs help."

Sam quivered again, wih the gulping, slightly melodramatic breath of a young
person about to stand against up a local maxima of authority. "Ralina, I know
what it's like to be an ADD maths geek. And I used to care for people who
suffered from Aspergers, which is a horrible but treatable affliction.
Bradley's doesn't have some genius sickness that magically permits him to walk
over everyone, including you. He's just a deep jerk. And you are enabling his
deep jerkitude."

"I appreciate your candor, Samuel."

"My name isn't Samuel, it's just Sam."

"Please don't interrupt when I'm talking executive management. Could you do me just
this one favor, I wonder?"

"Is this one of those executive management favors completely unbounded by
end-goal or time-limit?"

"If I promise you access to Bradley's internal note wiki, would you still
consider wiping his ass? Metaphorically?"

"There's an internal wiki? I thought Bradley made everything he thought of
public immediately?" 

"No, he's still trained to keep the patentable stuff behind Scansion!'s
firewall."

"That's scandalous!"

"See how much I trust you? I really need someone else here Sam. I can't do it
on my own. And you'll do."

Sam closed her laptop with a snap. "I am flatterred and will attempt to live up
to your barely-conceded respect."

Ralina checked her phone. "Survey says he's skulking in the hackerhaus.  He'll
be safe there. The ratio of friends to enemies there is still pretty good."

Ralina's own plan was to drop Sam off at the hackerhaus, and then finally get
some sleep in her own, sepulcharally unoccupied apartment. But when they pulled
into Castle Serotoni in its little corner of the Delores, the shouting from
inside forced an exchange of glances from them both. 

On the way up Ralina met Klax0n, a security analyst gangmember in his early
twenties that holed out at Serotoni when they weren't touring the convention
circuit. He was still putting on his coat as he pushed past them down the
apartment complex stairs.

"Bradley's up there singing Chuvashi dance tunes. He has trained his laptop to
do atonal harmonies, and no-one can get near him to pull it out of the
soundsystem. I'm going back to my condo to work. D3v0n is holed up in the lab,
and says she knows how to formulate enough horse tranquiliser to shut him up
for good. Please retrieve him."

Ralina punched the cab application on her smartphone, and authorized Sam to pick
it up. "It's on the company account. Just dump him back home, and we'll call it
a day. I've got to chew food and smokescreen a journalist: I'll mail you the
intranet account when I get home. If he causes problems start reeling off
numbers that aren't primes. Deal?"

Down the stairwell, a plaintive wailing in irregular rhythm come wafting over
them both. The timed lights in the corridor turned off. Sam started slowly up to
the third floor, like a jailer at slopping out time.

----

"I have to quit, Jason. Bradley isn't eccentric any more, he's a menace to
himself and others. Since he was sacked, he's lost all his friends, a chunk of
his stock, most of his friendly investors, and what sanity he had left. He has
payroll for six months, but no direction. I'd say he was depressed if he'd ever
had any affect at all. Instead, he's just annoying."

Jason watched the dykey bar attendant in the empty dive bar pour him his fourth
gin. He worked the tech beat on a local doomed newspaper chain, and was the
person Ralina must trusted for blunt survivalist advice. "So quit." 

Ralina's hands swayed her Cosmo around in a snake-charmed dance of indecision.
"I'm ruined for all other public relations jobs, Jason. My tolerance for boredom
has atrophied. I'd rather die than go back to pimping search-engine-optimizers
or virus-checkers, and with the economy as it is, there's no-one else out there
who could pay me. Bradley's random, but at least I feel his company needs me. I
don't know who else might need a PR person. Especially one who hates public
relations, the public, and anything related to the public, in that order."

"Find something that isn't public relations, then. It's not like you couldn't
shimmy into any number of other tech jobs."

"It's been five years since I last coded, which means I might as well speak
COBOL. The Chancellery never gave me a promotion once they found I had
Brad-wrangling skills. For all my resume says about the dying embers of my
twenties, I could have run off an become a waitress in Florida,  instead of
living in the Valley babysitting a grown toddler."

"What about journalism? It's exciting, even here in the technology ghetto. Lots
of impossible deadlines and freaky dysfunctional co-workers. Believe me, at the
Chronicle I'm regarded as a stalwart balwark of the community. I know you can
write to wordcounts, and your press releases don't stink of the built-in
Microsoft Word template like everyone else. You could try it out for a few
months, and probably segue it into a high-paid analyst job like everyone else
I've ever worked with."

"Well," said Ralina, surprised to be unable to find a sufficiently damning
cut-off to this line of conversation. "I did actually run my town's school paper
until they expelled me and turned it into an automatically generated blog."

"There you go: Pulitzer country already."

"So I should apply to work at your place?"

"God, no. The only people they're hiring now are insolvency specialists. But
most of the ship-jumpers tell me that there's a new well-funded media website
being set up in SoMa. Some media mogul flush on 20th Century Cash wants to shake
the online world and have yen fall out of it. Obviously, the tech losers at the
Chronicle are all baying for scraps, but I think I can put in a good word for
you. They seemed to respect my outright refusal to join them."

"All right, all right. I'll put Resume.Doc on your printer queue."

"Don't bother. Let me spruce up your online version. It's the least I can do,
and journalists are better than PR people at covering up their exagerrations.
You'll have to sharpen up your deceit game, Ralina. People know PR folk are
lying through their teeth, so you guys get lazy. Everyone suspects journalists
lie, but we still have an aura of potential truth. Makes us work harder to fool
them."

----

Ralina awoke to a four alarm fire. All of the messaging systems in the bedroom
cryed out for attention, and were refusing to be suddenly silenced. Cellphone,
alarm clock, laptop, and, most disturbing, her dusty landline's answering
machine blinked and dinged and ringtoned with unconcealed impatience. Ralina
played whack-a-mole until there was quiet, and, figuring that a cellphone text
message would inspire the least dread, and peered at it with her sleep-blurred,
contactless eyes.

RALINA STANTON NO REPLIES ARE YOU DEAD? - AURORA VELL

The message came from "Number Unobtainable". How could you even do that with a
text? She struggled to remember who or what Aurora Vell was. In her waking state
she thought of vampires drowning in mud at vaguely European folk festivals.

She found six emails from Vell in her inbox, in increasing levels of panic, and
decreasing amounts of information. She replied back to the first.

"Hey, I'm up now: I'm on PST, so you're calling me at" - she stared at her
bedside cabinet. Five AM? Okay, what kind of parochial oaf was she dealing with
now? The French were the worst for miscued timezones, followed by the
tabloid-sized British hacks.

The phone rang again. Against the protests of her higher brain functions, her
hand hit the green receive key. Belatedly, she realised that she was still too
tired to string audible word sounds into anything but a drawl.  There was a
pause.

"Stanton? Ralina Stanton? I'd like to be put through to Stanton, please, it's
very urgent."

The clipped English tones prodded Ralina's recall. Vell. She was talking to one
of the Vell Belles. 

"Ralina, you're there, I can hear you I've got a 7.30AM slot for you and
Stillwater Shanks at the Huntington. Jason from the, ah, Chronicle told me all
about it. It will be a pleasure."

Aurora hung up, which was relief, because Ralina was dangerously close to asking
her whether she was folk-singer, the furry, or the fascist.

An hour of steeping in caffeine, a hot bath, and Wikipedia left Ralina with a
few answers but no real context. She looked up Shanks first, because despite
Aurora's tone, she didn't know who the hell he was. He turned out to be an
author who Ralina vaguely remembered from a series of ponderous essays on the
benefits of Ecstasy in the Nineties, followed by a dark novelette on the dangers
of Prozac a decade ago, then, last year, a series of magazine retrospectives on
the cultural history of Viagra.  Ralina concluded that Shanks' pitches to
publishers was determined by whatever he saw in his bathroom cabinet that
morning.

The Vells slowly sorted themselves out in her head. Antonia was the folk-singer;
Acclaim was the Otherkin activist. Ralina's recall of a fascist was inaccurate:
she was thinking of Unity Mitford, whose looks Aurora undeniably resembled. She
was the eldest of the sisters, less prone to paparazzi but still as able to pull
a rubbernecking crowd as the rest of her siblings.  

The three of them had been British tabloid regulars for forty years. A.J. Vell,
their academic father had made his money in the Seventies by patenting key
elements of E.R.N.I.E., the computer that picked Britain's state lottery bonds.
He was made a peer of the realm by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1967, and
pardoned by him in 1976.  Unusually, Vell was not, at the time of the pardon,
charged with or suspected of any crime. Wilson blamed a clerical error; the
British newspapers asserted that it was a pre-emptive pardon, and A.J. became
"Get Out Of Jail Vell", the Lord who could do no wrong.  Immunity did not grant
him invulnerabilty and he was accidentally shot in face during a Zambian game
hunt in 1979, and died of complications, leaving three teenage daughters and a
distraught wife, who followed him shortly following three year drinking binge in
full view of British high society.

In her thirties, Aurora had thrown her lot and her inheritance into Fleet
Street, becoming the serial proprietor of at least three major newspaper titles
in the British media world. Nothing good had come of it, and she had been close
to bankruptcy when a bidding war between a local tycoon and Rupert Murdoch let
her sell out with dignity in the Nineties. 

After that, she found nothing but a few stories on Tony Blair's advisors, and
some ancient near-incomprehensible insider gossip in a magazine called "Private
Eye" about her being the Trotskyite Margaret Thatcher. 

Ralina dressed and put on a press-day level of makeup. If she was done with
Shanks and Vell by nine, she could get back to Scansion!'s offices for ten.
Most of the short news cycle writers had already filed, and she could pick up
the rest of the stragglers when she got in. Bradley and his gang of coders
didn't turn up until eleven: they wouldn't miss her, and wouldn't even notice
if she didn't turn up all day.

She wondered vaguely whether she should mention this meeting with Bradley.  

No. She was the one who was owed some loyalty. She had stepped in and saved him
when Jenny the Cult's handling had left him for dead in the public eye.
After the Great Exiling, when everyone else had cut him loose, she'd been the
only employee to follow him out. 

Back then he was desperate and scared and he treated her well, and confided with
her, and respected her opinion.  But ever since he'd snagged enough funding to
actually pay her, he'd gone back his usual obliviousness. 

For most of the last year, she *was* his inner circle, but she was an inner
circle of last resort. This was heading in a direction Ralina knew full well.
You could see he was already preparing to wrap himself in an armour of abrasive
geeks and fawning grad students. He spoke to his VC jocks more than he spoke to
her. Her future here was just the side-lined head of media in just another
start-up job. And you don't choose a start-up out of pity. Or stay out of
self-pity.

The foyer of Vell's hotel seemed to be Faraday-caged to prevent cellphone or
wi-fi signals. Ralina wriggled in her armchair for ten minutes, starved of
distraction. She parried several devastating questions posed by imaginary
headhunters. She got up and waved her phone around in a shamanic signal
raindance. She picked up, and put down, the hotel's paper copy of the Chronicle
several times, each time believing it may have magically updated with news of
Scansion!'s pre-launch. Finally, the receptionist called her over and told her
to go to the Daventry Suite.

"Vell!", Aurora self-announced, sweeping in first. Shanks followed, in
cordoroys, and hands plunged into the pockets of an expensive suit jacket,
flashing an introductory grin. Behind them both came a stocky, ruddy-faced man
with a bad haircut that Aurora called Terry. He was carrying a too-tight laptop
bag like a tourist, and muttered a "hullo" and gave a funny wave. 

Ralina was expecting the traditional British stumbling niceties to continue,
but Vell was sat down and emptying her handbag onto the table before Shanks and
Ralina had even begun to echo pleasantries.

"Something marvellous is happening here, don't you think?" she announced,
hushing them into attention, "and from the most unlikeliest of sources: this,
the humble micro-chip". Futilely rooting around in her handbag for some
technological marvel, she ended up gesturing at Terry. From the look on Terry's
face, Ralina guessed she meant the CPU in his laptop, rather than Terry
himself.

"I firmly believe that the changes wrought by this silicon chip revolution will
sweep through our media and our tired, dispirited world. I fully intend to
master the shockwave of chnage and use it for good.  To which end, I need the
best and the brightest minds in the world.  And the only question I have to ask
you is..." She paused dramatically as she unclasped her Filofax and pulled out
a three-sheet map with dark lines drawn longitudinally in biro. "Exactly how
should we divide the world between us?"

Ralina's mind filled with questions.  Firstly, did anyone actually make
processors from silicon any more?  Wasn't it all gallium arsenide now? And was
it just Vell's accent that made her pronounce "silicon" exactly like
"silicone", or was it an indication that she think they were the same thing?
And if these chips were so powerful, why could Ralina still not see a cellphone
signal in this damn hotel?

Ralina looked from her phone to see Aurora glaring at her. Apparently that last
question had not been rhetorical.

"My plan, Ralina,  is to create a newspaper of the world: a local newspaper
that is global in scope. It will produce stories twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week. Its editors will be divided not by areas of expertise but by
time-zone.  I'll ask you again. What part of the world do you want to rule?"

"Well, I -"

"Answer quickly, because I will not make this offer again."

From behind Vell's steady stare, Terry gave Ralina a toothy grin and a
thumbs-up. Ralina noticed he had freckles.

It was time to back out, very slowly.

"Ms Vell, I'm honored that you should see me on such short notice, but perhaps
Jason misled you about my availability."

Terry leaned in over Vell's shoulder. "We understand your situation, Miss
Stanton, and we are willing to double your salary and compensate you for your
current options."

"... also, I really don't have that much experience in the publishing industry.
Especially in other countries. I don't even have a second language."

"Language and publishing experience are unimportant for this operation," Vell
said. "I bring experience to the table, Ralina, and solutions. Shanks is
already leading our technical team to create a web site that creates a new
visual, international language. Think of it, Ralina!  You will be like
Gutenberg. No, no! Like Gutenberg squared!" 

Shanks chuckled. "Let me write that down, Aurora. We may use that."

Ralina suddenly and very badly missed having a backchannel.

Terry leaned over and whispered something into Aurora's ear. He turned and
exchanged glances with Shanks.

Without a word, Aurora scooped her belongings back into her handbag, and rose
from the table.  "I'm afraid that my next appointment presses upon me. Shanks
will continue the rest of this interview in my stead. I'm delighted to meet
you, and look forward to working with you shortly."

Ralina held out her hand, but Vell had already turned to leave. Terry opened
the door, and whisked out behind her. She waited until seconds after the door
had clicked shut.

"I think I need to pace nervously a little."

"Go ahead."

Ralina was at the far end of the table now, near the window, and looking down
on San Francisco. The city had decided to be foggy this morning, and white was
sweeping over the hills, like streaks of soap washing the day clean. She
thought of a picture of the city taken after the Quake, with the upward smoke
from the fires vying with the cold wet winds.

An external buzz jerked like an electric shock through her. She looked down,
and saw a single bar flicker onto her phone. As she watched, the top line of
icons all appeared. Her text message count started leaping up by fours and
fives. A speakerphone beside her caught the panic and echoed a desperate
"brat-brat-brat" noise.

She turned and waved the jiggling phone at Shanks like a get-out-of-jail card.
"I need to go. It sounds like all hell has broken loose while I've been in
here."

"Well, we should arrange to meet again. I can tell you more of Miss Vell's
plan, and perhaps you can tell me a little bit more of Scansion!'s current
predicament?"

That was an odd way to phrase it. Ralina took Shanks' card, and her phone
sucked up the details. 

"Dinner tomorrow? Vell and I are only on this coast until Thursday".

"I may still be occupied," said Ralina. She watched with growing alarm her
screen. What was Bradley doing up? And why was Jason repeatedly texting her?
And was that Jenny the Cult's number? And her mother? The messages were
coming in so fast she hadn't been able to distract the smartphone show her a
single message. "Let's be tentative."

"Yes, let's", Shanks said, leaving her to her single bar.

----

Bradley's texts started just after she had entered the hotel's dead zone,
repeatedly ask her to call him back. Bradley's channels of communication were
now variously describing themselves as engaged, busy, "do not disturb", and
"it's complicated".  Jason's texts were all jokingly non-informative: "He said
you want a revolution?", "All Power to the Scansionites!"", and "All Hail
Brad". Her mother wanted to know why her Google news feed for Scansion!  had
gone crazy, which appeared to be an inherited question, but gave her a final,
obvious clue.  She clicked on CNN.

An ancient Bradley bio picture -- showing him jumping into a room full of foam
and fellow employees at Stomatix occupied one of the four main video slots.
"The King of Silicon Valley?" read the title. Her phone rang.

"Bradley, who died and made you king?"

Bradley's stutter took thirty seconds to clear. She'd never heard him even trip
over a word before.

"I-i-i need to hide."

"Who from? Where are you?"

"Press. Tartastani assassins. My p-p-p-p-people. Ralina, I fucked up."

She hadn't heard him call her by name since they were thrown out of Stomatix
paradise. He sounded so desperately sad. There was a sort of grinding noise in
the background, as though his car's gears were screwed.

"What level of fucked up?"

"There's voicemail here whose caller ID says it's from the U-u-u-united Nations
Security Council."

"Walk me through this, Bradley. Don't let me have to turn on the TV and learn
about this at an eighth of the speed of normal thought."

She thought she heard him throwing something; or something was being thrown at
him. "This is *still* fucking Jenny's fault!", he yelped, and the line went
dead.

---

Jenny the Cult had been Ralina's predecessor at Stomatix. No, that wasn't
right: chronologically, Ralina preceeded Jenny. But Jenny had somehow stormed
through the ranks, graduating from being the newest disposable grad among the
"ridiculously parallelisable" dev team, somehow running most of the republican
guard that sprang up around Bradley once the IPO had popped in 2010 and he
became a paper billionaire.

In a Valley of workacoholics with attention deficit disorder, Jenny was a
platonic ideal. "When Jenny walks into a pharmacy," said Trebor once, "their
entire stock of ritalin spontaneously combusts." People thought it was a joke
tht Jenny had two keyboards on her desk, arranged like a pipe organ, but it
wasn't an affectation. She really used them that way, using one as a big pad of
macros to operate her Unix terminal, the other to one-handedly touch type. She
was the only woman Ralina knew who would sleep in her clothes at the office,
and had that musty smell of a person that was not exactly *unhygenic*, but
would skip showers for scheduling reasons.

Her voice was easily parodied: a constant chirpy high-pitched staccato,
endlessly answering her own posed questions. When she wasn't speaking out loud,
it was as though she were merely on mute: the expressions of her internal
monologue would continue to fly across her face, eyebrows and lips arching and
jutting as she puzzled her way through another 90-mph thought.

She was promoted to Vice-President of Sales and Marketing on April 1st, 2011.
It took Ralina the whole day to convince herself it wasn't a joke. 

"Oh is it you Ralina? Yes, cool, it is. So, I've been thinking of our media and
customer relationships in the same terms as we think of the semantic triplets
that connect the objects in our object relationship store," said Jenny. "Why
don't I draw this out on the whiteboard?" 

Jenny's first-day idea  appeared to be applying the higher principles of
Stomatix's own incredibly convoluted flagship product to their own sales and
media strategies. 

That seemed a bad idea, since the most pressing problem on both the sales and
marketing fronts was that the only person who really understood their product
was Bradley. The sales team had only managed to keep them going through before
the IPO by flying Bradley over to talk to major banking IT managers themselves.
As soon as any of them tried to explain Stomatix's unique database system
themselves, it all fell apart. Now the team was in danger of losing any
comprehension of even how their own org chart worked.

At the end of the meeting, everyone desultorily took a campic of the sprawling
whiteboard, with its surnames attached to fractional weightings, and
multi-color spirographs of "mitigated relationships". When Ralina showed
Trebor, her friend from the inner hacking core of Stomatix, he literally spat
out his beer.

"She's bullshitting you, Ralina. You can't apply neural waiting to org... wait,
maybe you..." Trebor's expression froze, and his eyes glazed over for twenty
seconds, then waggled his head from side to side like a bulldog after a bath.
"Gar! This is what Bradley and she have in common. My intuition is that this
makes no sense, but there's a bit of me that suspects it might just be
brilliantly applicable."

"Is she brilliant? She just seems a nutcase to me."

"Is Bradley brilliant? Or is he a nutcase?"

"Well, at least he can hack out code. I've never seen Jenny do more than type
fast and talk fast since she got here."

"Here's the truth," said Trebor, parting his annoying little mini-dreadlocks
from across his face, and tucking them behind his ears. "I'm a fucking awesome
programmer, and I have no idea of how Bradley does what he does. That is *not*
a good thing. On the micro-level, he doesn't document, he doesn't go back and
refactor his code, he doesn't even link to other people's libraries. Anywhere
else, he'd be sacked."On the macro-level, the software model he's created is
like a hybrid of Buckminster Fuller physics force-bred with a Ludwig von Mises
economics.  Maybe even the other way around."

"And that's not a good thing, either?"

"Not in any other financial market analyst system this side of Planet Bizarro,
no. But Stomatix is in the business of creating agents that predict market
conditions, and his bots do better than everyone else at that, and his bots are
built using the whacked-out design model that Jenny is using on you."

"But how long have we been going? Eighteen months? Bradley's wins could just be
a random walk. His theories might just be a rationalisation of a bunch of lucky
hits. For the purposes of making money, it doesn't really matter long-term,
because if they don't mesh with reality, then we'll lose Bradley's billions,
and that will be that."

"Well, if we don't make sales, then the same thing will happen with Jenny."

"Oh, come on," said Trebor, emptying his glass, "Do you really think that
fucking office theory is going to have any affect on the salesteam? They never
understood Bradley - do you think they care what bullshit Jenny is spouting?
No, my worry is that *Jenny* thinks that Bradley's theories are universally
applicable. I think she's trying to start a cult of Bradley, with her as its
first member."

"What about that part of you that thinks she's right."

"That little part of everyone is what makes cults grow."