"What's that?" asked Beth, peering over Sol's shoulder as she handed him his coffee (they had decided to take turns; she would make the coffee one week, he the next).

"Screen saver," said Sol. He was sat back in his chair, leafing through a sheaf of printouts, stapled at one corner.

"I can see that. What's it doing?"

He put the printouts down and swiveled in his chair to face her.

"Langton's Ant."

"What? Whose Langton, and what's his ant doing to your screen?"

Sol laughed. "I have absolutely no idea who Langton was. Or is, maybe. A mathematician, I guess. Anyway, his ant is, well, it's sort of a thought experiment. Imagine an ant."

Beth sat on the edge of the desk and smiled. "O.K.," she nodded, then took a sip of her tea.

"Right. Now imagine that the ant is standing on an infinite black and white tiled floor. And the ant has two pots of paint, one white and one black."

"Why?"

"It just does. Anyway, what the ant does, is it looks at the tile it's standing on. If it's black, the ant paints it white, and turns left. If it's black it, paints it white, then turns right. When it's done that, it moves one square forwards, and then starts again."

Beth looked at him expectantly. When he didn't say anything more, she said, "Is that it?"

"Yes."

"So what's the point?"

By way of answer, Sol waved his hand at the screen, which was strewn with small black and white squares, and a dot that was skating about, changing things as it went. Beth leaned forward and peered at it.

"It's just random." she concluded.

"No, it's not, and that's the point. It looks fairly random, but it's actually completely deterministic. For any particular starting pattern, the ant always produces the same changes; it's doing everything according to the rules, it can't do anything else."

"So it's predictable then."

"Not really; you see, the only way to work out where the ant will be after a specific number of steps is to do those steps. There's no shortcut."

"What's it doing now?" Beth interjected; the ant had started to make slow but determined progress in one specific direction, diagonally out towards the edge of the screen.

"Oh, it does that. Eventually, no matter what the starting grid is, it'll get itself into a state where it strikes out in one direction like that; it'd do the same hundred or so moves forever, if we let it carry on."

When the ant got to the edge of the screen, everything blanked out, and the simulation started again, this time in red and black, with a different pattern of squares in the centre of the screen. After a second, it started to mutate. Beth watched it change.

"And all this comes from that ant? Oh, hang on!" she exclaimed, "I think I get it - the complexity doesn't come from the ant at all, it comes from the terrain it's moving across. Right?"

"Different ant, I'm afraid. Even if you start with a completely featureless terrain - all white tiles, or all black, it'll still do something as complex as if you give it a black and white Mona Lisa."

"So where does the complexity come from, then?"

Sol shrugged. "Beats me. I only work here."

The anomalous sources had been kept out of Crystal for almost a week now, and it was still making startlingly accurate predictions about whatever they decided to throw at it. Sol still had his reservations, but he finally gave in to Ted's constant badgering and worked out a forecast for the Saturday racing. In exchange, Ted agreed to limit the stakes to something small; twenty pounds a race, or there abouts.

"Split two ways, of course."

"Four ways," Sol reminded him, nodding at Isabelle and Beth, who were chatting over their Friday afternoon coffee, "They're in on it as well, remember."

"O.K., four ways, then. As long as they chip in to the stake."

Ted was reticent to dilute the winnings, but he grudgingly admitted that he didn't have much more of a claim on the system than they did; it was Sol who had made the discovery, and it was Sol who knew how to work the damn thing. In any case, it wasn't as if there was a shortage. When they were sure that things were working as they should, they could start betting serious money, and all four of them would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Hence, being magnanimous didn't really cost him all that much.

As usual, Ted collected the money and phoned the bookie, and this time invited the others around to his flat to watch the results come in. Normally, all of them would have zoomed past Channel Four on their way from Saturday Kitchen to Popular, but today they sat watching it for hours, drinking weak Belgian beer from fun size bottles and talking about nothing in particular.

Ted had printed the forecast out in large type (late at night, so nobody saw it come off the printer), and taped it to the edge of the T.V. Whenever a winner was announced, there would be a moment of silence as everyone squinted at the printed list, then they would cheer and clink bottles together. Race by race, it became evident that the prediction was good, and they became less and less preoccupied with checking it. As the last race came home, they had comfortably increased their money eight- or nine-fold, and went their separate ways with a quiet, almost indefinable, sense of victory.

Saturday racing became a regular fixture; they took a little out of the winnings each time for pocket money, but most of it was fed back into the pot for further stakes. They were amassing a sizable amount, and started to use different bookmakers at different times, so that none of them saw the entire winning streak and got suspicious. Sol even suggested that they start using some of the money to place bets on horses they knew were going to lose, just to throw anyone watching them off the scent, but the others derided this idea as paranoid in the extreme, so he let it drop.

During this time, Professor Maxwell's staff at Minerva were drawing together the information need to fulfill their client's latest request. In particular, they needed to work out which information sources to tweak to get the desired result. After a few weeks of analysis, they presented Maxwell with a list. He read it, nodding sagely, and then told them to continue as planned.

Sol and Ted noticed that some of the anomalous WorldPulse sources had returned to normal, and others had started behaving strangely. After a brief discussion with Beth and Isabelle, everyone agreed that the best thing to do would be to update Crystal's shit list, but leave the main system alone until they'd figured out what was causing the problem. Sol resolved to find this out as soon as humanly possible.

Mr. Sherwood had an increasing amount of confidence in the WorldPulse system. It had lived up to, and indeed exceeded, all of his expectations, and breezed through every demand he placed on it. He was becoming far more relaxed about the information it provided, and diverted resources that he might have used checking up on it to other, more productive, ends. It had proved it's usefulness, and it continued to do so on a daily basis.

Hence, when WolrdPulse suggested that a particular former Soviet republic was heading for a period of economic and political turmoil, he began, without hesitation, to make arrangements for his various companies with interests in the area to move their operations elsewhere. He didn't bother to check to see what the other WorldPulse clients would do with the news. If he had, he might have been surprised at the number of them who had operations in and around that particular small, barely significant, state.

The daughter of James and Catherine Shelby was born on a bright, clear day in the middle of spring. She was a grew into a quiet child with thick, curly brown hair, and intense dark eyes, who always had the appeared to be thinking very hard about something. When she was three and a half, her baby bother was born. At first, she was excited about this, and fussed around him endlessly. Soon, however, she began to notice that everyone was paying less and less attention to her. She went to her room (which she now, of course, shared with her little brother), and thought very hard about what to do about the situation.

Her first attempt was, predictably, to cause trouble. She started to break things, to throw tantrums at the slightest provocation, and to disobey here parents when they told her to eat of or get ready for bed. This plan backfired spectacularly; they only seemed to pay attention to her when they wanted to tell her off, and still lavished their affections on her brother. Soon, she gave up on this strategy, went back to her (their) room, and thought about the problem some more.

She decided that she simply wasn't interesting enough. She was sure that if she made herself more interesting, she would get more attention, so that is precisely what she tried to do. She started asking about things, helping around the house, talking to people. This sudden sea change in her behaviour confused her parents no end - they considered taking her to a child psychologist, until his mother pointed out that the psychologist would either say she was fine, or fix her back the way she was, in which case she'd start breaking things again.

Hence, the quiet child with curly hair became something of an extrovert. This helped her make friends when she started school, and as she progressed through the years she became the centre of an ever-growing circle. Sometimes, this bothered her - some of the other members of her particular clique could be, to be frank, real bitches when it came to people outside their own social circle. By the end of her A-Levels, this was driving her nuts, so she made a conscious decision not to replicate the situation when she moved away to university. To some extent, she achieved this, but she was always tagged as one of the Beautiful People (it didn't help that, in fact, she had grown into quite a beautiful young woman).

After university, she went on to spend a short time in a string of jobs, and made friends at each. A select few of these she kept in touch with throughout the rest of her life. She had a string of relationships that were far from unpleasant, but were never anything special and petered out sooner or latter. Maybe her standards were set too high. It didn't really bother her; she'd rather settle for no-one than settle for someone. She lived in a succession of spacious, airy, one bedroom flats, content on her own.

Eventually, she bought a little house in the country. She got on well with the neighbours, and although their children irritated her she had the composure not to show it. She tended her small garden, called her diminishing numbers of friends, and was happy. As she got older, she spent more and more time sat in a big, worn, wicker chair in her front room, alternately reading and looking out of the window, over the hills.

At the ripe old age of eighty-five, she died in her sleep. As she was dozing in her chair by the window, an articulated lorry, taking a short cut, it's driver wired on Pro-Plus, careened off the road and ploughed into the front of the house, killing her in an instant. This was, when you think about it, an astonishing coincidence.