The conversation stopped. All four of them watched the screen as it reiterated, in expensive and beautifully crafted graphics, the winner that they had just seen come in. The reason that Beth, Sol, Isabelle and Ted were staring agog at the T.V. was, of course, that the horse that had crossed the line ahead of the others should not have been the winner.

Sol was the first to move; he got up off the floor and tore the cheat sheet from the side of the T.V. After he had briefly examined it, he handed it, without a word, to Beth, who read it in turn and then handed it on to the others.

"I don't understand." said Ted in disbelief. "I mean, how could this happen?"

Sol shrugged and sat down heavily in an armchair.

"I don't know."

"I thought it was infallible."

"Well, obviously, it isn't." snapped Beth irritably.

Sol sighed heavily. "I'll go through the forecast when I get in on Monday; maybe the inputs where wrong or something."

"Maybe you made a mistake; as you keep reminding us, it's not just a computer. You're part of it as well." put in Isabelle, glaring at Sol viciously.

Beth leaped to Sol's defence. "Leave him alone. It's not his fault!".

"Why not?" said Ted, "He's the one making all of the predictions."

"You weren't complaining when you were getting all the free money!"

"Money that we've just lost!"

"That wouldn't happen if I made a mistake." Sol said quietly. The others stopped shouting at each other and turned to listen to him.

"If I make a mistake, I'll not get an answer; the forecast just goes off down a blind alley and never terminates. At least, that's what's always happened before. False predictions just don't hang together; Crystal just can't produce them."

They sat there in mute contemplation for a moment, then Sol piped up again.

"How much did we lose?"

"That was the big one; we had almost a third of the pot on that race."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Well, I guess we can carry on. This just means that the predictions aren't 100%. We can still call most of the races." suggested Isabelle. She was answered by a chorus of non-committal monosyllables. "Oh, come on. Show a little enthusiasm."

"I'll be enthusiastic when we've won back that money." Ted glumly announced.

Their fortunes did not improve for the rest of the races. They lost the next one, and the one after that. The one after that matched the forecast, but it was the favourite, so the odds weren't high, and consequently they only had a token amount riding on it. By the time the winner of the last race, not the one they had predicted, was announced, they were utterly dispirited. Nobody said much as they collected their coats and dispersed.

"At least your off the hook." Beth suggested as she and Sol walked home (they shared the first part of the route).

"Why?" Exoneration had been the last thing on Sol's mind.

"Well, I can just about believe you made one typo - although, like you said, this isn't the sort of thing that happens when you do - but half a dozen? All in the same forecast?"

"I might have been having a really, really bad day." he suggested mirthlessly.

"Seriously, I don't think anyone can blame you, given what's happened. It must be a fault with the system somewhere. Hang on," she stopped and turned to him, "Didn't you take a load of sources out of Crystal a week and a bit ago? Could it be that?"

"I thought of that," said Sol, "But it doesn't seem likely. I mean, I ran a load of tests when we took them out, and everything seemed to be working fine. I mean, last week's predictions were spot on. Pity we didn't bet more on them really. We could've used the winnings"

"We'd have only lost those too."

"I suppose. Anyway, I don't think it's the sources that have caused the problem. It's something else, something that's changed."

They walked on in silence for a couple of minute, then reached the bottom of Sol's road.

"Well, I'm going to go and watch some crappy Saturday evening television, take my mind off things. I guess I'll see you Monday."

"'Kay. See you Monday."

They struck off in their separate directions, heads bowed.

For no reason that anyone could fathom, international companies had suddenly started to up and leave. Maybe it was like an avalanche; one company got jittery, and moved it's operations elsewhere, and then the others saw it, and this in turn made them jittery, and so on, until foreign dollars were flooding out of the region like oil spilling from a stricken tanker.

Whatever the cause, the effects were catastrophic. Since independence, when the internationals had started to move in, the country had become steadily wealthier. Say what you like about globalization, it did have it's up side. Sure, the kids were all wearing Levi's and drinking Coke by the gallon, but fewer people were starving, fewer people froze to death during the winter, and everyone was, in general, healthier and happier. The internationals provided people with jobs, and soon these people even had a little of something they'd never really encountered before - a disposable income, which they naturally spent on aspirationally promoted western products. This, of course, was the point. The western companies got cheap labour and new markets, the locals got money, healthcare and Nike. Everybody wins, apart from the occasional curmudgeon claiming that the international influx was an even greater threat to their traditional culture and way of life than the Soviet tanks had been. Still, you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Everything came crashing down around their ears, though, when the internationals started to leave. The first announcement came in the spring; many more followed in the next couple of weeks. Of course, few people lost their jobs immediately - they would be employed for a few more months, to finish orders of washing machines and t-shirt, and make sure the factories were closed down tidily. For a few weeks, everyone wandered around in a kind of daze, stunned by the sudden withdrawal of the thing they had staked their lives on. Nobody knew quite how to react.

Soon, though, people began to look for a target, something to lash out at, something to blame for the sudden and catastrophic collapse of their young prosperity. The internationals were too nebulous to make a good target; they were vague, formless entities that seemed to be from another world. In any case, jobs were getting hard to come by, and anyone who had one, even if they only had it for a few more months, didn't want to jeopardize it by rocking the boat. The curmudgeons, many of whom could barely keep themselves from sporting "I told you so" smirks as they strode around their villages, were tempting, but it was obvious to everyone that they weren't the problem. Most people grudgingly conceded that they might have had a point, after all.

That left the government. They had come to power when the Soviets withdrew, and the leadership was still made up of the dock workers and steel workers that had lead the revolution. These men of the people had kept their enormous popularity, and it was inconceivable that they would be removed by a democratic election any time soon. In recent years, however, a new class of individual had been working their way up the hierarchy of government. These professional politicians had far more aptitude for the day to day workings of state than the dockers and steel workers, and far more ambition. The old guard, the revolutionaries, often expressed a certain weariness with office, and the new breed of politician would be only too happy to take their place.

Such politicians were viewed with deep suspicion by the people at large. While they were, to the man, capitalists and free marketeers through and through, they were too reminiscent of the old, Communist rulers for comfort. Hence, when the people choose to direct their anger and frustration at the government, they became a convenient and emotive target. There was a mood of tension in the air that spring, and everyone whispered that Bravikstahn was heading for another revolution.

It was friday lunchtime, and as per usual the majority of the Jupiter staff were in the pub. Ted and Sol had volunteered to go to the bar to get the drinks and order the food. Ted looked quickly about, to check that no-one was within earshot, and then quietly asked, "Have you done the sheet for tomorrow?"

"Mm-hm." Sol was still a bit subdued after last weeks failure.

"Any luck tracking down the problem?"

"Not yet," This was the main reason Sol wasn't his usual happy self; he had spent a frustrating four days trying to find the cause of the bogus predictions, but had so far come up with nothing. "I've found one thing for sure, though. It's nothing to do with the bogus sources."

"Oh? How're you sure?"

"I wound Crystal back to the state it was in last Friday, when I'd done the forecasts, then reinserted the sources and tried again. The results were practically the same. It's got to be something else."

"What, though? Nothing's changed."

"I know. I'm going to go into the office at the weekend and have another go at it."

Sure enough, after watching the racing on Saturday (they only predicted half of the winners; they'd changed their betting pattern, though, and managed to make a little profit), Sol did not head home but instead drove to the Jupiter offices. He worked through until the early hours, when the screen began to swim in front of his eyes and he could no longer focus on the letters. He drove home - fortunately, at that time, there was no-one about on the roads - and then returned to the office at about noon on Sunday.

He tried everything he could think of, leaving his desk occasionally to pace around nervously, thinking, or to go and get titbits of junk food from the nearby village shop. The problem with Crystal still made no sense. At about half past nine, when his stomach had begun to ache (he had not had a real meal for a day and a half) and his eyes had started to tear up, inspiration struck. At first, he dismissed his idea as fancy, but his mind kept drifting back to it, and the more he thought about it the more sense it made.

He took a break, and made himself a strong, black coffee to wake himself up again, then returned to the computer to implement his idea. It turned out to be fairly simple; he had it working in a little under an hour. He tested it on the racing from last week. As he watched the forecast take shape, he breathed a long sigh of relief. Crystal predicted all of the races successfully.

He tried it on various other things, until he got up to the previous days racing. The forecasts were flawless.

He considered calling Ted to let him know, but then he realized that it was almost midnight. In any case, he wanted to run a couple of live tests to be sure, tests that weren't just predicted events that already happened.

Tomorrow was Monday, and off the top of his head Sol couldn't think of any sporting events that would make good candidates. On a whim, he decided to try and predict what would happen in this very office tomorrow - with the modifications he'd made, Crystal should be more than up to that. He tapped in the initial query, and started selecting and refining as he had done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.

As it became clear where the forecast was heading, he started to worry, and his typing became more frantic and desperate. As the final answer appeared, Sol just stared at the screen in shock, the blood draining from his face.