Mr Sherwood had paid for meal, and had then been picked up by a limousine. Sol and Isabelle walked back to the car in silence.

After driving for a little while, Isabelle began, "So, do you know what happened with this Columbia thing?"

"It shouldn't have been in there." replied Sol, after a short pause.

"Why not? Endangering your sources or something?"

"No!" Sol laughed shakily, "Nothing like that. We don't have any agents or informants or anything in South America; we get all of our stuff from public sources. The whole Columbia thing was a forecast."

Isabelle stamped on the brakes, and slewed the car on to the side of the road. She turned to Sol.

"Your telling me that you predicted that this guy was going to get arrested just from reading the newspapers? You can't have! I read about it; that guy had covered his tracks. Only a handful of people knew about it. It came right out of the blue."

"I know. I've not been reading the news much lately, what with the new system and all, so I didn't know that the Columbian had been arrested until Mr. Sherwood mentioned it just now. I can assure you, though, that at the time of the report, I wouldn't have even guessed at that happening."

"But you said it was a forecast. You said..."

"It was," he interrupted, "But not really one of mine. The reason it shouldn't have been in the report was that it was never intended to be published. It was the result of one of the tests of WorldPulse."

Isabelle stared at him in the dark for a few beats. A car, it's headlights on full beam, sped past, momentarily bathing their faces in cold light. Isabelle looked lost; Sol looked like he was being chased. After what seemed like hours, Isabelle turned back round in her seat, started the car, and carried on driving them back to town.

Beth had got into the habit of stopping around at Sol's desk on the way back from the kitchen with her mid-morning coffee. The morning after the dinner was no exception, but the reception she got was a little colder than usual. When she approached, Sol barely looked up.

"How's it going?" she asked. He answered with a vague-sounding monosyllable, so she decided to take a different approach.

"Whatca up to?"

"Nothing. Just checking something."

She didn't believe him; it was the way he didn't look at her when he said it. It wasn't important, so she moved on.

"Isabelle told me about the dinner last night." was thrown casually into the conversation, as if it were as innocuous as a comment about the weather. Sol stopped typing and looked straight at Beth.

"She did?"

"Yes. That guy, what was his name?"

"Sherwood"

"That's it. Anyway, he sounds a bit odd.He could've just asked her over the phone, couldn't he."

"Possibly," said Sol, guardedly studying her reactions, "Maybe he thought we'd be more inclined to help him if we met him in person."

"Maybe. Did it work?"

"How do you mean?" (Still guardedly.)

"Did you help him?"

"Well, he seemed nice enough, but we still had to give him the brush off - the NDAs and everything."

"Right."

"The test data shouldn't have been there anyway; if it gets out..." he trailed off as he noticed the way Beth was looking at him.

"She didn't tell you that bit, did she?"

Beth smiled and shook her head. "Nope."

She moved around to Sol's side of the desk, crouched next to him, and said, "So, tell me about this test data."

A look of panic crossed Sol's face. He grabbed Beth's arm and pulled her towards him.

"Not so loud!"

Beth started to say something, but stopped short when she saw the panicked look on Sol's face. He let go of her arm, and took a deep breath as she shrank back and stood up.

"No need to be so touchy about it; I was only kidding."

She turned and briskly walked off, her head down. She wasn't looking where she was going, and hence it was almost inevitable that she would bump into somebody; it turned out to be Ted.

"Hey!", then, as he saw that she was upset about something, "Are you O.K.?"

"Yes," she said, sniffing. "Sol's just being a prick."

"Right. I'm sure he didn't mean it," said Ted, as if reciting from a dimly-remembered script, "he's been under a lot of pressure lately."

"You're probably right. Thanks."

Sol watched this, then turned back to chasing up the Columbia forecast.

Generic sandwich shop had sundries like crisps and drinks arranged in racks around the doors, and a large, featureless expanse of tiled floor leading up the refrigerated cabinet and counter opposite the entrance where you ordered the main bit of your lunch; sandwiches, chiapatas, whatever. Anyway, there were no markings or barriers to suggests that the customers should behave in any way other than an outright melee. However, despite this, at around noon every day, dozens of busy, stressed people, each only thinking about their own agenda, would flock to the shop, and jostle around, Boid-like, each pursuing their own goals. Miraculously, order would spring from this chaos, and the potential scrum never failed to spontaneously organize itself into a neat, civilised queue zigging and zagging from the door to the till, leaving a little path at one side to allow people to exit.

That day, like most days, Sol put himself into this system, and never really thought about what was going on. As it happened, the human-scale Brownian motion resulted in him being directly behind Beth in the queue. He didn't realise it for a while, but when it did he felt like he had been dumped without warning into social quicksand, with no bullwhip, and no handy low-hanging branch to grab on to.

He'd already been there a while; wouldn't it look odd if he stood here and didn't say anything? Maybe she hadn't noticed him. If she hadn't, then he could get away with it. But, what if she had? Would she think he was ignoring her? On the other hand, she'd not said anything; that meant that she hadn't noticed him. Or maybe she was ignoring him. In that case, he definitely shouldn't say anything. But what if that wasn't it? Wouldn't it look odd if he stood here and didn't say anything?

Fortunately, Sol was shaken out of this unproductive cyclic reverie fairly quickly. Beth had turned around to speak to him, which moved them into a whole new and far more acute uncomfortable situation. It was like grabbing a sturdy vine that you hadn't noticed before, only to realise that it is in fact a large and poisonous snake.

"Oh, hi - didn't see you there."

That was plausible. She hadn't noticed him until now. At least that eliminated the possibility that he was being deliberately ignored. Good. Now, all that he needed to do was come up with a response. Something that would break the tension, and make it easier to deliver the apology that was hanging in the air like an axe. Better make it good.

"Hi. Um."

Beth looked at him, as if she were expecting him to continue. Given the circumstances, this wasn't unreasonable.

Pause.

It looked like the "breaking the ice" plan wasn't going to pan out successfully. Oh, well - it looked like he'd just have to go ahead and apologize straight out, without preparing the ground first. Sol bit the metaphorical bullet.

"Look, sorry I was a little curt with you earlier. It's just, I, there's something weird going on at the moment, and I'm not used to dealing with this sort of thing."

Beth looked at him stonily for a second; during that second, which seemed much, much longer, Sol couldn't breathe. Then she smiled, and Sol let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. He could tell from the smile that the danger had passed.

"Don't worry about it; I was being too nosy. I shouldn't have pushed you about it. Friends?"

"Yeah."

"Great. You can buy me lunch then."

"Don't push your luck."

It was a bitterly cold day, with the wind whipping the trees in the grounds of the hospital, when Edward was born. He was a little premature; not enough to cause the midwife real concern, but enough to scare the hell out of his parents. As a result of this, his mother always tended to be over protective, bordering on (and frequently becoming) overbearing. His father saw this, and quickly realized his son was being stifled by all of the attention. He was a quiet man, and given to acquiescing to his wife's suggestions before they became demands, but he founds ways. He would distract Edward's mother in order to give the boy a bit of time to himself, and latter, when Edward was a little older, he would conspire with his son to go off and doing some wholly unsuitable activity together. Of course, on the occasions that Edward's mother found out about these expeditions, she would smother her little boy with attention, then when he had gone to bed, berate his father for his recklessness. He, of course, took it all without a word, smiling inside; at least Edward had had some fun.

Another obsession of his mother's was illness; her baby always had whooping cough, or scarlet fever, or measles, or something else entirely. As it happened, Edward was far from sickly; he never had anything more severe than a cold throughout his entire life. His mother didn't make any friends at their local GP, where she would turn up in the waiting room on a monthly basis, dragging Edward along and scolding him if he went anywhere near the other, presumably highly infectious, children, only to be told that he was fine. At first, the doctor would prescribe something harmless, then she started suggesting some standard over-the-counter remedy, until eventually she gave up doing even that, and began telling Mrs Masters, in increasingly unsubtle terms, to go away and stop wasting her time. When Edward moved away from home, he saw the doctor when he registered, then never went again. He didn't need to; he didn't feel ill, and years of conditioning had taught him that he couldn't even play with the toys.

When Edward moved out, his mother fretted constantly (day and night - she couldn't sleep) for a fortnight. After that, she stopped. His father, watching events unfold with his usual air of silent contemplation, was slightly surprised by this, but after another week or so, decided not to worry; she was largely back to how she'd been before Edward was born, and that was fine by him. She got a bit broody when he phoned, and even more so when he visited, but that was all. Edward and his father both breathed a sigh of relief. Secretly, so did she.

Despite his father's efforts, while he was at school Edward didn't really get the chance to get properly involved in anything where he might get wet, or bruised, or have objects fly at his head. Hence, he turned to computers at an early age; these being a safe, indoor activity, with minimal chances of serious injury, there was little his mother could object to. It turned out he had an aptitude with them; by the age of 16, he knew more than a lot of professional knew in a lifetime. It seemed obvious, given this, that he should go on to study the subject at University, so was what he did.

There, however, he hit a snag. While he had a lot of talent, and he knew a hell of a lot (more than the people lecturing him) about certain very useful things, his knowledge was dotted around the place, unstructured and wild. Worse, according to his tutors, he didn't really want to improve the situation. While they were trying to rigorously teach him the fundamentals, in preparation for the more advanced stuff, he would dismiss it with a wave of his hand and go off on some highly technical, highly specific, tangent. From an academic perspective, there would be huge problems with his approach, but these were the sort of cracks you can paper over, at least in the situations that Edward had met so far. They tried to explain this to him, but he wouldn't listen. He was having a great time, making friends and enjoying the utopia of technology that the university provided, and getting barely-passable marks despite his practical ability.

He didn't have much luck with girls; he did have a girlfriend at home, but they were always paradoxically distant, and when he went back home after his first term away he found out that she was sleeping with the guy who used to beat him up a school. This sent him off on a series of doomed infatuations, none of which resulted in as much as a dinner date. After a few months, things improved a little, but he was still a fish out of water around women; he never knew what to say, and he always seemed to say or do something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect (even a few seconds latter) was obviously unbelievably stupid. He persevered, though, and by the time he graduated with a lower second (that didn't bother him, although his mum was a bit disappointed) he could hold a conversation with a woman for minutes at a time without making himself look like an idiot.

His confidence grew, and he was feeling quite good about himself, until one day at work he had a vision. More accurately a vision turned up. He fell head-over-heels in love with her in an instant, and he was straight back in the world of unattainable infatuation. His confidence was shot; there was no way he could approach her, and tell her how he felt. So, he took the route taken by men in that situation since the dawn of time. He ignored it. They became good friends, he watched as she fell for someone else, and he said nothing.

Edward died in a freak accident, but an accident that he could have avoided. He was twenty seven. His funeral was well attended; his friends and his family mixing and talking. His mother, got on well with the woman he had been in love with.