After they had sat in the dim church, uncomfortable on the rigid pews, and listened to the service (Ted had, it seemed, been a fine man, who touched the life of everyone he met), after they had stood silently, heads bowed, in the wind and the rain, watching Ted's body being lowered into the ground, after they had filed somberly back to their cars, they converged on a nearby hotel for a buffet lunch. Everyone sat around, eating polite little sandwiches and drinking stewed tea.

Beth, Sol and Isabelle sat at the edge of the group of work friends. The rest of the Jupiter lot seemed to be giving them something of a wide berth, as people who were actually Ted's friends, as opposed to those who merely worked with him. That's not strictly fair; most of them were his friends, it's just that some friends are closer than others. In any case, they didn't mind, particularly. None of them were really in the mood for talking all that much.

Isabelle went up to get another cup of tea. As she waited patiently in line, a short woman in a simple black dress and a hat with a veil came up to her and touched her one the elbow. She turned around; it was Ted's mother.

"Oh, hello, Mrs. Masters." Isabelle said. She was unsure of how to continue, so she left it at that.

"Hello, erm, Isabelle, wasn't it?" Isabelle nodded, "You were a good friend of my sons?"

"Yes." she said, without hesitation. "I've been missing him."

Mrs. Masters nodded. "I hear you were with him when he died."

Sol and Beth watched from their table. Isabelle chatted with Ted's mother as they waited in line, then as they got their drinks, then as they walked back to another table.

"Do you think we should rescue her?" asked Sol.

"I think she'll cope." said Beth, without elaborating. Now that Sol looked again, he was inclined to agree. Judging by her expression, and the way she was moving, she wasn't uncomfortable or awkward. She was just having a conversation. He hadn't seen Isabelle open up this much since the accident.

"You're right. She looks like she'll be fine." He turned to Beth, "Will you? You've haven't said much about all of this."

Beth smiled. "I'm coping. You don't need to worry. It's still all a bit overwhelming, especially with," lowered voice, "you know...," normal voice again, "But I'll be fine."

After she got back from the funeral, Isabelle kicked off her uncomfortable black shoes and sat down heavily on the bed. It was only five o'clock, but the only thing she felt like doing was curling up in bed an going to sleep. Talking to Ted's mother had helped, but she was still numb with shock and a weird, emotional disbelief. She wondered how long this was going to last; she hoped that it wouldn't be forever.

She sighed, got up, and dumped the contents of her little bag on the dresser. Along with an assortment of tissues, her purse, and emergency make-up was her phone. She realized she'd not switched it back on after the service, so, more by habit than for any rational reason, she switched it on now, then put it down and started to take off her suit.

As she was hanging up her jacket, the phone beeped a terse snatch of Morse code at her. She closed the wardrobe (again, more out of habit than for any reason) and went over to see what the message was. Turned out someone had tried to call and, when they failed to get through, left her a voicemail. She considered ignoring it, but then habit kicked in, and she dialed the voicemail number. After all, it might be important.

As it happened, there were two messages. The first was from her mother, asking why she hadn't called, and wanting to know what was wrong. Isabelle had called her a week ago, a little before the accident, but didn't have the energy to return the call right now. The second was a little more unusual. It was from Mr Sherwood, asking if she and Sol would meet him again (this time, he suggested drinks in a hotel bar). Isabelle hung up as the recorded voice told her that she had no more messages, wondering what Sherwood wanted. She decided that, again, she didn't have the energy to phone him back now. He said ring at any time - she'd call him tomorrow.

She tossed the phone back onto the dresser, and carried on getting undressed. She thought a long, hot shower might make her feel a bit bitter, but it didn't. She sat around in her big, fluffy dressing gown for a little while, then dried her hair and had a very early night.

Monday was the day that everything was meant to get back to normal. Prior to this, they had just been setting up test runs and making sure everything tied together, but today they had to start putting information back into the WorldPulse system again. (The static reports, which still made up a fair amount of the business, had been put on hold indefinitely. When WorldPulse was working again, they could be brought up to speed in a day or two.)

Naturally, the day was fairly hectic for everyone. Isabelle, and the rest of the marketing team, had been frantically preparing press released and information packs, and today they started to call around clients, apologizing profusely for the confusion and patching relationships up. Isabelle volunteered to handle Mr Sherwood, largely because she had already called him on Sunday to arrange a meeting. When she'd got on top of the rest of her paperwork, she'd try and find a moment to mention this to Sol.

Beth was occupied with the web interface to WorldPulse; the teams in India and Canada had managed to maintain it, but the designers of the system - Zach and herself - still knew more about it, and they'd been patching holes and fixing leaks for a while. There was still a little of this to do, but it was more important to keep at least one eye on the running system. In theory, it should be fine, but it had been made clear that this would be a very, very embarrassing time for it to fail.

Sol was back doing active analyses, and entering them into the live WorldPulse system. He was a little rusty, as he hadn't done them for a bit. In fact, now that he thought about it, the last one he had done had been the one that had foreseen Ted's death. This thought made him freeze at his keyboard for a moment, but he pressed on, and soon he was lost in his work, producing forecasts (not the hyper-accurate Crystal ones, merely the extremely useful and insightful ones that Jupiter's customers relied on to do business) and shipping them off in clumps down the production line.

The three of them met briefly at lunch. They no longer had a Generic Sandwich Shop sitting on stilts outside the front door (there was a likely looking building, but it was currently unoccupied), but Jupiter had had the forethought to arrange for Generic sandwiches to be delivered. The new office even had a real break room, with easy chair and low tables, so they didn't have to co-opt a meeting room for the purpose.

"How's it going?"

"Busy. You?"

"The same. I'll be glad when we've got today over. Hopefully we'll get back to normal."

"Yep. I'm run off my feet as well. I guess it can't last for all that long."

As they filed out of the door, throwing their paper bags and cardboard boxes into the bin as they went, Isabelle caught Sol on the shoulder. "What're you doing later this week?"

Beth looked back, then carried on to her desk. After a little discussion, Sol confirmed that he would be happy to accompany Isabelle again, and they both returned to their desks at opposite ends of the office. The more he thought about it, though, the less convinced he was that it was a good idea. It seemed to Sol that they were treading a very fine line. Still, last time they met, Sherwood had seemed to understand the precarious position that they were in, and hadn't pushed for more information than they could give him. It couldn't do any harm.

Sol got back to his desk, and got back to work. He did a couple of more forecasts, but something seemed to be wrong. He couldn't put his finger on what, so he stopped, got a cup of coffee, and sat down to go through the forecasts one by one. He started with the one's he'd just done, then went back to the ones he'd done this morning. He couldn't find anything amiss, and he was on the point of giving up, but something made him look again.

Eventually, it occurred to him to look at the sources. Sure enough, something was up with a small number of them, as it had been on previous occasions. This time, Sol was determined to try and work out what was going on.

He looked at each of them in turn, then tried to find a connection between them, but he couldn't see any. Dead ends and ideas that went nowhere took up too much of his time; eventually, he had to give up and go back to filing WorldPulse forecasts. This distracted him for the rest of the day, but he was determined to sort it out, so he stayed on after hours to work on it.

As Beth was leaving, she came over to his desk and stood behind his monitor. "Still at it?" she asked, "They don't pay you enough."

"Mm-hm. You know we mentioned the problem with the duff sources." He looked around. Nobody else was in earshot. "The ones on the Crystal shit list."

"Yeah."

"They've turned up again. I'm determined to find out why it keeps happening."

Beth moved around to Sol's side of the desk, and put down her bag and coat. She rolled up on of the chairs next to Sol's, and started to read the various bits and pieces on his monitor. "Show me."

Sol looked at her searchingly for a second, then with an air of decision launched into an explanation of the problem. Beth listened, and asking the occasional question. Soon, her questions were less to do with how things worked, and more to do with possible solutions. They bounced ideas off each other for an hour, but didn't make any progress.

Beth stood up and stretched. "I'm gonna get a coffee. Want one?"

"Mm-hm." Sol replied, not taking his eyes off the screen. Beth took his answer to be an affirmative, and walked off towards the kitchen. As she left, Sol tried one more thing, then slid the keyboard across the desk in frustration and sat down heavily in his chair to stare moodily at the collection of windows that should be giving him the answer.

Beth was making the coffee when she heard Sol come up behind her.

"I've had a thought," he announced, "Is Crystal working again?"

"Not as such, but we could get it going fairly easily. Why?" she looked at him for a second, then "Oh! You're going to use it to try and predict the answer!" She grinned broadly for a second, then her face fell into a look of slight confusion. "Will that work? I mean, can it do that?"

"It's not really a straight prediction, but yes, I think I can write it."

"Won't it have a problem predicting what WorldPulse is doing? Isn't that too complex?"

"It used to have a problem, but not any more. I gave it the ability to do reflexive forecasts, so it can factor it's own actions into the forecasts. That's why it started to give duff results on the horse racing."

"I don't follow." said Beth. The change of direction had taken her by surprise, and she was still trying to get her footing.

"By that time, we were placing fairly large bets on outsiders. We did it in such a way that any one bookie wouldn't notice, but it was still affected things in subtle ways,..."

"And that's exactly what holistic analysis deals with." finished off Beth. She was beginning to see where this was heading.

"Precisely. However, the old Crystal, and indeed the normal WorldPulse software, has a blind spot when it comes to self-examination. It just doesn't consider the effects it's own predictions have. In this case, that effect was to make us place very unusual bets, which in turn indirectly influenced the winners. Hence, as Crystal didn't consider the effects of the prediction, it got the winners wrong. Once I'd figured out that this was what the problem was, I added the ability for Crystal to factor itself into the forecasts, and it suddenly got more accurate."

"Right," said Beth, drinking her coffee and trying to figure out what all of this meant. Something occurred to her. "But aren't you in danger of getting into a loop, where predicting something one way causes it to happen another, so the system predicts it the other way, and then because of that it actually happens in some other way, and so on, forever?"

"Yes. That's why it wasn't done in the original system; we wanted to avoid that happening. It turns out that there are still certain circumstances in which it can happen, but we just make sure that those never happen."

"How?"

"Basically, there's a check in the interface; it looks for dangerous values, ones that would cause a divergent cascade,"

"Divergent cascade?"

"That's what we call it when the system would keep modifying the prediction forever."

"O.K.; I guess that make sense."

"Anyway, values that would cause a divergent cascade are screen in the interface, and never get through to the software proper."

"What if they did?"

Sol shrugged. "Well, the system would go haywire. It would use up an increasing amount of memory, and make more and more candidate predictions, until we stopped it. Of course, the system only has a finite amount of resources, so what would actually happen would be that the spurious predictions would take up more and more of them, leaving less and less room for real predictions. So, we wouldn't necessarily spot it immediately."

"Why doesn't that happen for the new stuff, for Crystal?"

"Data screening, again. We just make sure it doesn't see anything that might alarm it. There's a far greater risk of a cascade when you have reflexive forecasts, but as long as you know about it you're fairly safe. There's always another way to approach the forecast so that it doesn't create a cascade."

"Always?" Beth sounded skeptical, and with good reason. The mathematician in her was deeply suspicious of that statement, which sounded awfully like the halting problem in disguise.

"As far as we know." Sol confirmed confidently.

"Hmmm." Beth hadn't been convinced.

"Anyway, could we get it working tonight, do you think?"

"Sure, as long as you don't mind putting in a couple of extra hours."

Sol smiled. "I think I can handle that, if I've got you to keep me company."

They both needed computers to work at, and their desks weren't within comfortable shouting range, so they decided to grab two company laptops ("It's O.K.; you only need to sign the book if you're taking them out of the office." Beth reassured Sol) and set up in the break room, which was in any case more comfortable. The sun was already setting by the time they started. Soon, the outside world was pitch black, save for the lights of the cars and lorries careening back and forth on the road, at far more than seventy miles an hour.

They worked into the night, mostly silently tapping away at the laptops on their knees, or muttering to themselves. Occasionally, one would ask the other a question about some specific, or they would need to stop and synchronize with each other in order to run a test or try something out. At about nine, they both, simultaneously, noticed that they were hungry, and went out to buy snacks from the village shop. They returned, and ate while they worked.

Eventually, a few minutes after ten o'clock, Beth announced that she thought everything was done. Sol looked at his own screen for a second, then agreed that they hadn't missed anything. Beth took a deep breath, and issued the command to start up the system. There was an agonizing pause, then the terse, single line of text appeared, indicating that everything was working fine.

As Beth let out her breath in a long sigh, Sol fired up the interface. He tried a couple of operations, then nodded, satisfied.

"Looks like everything is fine." he confirmed.

"That's a relief. If it'd failed after all that, I'd have had to throttle somebody."

"I'm glad it didn't then," chuckled Sol, "I'm the only one here."

They both laughed, then looked at each other in the dim light of the break room (they'd put on a couple of desk lamps - the overheads seemed too harsh). For a moment, everything was absolutely quiet, and absolutely still. Sol shook his head, and looked back at his laptop, typing a handful of characters at random, and deleting them.

"Um, do you think we should test it?"

"How?" Beth was still watching Sol's face.

"Well, there's only on real way to test it properly, and that's to generate a prediction."

"Right. So," At that moment, Sol looked up and caught Beth's gaze again. "What do you want to predict?"

Sol was momentarily lost for words. This time, he was confused by the sudden change in direction. In fact, he wasn't entirely sure what direction they were going in. He decided that the safest way was to forge ahead in the same way that he'd been going anyway, and hope for the best.

"Um," he said, "How about, er, horse racing?"

Beth smiled, and then suggested football instead. They threw ideas back and forth, until eventually, they decided to pick some random, obscure and insane event from EuroSport. Both of them new that it wouldn't make a particularly good test - horse racing would have been easier to compare to what had gone before - but they were reasonably confident that the system was O.K., and so were happy to have a little fun with it.

"How about Equestrianism?" suggested Sol, leafing through the T.V. section of the newspaper.

"What is it with you and horses?"

"Well, there isn't much else... Football, Rally, Sailing...."

"How about Sailing? That's about as far away from horse racing as it's possible to get."

"They have stages that go on for days; I don't even know if there'd be a winner tomorrow."

"If only there were some way you could predict the future, you could find out." said Beth, with a wicked grin. Sol threw the paper at her, and hunted around for the previous day's Review.

"Ah, here's an idea," he declared, "Weight Lifting."

"Weight Lifting? Isn't that just a load of sweaty men rubbing oil on each other? How do you bet on that?"

"Apparently, it's a proper sport. Look," he proffered the paper, "there it is."

Beth leaned forwards and squinted at the page. "Dear lord, it's on twice. Well," she sat back, "that settles it for me. Weight Lifting it is. Want to put any money on?"

Sol shook his head somberly. "Probably not."

"Why?" asked Beth, momentarily taking things seriously, "You think it might not work?"

Sol's face cracked into a grin. "No. I just don't want to go into a bookies and put a bet on professional Weight Lifting."