Sol put Beth's coffee down on her desk, and wheeled up a spare chair up next to her. He'd been making her coffee for a week; she called it his penance. The week was up, though; that was the last cup. Next week she'd have to make her own coffee.

"Thanks" she said, cupping the cup in her hands, "What would I have to do for you to do this all the time?"

"I'll tell you what; I'll carry on doing it, you can owe me."

"Sounds like a bit of a risk. O.K., why not?"

"You going to the pub for lunch?"

"'Fraid not. I've got to try and get this finished up and published before tonight."

"Something important?"

"So I've been told; can't see it myself. It's new layout for the dynamic reports. I guess they've got their reasons."

"Guess so."

"So what are you up to at the moment? You've been staying late."

Sol was surprised that she'd noticed, and said so.

"Why? It's not a secret, is it?"

Sol said nothing.

"I see. How about you make me coffee for another week, and I'll not pester you about it."

Sol thought about this for a little while. "Sounds fair to me."

They wandered onto other subjects, until eventually Beth had to tell Sol to go, as she had to finish the layouts.

"Have you got a minute?"

Ted's morning had gone well, so he had. It was Sol who had requested the time; he was holding half a dozen single-page printouts.

"What is it? Not more tests, is it? I thought WorldPulse was working fine."

"It is," Sol replied, "better than fine. I just want to run a couple of tests, and I was wondering if you could set up a dummy installation so I don't foul up the live version by accident."

"Sure thing," said Ted, "We couldn't have test data released into the wild by accident, could we?" Sol had told him about half of the problem; he knew that some test data had been inadvertently been included in a report, but he didn't know the details.

After lunch, Ted came over to Sol's desk.

"I was doing some performance profiles on those test you're running, and they're giving some very odd results. What the hell are they?"

Sol looked up from his monitor, and shrugged, "Just some ordinary forecasts; I'm trying to fine-tune things."

"Oh, come on. They're nothing like normal forecasts. What's going on?"

Sol looked at Ted for a minute, then shook his head.

"I'm probably going to regret this, but O.K. Just promise that you keep it to yourself."

"This is starting to sounds interesting. Tell me more."

To give Ted a bit of context, Sol related the whole story of the extraordinary Columbia forecast, the uncannily specific prediction that had come true. He then went on to explain what he was doing at the moment; testing to see if they could do it consistently. He'd assembled a larger-than-normal corpus of information, and had set up the tests to do as much automatic cross-referencing as they could, just like they'd been doing on the original test. Once he'd done that, he just had to find something that presented a simple question he could try and answer, but where the results where unpredictable using conventional machines.

"Horse races?" asked Ted, open-mouthed.

"Uh-huh."

"You think you've found a way to predict the future, and you're using it to call horse races?"

"Only as a test. It's ideal; the result depend on a massive array of factors - form, weather, psychology, dozens of other things - and you can't predict the outcome ahead of time. At least, you can't by conventional means."

It sounded insane, but Ted had to agree that it made a certain kind of twisted sense. He nodded.

"So," he asked after a while, "How much have you put on?"

"What?"

"How much have you bet on the outcome?"

"I haven't. It's only a test."

"Yeah, but where's the harm in making a little bit of money on the side?"

Sol just looked at him.

"You can seed the system, right?"

"That is correct, yes."

"So, the predictions could be manipulated to give a particular answer?"

"Within certain parameters. We can't manipulate the predictions directly, of course, and it's impossible to determine what the answer will be ahead of time. However, I'm confident that we can manipulate the inputs in such a way that we can constrain the system to only give answers within a certain range,"

"Excellent."

"There is one potential problem, however."

"Oh. And that is?"

"Someone sufficiently knowledgeable may be able to determine that the system has been manipulated. It would not be easy, but an expert may be able to detect that something was amiss."

"That's not acceptable."

"If I may be more specific, they would not be able to determine the range of outputs that the manipulation was designed to achieve, only that manipulation of the input had occurred. Also, if we took sufficient care, then it would be exceedingly difficult for them to determine which inputs had been manipulated. A final point is, of course, that experts in our field are not unacquainted with coincidence. Any manipulation may be put down to mere coincidence. Do these facts make the proposal any more acceptable?"

"A little, but I'm still not happy. How many people would be, how did you put it, sufficiently knowledgeable?"

"A couple of dozen. Thirty at the most."

"Can you make me a list?"

Ted had set up a live audio stream on his workstation to listen to the midweek racing results. He and Sol were sat, leaning forwards, listening intently. Sol was clutching a printout, and Ted a betting slip. Both leaned even further forward as the horses reached the final furlong.

There was a breathless couple of seconds, then the race was won by a relative unknown, "Strange Attractor" (Sol had laughed himself silly when the name turned up in the forecast, then when he had calmed down he had to explain the joke to Ted, who was the only other person in the office at the time.)

"Yes!" cried Ted, leaping up and punching the air, before self-consciously sitting down again. He leaned towards Sol, who was sat stock still, sporting an expression more suited to a rabbit caught in headlights, and whispered conspiratorially.

"That was fantastic! You know what this means, right? We can clean up!" He got up and grabbed his coat. "I'm going to collect our winnings."

Sol just sat there as he walked away. After a minute or two, he just said, "We can do it again. We can do it again."

"Why so generous?" Isabelle asked.

"I'm always this generous." replied Ted.

"No you're bloody well not," said Beth, emphatically. "The last time you bought a round was when you lost your shirt at poker."

"Well, I've had a bit of luck."

"Go on..."

Ted looked at Sol, and said nothing.

"Oh, I see," said Beth, looking annoyed, "it's part of the conspiracy. You two aren't having an affair, are you?"

Sol looked at her for a long while. "O.K. We'll let you in on it. Not here though." he waved his hand, a gesture that encompassed the usual mass of pub-lunching Jupiter employees.

"What are you doing tonight?"

"Nothing I can't cancel."

"We can go for a drink after work, then, and all will be revealed."

"Can't wait." said Beth.

Isabelle and Ted both had to leave early to meet friends (different groups). Sol and Beth were getting hungry, and didn't fancy pub food twice in one day, so they decided to go for pizza.

The particular pizza restaurant that Beth lead them to wasn't your usual fast food delivery place with a couple of tables added as an afterthought. This was a far more classy affair. The first thing Sol noticed was the entrance; it was flanked by two huge mock-classical pillars. There was a double door of featureless glass - the designer had obviously thought that a handle would sully the pure line or something - which led into a waiting area filled with low sofas. A perky, blonde waitress with a perky, blonde pony tail gave them a perky, blonde smile, and showed them to one of these, and took an order for drinks. As he sat down, Sol noticed something else that marked this out as distinct from Domino's or Pizza Hut - a baby grand piano. It wasn't just there for decoration, either; a man in a black shirt open at the throat was playing light jazz that was all but drowned out by the rattle of conversation as people pored over their menus and caught up on each other's days.

"I don't think I've ever been to a pizza restaurant with a piano before." said Sol.

"Great, isn't it?"

"It's certainly different."

They ordered drinks, and sat back to wait for a table.

"So, what was it you were going to tell me?"

"D'ya know, I'd almost forgotten about that. Must be the piano. Soothing."

Beth laughed. "You're trying to wriggle out of it, aren't you? It's O.K.; you don't have to tell me."

"No; I want to."

So, there, amongst the chattering office dwellers and students suffused with light jazz, Sol explained everything. Beth sat there, dangling her bottle of foreign lager by the neck between her fingers, and listened as he talked. Eventually, when he had finished, she sat back.

"That's fantastic." She concluded, eventually.

"It is?" That wasn't the response Sol was expecting.

"Fantastic in the sense that it sounds like pure fantasy to me."

Now, that, that was one of the responses that Sol had been expecting.

"I promise you it's the truth. What can I do to convince you?"

Beth put her beer down on the low glass table and looked him straight in the eye.

"Assuming that I took everything you say at face value, which I don't, there are huge chasms in your story. How come nobody else has noticed? You send those reports out to dozens of people. Why has no-one done this before? For that matter, why haven't you done it before now? And if you can do it, why haven't you just won the lottery and retired to Bermuda?"

"Hold on; we only place the first bet today. And I've got serious reservations about using it gamble in any case."

Sol paused, and took a deep breath; he wanted to organize his thoughts, and make sure this came out right. He wanted Beth to believe him.

"Well, to begin with, this sort of stuff doesn't go in to the live reports; it's only off a test system Ted and I are running that's set up in a special way."

"Hold on - you said that that Sherwood guy saw the Columbia thing in a report."

"That was a mistake; the forecast shouldn't have been in there. Anyway, the reason that no-one else has done this is because no-one's got a computer-aided forecasting system lke WorldPulse - except for the guys in Bombay and Toronto, and we've not heard anything from them. You not only need that specific sort of system, you also need it set up in a highly specific way. I only stumbled on it by accident when we were testing the things to see what the limits were. The other thing to bear in mind is that there's no reason to expect that particular setup to behave like that - in fact, nothing should behave like that, and I have no idea how anything does - so there's no reason to go looking for it. The only reason we noticed was the slip-up with the Columbia forecast."

After that lot, Sol needed to take another deep breath. "So, that covers why we didn't do it before. Was there anything else?"

Beth's expression had softened. "Well, I still don't take everything you say at face value, but there's nothing you can do about that." She picked up he bottle and drained it. "Let's forget about it for tonight, enjoy the pizza, and you can tell me about it in the morning."

A couple of minutes latter, the perky blonde waitress returned to show them to their table. This involved weaving through an obstacle course of sofas, pillars and pot plants, and eventually lead to a sumptuous, high-ceilinged room that looked even less like a typical pizza place than the waiting area had. The walls were tastefully patterned maroon, and hanging on them were gilt-framed oil paintings of terribly dignified, slightly portly men in grey suits. A shelf ran around the room a few feet below the ceiling, and this was lined with old looking books with cracked leather bindings. More books filled shelves in the numerous alcoves. Tall plants in heavy pots broke up the vault-like room into smaller, more intimate spaces.

It took a moment for Sol to place what the whole things reminded him of. Eventually, he realized it fit almost exactly into his conception of a London gentleman's club. It was a little odd that he had such a strong impression of what such clubs looked like, as he had never seen the inside of one, but nevertheless he did. After the waitress had given them menus and hurried off to deal with other customers, Sol mentioned his club theory to Beth. She told him that the building had indeed been a gentleman's club in the past, and the current owners were trying to recreate the feel. She leaned forward and whispered that it was mostly fake, though ("Look at the books; a load of them are fairly recent. I bet they just got them in a job lot from OxFam or something.")

That was enough to move them off contentious topics like WorldPulse and horse racing; they started to talk freely about other things, and against his expectations Sol found that he enjoyed the evening immensely.