It was a slow, ponderous day. Nobody did any real work; they were all simply trying to set up their own personal environment the way it had been in the other office, before the accident. In one of the empty rooms at the back of the building were piles of disembodied filing cabinet drawers, salvaged from the other site. There was a steady trickle of people meandering in and out, emerging with armfuls of folders and trays awash with paper clips, Post-It notes and other desk drawer shrapnel.

People started to call it a day earlier than normal, about five o'clock, and began to drift towards the car park. Soon, only a few people remained. Beth, Sol and Isabelle were amongst them.

Beth looked over her desktops, real and virtual, once more; everything seemed to be in place. It should be; she had been listlessly fiddling with them for most of the afternoon. She switched off her monitor and her lamp, grabbed her coat, and walked over to Sol's desk.

"I'm about ready to go; how 'bout you?"

"There's just a couple of things I want to sort out first."

She grabbed a chair and rolled it over, sitting down on a level with Sol. "What're you working on?"

Sol lowered his voice. "I'm trying to sort out Crystal; they moved the server over here today, and I didn't want to say too much about it in case they asked why it was so important."

He ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture that Beth recognized as telegraphing severe, protracted frustration. "I'm not sure I can get it going again. There was a lot of stuff that Ted sorted out, and I only had a vague idea of how it worked." He hunched forwards again and resumed typing.

"Do you want me to have a look at it? Maybe I can sort it out." Beth offered.

"It's technical" said Sol without looking up. After a moment, he stopped typing. He could feel something burrowing into the back of his neck. He turned around to discover that it was Beth's glare.

"Just why do you think that's a problem? What do you think my job is?"

Sol sensed that it would be a really, really bad idea to smirk right now, so he tried his utmost not to. He almost succeeded. "It's a bit different to the web stuff..." he started. Beth cut him off.

"Zach and I wrote 'the web stuff' from scratch. It has to scalable, it has to be robust, and it has to be maintainable by three people per site, 'cause Jupiter is to tight to spring for more. We've designed and implemented a full distributed application platform, and a bunch of very complex software to run on top of it."

"The holistic evaluation stuff has a lot of fairly involved maths in it..." Sol ventured quietly.

"My degree is in maths. And in any case, I thought you handled all that. I got the impression that Ted, God rest his soul, probably thought that Topology was all about that guy from Fiddler On The Roof."

Sol could tell when he was beaten. "O.K. I'm sorry. I'll add you to the WorldPulse test group; we can say you're helping me set up test runs for the live system, if anyone asks. The source tree is kept here..."

Beth pulled up her chair and peered at the screen as Sol gave her the lightning tour of Crystal inner mysteries. After a while, Isabelle came up and announced that she was going home, so if they didn't want to spend the night, they'd better finish up pronto. They did, but Beth went back to Sol's for dinner, and there they finished off the tour at a more relaxed pace, lubricated by a glass or two of wine. Beth, to her guilty surprise, realized that she was having quite a good time. It must've been the novelty; she'd not worked on something new in a long, long time.

Mr Sherwood was not happy. He liked to feel that he was in control of his many businesses, which is why he amassed such diverse technology, and spent such copious amounts of money, to ensure that he was in constant touch with everyone who mattered, and was kept informed about everything important. Right now, holding the phone in a big knuckled hand and listening impotently to a recording telling him how important his call was, he did not feel the slightest bit in control.

Eventually, with a click, the line was taken up by a human operator.

"Hello my name is Julie how may I help you?" The operator, who had a warm Scottish accent, managed to merge the statement and the question into a single utterance, devoid of any pause or meter.

"I have been waiting for almost twenty minutes." Mr Sherwood replied in calm, measured tones. An alert listener would have detected an undercurrent of malice, but Julie missed this entirely.

"I'm sorry your call is very important to us." Obviously, her supervisor had told her that breaks in between words made an unacceptable dent in some sort of quota.

"I do not pay your company the considerable amount that I do in order to sit around listening to an utterly appalling rendition of The Four Seasons."

"I'm very sorry sir I will pass on your comments now what was it you were calling for?"

"I am concerned, to say the least, about the notice that has appeared atop all of the WorldPulse pages in the last day. It mentioned 'technical difficulties', without going into specifics. I would like to know exactly what these difficulties are."

"Due to unforeseen circumstances one of our sites has been temporarily relocated this may result in some breaks in service although we will do all we can to minimize disruption."

"Are you in a position to provide me with any more detail than that?"

"I'm afraid that is all the information that I can provide at this time would you like me to put you in touch with one of our technical support staff?"

"No, that will not be necessary, thank you."

"Very well was there anything else sir?"

"No."

"Thank you for calling."

Mr Sherwood hung up the receiver with a look of disgust. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. He hadn't been able to contact Jerry, which was why he had to endure the general customer services number. However, Jerry wasn't the only person at Jupiter he knew.

Professor Maxwell looked at his watch; it was getting late. Most of his staff had gone home hours ago. He couldn't blame them. It had been a long day, and they had been working hard to get their analysis back in line with the current state of WorldPulse. In fact, they'd been working flat out for the last week, preparing. Everyone was drained and deflated, but they had gone home happy. They'd done it.

Maxwell had just tied up the last few loose ends; their model was now, at last, ready and working again. They had a script for tweaking the input sources to achieve the client's desired results. All he had to do was to start it going, and then they would simply have to monitor it's progress over the next couple of days to ensure that nothing went wrong.

He took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. It really was getting late. Still, he didn't have much more to do. He was tempted to just go home and collapse into bed, without starting the script off. However, his conscience kept reminding him that the script was based on a start some time this evening, and the later they left it the more time it would take for it to take effect. He reached for the phone, in order to get final confirmation from the client.

He paused. Should he call at this time of night? It was late, but then again, the client had been very insistent that he be kept up to date with everything, and time was of the essence. He decided to give it a try. In all likelihood, he wouldn't get an answer and they would have to start in the morning anyway.

He dialed the number, and listened to the phone ring a couple of times. There was a pause, then the ringing resumed - must've been redirected. After a couple more rings, somebody picked up. "Hello?"

For a second, he didn't recognize the client's voice. Normally, he spoke in sharp, clipped tones with the merest hint of an unidentifiable accent. Now, he was muffled and indistinct, and was not speaking with his usual verbosity or vitriol.

"It's Professor Maxwell, sir. I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour."

"Maxwell, hi. Um. Yes. I was, um, asleep." There was a pause. Maxwell waited. "Sorry. Yes, what is it?"

"We've just completed the script to enact changes you requested, sir. I'm calling to obtain final confirmation that you want us to set it in motion. As I explained, once we have done so, reversing the effects may prove costly."

There was another, longer pause at the other end of the phone.

"Yes. Start it." came the terse reply, eventually.

"Very well. Well, good night. I apologize again for disturbing you at this hour."

"No. You did the right thing. I'll talk to you tomorrow." With that, he hung up.

The last comment rattled Professor Maxwell slightly. He did not appreciate being treated like an unworldly academic who needed to be cosseted from the big, bad world like some southern belle on a cotton plantation. His particular line of work made him more acutely aware of the workings of the world than most people, and he had been seen the underbelly of almost every industry you could name, so it jarred when people talked to him like a graduate fresh out of college, with no idea of the way things happened. Still, there were compensations. Working for the arrogant buffoon gave him the freedom to put into practice many of the ideas he'd been researching for years, and get paid handsomely for it. He smiled at this thought as he shrugged on his coat and walked to the door.

The following day was friday, the day of Ted's funeral. Everyone meet in their best black clothes, skirts and ties whipping in the unseasonably cold wind. Isabelle wandered up to the small crowd hesitantly, and after a few half hearted greetings and small, awkward conversations, found it easy to simply hang around the periphery, blending into the background. To avoid eye contact, she gazed fixedly at the ground, where she saw little drifts of confetti, sodden and mangled, a remnant from a happier occasion.

"Hi." said Sol, walking up slowly. "How're you doing?"

"Not too bad, considering." She was relieved to be speaking to someone she actually knew, and didn't have to make generic funereal small talk with. "It's just a bit," she tried to describe it, but couldn't, "you know."

"Yeah." agreed Sol. (He wasn't humouring her. He actually did know.)

Isabelle got a tissue out of here small, dressy bag, and dabbed at her eyes. She looked up. "Beth about?"

"I talked to her a little while ago. I think she'll be arriving in a couple of minutes."

They stood in silence as people milled around them, muttering generic banalities like some awful chorus. Soon, Beth arrived. They said brief hellos, and then moved into the church. The service was about to begin.