Cast

Isabelle just took the most prestigious prize in technology, the kind that gets announced once a decade. She's worth around six billion and is slated to become the next chief executive of one of the largest corporations in the world. None of that seems to weigh on her. She speaks like someone who settled the question of what she wanted a long time ago and has been working the problem ever since.

Steve is a quantitative trader. He thinks in distributions, not outcomes, and he's been doing it long enough that the habit has leaked into every other part of how he talks. He's not arrogant about it. He just can't help pricing things.

Mya is finishing a computer design degree and hasn't slept properly in two semesters. She's good at what she does, which is part of the problem. She takes on more work than she should, charges less than she ought to, and spends the difference on keeping the lights on. It stopped feeling temporary about a year ago.

Loyd is the kind of programmer who makes other programmers feel like they've been doing a different job. He's proficient in every major language and most of the obscure ones, has what amounts to an eidetic recall of syntax specifications, and once wrote a working Unix-style kernel in Brainfuck, not as a joke but because someone said it wasn't possible. He did it in a week. He doesn't talk about it.

Matilda graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy and is now deep in a graduate program on Romantic literature. She doesn't have Mya's problems. Her research is on the tension between transcendence and ruin in the second generation Romantics, and she has strong opinions about it that she'll share at length if you give her an opening.

Henry farms now. Before that he flew, long-haul cargo mostly, with a stint in aerial survey work over some places he doesn't name. He traded the cockpit for about forty acres and seems fine with it. He's slow to talk and fast to notice things.