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it’s crazy but it
just might
work, and it sounds a fuck of a lot less dangerous than what I was working on turned out to be. What could possibly go wrong?”
     • • • 
    WHICH IS WHY, IN THE END, ANDY DIDN’T GET TO DEMONSTRATE his coding chops by summoning up an Eater.
    And why I eventually sneaked my way into the clearances I needed to log onto the SUS Core Data Warehouse.
    And, ultimately, why all the deaths happened.

2.
MEET THE SCRUM

    HOW IT STARTED: ONE MONTH AGO.
    “Hey, Alex, did you hear the one about the dyslexic sailor?”
    “No—”
    “He spent the night in a warehouse!”
    Alex threw a bean bag at the joker—John—who caught it out of the air. Their supervisor was unamused: “Pigs!” said Mhari.
    “It’s okay, hen, we’re committed,” said John.
    Then
she laughed. “You will be.”
    It was lunchtime in an open-plan office, eight floors above the lobby level of a tower in Canary Wharf. North of Barclays, west of Santander, deep in the beating heart of global commerce. The office was a small clot of strangeness congealed in the pulsing circulation of an investment bank. They were
in
the bank, but not quite
of
it, this scrum of half a dozen Pigs and Chickens. They wore the suits and sometimes talked the talk, but held themselves apart; and when they left at night, they passed through a glassed-in corridor lined with metal detectors before they retrieved their personal phones and wallets and watches from metal lockers beneath the eyes of security guards. Some of them had worked in proprietary trading before joining this group; others had come straight out of academia, trailing the long shadows of student loans behind them (taken on by the bank as part of their golden handshake). But now they were
in
the bank but not
of
it, for the Scrum were not permitted any customer-facing contact at all. Indeed, they were employed by a shell company, the better to enable the parent’s corporate management to deny their very existence.
    There were other signs of distinction about them. Their hours were not governed by the ring of the trading floor bell in Paternoster Square, or any other market for that matter. (Electrons never sleep.) Nor did they directly support any of the parent institution’s trading teams. They had a designated Product Owner, it was true, to whom the Scrum Master (or in their case, Scrum Mistress) was answerable, both for handover of deliverables and negotiation of new goals, and the Owner actually worked with a committee of traders and analysts. But the office was carefully structured to keep the members of the Scrum as tightly insulated from their parent organization as possible.
    That way, deniability could be maintained for as long as possible.
     • • • 
    I WASN’T HERE, I DIDN’T SEE THIS, AND I CAN ONLY OFFER THIS fictionalized reconstruction, dredged from the turbid depths of my imagination and seasoned with facts.
    I got to sit in on the autopsy later, as we uncovered the gruesome history of the Scrum. Not that it was particularly awful, up to this point. So, an investment bank has a bunch of in-house proprietary trading teams who specialize in taking positions on the basis of quantitative analysis of which way the markets are trending? There’s nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about
that
. Investment Bank has a group who work on minimizing the latency in their trades, to reduce the market spread? Ditto. Algorithmic trading teams shoveling out and revoking put offers every few milliseconds to see what falls out of the high-frequency trading tree? We’re getting into dubious territory here, but everyone else has been doing it, ever since the Yanks deep-sixed the important bits of the Glass-Steagall Act and their commercial banks all sprouted high-stakes gambling arms—but that’s ancient history. The point is, the Bank wasn’t doing anything they shouldn’t have been doing, at least within the context of the crisis of early twenty-first-century