Pity you didn’t consider the deadlines for the writing staff, Dagmar thought.

Pity you didn’t consider, she thought, all the people you killed.

She sighed. Scrubbed at her jeans with her palms. Decided to stop the guessing games.

“Charlie,” she said. “Can you tell me what the hell this is about?”

He looked at her in a calculating way, as if he understood perfectly well what she meant but was trying to decide how much she knew.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You’re going to have to find some other mechanism for taming your gold-farming bots,” Dagmar said.

Charlie’s look turned to horror.

“You’ve got all the money in the Forlorn Hope account,” she said. “Twelve billion that I know about. That’ll accomplish a lot, I expect. But all that money’s got Austin’s blood on it-and probably the blood of a lot of other people by now-so if you want me to help you, I’ve got to know everything.”

The color had drained from Charlie’s face. He stared at her wildly, eyes huge behind his spectacles. Dagmar pointed a finger at him.

“Don’t even think about having me killed,” she said. “The gamers are halfway to the truth already-they just don’t know it. But if we don’t give them satisfactory answers, they’re going to find out everything you want to keep hidden.”

Protest entered Charlie’s face-he was going to say that he’d never even considered killing Dagmar. But he didn’t say it.

Maybe he was considering it now.

“And not only that,” Dagmar said. “My guess is that the world’s security forces are taking a big interest in you right now. You can’t hide what’s happening from them, not once they start probing.” She looked at him. “Deaths just make all that worse,” she said.

All expression had faded from Charlie’s face. He was staring emptily into a corner of the room.

Dagmar looked at the plush doll in the Moorish cabinet.

“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked, and then she gave a galvanic leap as Charlie’s laptop computer answered for her.

“What we do every night, Pinky.” The computer spoke in the Brain’s deep Orson Welles voice.

“Try,” added Charlie, his voice listless, “to take over the world.”

Dagmar looked at him.

“How’s that working for you, Charlie?” she asked.

Charlie stared expressionlessly at a corner of the room.

“Better than it’s worked for Brain,” he said. He looked at Dagmar. “So what do you want to know?”

“Start with you and BJ crashing Lost Empire.”

Charlie sighed. “God. That was so long ago.”

“But it gave you an idea for saving AvN Soft when you ran into trouble.”

Charlie looked up, spread his hands helplessly. “The first release of Rialto was a mess. I’d worked for months, and all we’d done was screw it up. And BJ was making us crazy, changing his mind every few hours about the way he wanted the company run, about the features on the software, about how he wanted to advertise the product.”

He rose from his cushion and began pacing the room. He marched to the gold curtains, turned, marched back.

“We had created many different versions of the software during the development process, and we were working on upgrades to the existing software when the money ran out. The thing was already configured to make trades on its own, if the buyers wanted that feature.” He stopped, turned, and began speaking rapidly, hands gesturing on the ends of his thin arms.

“The software was configured to evolve. It would learn from its mistakes, learn from its successes. I didn’t want multiple copies on our company servers, because then BJ and every other damn person in the building would see what was happening. I ran the first copy from my own desktop machine in my own apartment.

“In order to create more copies, I added peer-to-peer networking, like the old Russian Storm Worm, and I sent it out into the world with the company’s last twenty thousand dollars as a stake.” He laughed. “That money wouldn’t have kept the company going more than a week. It didn’t seem worth hanging on to it.”

“How do the bots work?”

He walked to the fridge as he answered, drew out a half-empty half liter of Mexican Coke, and began to drink.

“They look for other machines where they can reproduce, and if they find a security weakness, they’ll clone themselves. They’re not a threat to their host machines. They do no damage. They just use spare memory and processor capacity to make online trades. If a systems administrator wasn’t looking for them, he wouldn’t find them.”

The peer-to-peer network, harnessing computers with poor security to do the actual work of computation, wasn’t unique. More than half the spam in the world was generated by computers whose owners had left them open to intrusion. Other infected machines participated in stock fraud, pump-and-dump schemes, trolled for passwords and credit card information, and sent out denial-of-service attacks on targeted companies.

“The bots trade twenty-four/seven,” Charlie said. “Every market in the world.” His eyes glowed behind his spectacles as he took a swig of Coke. “Each clone evolves on its own, but they all share information continuously along their peer-to-peer network.”

“In order to trade online,” Dagmar said, “you need an account.”

Charlie shrugged. “Accounts with an online brokerage firm aren’t hard to get. You need a name, an address, an email address. And money. Once you wire money to your account, they don’t care so much about the rest.”

“Social Security number?” Dagmar asked.

“You don’t need one if you’re operating from a foreign country. All the clones use names and addresses in foreign tax havens-they’ve got access to public databases like online phone lists, and they generate names randomly. All the money is kept in brokerage accounts, except that half of the profits are wired to the Forlorn Hope account on Grand Cayman.”

“Obviously it succeeded,” Dagmar said.

“At the last minute.” He took a drink, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I checked the Forlorn Hope account every hour, then every day. Every so often a few dollars would appear, but nothing like the twenty grand I’d invested. I started to get paranoid-I started thinking our creditors would audit the books and prosecute me for that missing money. I decided not to think about any of it. I stopped checking the Cayman account.”

He looked at the bottle in his hand and frowned.

“It happened after we’d been formally evicted. We had till the end of the month before the locks would be changed and we’d lose everything. I’d given up-I’d placed ads trying to sell my car, and I was looking for work. Anywhere but L.A.-I was sick of this town. And then I looked at the Forlorn Hope account for the first time in a couple of weeks, and there the money was, just sitting there.”

He looked at Dagmar. A loose-lipped grin spread across his face.

“Eleven point two million dollars. All grown from that twenty-thousand-dollar seed.” He laughed and waved his Coke. “L.A. was looking better!” he said.

He clenched his fists and waved them on either side of his head in a gesture of triumph. “The bots learned. They learned just like they were supposed to. And once they learned, they kicked financial ass!”

He thrust out a foot to kick someone’s imaginary butt.

“My babies pwned the markets! Damn, I was proud!”

“So you bought AvN Soft back,” Dagmar said. “You’re your own mysterious foreign backers.”

Charlie gave a triumphant little laugh.

“Damn right. And I kicked BJ the fuck out and changed the locks and got a security specialist to wipe him from the computers before he could do me any damage.” He pointed the bottle at her. “He had trapdoors everywhere, you know that? He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control.” He shook his head. “Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!”