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flung it to the floor and crushed it with his heel. Ulla Mannheim stared in shock. Several people poked their heads out of office doors, and a small audience gathered in the corridor. Dominic glimpsed Karel Folger and Klas Lorn. The NP transferred its voice to the office security system, and its words echoed through the halls.
    “We want the same thing. To save ZahlenBank.”
    Dominic stepped into the elevator and commanded the doors to close. The NP continued speaking through the elevator’s intercom. “You can’t escape me. If you let ZahlenBank fail, you have nothing else. Believe me, son, I know.”
    Dominic punched the ID pad and muttered, “Lobby level.”
    “We can protect each other,” the NP went on. “We can keep it all. Money’s the immaculate computation of—”
    “Shut up!” Dominic tugged the intercom off its bracket and slammed it against the wall. When the door slid open, a warm breeze wafted in from, the lobby, and Dominic caught the unmistakable scent of protes. Acrid sweat and cheap deodorant, junk food and bad teeth. The concessionaires were out in full force, trading their unsanctioned goods in the ZahlenBank lobby. Their heat fogged the air.
    “Son, don’t you wanna hear my plan?” the voice echoed from the overhead P.A. system.
    Heads turned. Protes in the lobby glanced up at the speakers. “We can’t talk here,” Dominic hissed.
    The NP spoke at full volume. “Look around you, Dominic! Are these the people you want running our world?”
    “Quiet! Of course not. We can’t discuss this in front of them .”
    The ambient crowd noise was rising, and Dominic saw people pointing at the speakers. He strode across the lobby with his head down. Of course we don’t want these slackers running the world, he thought, pressing with distaste through the warm, fusty mob of prote bodies. Someone stepped on his shoe and scuffed the genuine leather. He cursed under his breath. These people had no conception of the value of things. They couldn’t even grasp basic facts—like market order.
    Dominic might have questioned some bank policies, but he still believed firmly in his father’s creed of stable markets. The markets fed everyone. Especially now, with Earth’s population stretching resources to the limit, mere was no margin for unrest. He also knew that only an enlightened class of executives, evolved through genetic breeding and groomed by education, could keep order in such an intricate, panicky marketplace. If the markets crashed, the result might be a global die-off.
    As if reading Dominic’s thoughts, the NP roared over the public speakers, “Without our management, protes will die.”
    “Fry bread, sir? Hot salty fry bread?” a man shouted in Dominic’s face.
    The hawker’s breath stank of tooth decay, and Dominic trembled with fury. He gripped his fists to his sides and had to call up all his will to keep from shoving the man away. The markets feed everyone, he recited to himself. After a moment, he exhaled and moved on.
    Outside the lobby, he summoned his aircar with a word. Protes milled up and down ZahlenBank’s granite steps, flaunting their soiled uniforms and greasy hair and sullen, shifty eyes. What had possessed him to free two thousand of these ill-bred clods? He must have been dozing when he suggested that spin-off.
    An adolescent boy bumped against him on the steps, and Dominic reeled back. One of the boy’s eyes was missing, and the skin covering the sunken socket was smooth and unblemished, the color of cream. The sight disturbed Dominic strangely.
    “Sorry, sir. Most sorry.” The boy spoke with a low-class twang.
    Dominic quickly looked away from the boy’s face. As the herd of protes shuffled around him, he held very still and watched his aircar glide to a stop at the curb. The door sprang open, and he descended the steps, working his jaw back and forth, twisting his full lips out of shape. He knew his father was right, he’d fucked up. No, not his father. The