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By Root 985 0

leans forward. “I can’t tell you the details. But part of what we do is abstract social-network analysis on waves, IM, email, phone calls—looking for indicators of pathological communications patterns. If you can track who’s talking to who, you can work out which parts of an organization work together, and see emergent patterns of behaviour. It goes back to the classic study on Enron’s email corpus in the noughties, but there’s been a lot of work since then on agent-assisted NLP and transitive clique identification . . . There’s also some promising work on determination of ethical or conspiratorial networks. There are other data sets we can trawl exhaustively—the banking crisis, the full corpus of internal communications left behind in the wake of the Goldman Sachs collapse. All the data sets from businesses we’ve audited since the corporate-responsibility criteria were introduced, suitably blinded and anonymized. We use them to spot warning signs. You get a different pattern of communication in groups who’re colluding to instigate a cover-up, for instance.”

At this point, you’re working hard to keep your eyes open. Dorothy would have made a kick-ass accountant if she hadn’t decided to go into corporate psychoanalysis: She could bore for Europe in the Olympics if she wanted to. But you ken where she’s going with this. It’s not so dissimilar to what you do in the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit—which, come to think of it, is how you met her in the first place, at a conference on pre-emptive gang-crime prevention. “What did you find?”

“What got my attention is the bank I’m here to audit—I got an anonymous tip to look into something and, well, there’s a pattern of communication in their investment arm that looks worryingly similar to some of the crazier stuff that was going on in 2007. Subprime investments, dangerous quant stuff. Unethical, if not illegal. Only it’s not real estate this time, Liz. I pulled the audit trail, and it turns out they’re investing heavily in options trades based on government bonds from a breakaway republic in the back end of Asia.

“What’s alarming me is . . . round about 2009, one of the things that happened during the great recession was that banks almost universally ran out of liquidity, all over the world, simultaneously. It got to the point where national regulators started turning a blind eye when their banks accepted deposits in cash from, uh, irregular sources. Money laundering. Some say up to a third of a trillion dollars in black money was laundered into the global banking system during the crash. It was the last hurrah of the great drugs cartels: Decriminalization and the dollar collapse effectively bankrupted them over the next decade. But ending the war on drugs didn’t end organized crime, and there are still gangs out there with money to launder. Anyway, I got a tip-off. Began looking for signs of weirdness in the money supply in the, the Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. We’ve got far less data on them than on our own banks, but I didn’t have to look hard. If they’re so poor, and they’ve got a 40 per cent unemployment rate, how come their GDP rose 30 per cent on independence?

“Anyway? I took it to my line manager, and he told me to lay off. It’s all inconclusive, and anyway, it’s outside our purview. Drop it completely, in other words. Then I got sent up here to do a routine audit, and it turns out that my hotel room’s bugged. Also—I think I spotted a man following me yesterday. On the tram, home from work. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m scared, Liz.”

There’s a time to stand on your work/life balance metric, and a time to throw the rule-book out the window. Dorothy is clearly frightened—so scared it took her three cocktails and a presumptively bug-free bar to open up to you. Unfortunately, a lot of what she told you is as confidential as the contents of your own ongoing investigations (i.e. it’s a honking great disciplinary—or even criminal—offence to talk about it out of school), not to mention reeking of some kind of artificial reality game to anyone who doesn’t know