That was the lure of wealth, he'd discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all - this wine, this woman, this world - for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.

It's like tossing a dart," he'd said. "There's nothing amazing about it. You throw and it sticks somewhere. But if you try and backtrack every factor that led there, the force of the throw and the angle and the air resistance, all of it had to be perfect, just exactly right, for it to end up where it did.

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

He never realized how noisy American silence was until all the gadgets died.