Papadelias: “Twenty-seven out of forty-seven car crashes in the past five years were immediately preceded by one of these episodes. That’s roughly half of all crashes.”
Guildbreaker: “I’m still working on the preceding five years, but I’ve had to get the crash reports through back channels, since the standard channel is to call Ockham Saneer.”
Papadelias: “One episode preceded Revere’s death, and got worse right before the O’Beirne crash.”
Guildbreaker: “Yes.”
Papadelias: “Before, not after.”
Guildbreaker: “Yes.”
Two minutes of reading in silence.
Papadelias: “This says Cato has eight to eleven episodes per year, and half of them don’t precede car crashes.”
Guildbreaker: “Yes, almost exactly half.”
Papadelias: “But the other half do.”
Guildbreaker: “Very precisely half.”
Twenty-one minutes of reading in silence.
Papadelias: “This is sketchy.”
Guildbreaker: “What?”
Papadelias: “The death of Yangtze Dekker in a car crash 11/22/2453 resulted in their widow appealing to their brother on the news, which probably ended the Six Lakes Hostage Crisis. The death of retired Romanov editor Anlevine Gorz-Marmalade in a car crash 08/08/2452 drastically weakened the Nurturist faction in the European elections. The death of Madden Manila in a car crash 05/15/2451 made Mycroft Gao drop out of the anti-Mitsubishi-land-grab movement. The death of Kirkegard Ranker may have passed the Reservation Welfare Act. The death of Jay Daiko may have saved Rongcorp & Subsidiaries. The death of Herrera Lee may have eased the Greenpeace Mitsubishi factionalism. But none of this is direct influence, these are all friends, cousins, ex-roommates, sometimes with four or five degrees of rather sketchy separation from the effect they’re supposed to have had.”
Guildbreaker: “Yes.”
Papadelias: “Connections no one would spot unless they were already looking for something suspicious, just like with Sugiyama’s grandba’kid’s fiancé.”
Guildbreaker: “Exactly.”
Papadelias: “How many of these did you find? These politically consequential crashes.”
Guildbreaker: “Thirty-four so far, roughly five per year or fifty percent of all car crashes over the last seven years.”
Papadelias: “Thirty-four? Was whoever did this analysis told which crashes were preceded by Cato’s episodes?”
Guildbreaker: “No.”
Papadelias: “Yet it seems every single politically influential death was preceded by an episode.”
Guildbreaker: “So it seems.”
Papadelias: “And the crashes which were not preceded by episodes seem to have had no meaningful political consequences.”
Guildbreaker: “So it seems.”
Papadelias: “Thirty-five deaths over seven years. The rafting accident that killed their ba’pas was five years ago, right?”
Guildbreaker: “Correct.”
Papadelias: “So this has to have started before that.”
Guildbreaker: “At least two years before.”
Four minutes of reading in silence.
Papadelias: “Hmm … You intend these as control groups?”
Guildbreaker: “Which?”
Papadelias: “Proportion of lethal food poisoning victims whose deaths had a detectible political impact, two point two percent; proportion of beesting deaths with a political impact, two point five percent; proportion of deaths from elevators breaking, two point three percent…”
Guildbreaker: “Yes, control groups. I had my analyst do precisely the same analysis of these groups that they did on the car crash deaths, since it’s possible that, with five degrees of separation, anyone’s death can have a traceable political impact. Two percent can, it seems, but two percent is not fifty percent.”
Papadelias: “No. No, it’s not.”
Eighteen minutes of reading in silence.
Papadelias: “Where did you get this data?”
Guildbreaker: “Which?”
Papadelias: “Cato’s episode in January did not precede a crash, but preceded the suicide of Tipper Casterman, which pulled Haleakala Banks out of the Nurturist movement. Cato’s episode in November preceded the alcohol poisoning death of Carlyle Gali, which stopped their uncle’s string of inflammatory speeches against President Ganymede. Cato’s episode in August preceded an unforeseen reaction to new medication which killed the infamous blackmailer Colorado Dix.”
Guildbreaker: “Three weeks before that episode, an experiment Cato conducted in the Junior Scientist Squad lab in Chicago suggested the possibility of that very medication causing such a fatal reaction when combined with another rare drug, but Cato tried to destroy the data. I stole the files.”
Papadelias: “You just confessed to a crime.”
Guildbreaker: “I know.”
Papadelias: “These deaths, these people who didn’t die in crashes, they have no connection of any kind to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’, to Black Sakura, to anything. What did you do, analyze every single person who died the day after one of Cato’s episodes to see if any had a political impact?”
Guildbreaker: “The two days after, yes.”
Papadelias: “How? There must have been thousands.”
Guildbreaker: “Tens of thousands. At first I asked the Romanovan Censor if they could do some calculations for me, but they were too busy. Their deputy Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet Kosala was also too busy, and Toshi Mitsubishi is biased, so I asked Mycroft Canner.”
Papadelias: “Naturally.”
Guildbreaker: “Mycroft was also too busy, so I asked Jung Su-Hyeon to recommend someone else who could do calculations on this scale. They said I should hire a Cartesian set-set.”
Papadelias: “Cartesian specifically?”
Guildbreaker: “Cartesian specifically. They’re capable of following dynamic charts with up to forty-five variables at once, so they can do the work of ten Censors, at least as far as reading data goes.”
Papadelias: “That’s the same kind of set-set Eureka Weeksbooth and Sidney Koons are, right?”
Guildbreaker: “Yes. I hired one as the Censor recommended, and that set-set is also how I found the political connections of the car crash victims. The connections are so indirect that, on my own I would only have spotted a handful of them, but the set-set found them in a flash. All they needed was a computer system with software for tracking the relationships between all people in the world. Five such computers exist to my knowledge: the computers in the Romanovan Censor’s office, the Tracker System, the Transit Computers in the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’, the identical computers at the Salekhard backup site, and the Utopian Transit System computers, which are what I used for the purpose.”