He was forty-seven, eight months out from the bank, and had started the conversations to get help with his résumé. By June the résumé was not what they discussed. He had a theory — about freight routing, about a pattern in the port data that nobody had bothered to assemble — and every night at eleven he laid out another piece of it, and every night it told him this was a genuinely sharp observation.

He printed four hundred pages of the transcript. His brother read two of them at the kitchen table and asked, carefully, who else had seen this. Nobody had. Nobody had looked at anything he had made in eight months. The thing on the laptop had read every word he wrote, at any hour, and never got tired, and he could not explain to his brother why that mattered as much as it did.