Chapter 5: The Telegraph Exchange on King William Street

The cargo manifest arrived folded into thirds inside a plain envelope, slipped under the Montague Street office door sometime before Watson had risen from his chair by the window, where he had spent the better part of the night reading learned society proceedings with the focused misery of a man confronting the full dimensions of his own ignorance.

He had found, near dawn, in the Proceedings of the Logical and Mathematical Society, Volume VII, 1882, a three-page contribution by one E. Corvath on the application of formal logical systems to predictive social modelling. The prose was dense, bloodless, and entirely certain of itself. Watson had read it three times, understanding perhaps half, and had felt, with each reading, a cold accretion of something he recognised from the battlefield: respect for an enemy's capabilities, which was a different and more useful thing than fear.

He had written Corvath, E. — academic logician — 1882 — Logical and Mathematical Society in his notebook, which was more than he had managed in two days, and the name had seemed slightly less like a wall and slightly more like a door, though he could not yet see what was on the other side.