In the middle of the warehouse, on a chair rescued from a skip, sat the most dangerous man in the cell — and he was playing a ukulele. Cables snaked around his feet. Binary codes flickered across his screens. His right hand danced across a keyboard while his left strummed a tune so soft it could have been a lullaby.
Shoothis recognised the setup. It was, in all but materials, his own workbench, a century and a half later. The same discipline: make the serious work look absurd. Make the room look like a hobby so that the inspectors, when they came, would underestimate what was leaving it.