"They got you too, huh?" Kettlewell said. "Just left. Wish I could say it was unexpected." "Wish I could say I blamed them," Kettlewell said. "Hey, you should see what the ride's been doing this week since Florida went down," Tjan said. "It's totally mutated. I think it's mostly coming from the Midwest, though those Brazilians seem to keep on logging in somehow too." "How many rides are there in South America, anyways?" "Brazilians of them!" Tjan said with a mirthless chuckle. "Impossible to say. They've got some kind of variant on the protocol that lets a bunch of them share one network address. I think some of them aren't even physical rides, just virtual flythroughs. Some are directly linked, some do a kind of mash-up between their current norms and other rides' current norms. It's pretty weird." Kettlewell paced. "Well, at least someone's having a good time." "They're going to nail us to the wall," Tjan said. "Both of us. Probably the individual ride-operators, too. They're out for blood." "It's not like they even lost much money." "They didn't need to -- they feel like they lost the money they might have won from Disney." "But that was twenty years away, and highly speculative." Tjan sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. "Landon, you're a very, very good finance person. The best I've ever met, but you really need to understand that even the most speculative investor is mostly speculating about how he's going to spend all the money you're about to make him. If investors didn't count their chickens before they hatched, you'd never raise a cent." "Yeah," Kettlewell said. He knew it, but he couldn't soak it in. He'd won and lost so many fortunes -- his own and others' -- that he'd learned to take it all in stride. Not everyone else was so sanguine. "So what do we do about it? I don't much want to lose everything." "You could always go back to Russia," Kettlewell said, suddenly feeling short-tempered. Why did he always have to come up with the plan? "Sorry. You know what the lawyers are going to tell us." "Yeah. Sue Perry and Lester." "And we told Lester we wouldn't do that. It was probably a mistake to do this at all, you know." "No, don't say that. The idea was a really good one. You might have saved their asses if they'd played along." "And if I'd kept the lawyers on a shorter leash." They both sat in glum silence. "How about if we defend ourselves by producing evidence that they reneged on a deal we'd made in good faith. Then the bastards can sue Perry and Lester and we'll still be keeping our promise." Kettlewell tried to picture Perry in a courtroom. He'd never been the most even-keeled dude and since he'd been shot and had his arm broken and been gassed, he was almost pathological.