At quarter to six, after having been in the office for well over ten hours, I finish up enough to leave the desk and sprint across to Aureus’s office. Two and a half hour meeting. I shamble back to my office, reeling with exhaustion. The elevator ride takes an eternity. I drop my bag at my desk and make a miserable grimace at the Latina who’s cleaning the office. She returns my miserable grimace, then grins with sympathy. We’ve had this exchange several times before. It’s nearly nine; the sun’s a dark-red circle behind the clouds on the horizon.

There are one hundred and sixty potential currency hedges waiting to be run. Everyone else uses Excel, but the data entry is just as tedious as on a graphing calculator and I’m a creature of habit. Besides, the academic feel of the TI-83 comforts me.

This is one of the standard functions of the analyst: looking for free money when everyone knows there isn’t any. It’s not as paradoxical as you might think. There are a number of inefficiencies (places where the market has mispriced a security or misjudged its riskiness), and inefficiencies translate to free money or cheap money just lying around. The trouble is that, when someone picks up that money, it goes into their pocket. There’s no continuous market glitch that you can exploit again and again for profit; it would go away (or become fully priced in) if you did that. Sadly, there is no such thing as a money machine.

So there are thousands of us running these numbers, looking for pennies on the ground that nobody else has seen. Statistically, there aren’t any. Realistically, there are. And if we weren’t looking, the market would be far more inefficient than it is, and then somebody would find it worthwhile to start looking again, and then everyone else would follow suit. So I’m actually a tiny circuit in the massive half-human half-artificial brain that drives global prices and keeps the market operating with reasonable efficiency. This is why I don’t usually mind running currency hedges. Tonight, though, it’s like digging holes and filling them in. I want to get home to Aureus. I punch numbers faster and faster, until I’m trembling. I’ve eaten only an apricot today, and that at my desk. I’m hungry. I’m lonely. My body hurts from spending too many consecutive sixteen-hour days in stilettos. I’m the only one left on the entire floor, which is dark except for emergency lights. I want a shower, a bowl of soup, a glass of wine, Aureus, and bed. I feel very small in this vast dark silent space with its deadlines and tensions only in cold-storage for the night. My fingers are flying. I’m breathing too quickly; I can’t slow down. The Latina looks at me oddly as she leaves with her cart. Half an hour later, I’ve concluded that there’s not a single inefficiency large enough to cover costs. I fire off the email and am suddenly so exhausted that I’m not sure I’ll make it home. I briefly consider getting a half-hour of sleep so that I can drive safely. Then I realize that I’ll be here all night if I try that. I groan, shoulder my bag, and go.