The contracts kept coming from all over: Matrix programming, system analysis, hardware design and maybe even a few shadowy Matrix runs, but she never talked about that. Until now a generalist, Lolly began to specialize. She'd always loved solving puzzles, she'd told me, and soon she found her niche in signal-enhancement and "washing." Washing was the half-art, half-science of picking out the true signal from background noise, and then cleaning it of distortion. Her goal had always been to work for UCASSA-the UCAS Space Agency-enhancing signals from deep-space probes, improving the signal-to-noise, or S/N, ratio. But she was still young, and would need to gather more experience before she could get the job she wanted. And that was why she signed on with Avatar Security Technologies, one of the Lone Star subsidiaries-to get experience.