For the third time or so, I’m going over the file that Cat’s demons put together on the five names, hoping that something will ring a bell. So far, no luck. The five names are all corps—Crystalite Environmental Research Corporation, Griffin Technologies Incorporated, Telestrian Industries Corporation, Margaux Enterprises, and Starbright Advanced Synergetics (a good dandelion-eater corp name if I ever heard one)—all more or less significant players in the Tir and, in some cases, elsewhere in the world as well. As Cat herself told me, none has any official presence in Seattle or UCAS in general. Of the five, Telestrian Industries Corporation—generally known as TIC—is by far the biggest. A big, sprawling, aggressive conglomerate, with its fingers into a hundred different pies. Annual cash flow and assets both measured in the multibillions of nuyen with corporate headquarters in a fragging arcology in downtown Portland. Into everything from genetic engineering to cutting-edge software development, with a few really weird sidelines going on in parallel.