When discussing her Project, April liked to dwell on the eldritch twentieth-century correlation between women’s hemlines and the stock market. The market would go up, hemlines would go up. The market would drop, hemlines would drop. Nobody knew why, or ever learned why, but the correlation held quite steady for decades. Eventually, of course, the stock market lost all contact with reality, and women no longer gave a damn about their hemlines even if they bothered to wear skirts, but, as April said, the crux of her Project was to discover and seize similar modern correlations while they were still fresh, and before the endless chaos of society necessarily rendered them extinct. Given that chaos, the "why" of the correlation was indeterminate. And given those genetic algorithms, causation wasn’t even logically traceable within the circuits of the machine. In any case, reason and causation were not the point of April’s effort. The crux of the matter was whether April’s massive simulation could parallel reality closely enough to be a useful design tool.