The more I spoke to her, the more I began to understand properly what it meant that she was the founder of this company: not merely that she was a good business brain, nor even that she possessed a flair for the smoke and mirrors of financing that must have been from her mother’s side of the family. No: Colson said she had the Blacksmith’s Word for numbers, for making them sit up and dance, and I began to realise that Annie was the creative engine of an atelier that worked in computer code. She would mash ideas together in her head and spit them out almost randomly, and Colson would spin them around in the air and bat them right back to her as narratives and demand to know if she could build something that would do that. They were very happy to have me join the parlay: it was an open conversation, only enriched by additional minds. The first rule was that everyone must be heard and no idea was weak. The triage came later, in hard-nosed edit sessions. I skipped those meetings, pleading age and art.