To avoid some scary-looking, switchbacky stuff in the Okanagans—perhaps not the best choice, in the middle of the night, and at this time of year—they shot up north and connected with a bigger, straighter highway at Kelowna. There they stopped at a gas station/convenience store, and Peter took the exceptional step of buying coffee. Zula made the hopeless suggestion that she be allowed to drive and Peter offered her an alternative role: "Talk to me and keep me awake." Which she could only laugh at since he hadn’t said a word. But from Kelowna onward she did try to talk to him. They ended up talking mostly about nerd stuff, since that was the only area where, once he got going, the words would really tumble out of him for hours. He was perpetually interested in the underlying security apparatus of T’Rain and how it might be vulnerable and how, therefore, he might be able to improve it, while charging them money for the service and making him look very good to his new employer. Zula was perpetually unable to talk about it much because she had signed an NDA of awesome length and intimidating detail, something on which no minister, scoutmaster, or guidance counselor could ever have given sage advice. She could talk about what had been made public, which was that her boss, Pluto, was the Keeper of the Key, the sole person on earth who knew a certain encryption key that was changed every month and that was used to digitally sign all the fantasy-geological output of his world-generating algorithm. It was sort of like the signature of the Treasurer of the United States that was printed on every dollar bill to certify that it was genuine. Because the output of Pluto’s code dictated, among other things, how much gold was in each wheelbarrow of ore dug out by Dwinn miners. Zula had not been hired to work so much on the precious-metals part of the system—her job was computational fluid dynamics simulations of magma flow—but she had to touch those security measures every day, and Peter was forever posing hypothetical questions about them and how they might be breached—not by him but by hypothetical black-hat hackers that he could be paid to outwit.