She opens the medical case history from her in-tray, and begins to read. The patient’s name was Anna Magdalena, and she was a probability and risk analyst. She was ultimately diagnosed as suffering from a rare form of epilepsy, in which her everyday experience was aligned with—but not actually the same as—what anyone else in her position might have felt, but which occasionally and unpredictably produced seizures manifesting as transient delusional paranoia. She would go from utterly calm to terrified in a few seconds, and back again. The syndrome was not ameliorable by therapy or medication: it was a crudely physical dysfunction firing ineluctably in her brain and ruining her mind. Ultimately her physical health was affected, the sudden flooding of her endocrine system with stress hormones leading to a dangerous tachycardic exhaustion. The extent of the problem came to light when she submitted herself for neural interview during a paranoiac spasm, believing she had uncovered a criminal syndicate. The sudden change in the structure of her thoughts meant that a direct neural interview would work only during her lucid periods, when she had minimal recollection of her manic ones. During the manic ones, the flurry of signals in the brain overloaded the probes. There was simply too much going on. Doctors hypothesised that part of the issue was a kind of noise, like the roaring of a gale inside her head, which produced the negative emotional response that then became paranoia.