A t nine A . M . Texas time every Monday and every Friday morning, Black Hat Practical Operations held a virtual stand-up meeting. They had started inviting Rufus to these shortly after he had set up operations at Marble Mine. It all happened over augmented-reality headsets. They had delivered one such device to him. You could use the thing anywhere and see the same stuff, but the overall effect was more convincing if you did it in a big dark empty space. By virtue of living in an abandoned mine, Rufus had access to one. So every Monday and every Friday just before nine A . M . he would go to a big empty space down in the mine and put the thing on his head. As the meeting started, people would begin to appear, standing in a circle around the room. Head count was never less than a dozen, sometimes as much as two dozen. Most of the participants seemed to be in charge of teams. Rufus, of course, was not in charge of anyone. He was on the invite list, as he well understood, because otherwise he’d be totally isolated. He’d have no idea what was going on and no one would know who he was. This could lead to confusion and friendly-fire fuckups. So he always showed up for the meetings. But he never spoke unless spoken to, which was never.