When she finished her warmups and went on, she found a bid already 
waiting for her. The casting agent, which was a semiautonomous piece of 
software, had assembled a company of nine payers, enough to ract all the guest 
roles in First Class to Geneva, which was about intrigue among rich 
people on a train in Nazi-occupied France, and which was to ractives what The Mousetrap was to passive theatre. It was an ensemble piece: nine 
guest roles to be assumed by payers, three somewhat larger and more glamorous 
host roles to be assumed by payees like Miranda. One of the characters was, 
unbeknownst to the others, an Allied spy. Another was a secret colonel in the 
SS, another was secretly Jewish, another was a Cheka agent. Sometimes there was 
a German trying to defect to the Allied side. But you never knew which was 
which when the ractive started up; the computer switched all the roles around 
at random.