"Marcus? Harmless idiot. Well, not entirely harmless: he’s trying to achieve alarm and affray. It’s a political engagement, allegedly. The intention is to jolt you out of established patterns of thought, to change the way your mind processes information and force you to examine it more closely. Specifically to point up the differences between machine-based semiotic analysis and human parsing and responses." She snorts. "Which, I have to say, he definitely achieved on the stairs. In both your case and his—I doubt it’s ever occurred to him that his own thought is as circumscribed as anyone else’s. The proximate excuse at the moment is the Monitoring Bill—although I’ve noticed that dressing up seems to be the chosen answer to a lot of different questions."