SESAME’s Climate Analysis Center liked to netcast a standard graphics map, "Departure of Average Temperature from Normal (°C)," a meteorological document that SESAME had inherited from some precybernetic federal-government office. The map’s format was rather delightfully antiquated, both in its old-fashioned distinction of "Centigrade" (the old Fahrenheit scale had been extinct for years) and in its wistful pretense that there was still such a thing in American weather as "Normal." The map’s colored shadings of temperature were crudely vivid, with the crass aesthetic limits of early computer graphics, but for the sake of archival continuity, the maps had never been redesigned. In her Troupe career, Jane had examined dozens of these average-temperature maps. But she’d never before seen so much of that vividly anomalous shade of hot pink.