Anyway, somebody has to handle all the data that comes out of the tap. In Seattle, that somebody is Avatar, and that's where Lolly ended up. Taps and bugs are notoriously noisy. The signals get fragged up by all the electronic drek just about everybody's got at home these days, and the S/N ration is fragging awful. Sure, contemporary signal-enhancement software and automatic filtering algorithms are sophisticated and wiz, but sometimes they're just not wiz enough. What's needed is that indefinable something, that purely human artistry that some people seem born with. Lolly was one of those people, and the signal-washing job might well have been created especially for her. She told me that she never listened to the contents of the taps. She didn't give a frag about what the subjects were saying. The only thing that mattered was tweaking the data stream to give that last boost to the S/N ratio.