The coworking space in Gotanda was a single floor whose only feature was its big windows.
One long table, three chairs, one coffee machine. That was close to the entire assets of Sigma Inc. Mio had her laptop open at the end of that table and was streaming text across the black screen of a terminal.
"We launch in five minutes."
Mikoshiba said it from another table. In front of him were a tablet and a sheaf of paper smelling of fresh ink. Makoto's terms of service. The logo Aya had designed—a single straight line with a small upward flick at the end—glowed modestly on the login screen.
"Ugh, Mio, your color again."
Aya said it as she set down a bottle of water. "Are you actually sleeping? If you collapse on launch day, I'm writing in the company history, 'First designer sees the Ice Bayes to her grave.'"
"I slept. Four hours. Two cycles of non-REM sleep are enough for memory consolidation in the brain."
"Out in the world, that's called not sleeping."
Mio didn't answer that, and ran the final test suite. Green "PASS" lines raced up the screen from bottom to top. Not a single line of red mixed in.
"The tests all passed."
That was all she said, quietly.
The corner of Mikoshiba's mouth lifted slightly. "Did you hear that, Aya? The Ice Bayes's seal of approval." He put down the papers and stood up. "Then let's launch. Makoto is open for business."
At Mikoshiba's signal, Aya pressed the Enter key. It was a moment far too plain to call one the three of them shared. No party poppers, no champagne. Just, somewhere on a server, a new social network opened its mouth to the world.
In the first hour, there were forty-two users.
"Connections from our last job, Aya's followers, and friends of friends," Mikoshiba said, looking over the numbers on the admin dashboard. "We'll hit a hundred by the end of today."
"A hundred," Mio repeated. "That's few."
"It's few," Mikoshiba admitted readily. "But it isn't zero. With a hundred people, you can see a hundred different ways of using it. Bugs, requests, malice—all of it comes out in real data. The thing you wanted."
At that, Mio's interest shifted slightly. A real board. Raw data, freshly born, that hadn't passed through anyone's filters. That was her one and only, and sufficient, reason for staying at this company.
"So," Mikoshiba turned toward her. "Himuro. About the banner I've been raising this whole time."
On the login screen, by Aya's hand, a short line of copy had been placed.
A place where scams don't flow in.
"Raise it if you like," Mio said, scrolling the screen. "But that promises too much. No engineer says 'zero scams.'"
"They don't?"
"They can't. However you build it, the gaps never reach zero. A perfect score is impossible in principle. But you can reduce it, even a little. Review new accounts and posts and drop them before other users see them." Mio's fingers called up a diagram of the detection pipeline. A plain plumbing diagram made of dots and lines. "Screening of accounts and before ad placement. User verification. Reports. And constant monitoring. —Gaps remain at every stage. They remain, but the probability of slipping through the stages gets smaller multiplicatively the more stages you stack. Even if one stage lets one in ten through, with four stages it's one in ten thousand. It never reaches zero. But you can get infinitely close. So it's 'getting closer to not flowing in.'"
Mikoshiba stared at the plumbing diagram. Then he said his usual line.
"So—in terms I can understand?"
"Plumbing," Mio said shortly. "You can't make dirty water perfectly free of dirt. —But you can make water as free of dirt as possible. A coarse one for big debris, a fine one for sand, and beyond that an even finer one—you run it through filters with different meshes, layer after layer. The water gets cleaner with each one. That's how you get as close as you can to water you can drink."
"I like it," Mikoshiba laughed. "Let's have Aya turn that straight into copy."
"As long as you don't bend the technology for business decisions," Mio said, driving the point home, "the plumbing metaphor is fine with me."