Any time in Hellsborough is a time when rigorous professional reasoning is going to run up against the economics of this place — and lose.

¢hits — Hellsborough's murk-charged cryptocurrency — do not look like money in the physical sense; they look like a quality in the space around you that is slightly denser, slightly warmer, slightly more organised. Accumulate enough of them and you risk becoming what the old players call a crypto-blub: a murk-entity so saturated with ¢hit-charge that the distinction between what you are and what you own becomes, as the manuals put it, "technical rather than practical." The murk notices the transfer. The murk always notices.

Ming Shalom does not keep her wealth in coin: the ¢hit is not a physical object but a unit of murk-charged value, and her fortune sits suspended four metres above the vault floor of the Hellsborough Hole in a managed murk-field lattice — outer nodes smaller than you'd expect, total larger than you'd like. The vault's builders apparently intended that anyone who stayed long enough would start thinking about money when they hadn't been before, which I find either elegant or extremely sinister, and have not yet decided which.