"So what if Peter is using Ender's money--that's what you're worried about, right?--if we suddenly cut it off, won't he notice? Won't that set back his efforts?"
"Ender saved the world. He's entitled to have his full pension, when and if he ever wants it. There are laws to protect child actors. Why not war heroes traveling at lightspeed?"
"Ah," said Graff. "So you are thinking about what will happen when you take off in the scoutship we offered you."
"I don't need you to manage my money. Petra will do it just fine. I want her to have the use of the money."
"Meaning you think you'll never come back."
"You're changing the subject. Software. Managing Ender's investments."
"A semi-autonomous program that--"
"Not semi. Autonomous."
"There are no autonomous programs. Besides which, the stock market is impossible to model. Nothing that depends on crowd behavior can be accurate over time. What computer could possibly deal with it?"
"I don't know," said Bean. "Didn't that mind game you had us play predict human behavior?"
"It's very specialized educational software."
"Come on," said Bean. "It was your shrink. You analyzed the behavior of the kids and--"
"That's right. Listen to yourself. We analyzed."
"But the game also analyzed. It anticipated our moves. When Ender was playing, it took him places the rest of us never saw. But the game was always ahead of him. That was one cool piece of software. Can't you teach it to play Investment Manager?"
Graff looked impatient. "I don't know. What does an ancient piece of software have to do with...Bean, do you realize how much effort you're asking me to go to in order to protect Ender's pension? I don't even know that it needs protecting."
"But you should know that it doesn't."
"Guilt. You, the conscienceless wonder, are actually using guilt on me."
"I spent a lot of time with Sister Carlotta. And Petra's no slouch, either."
"I'll look at the program. I'll look at Ender's money."
"Just out of curiosity, what is the program being used for now that you don't have any kids up there?"
Graff snorted. "We have nothing but kids here. The adults are playing it now. The Mind Game. Only I promised them never to let the program do analyses on their gameplay."
"So the program does analyze."
"It does pre-analysis. Looking for anomalies. Surprises."
"Wait a minute," said Bean.
"You don't want me to have it run Ender's finances?"
"I haven't changed my mind about that. I'm just wondering--maybe it could look at a really massive database we've got here and analyze...well, find some patterns that we're not seeing."
"The game was created for a very specific purpose. Pattern finding in databases wasn't--"
"Oh, come on," said Bean. "That's all it did. Patterns in our behavior. Just because it assembled the database of our actions on the fly doesn't change the nature of what it was doing. Checking our behavior against the behavior of earlier children. Against our own normal behavior. Seeing just how crazy your educational program was making us."
Graff sighed. "Have your computer people contact my computer people."
"With your blessing. Not some foot-dragging fob-them-off-with-smoke-and-mirrors 'effort' that deliberately leads nowhere."