"Lot of soldiers around these days, keeping the peace and all," Lawrence said, falling into idle chatter as easily as he had with Stanton and Walker and the others. How long before he was actually going to have to start dodging the army? The sooner he left London the better he supposed.

He glanced back up, going to sit down on the battered couch. "The project was on 'the potential of self-evolving algorithms in the development of real-time natural speech recognition'," he said with a touch of amusement. "Computers and AI stuff. I basically did a lot of copying up research notes for the professor and the occasional bit of programming."