The output, they called it, though to those who lived within the skin of the thing it was less a measurement than a tide, the velocity and the sharp, bright quality of the breakthrough solutions hewn from the organism’s own stubborn and unflagging blood; and this was born of the D, the index of their many facedness, the variance of those cognitive and experiential and cultural ghosts that walked within them, the identities that were not just names on a ledger but the very soil and rot and richness of their disparate being;

and then the alpha, the exponent of amplification, the degree arbitrary and often weary to which this wild and structural variety was allowed to rise up and stain the white, high pillared strategy of the elders, to let the truth of the varied many influence the top level vision of the few; and always there was the E, the variable of equity, that coefficient of either the grace or the neglect that decided if a specific node i that solitary and waiting soul would receive the structural nourishment of capital and mentorship and the hard won resources required to express the full, unbridled genetic potential of a lineage that had waited for centuries in the dust; and finally the I, the vector of inclusion, that metric defining how the distinct and lonely perspective of that same node i was woven—threaded, really, like a single strand of scarlet in a great and somber blanket—into the active, decision-making matrix of the group, so that the will of the many was at last irrevocably colored by the vision of the one.