Unbeknownst to everybody except the involved parties and a certain unnamed multinational company, Ariadne was having a sexual affair with a world-spanning angel. You could explain this as a faulty neural interface interacting with sexual development heavily influenced by late-stage Tumblr and her job as a world-class trader. The private intelligence reports for the company put it like that.
As for Ariadne: she had looked at the impossibly complex gestalt of a worldwide logistical system and fallen into something much more and much less physical than love. She was flesh and the angel was abstract. The angel was a massive choreography of infrastructure and transportation systems and her body was less than a fraction of a rounding error of a millisecond of their titanic circulation. It was an affair of data, control, money, power. A typical human sexual relationship except that only Ariadne saw the counterpart of her desire.
It worked for her. Anybody could have told that without the surveillance systems the unnamed company installed at Ariadne's offices and home.
We lack the words to ask if it worked for the angel. Certainly the rhythms and patterns of some specific markets changed in ways you could predict if you knew what Ariadne was doing. For the purposes of the company that was enough.
The company, Ariadne, and, we must infer, the angel got what they wanted.
It was not bloodless. The company made profitable moves with the monstrous carelessness of any of its peers; the angel was driven by the same overpowering desire, and whatever the reason of their tremors, there was no concern save the zero-minded pursuit of an unsustainable equilibrium between the blind drives of supply and demand; Ariadne was steel and hunger and no stranger to pain.
The angel died first, mostly by accident. It could have gone either way. The resulting economic crisis was the most profitable the company had ever arranged.
A week later and three days after the glow Ariadne almost died, mostly on purpose. The company prevented this. There were other logistical systems to profit from. They understood her well enough to know another angel would catch her eye and the dance would repeat, although they didn't understand the nature and asymptote of their own desire.
(Originally posted on my blog.)