Crash

by Guy Haley

  Every system has been assigned a pair of starships to investigate and settle favourable worlds they might find there – in Heracles’ case it is the ESS Adam Mickiewicz and ESS Goethe, both carrying colonists from central Europe. The vessels’ survey teams carry sophisticated equipment that will enable them to best use the resources they find upon each planet, or, in the case of their being little or no life, how to introduce adapted Earth lifeforms to create a biosphere where people can comfortably live. By the time the stargate opens, in seventy years’ time, multiple, comfortable worlds will await Earth’s teeming multitudes. Let’s go and talk to some of our bold pioneers now... [No mention is made of the difficulties, the chances of failure, the vast cost, or the fact that most of the audience this propaganda is intended for could not possibly pass the entrance tests to join the effort.]

  – Public holograph film, part of the popular weekly series To The Stars! broadcast worldwide, 2155-2165

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Market

  WITHIN HIS PLAIN virtspace at Consolidated Holdings, Karl Njálsson watched the Market’s numbers play. He was a quant – a quantitative analyst. An old title, and somewhat quaint, given how far its meaning had shifted, but one that carried with it still a certain weight and freedom. One such freedom was of expression. Other quants decorated their workspaces with whimsical imagery. They made them palaces of ice, or of impossible neo-modern architecture, or of pornography. Not Karl. Karl favoured a minimal display, a flow of primary coloured numbers in streams around him. What stocks were up, which were down, a space here for non-tracked stock that was nevertheless of interest, a larger space for the simulations that mirrored the Market’s own trades. He had gone through a phase of sensory experimentation, adding sound effects or odour and flavour markers to his investors’ portfolios, and he had experimented with his avatar, vainly reducing his large nose, strengthening his chin, adding gloss to his hair. It had made him feel a fake. On a whim, he had crafted a cartoon world of anthropomorphic creatures to shout out important deals, a caricature of the trading floors of old. Bears and bulls and dancing numbers featured heavily, all trite. They’d distracted him, and he’d torn it down after a day. It surprised him to learn it, but it turned out Karl liked the world as it was, unpleasant though it may be.

  It was possible, Karl thought, that he was deliberately suppressing the artistic side of his nature in order to limit distraction. Whatever meaning the word once had, securities now meant exactly that: security. Karl wanted to know himself, was prone to introspection. How could he second guess the Market if he could not second guess himself? Vulgar virtspaces were nothing but sightseeing tours of one’s own id; how foolish to be diverted by such things. Karl did not like to use his imagination for anything but market possibility. He often thought he had conjured up his half-assed imaginariums as a demonstration of how inappropriate they were.

  Imagination was a facility that hindered his work. Daydreaming was beneficial, true, but playing with that imagination, making it real... People with imaginations hoped too much, or feared too much. Imagination and anxiety were close friends, and no one wanted an anxious quant. Quants invented scenarios to run against the Market’s own, and that required a small degree of creativity, but analysis was the bedrock of such scenarios, not imagination. Consolidated Holdings had some appreciation of this theory, and the neural interface shunts that connected his flesh carcass to the wonderlands of the net where the Market worked carried imagination dampers, should the quants wish to use them. Were he in charge, and he intended to be one day, Karl would make their activation compulsory. Facts were king in speculation, imagination was the killer of fortunes. If that made him bland, so be it. Better to be bland and rich than colourful and poor.

  Karl’s sense of time was subjectively slowed by the shunt’s mechanisms so that he could comprehend the Market’s activity. Without slow-time, monitoring the Market’s billion trades per second was impossible; even with it, Karl could do little but follow the broader trends. That was enough. Karl was only a balance, a human overseer to an industrious quantum slave. Once upon a time, quants drove the markets, but now they watched, vigilant for cascade effects. One erroneous outcome plot could demolish the values of healthy companies in seconds. In event of a rare error, the Market could crash or force a bubble, and then a bigger crash would ensue. It wasn’t likely, it didn’t happen often, but such errors as there were in the system had a tendency to multiply themselves. The Market was not infallible, but it was far less volatile than when people were directly involved. Provided the quants remained vigilant, boom and bust was a historical horror.

  The shunt brought many benefits, and another was to enhance Karl’s prodigious mathematical talents. He spent some time on his scenarios, gaming against the system, assigning rankings to holdings he thought the Market might or should push. The stock tickers glowed brighter as he touched them with his mind. He insisted on seeing these actions as physical, extending his avatar’s phantom arm to the numbers and pressing them, although it all took place in the ghostworld of the net. Disincarnate interaction with the Market was uncomfortably vertiginous.

  He selected his stocks desultorily. Once, it had amused him to pit his own predictions against the Market; now, he was bored by his own clumsiness. Statistical arbitrage was a dying art for humans. There were firms where quants still took a greater hand in driving trades, but they were outperformed by those firms where the Market was left to its own devices, and Darwinian economics won out. In an earlier age, Karl would have been an exemplary trader. His accuracy ratings were a solid sixty per cent – more, if you isolated his knack for shorting. The Market averaged eighty. But every year, the Market became more accurate; the quants would ultimately follow the hundreds of other professions rendered irrelevant by technology into history.

  Karl watched the numbers twist around each other, streaming off into the uncertain distances of virtspace. The Market worked silently.

  Karl traced the Market’s own dealings with itself for eight hours of subjective time. The famine in South Asia had pushed up food prices across the board; the ripples in their elevated values, once anomalous, had become part of Karl’s daily world. Coltan was scarce, copper down, General Carbon struggled still. The establishment of a new Lagrange processing point hiked shares in Kosten...

  Karl narrowed his eyes. That was interesting. He brought up a detailed report on Kosten Enterprises. Too high, surely. He went further, dragging up ancillaries and associated industries, suppliers and competitors. What he saw made him dig deeper. It wasn’t just Kosten, all the major corporations involved in off-world construction were up. He frowned. He cut and pasted the stocks of a few thousand related companies into his own simulation, and watched the stocks climb. So far so good, but something seemed a little off. His fingers danced on virtual air, bringing up fifteen parallel traces on simulated portfolios. He set a variety of scenarios, each with differing opening parameters, backdated the start to two years ago. He watched. In the main, his scenarios followed the Market. A couple of individual stocks fell away here and there where they had not in reality, but that was not unusual. Only in two were there severe drop-offs across the board, but as these were the more extreme scenarios he’d plotted, Karl was not concerned. Seven of his scenarios ran close enough to the Market to be worth continuing into the future.

  The scenarios overtook the current day’s trading. Three months out, six months out, twelve. His simulations pulled in hard data: past performance, anticipated tech breakthrough, the resources crisis, historical trending and soft data (most human-behavioural in nature: emergent memes, aggregate social approval, cultural morale ratings, and a variety of minor factors). There were billions of potentials he could have included, but he did not; in that, he was crude and obvious where the Market was subtle and opaque. The Market could and did explore all options to an individual level, a new invisible hand, guiding Adam Smith’s original. To do the same was impossible for Karl. To human minds the financia
l markets were stochastic, to the Market they were not. Karl’s job was to make sure the hands behaved themselves, that was all.

  Karl let the simulations run, and turned his attention to the Market’s continued trading. He became engrossed in the interplay in the prices of conservation semicharities, their financial ecosystems more complex than those of the natural world they sought to protect.

  An urgent chiming.

  One of his simulations was collapsing. Then another, then a third, a fourth, the soft light of their graphics turning angry red. Karl frowned as stocks tumbled, all around seven years or so out from the present. Alarms ran into and over one another in shocking cacophony. He silenced them with a gesture.

  He checked the Market’s actual investments in the field again, going through them one by one rather than cutting and pasting them as he had for the simulations. The Market was playing the long game, there was no doubt about that, and with most of the major Pointer clans’ money. There was very little of the to-and-fro lending between Market sub-units indicative of the network anticipating a collapse. Of course, the various portfolios it ran for the Pointer families were all in competition with each other, according to instructions from their human holders, but these... They looked unusually homogenous. That was strange. Surely the Market had not missed the bubble?

  He followed a few lines of inquiry, but could find no identifiable reasons for the Market pushing space corporations so heavily. He stared at the numbers, tapping his steepled forefingers against his lips.

  Something wasn’t right. As long as the Market made money for the Pointers – the 0.01 per cent of the population who held 80 per cent of the world’s wealth – no one cared what it did. He cared now. The Market was not behaving rationally. The thought he was witnessing one of its rare mistakes thrilled him as much as frightened him. There had been no major errors during his time as a quant. He tried to think dispassionately. He was a soldier in peacetime, yearning for war. He had been trained to act, spent all day waiting to act, but had never been called on to act. Was action needed, or did he need action? That was the question. His heart quickened.

  There was a twinge of pain behind his eyes. His shift was coming to an end.

  Annoyance bit him. No doubt there were multiple, obscure factors at play here, whose roots extended far into the world; the kind of chains of cause and effect that humans never caught. It was one thing to track the Market, another to see what it saw. The scope of its power was awesome.

  The Market was held by some to be prescient; its inscrutable activities fuelled conjecture by all manner of flesh and blood charlatans. Numerological horoscoping, monetary divination, modern day soothsayers. They were about as accurate as reading the entrails of pigeons. It was ironic to Karl that something designed to eliminate irrationality had fostered it.

  He checked his clock. Four minutes remained of his shift, subjective time. He resisted the temptation to up his slow-time arrest to the maximum and investigate further. His headache was building. Pain would compromise his judgment. He had to do this properly – the bubble would not manifest for years in real time, he had centuries of subjective time to track the causes down and eliminate it. He could tell Hwang, but he would not. This would be his find, his glory, promotion maybe. He would go to it on his next shift. He should sleep on it, yes.

  The Market worked in mysterious ways, but not so mysteriously that he couldn’t work it out, given time.

  The shift clock beeped shrilly. Time was up. He felt the presence of Hwang as an itch at the back of his mind. His shift was over. He withdrew as Hwang entered. Consolidated Holdings promised unbroken vigilance to its customers, and unbroken vigilance was what they got.

  Karl opened his eyes, his real, flesh-and-blood eyes. He was in darkness. Muffled voices, the movement of hands on his body, the support technician about the messy procedure of disconnecting him.

  The helmet came off first, blank and sinister. The chair rose to an upright position, and Karl felt his muscles cramp. He had not been away long, but his body took exception to being ignored.

  Karl grimaced at the metallic drag of the shunt needle. The withdrawal always seemed to take far longer than was possible, as if the shunt were reluctant to let go of his brain. The sensation was unbearable, as if the organ were being gently unfolded and drawn from his skull along with the interface. Primitive, this direct connection, but the microseconds lost in wireless transmission from Market to quant were unconscionable. Karl gritted his teeth.

  The sensation ceased. He heard the tech behind him wipe the needle down, unscrew it from the shunt cable and push it into its sterile case. He put the locking plug in and closed the case with a click.

  Karl sat forward. The tech handed him a tissue to wipe off the fluid dribbling down his neck, then set to work on the saline drip. A nurse handed him his supplements and a glass of water; Karl took them, then nodded gratefully as he was handed a slack handful of painkillers. She applied drug impregnated patches to his skin and withdrew.

  He went through his medical check silently. None of the staff ever spoke to him. At shift change, he left one world of loneliness for another.

  An hour later, Karl was showered and dressed in his uniform of cold grey smartshirt and formal blue jeans. He dialled up his gondola, went down to the lobby and headed out into the close night. He had a booking at Portis, and a good date with a high-rated playmate. He’d been at work for a total of three hours, only twenty-five minutes of that inside the Market. He had earned fifty-six times the national monthly salary in that period.

  He ignored the pain in his head. The boat pulled up at the Wall Street canal wharf, and his inChip informed him that he had time to change, if he wished. He ordered the boat to head for home.

  Not prepared for the outside world, he set his inChip to an entertainments channel and blocked out the city.

  “AND THEN, I mean, we went to Tihuana, and my, my, ain’t it hot there!”

  Karl nodded disinterestedly at the playmate. He’d requested beautiful and was not disappointed. The man was a living sculpture of Apollo: gym-built muscles, strong face, tall, good teeth, oiled black curly hair, a good tan – a real one, not out of a bottle or from pills, gene-tweaked maybe, but that was a species of real. Good faces cost good money, and that suggested the playmate was gifted in his work.

  Karl’s interest in finding out whether that was the case or not was waning as the man prattled on and on about himself. He had one of those high voices some gay men cultivate, one that slid up and down the octaves as he melodramatically recounted yet another tedious, shallow anecdote about his tedious, shallow friends. To be at the beating heart of the world and then come to this... Karl’s eyes were cold as he nodded and smiled and sipped at his drink. He didn’t like it when they talked so much. He made a note in his inChip to specify that next time he ordered.

  “And he was all like, yeah, well the tequila here is strong!” The man let out a giddy, squealing laugh and held his hand up to his mouth. Perhaps catching Karl’s disapproval, he apologised. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not much of a wine drinker, this has really gone to my head.”

  Karl smiled a little harder. He didn’t doubt the man was unused to wine. He’d have to fuck for a week solid to pay for one glass.

  The residue of his headache bothered him, but if he were honest with himself – and he tried to be – it was the anomalous stocks that stopped him from relaxing. A feeling of foreboding he couldn’t shake had stolen up on him.

  He glanced away from the man – Eduardo or Ricardo or something. Never a good sign when he couldn’t remember their names. The sex was no good for him if he didn’t make some kind of connection. That’s why he’d brought him here to Portis, or so he told himself, to get to know him. Not that he was doing a spectacular job of that.

  The restaurant interior was faced in marble. Water flowed in streams along the partitions between the tables, tinkling down artfully sculpted waterfalls into small pools where fat koi swam, thence into chann
els cut into the floor. Bonsai were displayed on priceless lacquered tables along one wall. The colours of the trees and water were reflected by the restaurant’s subdued greens and blues. All was designed to calm. The room was generously sized, with wide gaps between the tables. In an overcrowded world, space was the principal definition of wealth. Only the very wealthy ate at Portis.

  Water cascaded down the windows, making a fluid sculpture of the cramped city outside. Karl figured they were going for oriental mystique. Naturally, it just came off as yet more New York fakery. Plus ça change.

  Karl pushed his glass around the spotless tablecloth. He enjoyed the texture of the cotton under his fingers after the falseness of the virtspace; cool and crisp.

  Karl liked Portis. The restaurant was an island of calm in an ocean of humanity. He found the crowds of the city archipelago unbearable, and needed somewhere quiet to unwind. Karl came here often.

  Manhattan drew people in by the thousand. Everyone these days was poor, unless they were exceedingly rich. Service of the rich was one of the only ways to end up in the thin middle class band in between. Eduardo or Ricardo or whatever was another leech swimming the canals of NYC, ready to suck on the wealthy; only he was going about it more literally than others.

  Karl snorted.

  Eduardo or Ricardo halted mid-flow, which was a pleasant surprise. Karl reckoned he’d said about fifty words himself all evening. Had he had the inclination to say more, he doubted he would have had the chance.