From Darron’s perspective, this made perfect sense. Darron was necessarily loyal to the Chief Advisor, far beyond the call of duty. If anyone did an audit of the strict interrogations he’d been running… He shuddered. If he were lucky, they’d throw him in jail forever. If he was not, well, his personal nightmare saw him locked in a torture room, worked over by the best of his men as part of their plea bargain.
So here Darron stood with the members of his interrogation team by his side, swinging a machine gun he’d just spent half an hour learning to use.
Miraculously, it looked like the speech was going to go off without a hitch. He started to relax. Then the speaker paused dramatically before saying, “Listen carefully, now. I have important news.”
Darron stiffened: this was off-script. He glanced sideways at the Chief Advisor, who was standing at the bottom of the scaffolding steps. He looked like he’d just been zinged with all the electrical power in the city.
The speaker continued, his voice booming through the microphones. “The President is dead. I’m an actor who was hired by the Chief Advisor to trick you.”
For a moment, you could have heard dandelion seeds waft through the air over Pennsylvania Avenue.
Then the noise began.
Equations flowed from the virtual point of Dr. Everest’s fingertip, explaining the response of the price level algorithm under diverse pressures.
Much against his will, Micky found himself being drawn into the math. As Jerry had pointed out, he was one of the BrainTrust’s premier math geeks, and he couldn’t help being fascinated.
Then the number in the corner of the wallscreen blinked, breaking him from his near-trance. He was the first to raise his hand. “Dr. Everest, the number changed.”
Everyone looked to see the new value of the SmartCoin account. It had grown from 1.0000SC to 1.0001SC.
Erika glanced over. “Excellent. As predicted, the costs of goods bought and sold through the SmartCoin network has fallen enough to trigger the creation of more currency. As you can see, the holder of this coin—me, actually—now has slightly more money. So though the real price of goods has fallen, the nominal price will stay approximately the same.”
Someone in the audience asked, “What caused the deflation?”
Erika shrugged. “There are dozens of reasons we might see deflation. One is if the effective amount of currency in circulation falls so each remaining coin can buy more goods. This can be caused, for example, when people choose to slow their spending, such as if they decide to pay off their credit card debt.” She shrugged. “In the absence of other volatility, however, the tendency in a technological society is for currency to deflate simply because productivity increases. As productivity rises, costs fall, so a single coin can buy more.”
Someone in the audience objected. “But productivity metrics throughout Western civilization show that productivity effectively flattened years ago. There are almost no productivity improvements anymore.”
Dr. Everest pointed at the speaker and smiled. “True, but the SmartCoin network has less exposure to Western civilization than other currencies. SmartCoin is used most heavily in Third World nations, where productivity continues to climb as they adopt basic tech. And of course, the heaviest single user of SmartCoin is the BrainTrust, where productivity continues to rise on an exponential curve.”
Micky raised his hand again, but this time just about everyone in the auditorium raised theirs at the same time. A general cry arose, diverse voices alerting the speaker with variations on one theme. “Look! The number changed again!”
The SmartCoin’s value had gone from 1.0001 to 1.0002.
Dr. Everest stared at the number, and her pale hand rose to her throat as her eyes widened. She swallowed. “Well, that was unexpected.”
Major Drew Moreno stared in horror as the crowd surged, screaming, against the fence separating the North Lawn from Pennsylvania Ave. He spoke with much greater calm than he felt. “Steady, men. Hold your fire.” At least, he thought, hold it until I figure out who the hell to shoot.
He heard muffled sounds scattered through the crowd that might have been gunfire, but in the absence of spotting a person with a gun shooting another person, he was reluctant to engage. He went to his best sniper and pulled him off the line. “If we see someone about to commit murder, I’m depending on you to take them down. Can you do that for me?”
The young man, pale but determined, nodded. “Oorah!”
It didn’t take long to identify the most dangerous prick in the mess. Up on the North Lawn, as the first people managed to climb over the backs of the broken and beaten first line of citizens at the fence, the chief interrogator panicked. He hosed down the intruders and his men followed suit, shooting into the packed crowd with no plan except slaughter.
Drew pointed at the Interrogator. “Kill that bastard!”
His sniper fired, and Darron fell over on his back.
Darron’s men somehow managed to figure out that the shot had come from Drew’s Marines. They raised their guns and started firing through the crowd at him. They were ineffectual as much because they were poor marksmen as because they were panicked, and also, the crowd was soaking up far too many bullets.
Drew had little choice. “Men, you see the line of bastards shooting at us? I was right, the Chief Advisor is attempting a coup! Take them down!”
Even as his team started firing as carefully as they could to minimize civilian casualties, Drew saw the next problem. The idiot in charge of the Marines on the west side of the park had seen the interrogator shooting at him and his men shooting back, and decided that Drew was the one fomenting a rebellion. The idiot’s men raised their rifles and began firing on Drew’s position.
Darron’s team was mostly down, and the survivors were now running. One fell as Drew watched, shot in the back, not by his own men, but by someone in the crowd.
Time to change tactics. Drew commanded, “Check fire! Everybody get down!” As his men went prone, Drew spoke quietly to his sniper. “If you get a clear shot, take out that traitorous major over there. But only if it’s a clear shot.”
His sniper eyed him doubtfully. “Not much chance of a clear shot here.”
Drew nodded. “But those are your orders. Be patient.”
As Drew watched, the situation deteriorated even more. Some of the people the Marines on the west side had shot had armed friends. One Marine went down in the face of fire from the crowd, then another. The hesitation the Marines had felt before evaporated. They fired back in earnest, creating a bloodbath of packed meat that had once been human beings.
Drew tried desperately to figure out what to do next.
The Chief Advisor stared with unspeakable rage at the faux President at the podium, then turned to the closest Secret Service agent, a member of his detail. “Kill him!” he ordered, pointing up the steps.
The agent stared back at him with puzzlement that slowly turned thoughtful, and the Advisor realized giving the agent such an order had not been his brightest move. The agent looked like he was considering shooting him, as if he were responsible for this hoax.
Of course, since the Advisor was responsible for the hoax, the possibility that the agent would arrive at this conclusion was perhaps his foremost problem—a problem even bigger than the mob tearing down the fence.
The Advisor turned to shout for Darron, only to watch the chief interrogator fall as he got hit by… Oh, Christ, he’d been shot by one of the Marines.
Moments later, Darron’s men broke. One of them ran toward him. The Advisor started to shout for the interrogator to go up and shoot the actor lying flat at the podium, but the man tossed his rifle aside to enable a faster withdrawal.
The Advisor felt the Secret Service agent step up behind him. He tensed, expecting to hear and feel a bullet, but he’d underestimated the Service.
The agent said quietly, “Sir, we should withdraw to the White House until we understand what’s happening.”
The Advisor stared at him
for a moment, then nodded crisply. “Quite right.” He walked with confident haste back to the building as his security team formed up around him.
Wolf scanned the situation with the eyes of a professional though his heart kept trying to leap in his throat.
The crowd was shifting to the east, away from the Marines shooting them, growing into an impossibly denser mass between Wolf’s little group and Drew’s east-side Marines. Reaching his friend Drew had become an unattainable objective.
Searching the situation for something useful he could do, Wolf concluded the main source of slaughter was the west-side Marines, and specifically the major who was encouraging them. If he could take out that major…
His eyes settled on Jonathan, who had pulled a pistol from somewhere and was swinging the firearm wildly, trying to protect his family. Wolf stepped around the wife and child and laid his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “Put your arm down, friend. You can’t make things better with your gun, but perhaps I can. Please give it to me.”
Eventually, Jonathan’s eyes settled on Wolf’s face, and a look of sanity entered them. He handed Wolf the gun.
Wolf gripped his arm. “Stay here with your family. Let me see if I can start fixing this.” He pushed toward the west-side Marines through the crowd streaming in the opposite direction until he had enough clearance to take a decent shot. He knelt, steadied, and fired.
His bullets hit the major in the chest. The major’s body armor stopped them but knocked him down, taking him out of the action.
The problem with getting a clear shot at the Marines was, of course, the Marines now had a clear shot at him. He hit the dirt and prayed.
Surprisingly, his prayer was answered. As he fired, Mother Nature drowned the sound of his shots in a crescendo of thunder as the storm burst to life. Rain pummeled the city, the drops falling so thickly you could barely see your outstretched hand through eyes shuttered against the violent splashing of the water.
After a moment, the rain lessened enough to allow Wolf to look up and see lightning cascade in giant arcs across the sky from horizon to horizon, forming the spiderweb outline of an inverted bowl above the crowd.
In a moment of silence between thunderclaps, Wolf heard another staccato roar behind him when Drew’s troops started firing. Wolf looked around and saw Drew leading them across the field, their weapons pointed straight into the air as they used the sound and their disciplined momentum to push through to the other Marine force. Between the fall of their commander and the pelting of the storm, the west-side soldiers had paused for a moment, and Drew was risking his team to reach them, take charge, and call a halt to the slaughter.
The west-side troops, seeing they were not being attacked by Drew’s platoon, continued to hold their fire. Soon Drew had them backing away from the thinning crowd.
Wolf started to push himself up, grunted with pain, and lay back down on his stomach. A fierce burning ran down his back: one of the Marines firing at him had connected.
A female voice that sounded like a drill sergeant’s yelled over the noise of the rain and the thunder and the crowd. “Stay down! You’ve been hit.”
Jonathan knelt next to him. “Better listen to her,” he said with considerable pride. “She’s a nurse. She’s also my wife.”
The drill sergeant/nurse inspected his back. “It’s a flesh wound, but it’s the longest flesh wound I’ve ever seen.” She touched his shoulder blade. “From here,” she ran her hand down to his buttock, “to here.” She turned to Jonathan. “Take off your shirt and cut it into strips with that ridiculous knife of yours.”
As Jonathan meekly cut his shirt up and she started working on Wolf with the makeshift bandages, she muttered, “Men. Always trying to be the hero. Unbelievable.”
The rain saved tremendous numbers of lives that day, not just Wolf’s. The foremost survivors of the crowd, having pushed down the fence and stomped over the bodies of those in the first wave, had started running after the Chief Advisor and his small security team. The Secret Service called in the overhead gunships to mow down the rioters. At that moment, the storm erupted. The crowd slowed to a stop, and the copter gunners, who couldn’t see a damn thing through the rain, held their fire.
The Chief Advisor made it back to the White House intact. Shaking off the rain that had soaked him to the bone, he muttered, “Well, that could have gone better.”
Dr. Everest forced herself to lower her hand from her throat and speak calmly. “You’re getting quite a treat. Never in history has the SmartCoin system made two deflationary adjustments to the currency in such a short period of time.”
The displayed winked again and returned with 1.0003.
Erika grabbed the edge of the podium in horror.
A young woman’s voice rose from the audience. “Dr. Everest, could someone have broken your Oracle algorithm?”
Erika nodded. “It’s not impossible. I hope that that’s what’s happening because that would merely be a disaster.” She took a sip of water and noticed her hand was trembling. “But this is almost certainly not an attack on SmartCoin. Something far more terrible than that has happened.”
She choked as she spoke her next words, addressed to the people at the sides of the stage. “Folks, could you turn the wifi and cell networks back on, please? We need to see the news. I’m afraid we’ll be cutting our lecture short.”
The young woman called, “Why? What’s wrong?”
Erika looked out at the crowd grimly. “Something terrible has just happened in the world, and it has triggered a long-overdue global economic readjustment.”
Another voice shouted, “Uh, what does that mean?”
Erika stared hard at the speaker far in the back of the room. “It means the world’s financial systems have just shattered. We’re looking at the beginning of an economic calamity far worse than the 1929 Great Depression. It will be like nothing you have ever imagined in your darkest nightmares.”
2
Schelling Point
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public's money.
— generally attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, possibly originated by Alexander Fraser Tytler
Lindsey Postrel, the owner/editor/operator of the Cogent News media site with the motto “Liberation not Regulation,” had been saying for over a decade, “Factual news is currently out of style, but I’m confident that will change. Reality has a habit, after all, of making itself felt in the long run.” She found herself tantalized by the possibility that right here, right now, was the teachable moment when factuality would make its dramatic comeback.
Factuality had made a partial comeback, at least among a small community of rich people, almost two years earlier when Lindsey blew the lid off California’s semi-secret plan to balance its budget by running civil forfeitures against all the millionaires in California. That scoop had put her on the map, increasing her readership and viewership by a factor of ten.
And today, judging by the numbers she was seeing for people logging into her show, she could have another factor of ten increase if these next interviews went as expected.
Lindsey introduced Colin Wheeler, whom most of her audience already knew, then smiled at the rather severe-looking middle-aged woman seated next to her. “Lenora Thornhill, I’m delighted to meet you.” Lindsey turned to the cameras. “Dr. Thornhill is the Expedition Commander for the Fuxing fleet of the BrainTrust, so it’s a delightful accident that we could get her here today for a few words on the sociology of economic catastrophes.” She turned back to Lenora. “And why are you here at this remarkable moment?”
Lenora gave the cameras a stiff smile. “I came back, as it happens, to hear Dr. Everest’s presentation on SmartCoin.” She let her head slide to the side. “And I needed to talk to my business partner, Jim Caplan, about some changes to the framework.”
Lindsey nodded. “That’s the Accel Educational Framework, which those of you on the BrainTrust have sur
ely encountered before.” Lindsey gave Lenora a shrewd look. “And your husband had nothing to do with your presence?”
Lenora’s smile turned warmer. “Of course. I was hoping to have a few moments of private time with him as well.” Her husband had gotten stuck, after years of pleasant toil as a software engineer, with the job of COO for the Accel Corporation. He rarely managed to leave the archipelago.
Lindsey leaned forward. “So, back to the question of the day. What causes a bubble to burst? Why do people suddenly start panic-selling the goods they’ve bought so eagerly?”
Lenora nodded. “So, in the times leading up to the pop of a bubble, some people know that they are in a bubble, and they know the bubble will burst.” She sighed. “Sometimes, as in the dotcom crash at the turn of the century, just about everyone knows a crash is just around the corner. But—”
Colin picked up the thread. “But until the moment the pop occurs, there’s money to be made riding it, like a surfer catching the leading edge of a tsunami.” His voice acquired dry irony. “It’s all great as long as you manage the last few moments of the trip with luck far in excess of your common sense.”
Lindsey pushed forward. “So, bubbles invariably hang on until…what?”
Lenora jumped in. “Until a game theoretic phenomenon known as a ‘Schelling point’ arises.”
Lindsey sat back. “Ahh. The Schelling point: the moment everyone knows that everyone knows that this is the moment to do a particular thing.”
Lenora nodded. “Schelling points have been with humanity for a very long time, although this form of coordinated cooperation with no communication operated in anonymity until Schelling identified it in 1960.”
Colin gave an example. “In ancient China, when a dynasty became too corrupt for the people to tolerate, it came to be understood by everyone that they would wait until the death of the emperor before revolting. Everyone knew that everyone knew that the time to rebel was at the funeral.”
Braintrust- Requiem Page 3
