The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  “You’re telling me LAFF put somebody on Maelstrom whose identity they didn’t know?”

  “No,” said Keane. “As I said, Casters was never officially on Maelstrom. I subcontracted some work to him. Nothing sensitive, and all the work was approved by someone from LAFF. Casters was never supposed to have access to any sensitive information. Of course, he was also one of the world’s leading experts in cryptography and computer security, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if he hacked the Empathix data.”

  “And what makes you think Ed Casters and Rachel Stuil are the same person?”

  “I’d known Ed Casters by reputation for several years before Maelstrom. The first time I worked with him, I did some digging. Didn’t come up with much; he covered his tracks well. But the name struck me as odd, so I spent some time puzzling over it.”

  “And?”

  “It’s an anagram,” Keane replied. “A tribute to one of Ed’s favorite thinkers. A philosopher and mathematician.”

  I thought for a few seconds. There weren’t many people known for their work in both philosophy and mathematics. Bertrand Russell and Gottfried Leibniz came to mind. And there was one other. “Descartes,” I said.

  “Very good, Fowler. Cogito, ergo sum: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Complete balderdash, of course, but old Rene made a valiant effort at a purely rational system of thought. He also developed the Cartesian coordinate system, which we still use.”

  “And how does this get us to Rachel Stuil?”

  “Once I knew Stuil was a made-up name,” Keane replied, “I started looking for anagrams for Rachel Stuil. It took me a little while, but I found one. Another philosopher, considerably earlier than Descartes.”

  I thought for some time but came up with nothing.

  “Heraclitus,” said Keane.

  “Oh, of course,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The famed Heraclitus.”

  “Not as well known as Descartes, admittedly, but he made his own contribution to Western Civilization. And the contrast between the two is instructive. Descartes was ultimately optimistic. He believed in God and the possibility of reconciling faith and reason. Heraclitus was more ambivalent. He’s best known for saying that no man ever steps in the same river twice.”

  “Meaning that change is constant?”

  “Constant, ubiquitous, and inescapable,” replied Keane. “Nothing in the universe is static. Panta rhei: everything flows. Some have characterized his philosophy as an attempt to reconcile this chaos with human reason, which he referred to as ‘Logos.’ We translate this as ‘reason’ or ‘word.’ The Apostle John borrowed this term for his gospel account, in which he says ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ The popular Greek mythology of the time held that all of creation was born from chaos, but John insisted that the Logos existed from the very beginning, forming and ordering the chaos. Heraclitus was not so optimistic. He saw only an ever-evolving, and apparently futile, struggle between order and chaos. It is for good reason that Heraclitus is known as ‘the weeping philosopher.’ He was said to live a very lonely, solitary life.”

  “That certainly sounds like our trickster,” I said. “A brilliant loner playing with order and chaos.” Lila, I thought. Directing the divine play.

  “Yes,” said Keane. “And it doesn’t bode well for us. Descartes was a loner, too, but he used reason to bridge the gap between himself and his fellow man. Heraclitus never got there.”

  “But he tried,” I said. “He believed in the struggle, at least.”

  “He did try,” said Keane, “but he never came to a satisfactory conclusion. He never found meaning or purpose in existence. He landed on what we today might call nihilism. With Heraclitus, order always gives way to chaos eventually. Ed Casters isn’t interested in amassing wealth or maintaining stability. He wants to build something up so he can watch it crash to the ground.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I was trying to reconcile this idea with my impression of Lila.

  “The pseudonyms seem to indicate a progression in Casters’s thinking,” Keane said. “Once I knew Casters and Stuil were one and the same, I scoured the Web looking for the names of all the developers who were known to have contributed to the iota project. There were over a hundred of them, but one stood out: Brad Melton.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s a real eye-catcher of a name.”

  “Deceptively mundane,” Keane replied. “It’s an anagram for Mandelbrot. Mathematician, the father of fractals. In some ways, Mandelbrot’s work anticipated the sort of complex modeling done by a company like Empathix. Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovering the Mandelbrot set. He believed that things typically considered to be chaotic, like clouds or shorelines, actually had a degree of order. It’s that sort of intrinsic order that allows Empathix’s modeling to work.”

  “Order out of chaos,” I said. “You think Ed Casters created the iota algorithm.”

  “I do,” Keane replied. “Other developers worked out some of the details, but I think Ed Casters was the prime mover. Our trickster seems to be a bit schizophrenic. He’s gone from Mandelbrot to Descartes to Heraclitus. Following the progression, Ed Casters seems to be moving from finding order in chaos to resigning himself to chaos wiping out order. All right, call a car. We need to go.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To visit Ed Casters.”

  * * *

  An hour later, we were staring at a tombstone in Evergreen Cemetery. It read:

  Ed Casters

  Apr 29, 2000–Jan 16, 2036

  Pura Vida

  “Pura Vida,” I said. “What does that mean? Pure life?”

  “It’s sort of an unofficial slogan for Costa Rica,” Keane replied. “Ed visited there once, many years ago. He talked about moving there.” Keane smiled. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist giving us a clue.”

  “You think he fled to Costa Rica?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Keane replied.

  My comm chirped. I checked the display. It was Lila again. The message read:

  *shudders* walking over my grave? ;)

  “Who was that?” Keane asked.

  “Wrong number,” I said. Anxious to change the subject, I went on hurriedly, “It’s not a bad idea, you know. Costa Rica is supposed to have the best climate in the world.”

  “You live in Los Angeles, Fowler. Don’t be a whiner.”

  “Says the guy who ate lunch in a virtual rain forest because actually going outside is too much work. You don’t get to call me a whiner until you’ve spent a summer in the Arabian Peninsula,” I said. “Spend three days hunkered down in a sandstorm and then you can feel free to make condescending comments about my … Keane?”

  Keane had gotten a faraway look in his eye. He mumbled something that I didn’t catch.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Hunkered down in a sandstorm,” he murmured.

  “Keane, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “We need to get back to the motel. I have an idea.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  While Keane studied the economic model that Olivia had gotten him from Empathix, I ordered pizza and watched Baywatch reruns. The classics never get old.

  My comm chirped. It was April.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “My secretary called while I was at lunch to warn me that the cops were looking for me again. So I took a cab home, but there were cops all over the place there, too.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah. Evidently there’s a warrant out for me. Aiding and abetting a fugitive.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “I think so, too, but I don’t really have the luxury of living my life on the lam. As a lawyer, it’s kind of important for me to stay on the right side of the law.”

  “Where are you now? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” said April, “Hang
ing out at a coffee shop a few blocks from the office. I’m going to have to turn myself in, Blake. I’ve probably already lost my job, but I can’t afford to get disbarred.”

  “Jesus, April. I’m sorry. It’s my fault for getting you into this.”

  “I got myself into this,” said April. “But you’re going to get me out.”

  “She’s not turning herself in, is she?” Keane asked. “Tell her not to be stupid.”

  “She has no choice, Keane,” I replied. “This isn’t even her fight, and it could ruin her life.”

  “Hmm,” said Keane, frowning. This might have been the first time he’d ever tried to see things from April’s point of view. Empathy was not his strong suit. “Toss the call to me.”

  “Hold on, April,” I said. “Keane wants to talk to you.” I tossed the call to his comm, but left it open on mine so I could listen in.

  “April,” said Keane. “Do not turn yourself in to the LAPD. Do you know anyone at the Justice Department?”

  “I could call my friend Deacon Walthers from the L.A. branch of the FBI,” April said. “Good guy. We went to law school together. You don’t trust the LAPD?”

  “I don’t trust anyone,” said Keane. “But we can negotiate with the feds.” He proceeded to give April a summary of what we’d learned about Gerard Canaan and Green River’s plan to take over the DZ.

  “I don’t suppose you have any actual evidence of this,” said April.

  “So far, it’s all conjecture,” said Keane. “The bigger problem, though, is that we don’t know how much of this the feds already know about any of this. If Canaan really is planning an invasion of the DZ, he almost had to get a buy-in from the LAPD, since they control the checkpoints. The question is whether the feds are in on it as well.”

  “What about Canaan’s collusion with the Wahhabis?” April asked. “If you’re right about that, there’s no way the federal government was in on that part. The coup was a huge blow to American interests.”

  “Agreed,” said Keane. “But the feds may very well have found out about it after the fact, and decided it wasn’t in their interests to go public with the information. In any case, we have even less evidence of that than we do of the pending invasion.”

  “So what you’re saying is that I have zero leverage to negotiate any kind of deal,” April said.

  “Correct,” replied Keane. “Which is why turning yourself in at this point is not a good idea.”

  “All right,” said April. “I think I can crash at a friend’s place tonight. But tomorrow morning, I’m going to the FBI. If you could have some kind of evidence for all your crazy conspiracy theories by then, that would be fantastic.”

  “Fowler and I are working on it,” Keane said.

  “I’m sorry, April,” I said. “We’ll fix this.”

  “Do that,” said April. “Talk to you soon.” She ended the call.

  “That’s just fucking fantastic,” I said. “They’re going to arrest April, Gwen is still stuck in the DZ, and we’ve got exactly nothing—no evidence to back up this crazy theory of yours.”

  “Actually,” said Keane, “I may have found something. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to look at this before.”

  “What?”

  “The model reflects a sudden drop in the value of the dollar, roughly seven percent, as actually happened in October 2027.”

  “Six months before the Collapse,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Keane. “That sudden drop was the first sign of the dollar’s weakness. The market became increasingly volatile after that.”

  “Didn’t the Wahhabi coup happen in October 2027?”

  “That’s right,” said Keane. “And you remember the first thing the Wahhabis did after taking power in Riyadh?”

  I had to think. There was a lot of death-to-America talk, as I recalled. Then it hit me. “They stopped taking dollars.”

  “Correct,” replied Keane. “The Wahhabi interim government rolled out a plan to denominate their oil in China’s currency, the yuan. Eventually they came around; the yuan really wasn’t a workable solution. But that announcement shook faith in the dollar.”

  “But currencies rise and fall against each other all the time. A seven-percent drop can’t be unprecedented. And didn’t the dollar recover most of its value over the next few weeks?”

  “Yes, but some economists have argued that initial drop was the tipping point. That was when people realized the dollar wasn’t invincible. There was already a lot of uneasiness, with the national debt at a hundred and twenty percent of GDP, but the coup was the first concrete sign that the dollar bubble had burst. People started to sell U.S. treasury bonds and buy gold, real estate, iotas … anything they could use as a hedge against the dollar. The cycle became self-perpetuating, and within a few months, the dollar had lost ninety-five percent of its value.”

  “Okay, so the coup precipitated the Collapse. So what?”

  “Interestingly, the seven-percent drop doesn’t appear to be a result of the modeling algorithm. It’s an arbitrary input value.”

  “You mean somebody deliberately tweaked the model to add the drop. Maybe they went back after the coup and corrected the inputs.”

  “That was my thought at first as well,” said Keane, “but the dates are off. The date of the seven-percent drop in the model is October tenth, 2027. The coup didn’t happen until October thirteenth. If the data had been corrected after the fact, they would have gotten the date right.”

  “So … somebody with access to the Empathix model knew the coup was going to happen, but they guessed wrong on the date. Why?”

  “You can’t orchestrate a sandstorm,” said Keane with a smile.

  “They knew the planned date for the coup, but the sandstorm delayed it by three days.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me.”

  I stared at him, hardly believing what he was saying. “Jesus Christ, Keane. You’re telling me that Gerard Canaan was behind the Collapse.”

  “I think Gerard Canaan engineered the coup in Saudi Arabia, knowing full well what it would do to the dollar. Somebody inside Empathix tipped him off. He planned the coup and gave his source the targeted date so he could update the model, but the sandstorm delayed the coup by three days.”

  “Who might have tipped him off?”

  “Probably a software developer, or someone else working on the forecasting algorithm. Someone with an interest in causing chaos.”

  “The trickster,” I said.

  “Occam’s razor,” Keane replied, nodding. “Eliminating unnecessary entities, it would appear that Gerard Canaan’s source inside Empathix is the same person dangling the coins in front of him.”

  “Why wouldn’t the trickster go to Selah?” I asked. “Empathix is her company, after all.”

  “Selah wasn’t positioned to crash the dollar the way Gerard Canaan was. The trickster probably gave Canaan enough forecasting data to convince him he was legit. Canaan went for the bait, not realizing the trickster was also involved in the creation of the iota algorithm. The trickster probably demanded a share of Canaan’s profits, and Canaan assumed he was simply an opportunist who had come across a way to make a lot of money with Canaan’s help. Canaan had no idea he was being suckered into an even bigger scheme.”

  “That explains Canaan’s comment about being manipulated,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Keane. “The trickster has been stringing him along for years.”

  I nodded, still trying to make sense of the motivations of the person I thought of as Lila. I hadn’t heard from her for several hours, and I was beginning to think she had gotten bored of me. Or maybe she was done playing now that Gerard Canaan had all the coins. It seemed oddly unsportsmanlike for her not to at least inform me the game had ended.

  Keane was still looking at the Empathix data, and shaking his head.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There’s still something I don’t understand about this model,” K
eane replied. “The numbers after the Collapse seem to be off. The projections for the yuan, iotas, and several other currencies are too high, and New Dollars are lacking completely.”

  “Well,” I said, “the model just predicts general patterns, right? The creation of New Dollars was the result of closeddoor meetings by some very powerful people in the government. Nobody could have predicted that.”

  “Of course they could,” Keane replied curtly. “That’s the whole point of a model like this. Maybe they wouldn’t have been called New Dollars, but the model should have accounted for the rise of a new currency of some sort. Call them flerberts or zingzangs or—”

  He was interrupted by a knock on our door. Keane and I traded glances. If it was the cops, our best bet was to surrender. I didn’t really think it was the police, though. For some reason I was convinced that it was Lila, finally revealing herself. If so, I was going to have some explaining to do. But when I opened the door, a familiar figure stood in front of me.

  “Hello, Olivia,” I said. “How do you intend to screw us over this time?”

  “May I come in?” Olivia asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” I said. “Keane and I were in the middle of a high-stakes canasta tournament.”

  “Perhaps I should rephrase my question,” Olivia said. “I’m going to stand out here banging on your door until either you let me in or the cops show up. Which would you prefer?”

  I shrugged and walked back into the room, flopping down on the bed. I watched with my hands laced behind my neck as Olivia walked into the room, closing the door behind her.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure, Olivia?” asked Keane. “And is it just you this time, or should we expect additional guests?”

  “Look, I’m sorry about that,” said Olivia. “I didn’t know Canaan was going to send those Green River guys after you.”