The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  “Go upstairs,” Keane said.

  I ran up the stairs. “How far?” I asked.

  “Until I can figure out how the hell to delete you from this database,” said Keane.

  I reached the second floor and continued to the third. I heard men shouting below me. In the back of my mind, I was wondering what good it was going to do to delete me from the database if Green River had me cornered at the top of a building. Had Keane momentarily forgotten that there was a difference between the model he was observing and the real world? That deleting Tom Phan from a table in a database didn’t magically transport me out of harm’s way?

  I reached the third floor and continued to the fourth. I heard boots coming up the stairs below me. My calves burned, but I didn’t dare slow down. When I reached the fourth floor, I realized it was the last one. I found myself in front of a door that read, simply, ROOF.

  “Roof!” I barked at Keane, too winded to manage more than the one syllable. He didn’t reply, so I assumed that I was to continue. I burst onto a flat tar roof covered with a smattering of gravel.

  “Head east,” said Keane. “I’ve almost got it.”

  “East?” I gasped. There was nothing to the east but the edge of the roof, about sixty feet away.

  “Yes, east,” replied Keane. “Don’t slow down. You’re going to jump.”

  “Fuck me,” I muttered, but didn’t slow down, even though my legs were screaming. I reached the edge of the roof and jumped.

  And fell.

  The roof of the building to the east was only about five feet away, but it was a good ten feet down. I landed hard, smacking my helmet against the gravel. It’s a good thing I hadn’t ditched it; that thing probably saved my life. Even with it on, I saw stars. I tried to get up, but my arms and legs wouldn’t respond.

  “Don’t move, Fowler,” said Keane.

  I would have laughed if I could. Instead, I just lay there, facedown on the roof, trying to breathe. Any second now, mercenaries would burst onto the roof next door, go to the edge of the roof, see me lying here, and shoot at me until I was dead.

  I heard the door open and then footsteps on the gravel. Voices that I couldn’t make out, then more footsteps … receding? And then silence.

  “Okay, you can move now,” said Keane. “I gave them a phantom Tom Phan on the fourth floor. Say that three times fast if you can.”

  I pulled myself to my feet. Something was wrong, and at first my addled brain couldn’t figure out what it was. Eventually I realized that I appeared to be floating. I could feel the roof under my foot, but I couldn’t see it. In fact, the whole building had simply disappeared out from under me. I was looking at a featureless gray floor three stories below. It was unsettling, to say the least.

  “Keane,” I said, “Are you seeing this?”

  “What is it, Fowler? Why aren’t you … Oh. There are controls on the left side of your helmet. Try adjusting them.”

  I reached up with my left hand and felt two buttons. I tapped one of them and suddenly a wireframe outline of the building appeared. I could see the entire structure of the building, right through the walls. Turning, I realized I could see through the building I’d jumped from as well. Inside the building I saw three-dimensional renderings of five men in combat gear on the fourth floor, apparently conversing with each other.

  I gave the button another tap and suddenly the building was opaque again.

  “Get moving, Fowler,” said Keane in my ear. “Fire escape off the back of the building, to your right. Move fast; I’m going to have to put you back on the roof in a few seconds.”

  “What?” I gasped, moving toward the rear of the building. “Why?”

  “Geolocation systems sometimes have problems with altitudes in urban environment. If you reappear on the roof, they’ll chalk it up to a momentary glitch. I don’t want them to figure out they’ve been hacked quite yet.”

  “All right,” I said, not happy with this development but seeing the wisdom of Keane’s plan. Looking over the edge of the roof, I located the fire escape landing on the third floor and lowered myself down to it. “What the hell was that?” I asked, as I made my way down the fire escape. “Why’d the building disappear?”

  “Transparency mode,” said Keane. “The Minotaur helmet has an integrated motion detector and thermal imaging camera that can be used to see through walls and other objects. The system also has the capability of filling in missing visual data about a location from its database, which is assembled from satellite data and other sources, including the helmet cams themselves. You must have activated it inadvertently when you fell.”

  I climbed the rest of the way down to the alley. As my foot hit the asphalt, I heard shouts from the roof.

  “I’m giving them your actual escape route with a ten-second lag,” said Keane. “So keep moving. Go down the alley to the west.”

  I ran as fast as I could down the alley. It came out on a street up ahead.

  “Go right at the street,” said Keane. “I’m going to have Major Tom go left and run down another alley. I can keep him just out of reach for hours.”

  I ran down the street for another hundred yards or so, and then Keane had me turn down an alley. At this point, I finally started to believe I’d actually lost my pursuers. Well, I hadn’t lost them. Technically they were still pursuing me. They were just looking in completely the wrong place.

  Following Keane’s instructions, I worked my way down alleys and side streets toward the address of the safe house. I was almost there when I hear Keane say, “Hold up, Fowler.”

  I stopped cold at the end of the alley I was about to emerge from. According to Keane, the safe house was just down the street to the right.

  “What’s happening, Keane?” I said.

  “Hmm,” Keane replied.

  I felt an unpleasant clenching in my chest. “What does that mean, Keane?”

  “Hey?”

  “You made your perplexed noise. Being perplexed at this stage of the game is not a good thing.”

  “Oh,” said Keane, “well, I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the movements of Green River personnel, but I’ve been a little busy keeping you alive. So something seems to have escaped my notice.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well,” said Keane. “The good news is that I found your Alpha Base.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “It’s on top of the safe house.”

  “What do you mean, ‘on top of’? Like, next door?”

  “No, I mean Alpha Base is on top of the safe house. Alpha Base is a three-story office building on the corner of 120th and Compton. The safe house is in the bomb shelter below that building.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked. “What are the odds that Green River would set up shop in the same goddamned building as the safe house?”

  “Fairly good, actually,” said Keane. “It’s centrally located and easy to get to. LAFF owns the building, and since it wasn’t on the safe house list, Canaan assumed it was vacant. He probably started preparing it to act as a base of operations well before the invasion. The bomb shelter is missing from Green River’s map; must be Ed Casters’s doing. As far as I know, it’s only accessible from a trapdoor in the closet of one of the rear offices. If Casters is down there, he’s either trapped or he’s got another exit I don’t know about.”

  “How do we know Casters is still down there?”

  “We don’t,” said Keane. “But unless Green River found his hiding spot, he’d be crazy to move at this point. And we can be fairly certain that they haven’t found him, because Canaan is still missing a coin.”

  That sounded like a lot of conjecture to me, but I decided to let it go to concentrate on the main point. “Okay,” I said. “So what I hear you saying is that we’re fucked.”

  “Hmm,” said Keane.

  “No, Keane. This is suicide. We’re aborting. Whatever happens when Canaan gets that coin is just going to have to happen. The bad guy becomes a trilli
onare. I don’t care, Keane. The police have nothing on us. We’ll turn ourselves in and hope for the best.”

  “Not an option,” said Keane.

  “It is an option,” I replied. “I just laid out the option in great detail. In fact, to prove it’s an option, I’m going to do it right now. I’m getting out of here.”

  “Hold on, Fowler,” said Keane. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  I groaned. Of course there was. “What?”

  “I figured out why New Dollars are missing from the Empathix model. Or rather, where they were hiding.”

  “Why is this suddenly relevant?”

  “It’s important that you understand the stakes of our predicament.”

  “All right,” I said. “Spit it out.” I sat down on the pavement, leaning against the wall of the alley. I had a feeling I was in for one of Keane’s monologues.

  “Like all currencies,” Keane began, “the New Dollar faced the bootstrapping problem. How do you convince people the currency is worth something before it’s worth anything? The feds could have linked it to gold or some other asset, but they’d already proven once they’d unlink it as soon as it became convenient. So in a sense, they were already starting at a disadvantage: people didn’t trust them to meet their commitments. At the first sign of trouble, investors would turn in their paper New Dollars for gold—and pretty soon, the feds would have no gold and a big pile of worthless New Dollars.”

  “This is all fascinating,” I said, “but can we cut to the chase? I’m hiding in an alley in a war zone here.”

  “Be patient, Fowler. This background is necessary for you to understand why the last iota is so important. To continue: what the feds did is to issue bonds, denominated in New Dollars. Their price in dollars was five percent of their face value, which is to say that twenty thousand old dollars would get you a one-thousand-New-Dollar bond. But the bonds could be purchased—at a substantial markup—with virtually any currency: yuan, yen, rubles … even iotas.

  “New Dollars were established by a special act of Congress, and the bill was full of limitations ostensibly designed to prevent rapid devaluation—the most significant of which was a federal law limiting the rate at which bonds could be issued. In reality, these limitations were mainly cosmetic: Congress could override them anytime they wanted to. Given this environment, no informed observers expected the bonds to sell. Conventional wisdom was that the New Dollar was a cynical, last-ditch cash grab by the feds. A trick to stabilize the dollar by linking it to a brand-new currency, which was also backed by nothing but a promise.

  “To the surprise of virtually everyone, however, demand for the bonds was high, and remained strong for the next several weeks. Occasionally, dips in the value of New Dollars against other currencies would make speculators nervous, but the New Dollar always seemed to recover when it dropped below a certain point. The explanation for these repeated recoveries was that large institutional investors had bet heavily on New Dollars and were buying more bonds whenever the value dropped significantly. The end result is that the New Dollar became the new default world currency, and old dollars stabilized at five percent of the New Dollar’s value.

  “The details of these federal bond transactions were not public, so no one knew who these ‘institutional investors’ were, or what currencies they were trading for the bonds. It was assumed there were dozens, if not hundreds, of these investors, and that they were purchasing the bonds in a wide variety of different currencies. A casual look at the money markets bore this out: while the New Dollar rose, most other currencies remained relatively flat. The main exception was the iota, which quadrupled in value.

  “The interesting thing, as we saw, is that the Empathix model seems to have missed these developments completely. According to their model, New Dollars shouldn’t exist, and the other currencies, particularly the iota, should have surged in value. In the Empathix model, the iota goes as high as twenty times its previous value. How do we explain this sudden divergence from reality, after the model predicted the Collapse with startling accuracy?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “How?”

  “Actually,” said Keane, “you gave me the answer. The Empathix model produces generalities, not specifics. In other words, the Empathix data is right, but the labels were wrong.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “Meaning, what if iotas are New Dollars?”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever, Keane.”

  “Think about it, Fowler. Postulate one: the feds launch a new currency, the New Dollar, which is near worthless. Postulate two: the iota is due to skyrocket in value just as this currency is launched. Now, given these two postulates, what happens to the model if someone secretly dumps a shitload of iotas and buys up New Dollars?”

  I thought for a moment. “The New Dollar rises, and the iota falls. Or at least doesn’t rise as much as predicted.”

  “Exactly. And other currencies don’t rise as much as predicted, either, because interest in New Dollars is now siphoning away some of their value. In other words, you end up with exactly what Empathix predicted. Their data is correct. The labels are wrong.”

  “So,” I said, trying to work out the ramifications of this, “the New Dollar isn’t actually based on nothing. It’s based on iotas.”

  “Very good, Fowler,” replied Keane. “To the casual observer, iotas remain a fringe currency, used in a relatively small number of transactions. But behind the scenes, there’s a huge mountain of iotas propping up New Dollars.”

  “And how do you know this exactly?” I asked. “I understand it fits with your understanding of the data, but do you have any actual evidence?”

  “I didn’t until about an hour ago,” Keane replied.

  “What happened an hour ago?”

  “April called,” Keane said. “She tried to contact you, but the call wouldn’t go through. The feds took our deal. They agreed to drop all charges if we get them the last iota.”

  I let this information sink in for a moment. “So when you suggested the deal, you didn’t know any of this. You had April go to the feds with a bluff.”

  “It was our only move,” Keane said. “Either they would take the deal, thereby confirming their concern about the flaw, or they would refuse, indicating I was wrong about the New Dollar being based on the iota. If I was wrong, we were screwed no matter what we did. At least now we have a chance.”

  A very slim chance, I thought. Once again, Keane had sent me—and April!—into harm’s way on the slightest of hunches. And once again, I seemed to have no choice but to go along with his insane plan. “So if the iota collapses…” I said.

  “The New Dollar collapses as well. If Canaan gets his hands on the last iota, we could be looking at another Collapse. And this time, we’re not ready for it.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Another Collapse. The world was still recovering from the last one, over ten years ago. Los Angeles almost didn’t survive—wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for Project Maelstrom. And there was no Project Maelstrom this time around. The reality I lived in was completely shaped by the Collapse; it was impossible to imagine what Los Angeles would look like after the next one. Something like a planet-sized DZ without out any walls, probably. And Gerard Canaan laughing his ass off on an island somewhere.

  But would Canaan intentionally cause the Collapse? Probably not. He’d keep the flaw in the iota algorithm a secret and use it to further enrich himself and impoverish everyone else, gradually devaluing New Dollars and iotas in exchange for control over more and more hard assets—oil fields, gold mines, oceanfront properties, utility companies, factories, skyscrapers … It would be Gerard Canaan’s world; the rest of us would just be living in it. And our continued existence would be at his whim: anytime he wanted to, he could inject a hundred trillion iotas into the economy and wreck it all.

  “How could Canaan have pulled that off?” I asked. “And what did he get for propping up New Dollars?”

&nb
sp; “Pulling it off would have been easy,” Keane replied, “given Canaan’s situation when the Collapse occurred. He probably called up the Fed Chair and pitched him on the idea of a new currency to replace the dollar. The feds would issue the bonds, and Canaan would secretly gobble them up, paying in iotas. As for what he got out of it, that’s less clear. The federal government had been de facto controlled by the banks and other financial interests for many years by that point. By now, I suspect Canaan exercises considerable influence over the federal government itself. The important thing is that letting Canaan have that coin at this point would be very, very dangerous.”

  “But if Canaan has that kind of influence over the federal government, then how do we know we can trust April’s friend at the FBI?”

  “We don’t,” said Keane. “But it’s the only chance we have.”

  I sighed. He was right, of course. “That may be,” I said, “but I can’t just walk into a Green River base. Even if you give me a new identity, they’ll be looking for me. They probably flashed Major Tom Phan’s picture on every Minotaur display in the DZ.”

  “What if I could make you invisible?”

  “How the hell would you do that?”

  “Transparency mode. The same way you made that building invisible.”

  “And you can do this with a person?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Keane. “By default, people will show up automatically, even if their surroundings are transparent. But that means Minotaur has an algorithm for recognizing people as such, and overriding the transparency parameters to display them. All I have to do is convince the system you aren’t a person. Then I activate the transparency mode for all Minotaur users within a certain range of you, and voilà, invisibility.”

  “As long as they’re all using their Minotaur displays.”

  “Well, yes. Also, it won’t work well in full illumination. You’ll show up as distortion in the visual field, something like heat waves in the desert. And I wouldn’t get within thirty feet of anyone if you can avoid it. And avoid dogs. They’ll smell you.”