"You keep records, of course," the Fed chairman observed. "What goes out, what comes in....Don't you?"
"Are you serious? You mean, like paper records? Or duplicate files?… Just how long have you been in that office, Micah? We're talking money here, not hard goods, not bales of polyester fiber. It has no physical existence, except as bits of data, as electrical charges in the machine, or flying through the stratosphere somewhere. If we made duplicates, then those would become legal tender under the ruling of Plumber v. Bank of America. Surely you know all this. What goes, goes. What comes, comes. What gets stuck in the middle, we have to eat.
"And that's why I'm calling you. We—that is, my bank—need a ruling from you right away. Will the Fed adjust the money supply to accommodate these unrecoverable losses? I need a yes or no today, this minute, Micah, because at three trillion down, I'll be having a serious talk with your federal examiners before the wire closes this afternoon."
"Well now, Peter, I don't know—"
"Not good enough, Micah. We're cooked, you know. And if you don't provide some relief pronto, you're going to have a lot of failures. I mean, Instant Black Friday. Squared. That's with people going headfirst out of windows and everything."
"Well, but certainly, I can't do a revaluation just like that," the Fed chairman protested. "Not on my own say-so. No, I'll have to discuss it with the Board of Governors. There are international implications, too, if what you say happened has happened. I'll have to get in touch with Helieurot at the Banc d'Europe, for example, to coordinate—"
"Well, don't take too long, Micah. You've got people dying out here."
"I'll move with all deliberate speed, I assure you, Peter… And, by the way, if all the beam channels are out, how is it you can talk to me?"
"Oh… About a year ago we leased one of the antique fiberoptic landline systems, just in case of emergencies like this. It doesn't take the money volume, of course, but—"
"I see. Well, I may ask to borrow that line, if the catastrophe is as widespread as you say it is."
"Anytime, Micah," the bank chairman assured him.
"I will get back to you."
"Soon, I hope."
Click-click.
"Marjory, would you get me the president of Banc d'Europe? I know it's after hours there, but see if we can get a patch to his home or wherever."
"Yes, sir… All the Atlantic channels are reported to be engaged, sir."
"All right. Let's go at this the other way around then. Try Mr. Yoshu at Nihon Central Bank. I'll need to talk to him, too."
"Right away… Those channels are also engaged, sir. What do you want me to do?"
"Hmm. Voice and data both?"
"All channels, it says."
"How about the satellite network?"
"That, too. I'm sorry, sir."
"Oh, well. Try again in an hour, will you? In the meantime, I'm going to my lunch with the governors. See what they have on their minds."
"Very good, sir."
Blink
Blink
Gasp!
Blink
Office of the Provincial Auditor, HK2 Exchange, 11:31 a.m. PST
"Gentlemen, we no longer have a market." That was the summation of Roger Fredericks, the provincial auditor for British Columbia.
The senior officials in charge of the HK2 Exchange's operations glanced uneasily across at one another. As the lowest man on that totem pole, just a technician really, Ethan Fong sat quietly in a corner.
"We have more than fifteen hundred traders in a near-cataleptic state," Fredericks went on. "We have some thousands of miles of charred fiber and insulation. We have four telephone switches with their internal safeties all thoroughly burned out. And finally, somewhere between here and Cloud-Cuckoo Land, we have some fourteen hundred interrupted transactions, for assets that can only be guessed at, representing a material worth that is now totally unknowable. We could possibly ask the parties to each trade themselves to reconstruct, from memory, the nature of the deals ongoing at the time of the… of the whatever—but they have no memories, that I can see. And if they did, whom would we trust? The buyer? The seller? You can't ask the computer, because it's cataleptic, too. So I ask you, what do we have here?"
"Big mess," said Warren Li, the chairman of the Exchange.
"Exactly, a big mess," Fredericks agreed. "And I can see no alternative but to declare that it is your mess, gentlemen. After all, the responsibility for safeguarding the trading environment is presumed to rest with you. Not to mention liability for the medical condition of those traders who used that optical link under your presumed assurances of safe operating conditions. When this day's losses are totted up, I expect you will owe in damages more than the net worth of your facilities, plus any insurance bonds you may have with the province."
The senior officials all hung their heads. And with their heads bowed, they all looked gloomily from one to another out of the corners of their eyes.
In his corner, Ethan Fong struggled to control himself. There was an answer to all this, just waiting at the tip of his tongue. Of course, it would be terribly bad form for him to speak up, among all these august personages, including the provincial auditor himself. He might well lose his position—Li would certainly see to that, as one thing he still could control—if Fong were to intrude himself at this terrible time.
But then a great calmness descended upon Ethan Fong. He realized that, if what these men were saying and agreeing to was literally true, then he had lost his position. Tomorrow he might well be working to fix the perennially brain-damaged artificial expert in control of Cousin Fong Hontin's bakery. So nothing Ethan might say now would make his situation any worse, could it?
"Excuse me, sir?" he spoke up.
Warren Li half turned, his face raised halfway, his eyes darting daggers to see who had dared to interrupt this sublime moment of misery.
"Yes, Mr… Fong—isn't it?" the provincial auditor prompted.
"I believe you have a way to avoid all this unpleasantness, sir."
"If I do, then I beg you to enlighten me."
"We certainly cannot, as you suggest, put Mr. Humpty-Dumpty together again. We will never be able to reconstruct, in all fairness and accuracy, the trades that were extinguished at the moment of the energy pulse."
"Be silent, babbling fool," the Exchange chairman hissed at Fong in Cantonese dialect.
"But you have it in your power to quash transactions for whatever reasons seem good to you, don't you?"
"That is a little regarded aspect of this office," Fredericks admitted. "But yes, what you say is essentially so."
"Then would it not be fair to all concerned to nullify all trades for this day? That way there are no winners or losers at any person's expense. Everyone returns to their recorded position as of midnight last night. You could declare that the trading day of March 21 did not exist."
The provincial auditor thought about it for a minute. "Why, that's a fine idea, young man." He smiled at last. "And I for one would concur with it. But this is an international market, accepting transactions from exchanges all over the world, and from the Luna Colony Bourse as well. Certainly, not all of those traders would agree—"
"But couldn't you work with your opposite numbers who govern in those markets, get them to agree? I mean, the reports we've heard hint that similar disturbances have occurred all over this hemisphere. Every other exchange will have been affected in one degree or another. If you were to propose something sensible, like a midnight rollback...."
"You tempt me with becoming the hero of the hour, do you, Mr. Fong?"
"Only if you wish it so, sir."
"Well, we shall see. I certainly should be contacting my colleagues in the Ministry of the Exchequer, just as soon as this infernal static clears. Let's see if they agree."
Li was still looking hard at Fong, but his expression had gone from angry to blankly unreadable. Perhaps the chairman was even beginning to realize that the lowly computer progra
mmer may have saved him billions of dollars in damages. The other senior officials were raising their heads in something like hope.
"There is still, of course," Fredericks went on, "the responsibility for those unfortunate souls whose brains have been snuffed out by your negligence. We will have to assess the course of their treatment and care."
Down went the heads again. And again the eyes shifted side to side in agonies of shame and blame. Ethan Fong could almost believe they liked it that way. And he was right.
By accepting the personal blame now, they might preserve the reputation of their institution later on. Each of these men was reacting to a force that was stronger in him than mere personal vanity. Over the years they had pledged their loyalty to the one thing stronger than love of country, or commitment to the social good, or respect for their elders and rulers. It was the one thing in life that never decayed, that time could not tarnish nor princes corrupt, that perpetual use could not wear thin.
The power of money.
Chapter 12
Flying Blind
10,000 meters
9,000 meters
8,000 meters
7,000 meters
Approach to Ezeiza International Airport, March 21, 2081, (+3) 1453 ZT
The radar altimeter chirped its descending scale in Captain Eduardo Thompson's ears as he brought the SCramjet San Martin, Aerolineas Argentinas Flight 19 from London-Heathrow, into the airspace east of Buenos Aires. It didn't bother the captain that the altimeter was the only active locating device aboard his plane, that all the rest of his navigation instruments were merely passive receivers. They always had been, for as long as he'd been flying.
The Rio de la Plata estuary was laid out before Thompson's eyes by the Neural link™ goggles attached to the plane's navigation and flight control computer. To his left, depicted in bright greens, were the fertile pampas of Argentina, showing a concentrated cross-hatching in gray which represented the capital city and its surrounding suburbs. To his right, in faded yellows, were the running uplands of Uruguay. Straight ahead, on a bearing of 300 degrees true, the marshy delta of the Rio Parana stretched for 150 kilometers beyond Buenos Aires and its airport.
His goggles displayed all these features in the gridded approach pattern to Ezeiza from San Martin's viewpoint, which the plane's onboard computer established by trian-gulation from the Universal Global Positioning System.
The UGPS was an active signaling system, whereby the computer took readings from at least three satellites overhead in orbit, calculated the plane's position on the Earth's surface from these extracts, and in conjunction with the radar altimeter and its own estimate of current heading and groundspeed, transmitted the appropriate visual cues from its reference library to Thompson's goggles. The runway's approach vectors were embedded in these cues.
Years ago, Thompson knew, major airports like Ezeiza had used broadcast radio signals to guide in aircraft like San Martin for automated instrument landings. At the same time, the plane itself might be sampling much of its own flight information from its surroundings: speed, altitude, compass heading, and so on. But during the landing, it relied on signals from the ground for all critical maneuvers. It then became the duty of the controllers in the tower to bring the plane in safely, not only relating it to other traffic in the air but also to its own descent rate, location, heading, and speed.
All of this had changed by Eduardo Thompson's day. First the UGPS, which was operated on a fee basis by the U.S.A.'s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, eliminated the need for reliance on typically faulty compass readings, uncertain estimates of airspeed through the changeable winds, and the other vagaries of flying. Radar transponders eliminated the reliance on feeble barometric readings for altitude, especially along the sub-orbital routes that the SCramjets flew.
Then, in 2028, came the international tragedy celebrated in the case of Varig v. Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport et al. In that incident, a combination of faulty OMNI beacons and a defective ILS crashed a conventional Brazilian jetliner two miles short of the runway. Damages to passengers and ground personnel ran to five billion U.S. dollars. And since then, as a matter of international law, airline insurance policy guidelines, and basic prudence, all commercial traffic had been responsible for its own positioning on approach.
This was actually a benefit, because Captain Eduardo Thompson and his copilot flew their plane from the same visual cues they had trained with in the simulator. The same callouts flowed along the right and left edges of the pilot's stimulated retinas, and the same imaginary levers and knobs hovered just under his fingertips in the action gloves. The only thing different from the training sessions were the accelerations which shifted his punta up or down, left or right as the seat surged under him. The training pod's movements were supposed to be identical with a real plane in motion, but they never were. Thompson said he could always tell the difference. And that, he felt, made him a superior pilot.
Long, blue stretches of the estuary rolled under his nose. Its stylized ripple pattern was disappearing at the precise rate for his current descent profile. In the green distance, the ghostly bingos of a mechanical Ezeiza lined themselves up. The red tracers of the runway converged toward his point of touchdown, which was highlighted at this distance with a red circle. Everything about this landing was going perfectly.
The plane started yawing inexplicably to the right.
Thompson instinctively began to move his hands in the gloves to correct it, then paused. Although he could see the motion in the display before his eyes, he couldn't feel it through his seat. Although it was true enough that the yaw was a subtle movement, still he felt nothing except for the buffeting of air over the wings.
The visual display flickered and disappeared.
"Hola!" Thompson said aloud—but calmly, almost amusedly.
"Is something wrong?" Allison Carlyle asked at his elbow. Thompson's copilot was off duty for this leg of the flight, and so she would not be wearing her goggles and gloves. Or she might be using them for other purposes, such as reviewing the engineering readouts on San Martin's ramjet or other systems.
"The landscape display is gone."
"Let me see if I—"
"No, wait. Here it is."
The image slowly rebuilt itself, feature by feature, in the way of a complex computer graphic: first the blue sea, then the green land masses, then features like cities and towns, and finally the airport's approach grid. But the land masses had acquired fuzzy, wavery edges. The cross-hatching for the cities wiggled around. The towns blinked on and off. It was as if the artificial intelligence were uncertain where everything went and was trying out different locations faster than the eye could blink.
Eduardo Thompson swallowed hard and tried to keep his hands absolutely steady as the machinery worked through its glitch.
"Something is definitely wrong," he told Carlyle.
"I'm plugging in now." He could hear a click as she made the connections. Then, "Yes, I see… This is really weird."
After dithering with the scenery for perhaps ten seconds more, the upper-tier display blanked out entirely and the goggles showed in red letters against a null-gray field:
NAVIGATION SYSTEM MALFUNCTION
SWITCHING TO ONBOARD SYSTEMS
"What is happening?" the copilot asked.
"Lacking a true global position, the navigation system will attempt to complete its mission with the meager information at hand," he explained. "First, it will try for a reading from the backup magnetic compass."
The control field in their goggles flickered and displayed the image of an old-fashioned ball-and-needle, like something out of a sailing ship's binnacle. This was a reference to the electrocompass that was buried in the airframe and supposedly isolated from disturbances by San Martin's electronics, its steel components, and the gypsy magnetic fields of the SCramjet's ionizing reentry envelope. The compass was presumed to be foolproof, like a simple feedback machine. But now the ball
was swinging crazily in its socket behind the imaginary window. The graphic needle showed them heading first north then south, but without passing through a heading of east or west. Impossible things.
"That system, too, is defective," Thompson said. "Unless, of course, the Earth's geomagnetic field is damaged—I think not."
With a touch of a ghostly button, he instructed the computer to disregard all readings from the magnetic compass and proceed by its own internal calculations.
SWITCHING TO INERTIAL REFERENCES
"Now what does that mean?" Carlyle asked. "I've never seen that message before."
"It means the computer is giving up rational thought and is going to try 'dead reckoning,' " Thompson told her with a sigh. "And, as the old pilots used to say, dead is where such reckoning will surely leave you. This goes double, of course, for semiballistic SCramjets."
He knew that, in terms of those "inertial references," the artificial intelligence would use San Martin's last known position, the last recorded heading and speed, and any random accelerations which might have been noted by the internal gyros, to calculate the plane's further course. In other words, the machine was flying by the seat of its pants.
"What could have gone wrong here?" the copilot asked. "We have backups—"
"Yes, the equipment was thoroughly checked on the ground and employs multiple redundancies to insure against failures in the air. We tend to trust our systems because, after all, we have to." As Thompson said all this, he still held his hands in the neutral position, continuing the plane's once-perfect glide. Not wanting to confuse the equipment, he waited patiently while it churned numbers and tried to rebuild a solid graphic image of the estuary and the airport.
"Our one clue is the altimeter," he went on. "Listen!"
The radar was still chirping in his ears, now in hers. And, along the left periphery of each pilot's visual field, the numbers were still falling off smoothly.
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