Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  “Flicker is dead, the traitor.”

  “No, ‘fraid not, though they may have told you that. We busted her out. She’ll have her own ship to go where she wants. Looking forward to a heck of a non-retirement, but she misses her crew. How would you like to go against her? I know I’ve learned a lot from her.”

  “Prove it,” Pikaard interjected.

  “You the carrier captain?” Pikaard nodded affirmative. “She said you talk about your grandson, Neil the third. He’s got his mom’s eyes.” Pikaard’s face stayed immobile, except for one raised eyebrow and the faintest of narrow smiles. “So now you have to make a choice. Accept a truce and let us be, or try to fight and die?”

  The admiral’s face flushed and his jaw clenched as he stared, slit-eyed, at the man on the screen mocking him. “Ram them! Take over a fighter, or a cruiser if you have to, and ram him head-on!”

  “Which one, sir?” the weapons officer asked, an edge of challenge in his voice.

  “Whichever is closest! Do it NOW! NOW, damn you! I don’t care which one it is!”

  Nobody moved. Unexpectedly the navigation officer spoke, his voice crackling with barely suppressed emotion. “The net’s too wide. We are the only ship that could possibly intercept. Current relative velocity approximately 3200 kilometers per second…. Sir. Your call.”

  Chorf’s flush drained away as he instantly realized the implications of such a collision. He also saw the disappearance of his command authority. He couldn’t face the mockery he’d be subjected to. He nodded and snarled at the navigator. “Yes,” he hissed. “Stop them.”

  The navigator shook his head, sitting rigidly upright. The duty enforcement officer stepped up, pistol raised, aimed for his head. “Do as he commands!”

  A short, muffled three-round burst burp out, dropping the commissar in a heap, low velocity bullets shattering the base of his skull and the gray matter behind it. The marine guard near the hatchway reholstered his weapon and returned to parade rest, eyes forward. “A clear and present danger to the proper decision-making process, Captain.”

  With a curt nod and humorless smile, Pikaard faced his commanding officer. “You are relieved of command, Admiral.” He turned to the marine guard. “Take a squad and escort the Admiral to the brig. No visitors. Put the other two political officers in separate cells.” He faced the helm. “At these velocities, it might be best if we avoided the possibility that our drive field intersect. Vector accordingly.” His expression was bland as we paused and addressed the marine guard as he approached the sputtering Admiral. “You should talk to the armorer about that weapons malfunction, sergeant. I’d hate to have any more accidental discharges around here.”

  Ripples

  The lobby of Whitman and Dungeness’s was busy. A dozen people stood or sat around waiting, looking at the nearly empty display cases (only high-end numismatic coins and things not made of precious metals remained) or watching the wall screen as the price charts for gold and silver inched slowly higher, with the recent historic price recording forming ragged, mountain-range like shape which showed a dramatic increase over the last week.

  The dapper older gentleman walked slowly through the door, sighing resignedly at sight. As he paused, Maurice pushed past him, flushed and slightly out of breath, heading straight for the receptionist counter without a glance at anyone in the room. “I need to buy some gold,” he whispered loudly. “I have cash, and I need some now!”

  The receptionist restrained her irritation, now well-practiced at telling wealthy people used to getting their demands instantly met that they’d have to wait just like everyone else. “I’m sorry, sir, but do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I want some metal.”

  “May I have your name, sir? We have fifteen people ahead of you who would also like to do the same, but all we can really do right now is take orders for future delivery.”

  “You don’t understand. I need to buy some metal today!”

  “And so would everyone else, sir, but right now supplies are very tight. If I may have a name, I’ll call you when a salesman can-”

  “I need it right now! I can pay above spot! If you can’t see me right now, I’ll take my money to another dealer.”

  Behind him the elderly man walked carefully to the counter and stood patiently behind and to one side, catching the receptionist’s eye with a hint of a conspiratorial smile. He’s seen such desperation before, and could afford to patiently wait.

  “That’s very nice of you, sir, but if you don’t have an appointment we do our best to treat all walk-ins fairly and in order, and every other dealer on the planet is in the same circumstance or worse.”

  “I will pay twenty percent above current spot!”

  Silence descended on the room as everyone eavesdropped on the conversation whether they really want to or not.

  “Sir, unless someone in the room is selling, and none of them have indicated they are, there simply isn’t any to be had right now.”

  “I will pay thirty percent above spot!” the bank manager hissed, choking on his words, his face even more flushed with excitement, desperation, and concern, which those in the room would understand better if they knew that not all the cash in his pocket was, strictly speaking, his own to invest.

  A few moments of tense silence ticked by. The elderly man chuckled quietly. “Perhaps I may be of assistance.” Maurice turned abruptly, his brain registering for the first time what his eyes saw earlier, and the receptionist smiled, recognizing the wizened face. The older man turned and asked the room politely in a quiet voice “Anyone here willing to pay more than thirty percent above spot to walk out with metal?” Around the room there are many quiet negatives and shakes of the head, and murmurs at the foolhardiness of others, but no one spoke up to get into a bidding war that started that richly.

  Maurice looked down at the small man, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do I know you are not selling painted lead?” The implied insult was clearly understood by everyone in the room but the speaker. The recipient chuckled again with amusement and shrugged it off.

  “When Whitman is available, perhaps he can mediate the transaction for a small percentage, so that I can be certain your bills are not hot off the press, either.”

  An hour later, metal and bills verified as genuine, the banker all but ran from the dealer’s office having bought much less than he’d expected, but happy to have the soft yellow metal in his pocket and not simply a digital slip of paper to be exchanged, hopefully, sometime later. The dealer and the older man watched him go, shaking their heads but equally happy with the results of the exchange.

  “Manias always peak, my friend, and there is no crazy like gold fever. You never know when it’ll pass.”

  The dealer shook his old friend’s hand warmly. “Indeed, Art, indeed. As always, a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “Any idea yet what’s behind it all?”

  “Rumors. Just rumors.” He shrugged dismissal. “Nothing fundamental has changed.”

  “Other than perhaps people’s awareness.” Art patted the small package of cash. “Sometimes understanding is beyond us mortals. Interesting times, my friend, interesting times and mysterious ways.”

  “OK, but I’m still a little vague on how exactly all this went down,” Allonia grumped, slathering jam on toast in the mess room. “I mean, I know we wanted to undercut confidence in the system and bleed the parasites, but it’s incredible they’d let us walk out with all that unless we paid for it.”

  “It’s pretty simple. Control the money, control the economy. Pols always want to spend more than they tax, so they need debts and bankers. They need problems to ‘solve’,” which Bipasha air-quoted, “so they need some crime… not anything that actually affects them, personally, just the occasional sacrificial fall-guy and petty things. They need to hand out government contracts that they can profit on from foreknowledge, so they need cartels and industry insiders to work with. A few big corporations are
easier to control than a million little companies. We wanted them to lose control for a while, and suffer losses like the little guys they fleece all the time. The rules let them sell more than they have, just like they can loan out more money than they have on deposit, because only a small percentage of depositors will want their money back at the same time. It’s called fractional reserve banking, and no matter how many time it blows up, the geniuses still convince politicians to allow it, because they are smarter than everyone in history and they honestly think this time it’s different. Or at least it won’t blow up until after they are gone. And all the while the media exchanges friendly coverage for access, because they are storytellers who want to shape the narrative.”

  “But laws of physics and economics don’t change simply because they are inconvenient to puny humans,” Helton interjected, eyeing Allonia’s toast and contemplating getting some for himself.

  “Anyway, we sort of took a short term loan from Trask to buy a bunch of leveraged futures contracts – nothing more than paper, really – and then made quiet connections to a lot of normally little buyers to drive the price up. No one raindrop is the flood, but enough of them sucking the slack out of the system at the right time gave the bigger players no wiggle room. The high-leveraged paper, when playing by their rules, was leveraged into even more paper contracts, to set up several different market squeezes where the normally large-and-in-charge players got backed into a corner where they had to sell to raise cash, or buy contracts back at a loss to cover bets going pear-shaped, or find cash from somewhere else to cover margins on bets going the wrong way that they couldn’t retrieve. We rolled over our leveraged profits into larger positions after paying back the original loan.”

  Allonia doesn’t look very convinced. “Sort of like borrowing from the casino, betting on green at the fixed roulette table, taking the expected thirty-five-to-one payout to pay off the original loan, then letting the rest ride on green knowing that the next spin will hit green again?”

  “Yes, pretty much. Then, once we had physical possession by taking delivery, Fredrix’s options were even more limited. We had a rough guess how much money they were storing for the Zamboni brothers and the Russian mobsters that Skelton has been in a turf dispute with, and knew that the only way Fredrix could get even part of the gold back was to offer us a deal we couldn’t pass up, well above market rates. Taj’s voice-stress analysis of him as we talked gave me a pretty good idea when he really was maxed out. We figured he’d want to cover the whole Nigerian contract, and we sized it to drain the vaults.”

  “So when all the big boys panic and try to follow that move with more of their own money, we changed our bets to red, and-” Allonia said, starting to see the big picture.

  “Their panic buyback of all the guaranteed contracts to close them out as fast as possible, trying to buy time by ensuring that no more deliveries would be called on let us close our positions out, allowed us to book even more paper profits and wrap everything up. We hinted to the metal wholesalers they might want to curtail their own buying for a little while, and ask the exchange to back them up directly so the exchange would have to post an open fixed buy price for all incoming orders, which they effectively got locked into at around a hundred and fifty per gram. Everyone that bought on our recommendation earlier sold part of it back and pocketed the profits, keeping a bit of it in their mattress just to keep the supply limited.”

  “So the currency, metals, stock, and bonds all spin wildly out of control and we make a fortune. But we already have an entire world. What do we need it for?”

  “We don’t,” Helton replied. Allonai looked confused again.

  “That’s just looking at us.”

  “So who else was there? If they can print money it doesn’t really hurt them, does it?”

  “We dropped hints from seemingly impeccable sources with self-destructing messages to some highly placed pols and businessmen and media personalities that were known to do some very occasional trading with a statistically improbable success rate, like a novice turning one thousand into a hundred thousand in ten months. Hints that gold and silver were going to fall hard, though possibly with a modest spike first. Being both greedy and unsophisticated traders with apparently solid inside information, they bit, and bit hard. This affair drove a huge wedge in the already shaky trust between the cartels, the politicians, the banks, organized crime, the media, and the highly connected conglomerates. Each rightly views the other as crooks, but as a necessary evil that can be used and manipulated for personal profit. So they tacitly tolerate each other. Not a formal conspiracy, just sort of an ungentlemanly silent understanding. That limited trust based on mutual self-interest in maintaining power has been shattered, because they all lost money, and think it’s the other guy’s fault. Skelton not only made some serious coin, so did most of his men, and he’s quite happy with the abandon that his competitors have drawn the long knives on each other. And the media will cover it because for once several of them had skin in the game, and staggered away with serious road-rash.”

  Taj chimed in. “It’s all a confidence game. The voters allow the banks and politicians and corporations to do what they do because they have confidence the people at the top know what they are doing, and are not really as crazy or stupid or crass as they appear to be. Your goal wasn’t profits, just undermining that confidence, to wake people up to the inner Kafka of it all.”

  “Exactly. Losing a cruiser isn’t a politician’s fault, they say, because it was under the captain’s command. Plausible deniability. Losing control of the money, or the banks, though, it a lot harder to explain. They will all be looking for scapegoats in each other. The fact that the ingots returned to them were not the ones they gave us, and not exactly pure gold, might end up causing them a little grief, too.”

  Allonia chuckled as a thought bubbles up in her mind. “I remember hearing somewhere that con men are the easiest men to trick because they have so much arrogance. They are so used to being the player, they never consider the possibility they might be getting played.”

  Rudel, Sand, Go

  The Armadillo didn’t look very beat up – no more than scattered light laser burns and three

  turrets with visible damage – but the AI avatar was clearly sulking as it returned to the Tau Piper system. Sword’s terse request to dock and make repairs was met with a cautious welcome, and his one editorial comment of “humans are insane” was agreed with but not followed up on.

  Sword landed in the main bay of the no longer entirely robotic mil-moon, and then informed Taj with machine precision the itemized list of damages. Taj passed it on to the interested humans, some of whom were standing on the hanger deck watching warily. As they scanned through the list, Stenson and McPherson exchange a glance and a frown. “He’s got it all wrong.”

  “What do you mean, Chief?” Helton replied, not seeing anything specific obviously askew from where he’s standing.

  “How do you list damage when you have repairs to make?”

  “Most immediate concerns first, basic life-and-death issues first if there are any, then… Oh.

  “Yeah. I see. Rookie mistake that only an AI would make. Sword?” A logo-like sword icon appeared on his screen, but no avatar. “We have to talk. I can tell you right now I’m pretty sure I know why you failed. But I want to hear your side of things before I tell you.” The icon blinked once, then disappears. Helton heads for Sword’s lowering ramp, waving to Quiri to join him aboard.

  “What made you not fade, and what happened out there? Any particular points that just sort of… struck you?”

  “Coliseum sand, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and Go.” Helton and Quiritis look confused. “No relation that I’m aware of,” the newly emerged AI clarifies unhelpfully.

  “I still don’t follow,” Quiritis replied, studying at the images flashing on the screens.

  “Humanity is insane. When the Roman Empire was fading and economically stagnating, they kept the masses under control
with bread and circuses. The wheat for the bread and sand they used on the coliseum floor had to be imported, mostly from Egypt. When money ran short and they could not afford enough of both, they cut back on bread to weaken their own people, but kept the sand flowing, the brilliant white Egyptian sand they used would ensure a grand spectacle when scarlet blood was spilled. Entertainment before strength and survival, done for the survival of the selfish few at the top. This decay from within allowed invasion and ultimately destruction of the empire.”

  “But what’s that got to do with Rudel? And who was he?”

  “Hans-Ulrich Rudel was the most decorated pilot ever. Even with a prosthetic leg, and after being shot down over enemy lines and captured multiple times, he kept escaping and climbing back into the cockpit and putting his life on the line, day after day, killing thousands of enemy soldiers and many hundreds of tanks and vehicles. He faced death a thousand times over fighting for a doomed cause and a mentally ill government, but doing it with bravery and skill, even when it must have been clear to him the end was near. Those two items, the selfishness of leadership and the selflessness of some men fighting for their people, seem absurd, but they seem to define the greatest peoples and states…. You appear to want to change that dichotomy, and that strikes me as a good thing, but the how is not clear.”

  “And Go?”

  “A game with such simple rules and limited play should not be winnable by a human competing against my computational power. Yet I lost every single game. It was like fighting. I should win.”

  “But computers can win at Go.”

  “Yes, specially trained neural networks. The rules are so simple I should still be able to suss out a winning strategy easily enough. But out there, as in go, I kept losing against inferior ships. I met a carrier fleet and challenged them, but they refused to leave the gravity well to engage where I could outmaneuver them by skipping, and driving in left me exposed to fire for too long. I tried a few passes, took some damage and did nothing significant, and left. A draw at best. I met a pair of frigates further out of the well in another system; they stayed very close together, to close to risk skipping between them, and I lost two turrets trying to damage them. But they were nearly out of the gravity well when I met them, and they got away. Again, a draw at best. No winning.