Chương 84: Black Monday (10/19/1987 | 06:45 AM)

DATE: Monday, October 19, 1987 LOCATION: Burbank, California | Warner Bros. Studios, Stage 12 LOCAL TIME: 06: 45 AM PST The soundstage was a cathedral of artificial gloom. Massive Klieg lights hummed in the rafters, casting long, sharp shadows across the "Narrows" alleyway set. Overhead, a rain machine sputtered, coughing out a fine, freezing mist that smelled of ozone and stagnant water. I stood on a rusted iron fire escape, fifteen feet above the pavement.

I was eleven years old, trapped in fifteen pounds of sweating Kevlar-weave Robin armor and a domino mask that felt like it had been epoxied to my cheekbones. Below me, Michael Mann was barking at a cinematographer about the "texture" of the darkness. My joints ached from the morning's stunts, but my mind was three thousand miles away, watching the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I wasn't looking at the director. I was gripping a small, matte-black handset in my gloved hand.

It was a prototype—a CDMA-enabled mobile unit derived from the GaAs chips we'd forged in the bunker. While the rest of the world was tethered to a dying copper grid, I was holding a digital skeleton key. I pressed the encrypted line. It didn't ring; it simply locked on.

"Chad?" Uncle Bob's voice was a jagged frequency of raw panic, yet unnervingly clear.

"I've been trying to call the Archive for twenty minutes. The landlines are dead. I tried the back-line to our brokers at Goldman—nothing. Just a busy signal. It's like the whole country has been unplugged."

"The copper wall just fell, Uncle Bob," I said. My voice was a flat, fifty-nine-year-old baritone, jarringly out of place coming from a boy in a red-and-green tactical suit.

"Breathe. You're hearing the sound of a system hitting its physical latency limit. The NYSE's SuperDot system is choking on the volume; the physical switches can't flip fast enough to keep up with the panic."

"The Dow is down over four hundred points, Chad! It's a stampede. Everyone is trying to sell at the same time, and the phones can't handle the load. We're losing millions every second because we can't reach the floor."

"We aren't selling, Uncle Bob. We're going to buy. And the reason you can hear me perfectly right now is why we developed the spread-spectrum system so aggressively. We didn't just build a better phone; we built a private door to the exchange while the rest of Wall Street is suffocating in the hallway." I looked down. Michael Mann looked up at me, gesturing frantically for me to get into position for the next take. I held up a single, dismissive finger—one minute—and turned my back to the crew.

I wiped a smear of artificial grime and real sweat from under my mask. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Listen closely," I commanded.

"The 'Portfolio Insurance' algorithms are in a feedback loop. They're firing sell orders into a jammed pipe. The brokers aren't answering because they physically can't. But our servers are already linked via the CDMA nodes. You're going to execute a total Requisition. Five strategic targets."

"Requisition?" Uncle Bob's voice steadied, the systems architect in him responding to the clarity of the plan.

"Tell me."

"First, McCaw Cellular. Craig McCaw is over-leveraged, and he's going to be a corporate corpse by noon. I don't care about his towers or his debt—I want his FCC spectrum licenses. Buy a controlling interest. We need the airwaves to anchor the Fractal Net."

"Spectrum. Got it. What else?"

"Federal Express. The market is dumping transport because they're afraid of a recession. They're wrong. The DV-8 maglev we're boring needs a physical 'last mile.' FedEx is that nervous system. We buy them today, and in a few years, I'm going to recruit a kid named Bezos out of D. E. Shaw. I'm going to give him the DV-8 and the FedEx fleet and let him build an unstoppable logistical monopoly."

"Bezos... okay," Uncle Bob muttered, the sound of a pen scratching frantically.

"Next?"

"Apple. Jobs is gone, and the board is flailing. Buy thirty percent. I don't want their beige boxes, Uncle Bob. I want the interface. I want the digital storefront. We're securing iTunes before they even know what a digital file is. And Blockbuster Entertainment." Uncle Bob paused.

"Video tapes? Chad, that's a retail play. Why?"

"It's an insurance policy. In about thirteen years, a company called Netflix will try to sell itself to Blockbuster for fifty million. In my past, Blockbuster laughed at them and died. In this timeline, we own the chair. We manage the transition to streaming from the inside." A production assistant tapped me on the shoulder, looking terrified of Michael Mann's mounting temper.

"Chad, we're rolling in thirty seconds."

"Last one, Uncle Bob," I whispered into the mic, my eyes turning to ice.

"The Walt Disney Company. Aggressive buyout. I'm putting a shield around the Mouse. Eventually, they're going to buy the Star Wars and Marvel mythologies. In my timeline, they let suits who didn't understand the stories rot them from the inside. Not this time. I want a seat on that board so I can fire the vandals before they ever touch a script."

"Chad, this is billions," Uncle Bob whispered.

"We're buying while the world is ending."

"We're harvesting the panic today so we can plant the future tomorrow," I said, watching the Dow ticker on my watch dropping another ten points.

"Buy the blood, Uncle Bob. Buy everything on the list. Then, in two years, when the greed returns, we sell the excess blue chips and flip the profit back into the Arcology. We're going to buy big when they're screaming, and sell big when they're cheering." I saw Michael Mann reach for his megaphone. I felt my posture shift, the rigid authority of the Admin dissolving into the high-energy bounce of an eleven-year-old actor.

"Relax, Uncle Bob," I said, a dark, predatory grin stretching across my face.

"This is when the job gets fun." I folded the phone shut and tucked it into a hidden pouch in my belt. I turned toward the lights, flashing a bright, boyish grin at Michael Mann.

"Ready, Michael!" I chirped, my voice pitching up an octave.

"Let's catch the bad guys."