“I am not regretting not reading this book.”
“No. I mean, now that we’re living it, I don’t think the book is really necessary. It would be redundant. But at least it was short. This is long. How long have we been in here?”
“Twenty-nine days, I think.”
“Okay, that’s long.”
“Feels longer.”
“True, it does. But it’s only a month. It could go on longer.”
“Obviously.”
“But people must be looking for us, right?”
“I hope so.”
Jeff sighs. “I put some dead man’s switches in part of what I sent out, you know, and some of those are set to go off soon.”
“But people will already know we’re missing. What good is it going to do if your help calls go off? They’ll just confirm what people already know.”
“But they’ll know there’s a reason we’re missing.”
“Which is what?”
“Well, if I was right, it would be the information we sent to the people we tapped into.”
“That you sent out to the people you tapped into.”
“Right. People would learn that information and investigate the problem, and maybe that will lead them to us here.”
“Here on the river bottom.”
“Well, whoever put us here must have left some record of doing it.”
Mutt shakes his head. “This isn’t the kind of thing people write about or talk about.”
“What, they wink? They use sign language?”
“Something like that. A word to the wise. Unrecorded.”
“Well, we have to hope it isn’t like that. Also, I’ve got a chip injected in my skin, it’s got a GPS signal going out.”
“How far does it reach?”
“I don’t know.”
“How big is the chip?”
“Maybe half an inch? You can feel it, back of my neck here.”
“So, maybe a hundred feet? If you weren’t at the bottom of a river?”
“Does water slow down radio waves?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I did what I could.”
“You put out a call to the SEC without telling me, is what you did. To the SEC and to some dark pools, if I’m understanding you right.”
“It was just a test. I wasn’t stealing or anything. It was like whistle-blowing.”
“Good to know. But now it’s us who are in the dark pool.”
“I wanted to see if we could tap in. And we could, so that’s good. I’m not even sure that that’s what got us stuck here. We were the ones who wrote the security for that stack, and I wrote in a covert channel for us to use, and there was no way anyone could notice it.”
“But you still seem to think that’s what got us in here.”
“It’s just I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. I mean, it’s been a long time since I pissed off you know who. And no one heard that whistle blow. I meant to make it a foghorn and it came out a dog whistle.”
“What about those sixteen tweaks to the world system that you were talking about? What if the world system didn’t like that idea?”
“But how would it know?”
“I thought you said the system is self-aware.”
Jeff stares at Mutt for a while. “That was a metaphor. Hyperbole. Symbolism.”
“I thought it was programming. All the programs knitted together into one kind of mastermind program. That’s what you said.”
“Like Gaia, Mutt. It’s like Gaia is everything living on Earth influencing everything else and the rocks and air and such. Like the cloud, maybe. But they’re both metaphors. There’s no one actually home in either case.”
“If you say so. But look, you put your tap in, through your own covert channel no less, and next thing we know we’re trapped in a container decked out like some kind of limbo. Maybe the cloud killed us, and this is us dead.”
“No. That was Waiting for Godot. We’re just in a container somewhere. Somewhere with rushing water sounds outside the walls, locked in and so on. Bad food.”
“Limbo might have bad food.”
“Mutt, please. Why after fourteen years of brute literal-mindedness would you choose now to go metaphysical on me? I’m not sure I can stand it.”
Mutt shrugs. “It’s mysterious, that’s all. Highly mysterious.”
Jeff can only nod to this.
“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.”
Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.”
Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?”
“Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.”
“Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?”
“It wasn’t that much. Only a few billion.”
“Per day?”
“Well, per hour.”
Mutt finds himself standing up, looking at Jeff, who is regarding the floor. “And you wonder why someone came after us?”
Jeff shrugged. “There were other tweaks I did that might have been, you know, even more of a freak-out.”
“More than stealing a few billion dollars an hour?”
“It wasn’t stealing, it was redirecting. To the SEC no less. I’m not sure that kind of thing isn’t happening all the time. If it was, who would know? Would the SEC know? These are fictional trillions, they’re derivatives and securities and the nth tranche of a jumble bond. If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know. Some bank accounts in a tax haven would grow and no one would be the wiser.”
“Why did you do it, then?”
“To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for God’s sake!”
“So you did want them to notice.”
“I guess so. Yeah, I did. The SEC I did. I did all sorts of stuff. That might not even be what got noticed.”
“No? What else did you do?”
“I killed all those tax havens.”
Mutt stares at him. “Killed them?”
“I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to. You know how there’s about ten terror sponsor countries that you can’t wire money to? I added all the tax havens to that list.”
“You mean like England?”
“All of them.”
“So how’s the world economy supposed to work? Money can’t move if it can’t move to tax havens.”
“It shouldn’t be that way. There shouldn’t be tax havens.”
Mutt throws up his hands. “What else did you do? If I may ask.”
“I pikettied the U.S. tax code.”
“Meaning?”
“Sharp progressive tax on capital assets. All capital assets in the United States, taxed at a progressive rate that goes to ninety percent of any holdings over one hundred million.”
Mutt goes and sits down on his bed. “So this would be, like …” He makes a cutting motion with his hand.
“It would be like what Keynes called the euthanasia of the rentier. Yes. He fully expected it to happen, and that was two centuries ago.”
“Didn’t he also say that most supposedly smart economists are idiots working from ideas that are centuries old?”
“He did say something like that, yes. And he was right.”
“So now you’re doing it too?”