“Deploy, please,” Rosario said. “Okay, let’s go. If this is a hostage box there’s sure to be sensors on it, so let’s go fast.”
Vlade finned hard to the side of the hot container. He tapped the old hello pattern: Shave and a haircut, two bits! Then put his ear to the side of the container.
After a few moments he heard taps back. Tip tip tip, tap, tap, tap, tip tip tip. A clear SOS. Maybe the only bit of Morse code left alive in the world.
“Call the police,” he said to the others.
Rosario swam up the old subway stairs toward the surface. She had radio comms in her swim bag and got the call off; they could hear it through their walkie-talkie system.
A police cruiser was over them in about fifteen minutes, though it felt longer. When the cruiser cut its motors, all four of them surfaced and explained what they had found.
The police officers aboard had run into situations like this before. They asked the divers to go down and pull the inflatable staircase tube up to them, which Vlade and Jim did. Then they attached an air hose to the tube’s valve and pumped it rigid, at which point it filled most of the old subway hole. After that they put a water vacuum in the interior cylinder and pumped it dry. Their vacuum was nothing compared to Idelba’s, but it was strong enough to quickly empty the interior of the staircase tube, which had been collapsed down below and was mostly dry to begin with. When it was cleared, two of the water officers descended into it, one carrying a welding gun and headset.
After that Vlade and the others floated by the boat, waiting. They couldn’t help keeping an eye out to see if other watercraft were approaching, though with their eyes right at the water’s surface their prospect was not good. They also swam back down from time to time to make sure no submersibles were approaching. This was something they could do that the police cruiser couldn’t (not optically, anyway), so after a while Vlade and Jim stayed down there by the container, looking around uneasily. Nothing came near them. They resurfaced when Rosario called them, and got there just in time to see the two water cops emerge from the floating end of the inflated staircase tube, helping two bearded men make their way up the stairs. Up in the wind the two men paused and looked around at the river, hands shielding their eyes, blinking like moles.
There’s a market for markets.
said Donald MacKenzie
c) that citizen
Dark pools. Dark pools of money, of financial activities. Unregulated and unreported. Estimated to be three times larger than the officially reported economy. Exchanges not advertised or explained to outsiders. Exchanges opaque even to those making them.
Go into one and see what’s being offered in there for less than in the regular exchanges. Buy a lot of it and hope it’s what it was supposed to be, take it out and sell it at the list price. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Trades happen that fast. The offer on your screen is not in the actual present but represents some moment of the past. Or, if you want to say it’s in the present, there are high-frequency algorithms that are working in your actionable future, in that they can act before you can. They’re across a technological international date line, working in the next present, and when you offer to buy something they can buy it first and sell it to you for more. High-frequency trading algorithms can react to a quote faster than the public actually sees it offered at all. Any trade in the dark pools is getting shaved by a high-frequency interloper. It’s a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.
Liquidity vaporized. Liquidity gone through the phase change that makes it a gas. Liquidity become gaseous, become telepathy. Liquidity gone metaphysical.
So because of this situation, much of the movement of capital therefore now happens out of sight, unregulated, in a world of its own. Two thirds of all finance, but this is an estimate; it could be more. Trillions of dollars a day. Possibly a quadrillion dollars a day, meaning a thousand trillion dollars. And some people, when they want to, can pull some of this vaporized money out of the dark pools and reliquefy it, then solidify it by buying things in the real economy. In the real world.
This being the case, if you think you know how the world works, think again. You are deceived. You don’t know; you can’t see it, and the whole story has never been told to you. Sorry. Just the way it is.