The Merchants of Zion (16 page)

“You know the government created H-9, right?” he said, referring to the flu pandemic that was supposed to wipe out humanity, but did little more than put a few nursing homes out of business. “The government didn't want to kill its tax base, you see,” he continued, “only to train it to accept their authority unconditionally. Mary leaned on her elbows towards James while he explained other examples of their nefarious scheming, and my best attempts to derail the conversation failed like James's life. Mary might be pretty, but she lacked the good Midwestern sense I'd originally attributed her. I swear, live on the East coast long enough and it'll turn anyone crazy.

“This is how you can tell the airborne toxic event was a set-up...” I dreaded any new disasters because a conspiracy would be spun out of whole cloth, which meant I'd have to listen to James tell me about it, which meant I'd have to educate myself about why he was wrong. They sounded so good on the surface, until you peered closer and discovered the inevitable exaggerations, quotes taken out of context, and facts fabricated from thin air. The airborne toxic event, H-9, the Panic—the US government or Liberty Bell or the Jews or whoever—had an impressive record of ensuring disasters without producing material witnesses. I would believe in alien contact before any of those—at least the UFO movement had cracked-out ex-military and ex-astronauts willing to go on the record and say yes, I knew about aliens but the government threatened to kill me if I spoke up.

I checked my phone, not wanting to hear James's most polished monologue for the fiftieth time. No word from Ruth, although my sister had texted me. She'd just received her grades, and had gotten the highest grade in the class on her physics final. “Keep up the good work and study hard,” I replied. “College won't be this easy.”

Dimitri and I went to get another drink—Mary and James were too engrossed in conversation to have finished theirs. The Merchant was busy refilling the back bar and Honey was ferrying hookahs, so we hung around the counter, waiting and smoking cigarettes.

“Hey,” I said, “James was telling me that the Terminus case caused the Crash. What's your opinion of that?”

“He didn't think it was a conspiracy?”

“I meant that's his version of the story if you strip away all the crazy.”

“Well, it's like saying the Sun creates the Earth's orbit, when it's actually gravity. Technically, the Panic was caused by widespread business failure and unemployment. And proximally, a demand for money that outstripped its supply.”

“So the Terminus case was the center of gravity for the Panic?”

“I didn't say that, I was just pointing out it indicates a lack of understanding at a very basic level. After all, Kepler basically thought the Sun emits gravitons like it does photons. Which we now know is untrue.”

“So what do you think happened?” I asked, frustrated. “What's the real story behind the Panic?”

“That's easy. You know the three T's of irrational exuberance, right? Tulips, tranches, and tech. This one was a Storebrand tech bubble. All those robot companies were going to create a machine intelligence that was going to change the world. It would be the end of scarcity. They were going to roll back climate change. One more iteration and all of humanity's problems were solved, for good. And anyone who'd invested in the company that finally ironed out the final, trivial, minor kinks of self-improving, general MI would possess more wealth than has existed in the entirety of human history.

“So of course, every spare dollar from every hedge fund, mutual fund, and venture capital firm flowed to these companies. But, like any bubble, the massive valuations in no way reflected the underlying reality. MI was kind of a bust, there's no way around it. If it hadn't been 
Calvin v. Terminus
, it would've been something else. The amount of investment required to build an autonomous robot capable of completely replacing a human worker is massive. MI-7X, for example, cost Calvin over a hundred million dollars, and she could only be used on a single train. How many workers did she replace? Five? Three? Trains are almost completely automated anyway, and creating a machine intelligence to replace that final person is going to cost way more than replacing the second-to-last person, whose replacement cost way more than that of the third-to-last, etc. Because if it were easy to replace them with a computer it would already have been done. 

"The theory was that the marginal cost of each unit would diminish over time like any other piece of electronics. Today's sleekest phone is tomorrow's junk, and MI's that started out costing more than your own personal seasteading fiefdom would, over time, end up being the price of a cup of coffee. Either that or the MI was supposed to get smarter on its own and eventually you could use the same system driving your trains to file your taxes. In the end neither really happened. And so you have all these investors who are pretty sure they've been had but, as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. And the stocks kept going up. The DOW hit a hundred-k, and anyone not all-in on these companies looked like a sucker.”

“So it was the Terminus case after all?” I asked, now confused. “Even if it could have been something else, it was the Terminus case that brought down the stock market and caused the Panic."

“No, the Supreme Court case was only the first act, or second, I guess. The airborne toxic event was the first. There have been terrorist attacks, bad court decisions, and financial crises since forever, and few end up this bad. After Terminus went bankrupt the stock market crashed and the banks, to no one's surprise, found themselves in way over their heads. They were taking deposits from people and turning around and investing them in these robotics companies. Every time you withdrew money from the bank, the bank would sell a tiny piece of stock in, say, Terminus, give you whatever you'd asked for, then keep the profit they'd accrued from rising stock prices. They made a killing for years , but now with the court decision those stocks were worthless, and when all their depositors rushed to get their money back from the bank, all of that money had disappeared.

“Bubbles have been popping since the seventeenth century, and we've known since at least the early twentieth century how to avoid the worst consequences. The central bank loans the private banks money so they can cover withdrawals, which makes everyone feel secure and willing to keep their accounts open. It's a masterstroke of psychological hacking, really. Maybe the best one we know about.

“What surprised everyone was that this time the government didn't intervene, and let all the banks fail. The idiots in charge said the markets were supposed to sort it out themselves, and only the strongest companies would survive, which would make the economy even stronger when it recovered. Which it never did, and here we are today.

“Of course, with a fucked up economy the government didn't have any taxes coming in. So they cut spending, saying it would save money and increase business confidence, which would jump-start the economy and the whole problem would solve itself. How? Magic, that's how. And when it turned out that magic isn't real they sold everything to Liberty Bell in a fire-sale and made federal employees work half-days. So, in my final estimation, I would say it was the government's fiscal responsibility that turned a panic into the Panic.”

The Merchant had restocked the bar by the time Dimitri finished his version of the story. We bought our cheap beers and went back to the table, where James was telling Mary how all of these conspiracies kept him out of the market and how he could find a lower paying job most people would kill for in like two seconds, but he wasn't ready to give up on his dreams just yet.

Mary patted my leg and whispered into my ear, “Calm down, I'm only being friendly. I still like you best.” She strengthened her reassurance with a kiss before turning back to James, who wanted to continue discussing his personal favorite conspiracy, a Chinese and American collaboration called PACIC, pronounced passic and standing for Project for American and Chinese International Cooperation. In James's mind, the two most powerful countries on the planet were screwing their citizens because they had nothing better to do.

Dimitri pored over his tablet and I sank into my beer. We'd arrived thirty-eight minutes ago, and it had taken us about twenty minutes to walk here. That made Ruth an hour late. More likely she'd skipped out on us. I asked Merch to put on some music. Classical piano filtered in through speakers mounted in the corners of the room.

“Any idea who this is?” James asked.

“Mozart?” I supplied unhelpfully.

“Bach?” Mary guessed.

“It's definitely Tchaikovsky,” James pronounced.

“It's Schubert,” said Dimitri. “Piano Sonata #16 in A minor. Maybe the first movement?” He moved his fingers on an imaginary set of keys. “Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.” The three of us gaped at him. “What?” he said defensively. “I learned to play the piano when I was six. And regardless, it's really, really famous.”

“Bullshit,” James said. “You're only saying that because they don't know what song it is. It's Tchaikovsky, like I said. Of course it's going to be the first movement—the Merch put it on thirty seconds ago.”

“Which song?” Dimitri asked.

“I don't know, I have a bad memory for that stuff.”

“We can ask Merch,” I said. James called him over, and when we asked he went to check. “It's Piano Sonata #16 in A minor, man. Composed by the wonderful and glorious Franz Schubert.”

James began arguing with him over the music, suggesting it had been mislabeled and wondering aloud if it didn't sound more like Tchaikovsky than Schubert. Merch admitted it was possible, and excused himself to go serve his other customers.

Fifty-one minutes after we arrived—at the start of the second movement, according to Dimitri—Ruth walked into the Well-Tempered Clavier. She looked like a celebrity in disguise, hiding behind monstrous sunglasses and wearing scintillating, golden teardrop earrings that diverted attention from her face. She had on an aquamarine halter top and pressed tennis skirt, and looked like she belonged on a yacht with some young East Coast aristocrat and not in an underground drug den in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood.

She scanned the room, mouth turned down in a grimace. When she spotted us it flared up into a smile that I returned involuntarily. The Germans paused to watch her cross the room. Ruth kissed me, then James, on the cheek. Dimitri stared at her with glazed, stupefied eyes—he hadn't seen her since graduation and seemed torn between holding a deep-seated, trivial grudge and giving her another chance. In a normal state of mind he would've ignored her the entire time, but high Dimitri placed a lower priority on projecting his conscious, cultivated self-image. She smiled at him and his face brightened into a dopey grin. For the moment the past was past.

“Hi Mary, it's nice to see you.”

“Glad you could make it.”

“Sorry I'm late. I had lunch with this guy. He's an actor in 
Othello
.”

“The play?” I asked.

“No, you idiot,” James said. “She means the show. Who is he?”

“It doesn't matter,” she said, sitting down next to him.

“Well it has to be based on the play, right?” I inquired, but no one was paying attention. James was engaged with Ruth and Dimitri was trying to butt in. Mary rocked back and forth, holding herself and blankly gazing down at the table. She must have smoked while Dimitri and I were at the counter. The two Germans were talking, eyes fixed on Ruth. Probably discussing how to get her attention and peel her off from us. She'd broken the flow of our conversation and focused all attention on herself, and I resented her for it.

Mary mumbled something. “What was that?” I asked.

“This table—it used to be a living tree.”

“So what?”

“And... and... Cliff do you think any animals died when they cut it down?” she blurted.

“I dunno. Yeah, I bet some did.”

“That's terrible!” she cried. “Poor animals. Minding their own business and then,” she made a buzzing sound, “they're all dead!” I wished I'd smoked. When I'm high I become paranoid and cynical to the point of nihilism, but at least I'd be wrestling with magnified, sublime interior fears instead of feeling awkward and out of place.

“Ruth, you gonna smoke?” I asked.

“There's pot in there?”

“Mhm.”

“I don't think so. Have you been smoking?”

“No, but I was about to start.”

“Go ahead. I don't really like to.”

“What, since when?” In college she'd been something of a closet stoner.

“Since always. I don't feel anything from it.”

“Everyone gets high. It's a chemical reaction, it's not like you can avoid it.”

“I don't know about any of that. I know it doesn't work for me."

“In that case, you can smoke and it won't matter.”

“No thanks—don't feel like it. Don't let me stop you.”

“I'm good.”

“I'm glad,” she said, and turned to Mary, “How've you been?”

“Good. Very good,” she said, drawing me to her and feeling my face. “You're skin is so soft. You should shave and be gone with those nasty whiskers. Don't you think so?” she asked Ruth.

“When Cliff shaves he looks so young. Are you still in school?”

“It's the summer.”

“Of course it is, dearie. I mean have you graduated?”

“I will next spring. Right now I'm working for a graphic design company.”

“Are you? I hear they pay pretty well.”

“They pay alright.” I hated Ruth's vaguely accusatory compliments. If her and James ever dated, I'd be interested to see who killed the other first. I put my money on Ruth—a poisoned drink, or a helping hand off their penthouse balcony.

“I'm sure they do,” Ruth said. To me, “How's Elly?”

“Who's Elly?” Mary demanded.

“The girl I tutor, remember? She's fine. School's over, so her schedule is a bit hectic at the moment.”

“Of course. Am I ever going to meet her?”

“I don't see why you would.”

“Don't you take her to the park? I could meet you two there. I'll take her out for ice cream afterwards. I bet she's adorable.”