Red. All of it.
The digits on the Bloomberg terminal cascaded downwards in a waterfall of red, each of them a new drop of blood from the bleeding portfolio of Underwood Capital. -9.3% (Daily). The figure gleamed with wicked cheerfulness against the dark office lighting.
Jason Underwood, his angular body in a Tom Ford suit that felt like a straitjacket, stared at the screen. His minimalist, all-glass office, fifty floors over a rain-soaked Manhattan that once was his welcoming beacon of arrival, was an über-expensive tomb with a great view of his own failure.
The desk speakerphone coughed into existence, regurgitating the anger of a man who was witnessing his retirement go down in smoke. "My pension fund, Jason! You sold me on 'disruptive tech' as a bulwark! A bulwark against inflation, a bulwark against the establishment! It's a paper shack in a storm!"
Jason did not speak. His knuckles were white from his tight grip on his highly polished chrome desk. He had heard it all before a dozen times during the day. He was the wunderkind, the thirty-something whiz kid who knew what's next. He was the man who could spin quantum computing and its effects on markets to a room of Ivy League dinosaurs. And he was now just another false prophet who lost other people's money. He stabbed his finger at the mute button, silencing the tirade.
His mind, a finely-tuned processor of numbers and gaugler of probabilities, relived the disaster in tortuous detail. He hadn't been incorrect. He wasn't incorrect. The artificially-smart drugs research corporation he'd bet on was next-generation. Decentralized logistics network was where shipping was headed. It wasn't his thesis that was incorrect, it was the war zone.
They front-ran my orders, he argued, a common, sour rage churning in his gut. Every large block trade, a high-speed trading program saw it, bought the stock a nanosecond earlier than me, and sold it back to my fund a penny or two more expensively. Milking fractions of a penny, millions of times each day. Fiber-optic cable leeches.
Then there was the SEC. A surprise inquiry from a regulator, leaked to reporters, had spooked his more institutional clients. And to top it all off? A single impulsive tweet from a politican about going after "predatory tech monopolies" had wiped out ten percent of his fund's value in ninety minutes.
He unmuted the phone just as he caught the investor's going-away shot. "You're finished, Underwood."
Jason hung up the phone emotionlessly and leaned back, the plush leather of his chair groaning in response. He stared out into the rain streaming down the panoramic windows.
Over? He thought. This isn't chess any more. It isn't poker. It's a fixed slot machine for governments, robots, and whims of numbskulls with social media accounts. There's no strategy, no waiting on your opponent. Only pandemonium.
The madness had trailed after him home to his penthouse later in the evening. Lit only by city lights below, a great universe of hard, indifferent stars, a HALF-full decanter of Macallan 25 stood on the marble coffee table, its amber contents a small drop of heat in a sterile sea of his sitting room.
On the wall, beautifully matted and nicely lit, hung a sepia photo he'd bought at a high-end auction. It was the fabled image of the Titans: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan. Hard, unyielding men who'd shaped the world to their wills.
Jason raised his heavy crystal tumbler to the portrait.
"To you bastards," he grunted, his tone rough and jagged. "You had it all. No compliance officers. No HFTs. No environmental impact statements. Just vision, ambition, and pure, uncut steel. You played the game on God Mode."
He drained the glass, the peaty smoke of the scotch burning a trail down his throat. The universe spun on its axis. City lights dissolved into pastel stripes of gold and white. He leaned onto a plush, white couch, his defeat a physical weight on his chest, and surrendered to descending blackness.
There was no dream. No sense of floating in space.
There was only harsh, vicious effect of sense perception.
The clean, almost sterile scent of his air-filtered flat was lost, replaced with an overwhelming whiff of lemon polish and a faint, resiny whiff of a wood fire. The lightweight, airy cashmere of his sweater was lost, replaced with heavy, prickly texture of wool on his skin. Lost was hum of city background—the distant sirens, ventilation shaft whine—replaced with maddening slow tick of some grandfather clock and, from some outside place, chirring of crickets.
Jason's eyelids sprang wide. Everything was a blur. He wasn't on his couch. He was on his back in a colossal four-post bed, sunlight struggling its way through heavy, gold-and-green damask drapery. A man stood beside the bed, a stranger who was dressed in a neat, black valet's uniform.
"Good morning, Mr. Prentice," he stated, his voice respectful but not with enthusiasm. "Pretty rocky night on the train, wasn't it?Mrs. Prentice was concerned."
The words floated in mid-air, without meaning. Train? Prentice? Jason's head throbbed with a pain so acute it felt structural, as if his head had been battered wide open and poorly reconstructed. He crawled to a sitting position, a groan escaping his lips.
"I'm fine," he said, his tone curiously formal, his voice sounding reedy in his own head. He waved the valet away, needing a moment to clear his head. He let his legs go over the side of the bed, his bare feet impacting a thick, elaborate Persian carpet. The room came into clarity. It was a tour-de-force of Gilded Age decoration—mahogany pieces, gold-plated hardware, oil paintings in heavy frames.
He groaned to his feet and staggered across to an oversized, ornate dresser, his reflection blurring in the gold-framed mirror hanging over it.
He paused. Dead.
His chest, once pulsating with slow hungover rhythms, thudded against his rib cage as if caged.
The face that stared back at him was not his own.
His was a hard, angular face, with dark, menacing eyes of a modern predator. This was a very different face. It was a man of a similar age, perhaps his early forties, but his was softer, with patrician features, a squarer jawline, and calm blue eyes wide with an alien terror.
Panic, chill and certain, gripped him. He was not dreaming. Too real was his headache, too strong the feel of wool against his flesh. His hands, not his hands, trembled as he felt for the brown leather wallet on the dresser.
He opened it. Behind some large, strange-looking bills, folded was a New York State driver's license. The picture showed the stranger in the mirror. He brought his eyes to focus on the name next to it.
Ezra Parmelee Prentice.
The name opened a dusty file cabinet in one corner of his consciousness, a vestige of his college history-major days. Prentice. A good lawyer from a good family. A name that was a footnote, a satellite orbiting a far more extensive, more powerful celestial body.
Ezra Parmelee Prentice, Alta Rockefeller's husband.
Jason's breath stopped. He felt his blood congeal. The fragments of the impossible puzzle clicked into place with a chilling, psychological crash.
Son-in-law of... him.