The Commodities Rebel

I have nothing to say.

Hmm.

Well, there’s a lie of the first water, ain’t it? And I use ain’t intentionally, because after today and the Ancient Grammar Nazi, I think I’ll mutilate the English language to my heart’s content. Consider it homage to my rebellious youth. Yeah. Rebel, rebel. That’s me.

Not.

That’s really the crux of it all, ain’t it?

I’m no rebel.

* * *

It’s simple, really. I have this job. It’s part time. It doesn’t pay well and it’s working for the Ancient Grammar Nazi. She’s a nice enough old lady when she wants to be, but the rest of the time she makes me want to pound my head into my console. She’s 63. Doesn’t look a day over 40, considering all the work she’s had done and the work her nanites continue to do. She’ll be a perpetual 40 till the day she dies. She probably could have retired three years ago. But…

Y’know. I don’t think she has a life outside of the office. Outside of the daily feeds and the daily stock trading between us and the Asteroid Belt. Heavy metals and hydrocarbons. Euros, Yen and Dollars. It’s all she has.

Oh, and me.

* * *

Y’know how you’re going along one day and you hit something, some event that makes you drop your drink? Makes you look up from whatever your humdrum existence is (and believe me, my life is effin’ humdrum) and go, Christ on a cracker, I gotta make a change?

That was Tuesday.

Mary (the Ancient Grammar Nazi) has this client out in the Greater Dark. Personal asteroid colony, high effin’ net worth, whole family’s on that rock, making bank, hand over fist, in hydrocarbon and platinum mining. Regular modern-day robber baron. Protected from security exchange investigation, because it takes a few weeks to get auditors out there and back and in the time it takes to transit? Well, it’s gone by then, covered up all the way. There’s only so much you can track over the Solar Net. With the kind of high paid jockeys this guy has, well, you’d have to have more money than he has to crack their ice.

Well, you get the idea. You can hide a lot of crap with that kind of lead time.

It’s not like I didn’t know this guy’s dirty laundry inside and out. Anti-money laundering rules aside, the things that Mary and I have done for this bozo over the years has probably made and ended more personal fortunes than I like to think on.

I won’t say I slept well at night.

I don’t.

But there’s a line apparently even I won’t cross.

Like I said, that was Tuesday.

Apparently I have problems with the idea of someone deciding they want to ruin a small country for fun. Okay, the Consolidated States aren’t exactly small anymore. But it’s my home, bankrupt as it is. I’ve never known any other. Never traveled. It’s got problems. Who doesn’t? Our Dollar is crap.

I don’t know what bee got in the bozo’s bonnet. I just know that he ordered us to dump every Dollar we had in his portfolio and at a loss, Tuesday morning.

One client. No big, right?

Yeah.

This one client was going to crash the effin’ market.

* * *

I sat staring at the order on my console, jacked into the Solar Net like I am every morning, the day’s ticker scrolling under my eyes on my internal feed. I don’t even have a cube. Just the desk, across the room from Mary’s. Hers is always buried in chips and memory sticks, no matter how often I clean, file or organize. She’s entropy in action and on an accelerated time scale.

I looked over at her. She sat slouched in front of her own console, jacked in like me, eyes half-glazed over, looking at her own internal feed.

I turned my attention back on the blinking order.

Looked back over at Mary.

She didn’t move.

* * *

I could have just deleted the order. Pretended I never saw it. But that’s just it. He would have just resent it. Double coded it to Mary’s eyes and that, as they say, would have been that for the house that Jack built.

I didn’t delete the order.

With a flick of my eyelid, I pulled up the break out for International Markets, sub sector, Developing World. Markets in East Asia and Africa started scrolling across my console, with comparative data analysis scrolling now on top of the ticker in my internal field of vision.

There.

Myanmar.

Another storm had wiped out more coast. Market starving for Dollars. Could only afford to pay what the guy wanted and no more. Cheap Dollars needed for expensive aid.

Another eye blink.

I dumped the Dollars in Myanmar.

And then did the one thing I swore I would never do when I finally achieved my Series 7 certification.

I falsified the order and indicated it had been dumped in the Consolidated States. Back tracked, dumped my IDs into a pirate hedge fund I’d been following on my own time and data corrupted the rest.

It wasn’t perfect. It wouldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny. But it would do the job. By the time the trade was checked and uncovered, it’d be too late.

Myanmar had its boost.

And my home wasn’t swimming through another bankruptcy like it did through the Oughts.

* * *

Mary nearly fired me when it came out two weeks later. Apparently, the influx of cash enabled Myanmar to buy vaccine and aid to quash an epidemic. The economy rebounded and tourism rebounded, yes, even in that short time. Things move fast nowadays.

And the guy?

Well, he couldn’t take the order back, now could he? Dollars dumped. He made a profit. Straight conversion to Euros. Smart investment for his portfolio.

But he found out what I had done.

Mary found out what I had done.

And now you’ve found out what I’ve done. And I’m not out in the Outer Dark, so what, it only took you an hour to get here to my dear Angeleno home? My little apartment in the ghetto? Hope you didn’t leave the flitter parked on the street. The neighbors’ll have it stripped for the ‘tronics in half a beat.

No?

Good.

So. Yeah. Rebel, rebel. That’s me. Couldn’t take it anymore. Day in, day out. Amounts of money that I don’t think even you can comprehend, trading hands for what? It’s the kind of money that isn’t even worth counting anymore. It’s just big numbers. Meaningless.

Why’d I do it?

It’s been twenty years, don’tcha know. The Ancient Grammar Nazi would have a cow for that sentence. Twenty years of pushing money into markets that don’t need ‘em. Taking money out of markets that do need ‘em. All because of what?

Because some jerk in the Outer Dark got pissed? Someone said he wasn’t big enough endowed in the right areas? Some politician didn’t kiss his butt? What?

Who cares.

Some egomaniac decided to go nutso on the exchange. Decided he was going to eff with my home because he could. Not because of anything we’d done. Just because. Because when the money’s that big, the numbers that meaningless? You start looking for different thrills.

And that’s what that jerk was looking for. Just a damn thrill.

That’s why Mary didn’t fire me.

She just looked at me with her old, sad eyes in her young face, one eyelid twitching as she executed trades off of her own internal feed, a feed I had no access to. For all I knew, she’d undone my little act of rebellion.

Except that I know she didn’t.

My own feed, my own ticker told me that.

She let it ride.

“Let’s not have anymore of that then, shall we? Rebels don’t live long, Paul.”

I just nodded, plugged into my console and would have gone to work.

But that’s when you all showed up.

So what’s it to be? Jail? Personality restructuring?

* * *

I’m still scratching my head, y’know.

Giving me a new rig and an advanced jack isn’t my idea of punishment for what I did. I don’t understand all of your gents reasoning. I don’t think my little act of rebellion matters for anything.

But apparently, you don’t agree with me.

So.

Here I am.

Trawling the Solar Net for more like the bozo. More guys looking to eff with the market because they have nothing better to do with their time and ludicrous wealth. Looking for Dollars, Yen or Euros being dumped. Looking for stock not doing what I know it’s supposed to do in a right market.

Remember? Twenty years.

I know a good and right market when I see it.

And now?

If I catch another one? Another bogus order?

Well, I hear there was another earthquake in China Republic. They can certainly use some unlooked for lucre.

Who knew the world needed someone like me? It’s not the kind of thing that I thought existed. But then that’s what you said you wanted. A little hidden rebellion. The kind you never see coming.

And ain’t that just me in a nutshell?

Rebel, rebel.

Originally published at Angela N. Hunt. You can comment here or there.