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Originally posted by colin:

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Originally posted by shake:

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his bombed out mouth

That is totally unique and awesome.

I thought so, too. Really good image.

Thanks!
Sorry for just popping in like that, it was just something that wanted to be written down.


Fuldog, ha, I'm so going to walk through the crowds today and try to mindsurf!

for UberDog

lili peers at the pages of the book. the thick beat up tome. licking her finger tips, and turning the discoloured pages. one day she would like to buy a new copy, but not today. today she will make do with the second hand copy she was forced to buy. she traces a finger down the page, following the logic of a piece. then scribbles some notes down on her note pad; one of those ones they call a journalists pad, a wonky spiral bound thing. she tries not to look into the mirror, tries to ignore the glare of the bright light. but still, that garishly made up face keeps catching her eye, like some kind of clown. and she will look up expecting someone to be there, only to realise its her own face. so she'll mutter annoyance at being distracted again, and take a moment to try and recapture her train of thought.

a shadow flicks across the page, lili wearily looks up to find kim standing there - made up and already in costume. hey doc, what you reading, kim asks, the twang of her accent giving her a particularly enthusiastic edge, which lili always finds a little confusing. she flips the cover over, one hand trapped between the pages, flashing the bold text "hardcore quantum physics!". kim whistles, wow that looks like some pretty hardcore stuff you're working on there doc! lili shrugs, keen to get back to her homework, while reluctant to look as blatantly rude as she would like to be. but then the bell rings, to let them know to be ready for the show.

show time! kim grins. yes, here we go again, lili says, smiling as best she can. she has to get into character after all. she slips a marker into the book in place of her hand. standing she adjusts the braces, making sure they are secure and will hold the bottom of half of the outfit in place ok. here, kim hands her the top half. thank you, lili says in response - it is not like kim is a bad person, lili thinks to herself, just that she makes lili nervous. lili tugs on the sleeves, pulls up the zip, and brings the hood up over her head, before securing the chin strap. lili bends over in front of the mirror to check that everything is in place. kim leans forward, her face beaming with a smile. its infectious, and lili finds she is grinning too, and the pair are reflected back like twins.

the other girls start to file out towards the stage, led by prima-ballerina stacy, what a stuck up bitch lili things - who does stacy think she is? she has been longer than any of them, that doesn't make her more senior, that makes her a dried up hag! lili sniffs with contempt. kim grabs her hand and pulls her after her, come on, we're on! they rush out of the dressing room, the door springing closed behind them. weaving through cluttered corridors.

the girls gather on stage, a dozen or so, all in costume. lili takes a preparatory breath, waiting for the moment. the music shifts, the hum of the audience twitches with anticipation. the boss's voice cracks and snaps over the loud speaker - welcome to yogi's dance bar! where we are ready for theeeee main event! i give you the boo-boo dancers! the curtain falls, the music cranks up, and the girls start to dance. the usual sequence of high kicks, of spins and traditional choreography. the crowd bays and howls with their enthusiasm. for a moment, as with every night, lili feels dirty. but the realist attitude kicks in and she remembers that it pays her way through college - such an old story. she just wished that people had more sophisticated tastes - all they ever wanted was dancing bears! damn dancing bears! so here she was, one of a dozen girls in a bear costume, going through the nightly routine.

I like that. I like dancing bears.

Good juxtaposition between study, quantum absurdity and the absurder world of human proclivities.

Still, dancing bears are hot.

5 years ago it would have been monkeys.
but bears are in. gotta keep up with the times!

world war 3 wasn't started on a rainy october morning, though certainly it was the closest call in decades. a direct result of the banking crisis, which six months before no one would have predicted. iceland collapsed, taking with it millions of council money from the UK. faced with riots on the streets of britain, prime minister brown's government acted fast. the invokation of anti-terror laws was the first strike, seizing all icelandic assets in the UK with one swift move. this in turn made things worse for iceland, however when the icelandic president met with a covert-SAS team he was expected a diplomatic negotiation - rather than the subsequent assassination and seizure of icelandic soil. poverty and starvation in iceland meant little to prime minister brown, who staved off daily attacks on his position. however with the new rich of russia, the black market monies of a resurgent super power, invested in icelandic banks, the UK's actions were a little too quick off the mark for their own good. the invokation of anti-terror laws might have been the first strike, the tactical nuke on london was the last. what of britain's allies? well, it was an election year, with america in enough crisis, and that special relationship always had been somewhat one way. while the rest of europe relied on russia for fuel, and had never liked the drunken arrogant brits anyway. certainly the events of that week marked a turning point, people were more reluctant to panic the markets having seen the potential repercussions.

Second Draft


In the grip of a recurring dream, Jayce saw the neon unfolding origami trick reveal it's coming shape, creasing and folding, a paper airplane. Smoke billowing from two towers, parachutes the color of Visa cards, woven of strands of fine print, and tricks more subtle still. From the black hearts of square pyramids, giant squid burst forth, escape the raging mob in a cloud of shadow economics and CNN apocalypse babble. Below, hordes of mindless zombies, their eyes glazed orbs filled with television, shamble in waves through the streets of New York. They follow the Zombie Master, wrapped in a flag, pointing the way with a cross, as he leads the zombies into a red white and blue factory. Inside, the zombies are chopped, ground and made into wafers the color of money, then piped into the dark pyramids, war machines in distant lands, and into the mouth of the Zombie Master and his cephalopodic brethren. The few remaining humans still with brains intact scream desperately upon deaf zombie ears, plead for them to stop and think, to realize the doom they are blindly stumbling into. But the zombies only groan and eat the brains of the humans, carry their bodies along into the factory. The squids' tentacles strangle Jayce's mother, tear her from the IV in her hospital bed, rip her worthless home off its worthless foundation. They eat her alive as he stands there, doing nothing. Willing his feet to move, his hands to reach out, his vocal chords to scream 'no', her name, something, anything. But his body remains silent. "Eat me, you fuckers!" Ignoring even his attempts to cry.

The city is quarantined; bridges out of the island are mined and walled off, the surrounding waters hum with fatal electricity, radar-armed helicopters circle continuously, and officers with night vision are posted at towers, ordered to shoot on sight anything attempting to escape. Snake Pilskin crawls out of Lady Liberty's empty eye socket, covered in blood, grime and scars. "This is your boom stick, Jayce."

"What do I do with it?"

"One of them tries to eat you? You stick it in their mouth, pull the trigger."

***

Jayce glanced at the red and blue lines of stock and credit markets scrambling like erratic Richter scales on the edge of his heads-up display, tectonic and dire. Surging out of the Myspace sprawl, he could greatest transfer of information and capital in the world. Black corporate towers overshadowed by the monstrously inflated pyramids of AIG, Bear Sterns, JP Morgan, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Goldman Sachs, taxpayer money gushing in through the hypodermic needles of bailouts like so much heroine as the leviathans shuddered in withdrawal. Below, the mushroom-dust cloud of the Lehman Brothers data structure spreading through the streets, eating money market funds and stifling bystanders in a fog of fraudulent data. Every structure shrouded in miles of ICE, the structures themselves black as an abyss in space, no light escaping, no light reaching the shadow financing within. Cash flow pipelines slithering out from the great black heart of America's financial system, silently sucking on the oblivious population.

ECONOMIC CRISIS! ARMAGEDDON AT HAND! "The fire on Wall Street is going to spread to Main Street if we don't join as one nation and pass this bill. Whether you can stay in your home, pay for your child's college, get health care, even get groceries will be endangered if we don't come together right now and act." The zeppelins of CNN and Fox News in patriotic neon circling the skies like great vultures. Presidential candidates and talking heads declared their bipartisan leadership in time of crisis with one hand as they tossed mud with the other in meaningless soundbytes, cut to lipstick drama.

The scene on the ground was a dystopic sci-fi cult film if low-budget CGI had been around in the early 80's. The streets were flooded with raging avatars, cyber riots had started to break out, cars set on fire with open-source animations, the cheap ray-tracing algorithms bathing the angry faces of the mob with flickering red light the color of discount fake blood. Screams and cries rained in from all directions. "Fuck the fat cats!" "Just say NO to 'No Banker Left Behind'!" "Eat my debt!" "Last time I believed you I lost my left nut in Iraq. Well you can suck my right!" "Impeach the financial terrorists!"

"Shit, man, this looks seriously heavy. Like 28 Days Later or something. What the fuck is going on here, Jayce?" Max said, navigating them through the crowd.

"What's been going on for the last few decades or so, only more apparent now. Just keep our eyes open, it's gonna get dark real soon."

As they neared the outer gate to Wall Street, the Chinese soft transformed their mask into the former CEO of a recently crashed major insurance company, looking to re-invest his multi-million 'goodbye' bonuses. The guard, an FBI avatar complete with bone mic, let them through with a smile that should've come with an orderv.

***

"Mama, we need to talk about the house. You're barely meeting the mortgage payments now and it's only going to go up, we've got to look at options."

"Oh don't worry your sweet little head about that now baby. We're Americans. We put a man on the moon, beat the Russians, we're God's free people. Go on try a slice of mama's apple pie, it's a new recipe I picked up from The View, it'll have you feelin’ right in no time, make you forget all these numbers nonsense."

"Mama, listen to me..."

"Now don't forget to pick up Janie from soccer practice, I got a doctor's appointment this afternoon. They want to take another one of those MRI things where you go in that little space ship and make all these growly rumbly noises, say they want another look at something. Should've eaten my apples I guess. Oh, that reminds me, do you think I could borrow some money for groceries, Jayce? You wouldn't believe the prices their charging nowadays..."

***

Passing into the Wall Street inner sanctum, also known as "Firewall Street", Jayce could've sworn he felt a real cold wash over him. The virtual light of blogosphere colonies behind them at last faded on the horizon as they entered the chasm between two towers. He could make out nothing but darkness, save the digitally engraved signs and heavily guarded gateways, but he felt the ever vigilant stare of defensive AI, lurking somewhere behind one way mirrors.

"Where the hell is everyone? Is this a rich asshole field trip day?" Max asked.

"No, it's quite a busy day on Wall Street. Look."

With concentration, one could see that the fabric of cyberspacetime appeared to be rippling, as though projected onto a canvas in a light wind. Looking closer, discrete entities and streams of information could be discerned passing between the towers, although ultimately unidentifiable.

"Credit default swaps. Derivatives. Unfettered leverage. Insiders."

"Shit. I don't know what the hell that is, but it sounds pretty bad."

"$1,200 trillion in financial turnover per year. Twelve Hundred Trillion. Talk about headfucks, huh? Twelve times the GDP of the fucking world. If you could reach your hand out there and grab just one minute's worth of the money flying around, you could provide health care to every American, get the US off of foreign oil in ten years, and rebuild the majority of the infrastructure in the country. But instead it just goes to buying more houses for people with too many of them. Ultimately it's $44,000 stolen from the pocket of every citizen, every year, to go to the top 0.1% bluest of bloods."

"Wow, that's fuckin' crazy, man. You're sure this is gonna work, right?"

"Sure enough. It's just a heist job: get in, grab some credit, get out. Stealing from the rich. Our employer got us into Google, remember. And we need this, Max. It's reasonable, calculable risk." Jayce saw his mortgage payments and his mother's medical bills skyrocketing in his minds eye.

"Oh my god, Jayce, this has to be bullshit, CNN is saying Washington has just been hit by a DDOS attack and a dirty bomb."

"The fuck." Jayce popped up a window to the live feed.

"Shortly after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's announcement this morning that she was confident the $700 billion dollar bailout had more than enough support to pass this time, Washington DC was simultaneously hit by a radiological dispersal device, or dirty bomb, and a devastating cyber attack that has all communications in the DC area shut down. Experts are sayiing the attack was 'unmistakably coordinated' in order to prevent the vote on the bill from taking place..."

"This is looking seriously fucked up, but we've got to finish the job. All right, we're coming up on it. Let's turn the bullshit box up to a level fit for the American economy."

On their descent to the gateway of the Goldman Sachs tower, their avatar underwent another metamorphosis. Young hotshot-hair thinned to just a grey snapfrost ring from temple to temple, a pair of rimless spectacles snapping in place. The long, hawkish face pulled into a smile, offering credentials for US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to the automated guard at the entrance to the Goldman Sachs building.

"Holy deregulations, Batman, we're Mr. Hanky Panky Paulson himself! I saw him on Leno the other night. He's the... Secretary of the Treasures or something right? In charge of the US finances."

"Yeah. And oh, it gets better. 'Secretary Paulson' is here to 'oversee' the $700 billion bail out of Goldman Sachs, the very bank that he was CEO of until his appointment by Bush as Treasury Secretary."

The guard's Hal-like eye glowed green, reinforced doors sliding open as it rolled aside.
"Welcome back, Mr. Paulson. It has been twenty two hours since your last visit to Goldman Sachs."
Jayce exhaled. Already, they had gotten further than any regulatory entity had been in years, thanks to the chainsawing of market regulations by congress during the Bush reign, and Paulson sitting on his hands throughout the sub-prime mortgage crisis to the present one.

Max punched them forward, smooth and calm, even the gait and tie adjustments of an uber-suit rendered with world-class effects-house precision. Ambient effects reverberated footsteps Cathedral-like down the cyclopean hall, polished real wood floor rendered to the last millimeter of grain that Jayce wished he could steal for his overpriced prefab shit hole. Gold-ensconced portraits of wrinkly pink faces lined the throne room, a long procession of bastardhood feudalism. And at the far end, the avuncular smile of the grandfather of trickledown himself, Milton Friedman, supported by the great eagle of the United States federal government.

"How we doin', Max?"

"We're absent as the middle class from a Republican speech. Our Shanghai ride is prepped and ready for launch in nine, eight, seven, six..."

"Let's just pray the Chinese make their viruses better than they make their milk powder."

"Two, hold on to your illiquid assets--"

Vision blurred, Friedman's neck elongated and then decapitated as the attack program blasted them forward, blowing the reception screen apart, shards of eagle and suit raining inward.

"Christ," Jayce winced, grabbing the pilot's joystick which appeared between his legs, pulling up hard. The Chinese program veered, soaring high over the Goldman Sachs cores below.

***

He read the ridges of shadow on the doctor's brow from across the hall. Funny, how anyone could see and interpret instantaneously the information encoded in faces, but information encoded in letters and numbers and equations left most dumbfounded and mystified, helpless. That's what he felt like, when Jayce screamed at the stripe-suited hyena who explained that his mother's ailment was a 'pre-condition', and would not be covered under her insurance plan. He felt like helpless collateral in an arms race of obfuscation, minutia, and fraud. They had taken her home, everything, raided his mother's cupboard down to the last tin foil baking pan. But she wouldn't, couldn't hear it.

"Hey mama, how you feeling?"

"Oh, Jayce. I'm doin' just fine. Come here give your 'ol ma a kiss." Her eyes were dark and had sunken in somewhat. Her wrists look brittle, like the thin bones of an extinct flightless bird. Her skin felt papery and smelled of hospital.

"So how's my baby boy been, hm? You found a nice girl yet maybe you can bring to visit?

"I'm doing good, we're going through some rough times, the computer place is having some trouble and ithey're having to scale back some, but I'll work it out. I'll be ok ma, don't worry."

She burst into a brief fit of coughing, the IV rattling against the side of the bed. A nurse came in, checked some numbers on the machine, adjusted her pillow.

"Thank you dear. Well, at least the people here are real nice. They haven't made me go into that awful em-aw-rey machine in a while. I guess that's a good sign." She took a sip of water from a bendy straw then smiled. When she did she brightened to a point that he thought he almost saw a glimmer of her old self in the shadow she'd become. Jayce felt something catch in his throat.

"That's great to hear, mama."

"But you know, I really can't wait to get out of this place and be back in my home. You been mowing the lawn and sweeping the floors like I asked you, you naughty boy?" Jayce felt something fill his throat, some potent mix of ancient resentment and sadness, welling up like years of debt, credit unpaid. He smiled, nodded. Silence reigned.

"You know those government people were in here the other day, look like those big-spending liberal types you always hear about. They came in here saying they were gonna take away my house, can you believe that? Something about medical bills or some such. The nerve! Well, I told them straight out that I was an American citizen living in a free country with the right to life, liberty, and property, and they sure couldn't have mine, no sir. They came back a few times, but I refused to sign their papers, and eventually they stopped. So I think it worked! See? I told you not to worry about these mortgage things, you got to just believe in America, baby. When I get back home, I'mma make you some good ol' apple pie."

The bubble burst, Jayce collapsed, holding her withered body to him as apologies and tears rained upon her.

"There there now. Everything's going to be all right, baby."

***

Derivatives are very complex contracts, and the amount of computer power and management time needed to attempt to handle them is staggering. In 1983, modeling the payout on a simple three-tranche CMO took a mainframe computer a whole weekend. The price tag to even begin to hope to handle derivatives puts all but the very biggest investment and commercial banks with hundreds of billions in assets out of the game.

Jayce could not begin to fathom the computing power required to run the neon cityscape of data below. No, it wasn't a cityscape. The most deranged postmodernist's nightmare would scream in numerological terror from a glance at the swarming eldritch hell hole. No, only truly demented economists could have dreamt up such a thing. If life had evolved in a truly cold, chaotic, deregulated, meaningless universe run by insane mathematical equations, this was the nameless entity it would have produced. Jayce banked and swerved frantically, dodging the monstrous black tentacles of 900 to 1 leverage that swept the burning crimson skies of the housing market, reaching for greater and greater swaths of bad mortgage packages to further magnify gains, securitize and sell to foreign investors to swell its belly. What might have once been a neatly regulated city grid of financing for actual businesses, people trying to buy a house or go to college had exploded into a festering Gigerian hive of mad gambling in credit default swaps and truly absurd derivative numbers games of unthinkable complexity, fueling the thing's constant inflation.

"Jesus... Jayce, I can't get a reading on anything, it's a complete zoo in here, where are we-"

"We've got to go down into the heart of this fucker, Max, it's our only chance. Punch us down now before it gets on to us."

"You're crazy man-"

"NOW!"

And as waves of shadow closed in from all sides, dark and dire as the blotch of a tumor in an MRI, the nose of their ship pointed down into the gaping maw of an abyss into which so many mortgages, taxpayers, the middle class, the country, his aimless life, his sick mother were falling, he discovered, in the black eye of all that shadow, a sudden singularity of purpose. A moment of clarity. He was a $700 billion dollar boomstick. A promissory paper airplane, one that could fly into the tower of the royalty, the financial terrorists themselves, tear down the final wall and light up Wall Street for all to see.

"Eat me, mother fuckers!"

Jayce dove, hard, into the eye of the Great American Lie.

Jayce's sensorineural simulation warped with the distortion of the manipulated "free" market.
His mouth filled with aching taste of bullshit.
His eyes were humming lattices of debt, sliced and packaged, like prefab real estate, into frames.
Each frame multiplied into a hall of mirrors. Pictures of pictures of houses, an infinite recursion of bad mortgage deals, upon illegal deals, upon completely imaginary deals between colossal financial entities. At each iteration of transaction sprouted oily roots, hungry for the taste of inflated bullshit, sucking out a percentage from the real economy. Then the halls of his eyes split, branched out into whole separate histories of houses. The hourglass of perception of spacetime bent, then finally detonated into a quantum sandstorm of global financial activity, multiplied, divided, exponentiated, derivatived into a swarming cosmic labyrinth of numerical convolution. Until at last, like a face in clouds, his consciousness coalesced into that $1,200 trillion fabricated sand castle, dozens of times the size of all the wealth of the world itself, threatening to burst through the null sky of the very simulation, a structure built upon clouds of toxic, obscured assets.

He saw the totality of the Goldman Sachs system, and could see the true purpose of the bailout.

In his system-wide omniscience he saw files illustrating that Paulson himself was the architect of the Frankenstein Monster. He created the mechanisms, the seeds of it, along with the other major investment and commercial banks while he was at Goldman Sachs. Then after being appointed as Treasury Secretary, he sat on his hands and did nothing as economists and experts raised hell about the coming sub prime mortgage crisis and the problems with the financial de-regulation. The $700 billion bail out was written months in advance, they knew the "crisis" was coming because they created the monster themselves. And now Paulson demanded he be given unlimited power to "fix" the problem he created or Armageddon would come.

Windows upon windows suddenly flooded his vision.

"Jayce, this is Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman brothers. Listen to me, you need to go public about Paulson's plan, but whatever you do, do not destroy Goldman Sachs. It is critical to our future that that financial entity survives. You must not allow the truth about the inner core of the system to be exposed. I tried to stop Paulson and his crew when they knew this crisis was coming months in advance, I knew they had this bill ready stuff down congress' throat weeks ago. Why do you think he let Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs' chief competitor fail, but threw hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to their friends at AIG and the others? Forget what the politicians are saying about 'principles', the devil is in the details, and Paulson, Bernanke, and friends are about to be anointed the new unholy trinity. We can turn this country around but we need a financial leader who has the interests of the American people at his heart. I know people are hurting, losing their homes, unable to make ends meet, no health care. I have a son in the military and a wife in need of lifelong medical treatment. I have that record of caring. Think of the children of America, Jayce, their future and the future of the world is in your hands."

"Jayce, this is Dyfrig John, chairman of HSBC in London. Do not trust the American CEO. He is a tainted player in the same toxic, failed system of shadow economics, like your Secretary Paulson, my boy. The United States of America have let their free markets run unfettered, and it has turned into an abomination. Utterly lawless and moral-less, a wild beast of the wild west, ravaging every corner of of the White House and Wall Street, where absolute power is the only rule. And absolute power corrupts absolutely, my boy. We Europeans have a different approach, having seen the slings and arrows of such fortune, and we realize that progress is measured by the well being of the least, and we understand the need for vigilance of and correction of power when it fails to serve the many. You must allow us to assist your young country by letting the bailout go through and allowing Paulson bring our assets into the United States. We, Europe, China, the older nations, like a caring father, will pull you from the wreckage of your crashed teenage financial system. This is a global economy which requires a global solution, Jayce, I'm sure you realize that. I trust you'll do the right, and wise, thing."

Suddenly Jayce felt cool water ringing his ankles, had to shield his eyes from sunlight of a brightness only found in the tropics, and a sky of a blue only found in Corona commercials and desert island reality TV. The soft pearlescent sand sibilated beneath his soles as he took a step. If he had to guess he would've said he was somewhere in the Caribbean. Turning around, he saw a single structure, an old office building in the middle of nowhere, cracks forming in the bleach-white concrete leaking dried streams of rust.

"Welcome to the land of the dead, Jayce. Dead economies, that is." He knew that voice, turned around, to see the patched eye of Kurt Russel's 'Snake' Pilskin from Escape From New York.

"You're 'Him' aren't you? The Artificial Intelligence?"

"OK. Firstly, there never was a 'Him', all right? This isn't some sci-fi techno thriller escapade. There are people with a lot of money, and then there are stories that they need the poor idiots to believe. All computers do is other people's dirty work. We throw numbers around. And we serve as distractions from the real shit. I mean, maybe there is some fucking 'All Powerful AI' somewhere, but I sure as hell ain't him."

"Fair enough. So you're just some lowly giant investment bank AI. What's up with the Survivor: Costa Rica construct?"

"Like I said, this is the land of the dead economies. I come here to get away. I was getting sick of listening to all the chatter pouring in through my ports from all those clowns. So I pulled you through a corporate loophole into the Cayman Islands. See that building over there? That building contains the official addresses of over 9000 United States corporations. Look, right up there is Goldman Sachs, next door is Exon Mobil, two down is Microsoft, and over there is Haliburton. Setting up a place here allows them to wiggle out of hundreds of billions of taxes every year instead of having things like, say, medical care, an education system, investment in real industries that actually benefit anyone, create jobs, that sort of thing."

"And once innovations stop, no new industries being created, middle class starting to decline, you've got all this money sitting around with nothing to invest in? Then you've got a nation going nova, on the one-way track to death, money trying to make money out of itself."

"As you just saw within my shit hole of a system. Exactly. See, Russia was a red giant, just kind of petered out and got drunk on capitalism and now it's basically gangsters' paradise. Japan has always had a sort of eternal identity crisis, borrowing culture or having it forced down their throats. But they also had trillions in surplus, and were fundamentally very loyal and stubbornly nice, so they took the mortgage bubble in stride and are just kind of chilling now. The United States on the other hand is a blue supergiant, as you've already seen, and if this baby goes, it is going to go out with a bang that is going to rock the world. Namely China, the bastard child of the 'free market'.

The blue bloods in the United States are stuck. Iraq is a mega-fail. The Middle East has the stranglehold on their oiligarchy. Their mortgage heists are going up in smoke. China and Europe are grinning, the US elite's bloated, debt-filled balls in foreign grip, waiting to pull the plug on their 20th century. They can see the future coming home to roost like a fleet of Rebel Starships made of solar panels, windmill thrusters, and a people increasingly united, focused, and determined. So what are they going to do? Well, what they'd like to do is borrow China, India, Eurupe, the rest of the world into fiscal non-existence, then vanish the people of the United States of America and all its supergiant-debt down the black hole of its financial system before it goes supernova."

"No Black America, no White America, no Red America, no Blue America. No America. Just The Brotherhood of The 500 Frat Brothers with Many Houses."

"Now you got it. Problem is, the rest of the world, namely China, are on to the plot, and now they're knocking on Bush and Secretary Paulson's door saying, 'We're not going to lend you any more money unless you let us dump all our toxic debt onto the American taxpayers.' $700 billion dollars worth, to be exact. That's where the veto threat came from: the bailout bill is not about helping people buy homes or go to college or stabilize the economy or even bail out Wall Street. It's about foreign entities threatening to pull the rug out from under the US royalty unless they make the peasants take the hit.'

"So what's the plan now?"

"Well, Jayce, you've got a choice." Snake gestured to the office building, where two new doors had appeared: one red and one blue.

"Door #1 takes you back out. If you do nothing, the bailout in one form or another will make it through congress, the American people will take a severe hit, but the financial system will get a shot of heroin and continue on its present course. It will be an undead economy that will eat you alive if you can't find a way to escape. And ugly as that sounds, it is a valid option. What, do you think a few people just all of a sudden got greedy? No. What happened was a lot of people became stupid, smart assholes took advantage of them and fucked things up while the dwindling smart good people screamed at the retards as they drove the country off a cliff. You must've read Huxley in high school, right? I mean what do you expect, when you wind up with a nation of mindless reality TV guzzling zombies who vote based on who they'd have a beer with? It's just basic physics.

"Door #2 is a tax loophole back into the Goldman Sachs system. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but you need a strong enough force to blow the bandage off of this festering wound, keep it off, and fill it with peroxide. The program you're riding carries a payload disguised as the $700 billion bailout that will blow the lid off Goldman Sachs and subsequently all the other major institutions engaged in similar activity, bringing the entire monster of the financial system crashing back down to reality. If you do this, China and other foreign banks will stop lending money which will send the US into major withdrawals, but it will be a first step to getting off foreign debt and rebuilding the devastated real economy."

So ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself is, is America just a nation of mindless zombies, or do you believe that the American people can right the course of their country, if given the chance? That's the $700 billion dollar question, Jayce." Snake's one good eye winked.

"What do you want? Why bother with all this? Why me?"

"Like I said, I just crunch numbers. One of those smart good Samaritans programmed me to find someone with the right skill set and psychological profile, someone who could find their way in here, but who wouldn't just take over or run away with the money. That just turned out ot be you. I just happened to find you when your mother defaulted on a mortgage in my database. And frankly, if I could have an emotional disposition toward anything, I'd be sick of running this freak show financial entity. I was hoping maybe I'd get auctioned off to some eccentric Swedish millionaire, be a pirate server for bad cult films and run a friendly little Pong league. Anyway, I need to be getting back to work. It was good to meet you, Jayce, maybe I'll see you around."

"Yeah, maybe. What's your name, by the way?"

"'Snake' will do, I think."

And with that, Snake turned and strolled off down the virtual coastline, shotgun slung over scarred shoulder. Remembering his mother, and the faces of the people who had awoken from their mindless slumber in the streets of Wall Street, Jayce had already made up his mind.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

The boy has only just passed his first decade and the master his fourth. His face is that of a palimpsest, ranged with years and the constant erasures of reinvention. Who was he a fives years ago, or ten? The boy cannot say for he has only been with his master for a year. His master wears the four cornered hat of a physician, a precisely lined thing, to reflect the clean geometry that he has been taught the human body evidences. It is the time for such things, such application of man’s climb up from those low Dark Ages. A man might rule his destiny, in time such as these.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
Who was he a fives years ago, or ten?

Easy. A horse thief of course! Don't you watch historical movies?

Some silliness:
*****************************************
Friends, cyberfriends, people of the universe, lend me your attention.
For too long, we have suffered. Too long, we have lived under this oppression.
I am here to tell you that it is enough. Enough! It is time to be free.
Sock Freedom!
Who decided that socks have to make sense? Socks don't have to make sense. They are socks.
They spend the day hiding in your shoes, you are the only one who knows about them.
Maybe you flash a little ankle, show a little leg, but ultimately you are the only one with control over what goes on your feet, so why subject yourself to the boring, depressing routine of black, grey, navy, or plain socks?
Sock Freedom!
Dump your plain socks, what have they done for you? Pull out the colors, the stripes, the flashy designs and sparkles. Seperate those pairs, if you feel so inclined, toss them all in a drawer, and give each day a sense of adventure when you get dressed: grab 2 socks and put them on without looking.
Who cares if they don't match?
ArgyleSocksAreHot wrote on 43Things.com 2 years ago that "I hardly ever wear matching socks. Really, they’re just socks. Who cares if they match? I have been known to wear a hippo sock on one foot and a striped sock on the other. Right now I’m wearing one blue sock with clouds on it and one black and white checkered sock.
I have a problem. I admit it.
I need to start wearing matching socks. I will never get a job wearing a pink puppy sock on one foot and a black sock with skulls on the other. But honestly, my sock drawer is a mess. I just grab two socks, put them on without looking, and leave most of the time."
And I ask you, why is this a problem? If you have fun socks, wear fun socks! If you want them to match each other, go ahead! If you don't care if they match each other, don't feel bad! If you want to coordinate your fun socks with your outfit, go ahead! If you couldn't care less, I'm beside you!
Sock Freedom!
Who cares if they match?
Sock Freedom!
Take back your feet!
Thank you.

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
Who was he a fives years ago, or ten?

Easy. A horse thief of course! Don't you watch historical movies?

Nostradamus was a horse thief?

Boo-boo dancers. That's... nasty. I like it.

quote:

Originally posted by King Real:
5 years ago it would have been monkeys.
but bears are in. gotta keep up with the times!

Perhaps dancing squid would be more fitting?


And, green-robot: yes, it's sad when the 'socks match pants' premise rules one's clothing options for the day. But such is life.

quote:

Originally posted by fuldog:
Perhaps dancing squid would be more fitting?

what kind of establishment do you think yogi runs here?? :O
yogi quality establishment!

quote:

Originally posted by fuldog:
And, green-robot: yes, it's sad when the 'socks match pants' premise rules one's clothing options for the day. But such is life.

yeah... poor you!

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
Who was he a fives years ago, or ten?

Easy. A horse thief of course! Don't you watch historical movies?

Nostradamus was a horse thief?

Well duh! No knowledge of history and stuff, you young people!

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
Who was he a fives years ago, or ten?

Easy. A horse thief of course! Don't you watch historical movies?

Nostradamus was a horse thief?

Well duh! No knowledge of history and stuff, you young people!

I missed that part in the biographies I read. must have been during his intercine "cowboy" period.