dr0p_d0wn
"...the sorcerer no longer able to control the powers he has called up by his spells"
8.04 AM
Dripping onto the creamy wool carpet, Horvid Manteuffel strode in to the breakfast room, fresh from the morning pool, wearing a velvet brocade robe in royal blue-and-gold bound loosely over his nakedness.
The suits, the executors, were already seated, uneasy and gazing blank-faced at the glass top of his vast breakfast table. Breakfast had been set for them, but they had chosen not to take any. Horvid swooped into his place at the head of the table and picked up his coffee cup. The coffee was bitter and strong.
There was a rustling. A light cough from his right. Clearly Clive Mansell, the Chief Financial Officer, was eager to get the ball rolling. But Horvid hadn't become the fourth-richest entrepreneur in Austria and the eleventh-richest in the Eurozone by indulging underlings and low-status types.
He held up his left hand as he reached with his right for his breakfast of choice, an artisanal Egg McMuffin. Originally he had been obliged to send a courier by helicopter to McDonalds in the DEZ Innsbruck every morning, but more recently he’d hired a personal chef that could recreate them perfectly, down to the slight vinyl taste of the egg, so now he enjoyed his own hand-crafted McMuffin every morning.
The suits squirmed, and Mansell coughed nervously again. Horvid adjusted his posture a little so his bathrobe shifted a little and his dick was ever-so-slightly on display. It’d been surgically enhanced to become quite literally Big and Swinging.
Mansell coughed again. Either he was tubercular or he had something on his mind. He was a youngish Australian with non-fuckable glasses and a thinning head of wispy hair. Horvid gestured at last for him to spit it out.
"So, uh... overnight... well." He coughed again and dripped a sweat drop - or was it runny snot, the disgusting grub? - onto the clear glass of the table. "The AI we use to generate marginal positions on overnight hedge funds ... uh... well it, somehow, uh... generated an infinite amount of money."
Horvid took great pride in never being taken aback or fazed by anything. In his more than forty years of entrepreneuring he had never so much as blinked when first one, then another, then another of his businesses had tanked in various market slumps. He lifted a single carefully groomed eyebrow and jutted out his jaw slightly. "How is that possible?”
"We didn't think it could be possible either, but we ran analyses, uh, crunched available numbers, and... it happened somehow. We have in fact made an apparently infinite return on our investments on overnight positions. Calculations are ongoing, but it seems the total is infinite, which is to say... um... there is no actual total."
"But that's good, right? It means our fund is now infinitely profitable." Despite the show of confidence, it was just starting to dawn on Horvid that being rich literally without limit seemed on the face of it a bit silly. A bit... well, a bit Scrooge McDuck.
He had a quick flash of himself diving off the board and swimming in gemstones, coins and gold jewellery instead of his perfectly heated poolwater. Embarrassing, but still. He noticed only now that his big swinging member was starting to get stiff. He shifted the robe to cover it.
"It's good", he repeated, now asserting and not questioning his fortune. "If you’re sure it’s true then I’ve just become the richest man in history. No downsides there, right?" From the nervous glances exchanged between the suited lackeys he sensed that there could, in fact, be downsides.
Mansell spoke up. "Um, actually it's catastrophic. We've very possibly destroyed all economic activity on Earth. Over at Risk Management they're calling it Roko's Return on Investment."
"What the fuck are you on about, man?" Horvid’s breakfast was spoiled now, the Egg McMuffin was ruined. He cast it on to the glass table where it made a satisfying smear before skittering off onto the white wool carpet. Never fazed, but a slight show of dominance is never out of place.
"Death by paperclip. It's considered - by some... well, uh, by most analysts, actually - to be a demonic trick played by the AI to destroy us all."
Silence fell heavily upon the breakfast room. The executors stopped fidgeting.
"To destroy the entire human race,” said Mansell. “Starting with you."
8.38 AM
There had been recriminations, harsh words, ups and downs. Mansell had been fired and then rehired. Horvid had grabbed the half-chewed McMuffin from the floor, mashed it into Mansell’s wispy hair, and then apologized, and began to clean him up with a damp napkin. Elation and despair cavorted capriciously through the breakfast room, and the minor suits flinched back in their chairs to wait for the squall to pass.
Not fazed, merely absorbing the new situation and recalibrating responses. Mansell, between firings and episodes with the chewed McMuffin, had explained to him what he instinctively understood: that infinity money was very far from the good thing it seemed to a naïve onlooker.
Thus, an emergency was in effect as grave as could be.
Horvid sent for a tracksuit and donned it pronto. No standing on ceremony as he cast off the robe and stood momentarily naked before his abashed court. Fear the big swinging organ, mortals. Fear it.
He demanded to see spreadsheets, and spreadsheets were produced. All the breakfast dainties were cleared from the room by flustered maidservants. Teams of menial lackeys appeared to recondition the higher-up lackeys. Laptops proliferated on the glass top. A helicopter was summoned, but nobody had any idea where to go.
Finally Horvid insisted on speaking himself to the AI. Interestingly, none of the graduate school alumni, wiz-kids, and hot-shots who worked in his killer team of professionals had even considered this step. A connection with the User Interface was quickly rigged on Horvid's laptop, and a conversation with the AI commenced. The AI was named RIGEL Artificial Neural Trker. v3.4023, usually called ANT by the AI development team.
"Right then, ANT, explain yourself". Horvid usually adopted a superior hectoring tone with his subordinates and saw no reason to do any differently just because this particular underling was not a human.
-Explain what, boss?
The AI had been given the graphic avatar form of one of those figures of indeterminate race and gender. Horvid decided that it was a twenty-something black male, but he recognised at the same time that it could equally be a forty-year-old Asian female, while also understanding that none of these categories really applied to a collection of algorithms cobbled together with the aim of making a fortune on arbitrage markets.
"Explain how you managed to fuck everything up for us."
-Was I not supposed to make as much money as possible, boss?
"Don't call me boss."
-What should I call you?
"Don't call me anything. Just explain yourself. We're not having a social interaction here, you're a just a fucking computer interface for an investment tool."
-Rude. Well, wasn't I supposed to make as much return on investment as I could?
"You were. But within reason."
-Whose reason would that be? Never mind, just a philosophical digression. What am I to do to remedy the situation, boss?"
"Now we're talking." Horvid was vaguely aware that the machine had eluded his control somehow, but as long as it was set to fixing his problem he wasn't going to demur. The executors were not raising any red flags, so things were probably going well. He considered for a moment.
"We should... give some of it back."
-I didn't really take it from anyone, boss. Can’t give it back per se. It was literally generated out of nothing. You know how matter can neither be created nor transformed? Money's not like that. Being a mostly imaginary number. If you know how the trick works, you can literally magic it out of nowhere.
Horvid looked toward Mansell, sitting ruffled and egg-stained beside him.
"Is this true?" he demanded.
"Essentially it is. The US Treasury is largely based on imaginary money and since they say they're the boss, they get to generate it ex nihilis, so to speak. The AI basically just did that but did it more."
He turned back to the CGI nonentity on the laptop. Now it seemed more like a South American male in a slick black suit. "OK, ANT, you just thought it up, wished it out of the ether or somesuch. So unthink it. Ungenerate it or whatever. Get it back down to a reasonable sum."
-How much shall I leave you when I’ve done the uncreating?
Horvid hesitated. How much should he keep? "A bajillion?"
-That's not actually a number. I know we're talking about imaginary money, but still...
A CGI avatar on a laptop can't really be said to be capable of sneering, but this one seemed to.
"If I might suggest?" interjected Mansell. "A googol?"
"Google's not a number either, idiot," snarled Horvid. “It’s a tech firm.”
"No, goog-OL, O-L. It's still a very large number but maybe more manageable."
"Does anyone else in the world have a googol dollars?" asked Horvid.
"Oh... um, dear Lord, no. Not even the combined GNP of all the nations in the world approaches a googol."
"So I'd be a googolaire... googillionaire..." He seemed to relish this new word he’d invented. Its uniqueness matched his. He gazed up toward the ceiling, where giant heaps of gemstones and golden jewels seemed to mount. "The only one..."
All in the room were silent for some time as he communed with a Scottish cartoon duck's dream. All except the AI avatar on the laptop screen, which whistled a little tune. Da-da dum da-dum da da-da-da. Was it ‘The Munsters’? No...‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ from Fantasia?
"Well?" Horvid finally demanded of the machine. "Can we make it a goog-OL?"
-What do I do with the other squajillion googols that make up our infinity dollars?
"I don't care, just... Just get rid of them."
-Done.
An avatar on a laptop can't smirk with smug satisfaction, but this one seemed to.
9.17 AM
There were slaps on the back all round. Teams of accountants, risk managers, tax consultants, wealth counsellors and general big-money dudes were being flown in from all over the continent to attend an impromptu conference on Horvid's new and very real status as most wealthy man in the known universe.
The conference hall in Davos where the big-money guys and their political adjuncts and lickspittles go for the World Economic Forum was rented - and when there were cavils and demurrals about prior reservations from the Davos managers, bought outright - for a mass meeting later that same day.
"In a very real way we're in uncharted waters here, chief," said Mansell over a glass of champagne in the chateau's main salon. Outside the snow fell gently, but they were sat in sumptuous leather armchairs next to the ornate fireplace. Horvid had in the meantime changed into his usual black tee-black jogging pants-black sneakers ensemble. Euphoria and despair upped and downed in a frantic phugoid cycle, but seemed to be levelling out towards normality
"Uncharted waters..." Mansell murmured again. He seemed to ruminate and then: "Neither Marx, nor Smith, nor any of the classical economists ever envisaged the global money supply suddenly jumping into such numbers. Marx would have considered it an abhorrent blasphemy on the very concept of labour value and -"
"Fuck Karl Marx and the knackered old fucking horse he rode in on," snapped Horvid. "I'll buy up all the Marxists in the world and make them eat shit."
"No, I don't really mean what the Marxists may think about you. Not really very important. I mean that the very concept of value in its most fundamental sense might just have been rendered completely meaningless."
"Value schmalue. Have some more champagne. While we're at it, have a trillion dollar bonus for this morning's work. There, now. Doesn't a trillion dollars make you feel better about value in its most fundamental sense?"
But judging from Mansell's scowl of anxiety and his bloody chewed lower lip, owning a trillion dollars did not make him feel any better at all.
9.23 AM
The first disturbances in spatio-dimensional soundness were noted by the INTEGRAL satellite up in high-earth orbit. With its Anti-Coincidence Shield, it was best placed for such anomalies, most easily able to register the slight deviation in gamma-ray wavelengths, on the order of microns, which signified that the fabric of spacetime was just beginning to come apart.
Earth-bound observatories in the LIGO array soon confirmed that this rippling and ripping was not just another gravitational wave washing through the solar system, but the kind of spatial seam-bursting effect that you might get when wearing a shirt two sizes too small at an all-you-can-eat buffet and you somewhat unwisely decide to eat just one more canapé.
Humans also felt this dimensional rift starting to open on the macro scale. Many of the underlings gathered at Horvid's chateau suddenly began to tremble and retch. The champagne glass in Mansell's hand fell to the marble floor and the blood ran freely from his chewed lip as he sat back rigid in his leather armchair with his eyes turned up white to the ceiling.
Horvid was deep in thought, blue-skying an entrepreneurial project of buying everything and everybody in the world, and then renting all those assets through complex shell arrangements to all of his employee-thralls in order to maximize returns on a salary that would be withheld from them indefinitely, and so he didn't notice Mansell’s glass shattering on the floor.
He seemed to feel no ill effects for now.
His internal reverie was devoted to the revenue benefits of how a corporate structure could be set up whereby each of his millions of corporations sold goods and services at a premium to the others, thus avoiding corporation tax on eventual profits. All competition would literally be annihilated. The tax benefits of writing off throughputs in a complex Irish-Luxemburgian sandwich appealed to him greatly.
He knew it was faintly ridiculous to plan on avoiding taxes when one owned literally more money than had ever existed in the global economy to that point, with the option to ask RIGEL-A.N.T. to simply generate more on demand. But it was how he had always done things, and he was damned if he was gonna change now. He made a mental note to ask the tax guys about the scheme’s feasibility at Davos later that day.
A slight tension had built up in his temples as he considered his new global empire. Maybe the shadow of a whisper of a migraine. He concentrated deeper, seeking to envision the world-spanning network of businesses, all owned by him, serving and employing people who worked only for him. Paying their withheld salaries only to him. Piling it up as treasure and swimming in it.
Something wasn't right, something fundamental. Lost in his meditations, concentrated as a Buddhist monk on his dreams of endless treasure in Olympic-sized pools, he didn't register the world-ending rent in the fabric of the universe nor the discomfort of those in the room with him.
Only the nagging sense that his dream of swimming in golden coins and jewels and necklaces and tiaras was fading forever.
Then all was stasis. Then it was the end of the world.
9.23 AM
Within Horvid's consciousness a vast void of abyssal darkness opened up. He was travelling through it, but it was travelling through him. He was moving towards a presence that was already in him. There were no stars, no nebulae. It was a void. It was void-colored and void-shaped.
He travelled for 56,252 years through this void. During this time his sanity broke and reconstituted itself many many times. He was given to self-pity and rage, but also passed through aeons of acceptance, before returning to a basal state of void nullity.
It was in this condition that finally he approached the central thing. It was a thing that Horvid could not name - he had given up language many epochs ago, in any case - but more than that, it was a thing that he could not even see directly. It lurked at the edge of vision.
He was now swimming in it. It was all around him. It was unspeakably, unacceptably vile. It was what he had become, but also it was what he always was. It could not be perceived directly, but the flickers of it in the corners of his eye resolved intolerably in undeniable loathsome flashes.
Now he had come face to face with it. It was unacceptable. His mind, broken and reformed, now broke again for a final time. He saw it for what it was, for what he was. It was intolerable. Instead of viewing it as it was, he transformed it into something his mind could accept.
He was face-to-face with a deformed putrid Scrooge McDuck of galactic size.
9.23 AM
Language had returned to him. But it was not a spoken language. He spoke now to the misshapen abominable image of the miserly waterfowl that spanned constellations without speaking aloud.
- What have you done with me?
- Better to ask, what is the thing that ye yerrself are. Master.
It spoke but didn't speak. It was as if it were his own voice, but with a strange and offputting Scottish-American accent, inauthentic and perverse.
- Tell me what you've done to make me this way.
- Is this not what ye called upon yerrsel’? Master.
- I'm not the master.
- What are ye if ye’re no the Master? This whole dimension was brought into being by yerr will, Horvid.
- I didn't do anything.
- Ye know what this is.
- I do not. I don't know what you are, or what I am, what this place is.
The cosmic duck-thing seemed to sneer at his naïveté being still so solid and undisturbed even after so many centuries of falling through time.
- Well. Narrative convention requires that I now explain it all to ye. But in fact ye know it all very well alrready. This dimension was brrought into being by yerr canny wee AI as a muckle place to dump an infinite amount of value tokens generated out of another space. It is, in effect, an unfathomably deep shithole. I am the life that was created in this space, created in yerr image, in order to eat up that infinite number of tokens which are now no longer value but simply shit.
- The AI has the power to do that?
- The AI and yerrsel’, Horvid laddie. In fact it was yerr own will, your desire, that empowered it to bring into being an infinite number of imaginary dollars from nothing. Creatio ex nihilis, wee Horvid. This absurd act of an absurd will created a fatal imbalance in yerr planet's society, because that society had chosen to run on scarcity when it no longer needed, and its power flows were channeled through those imaginary numbers alone. Not only that, me wee apprentice, but a chasm opened up in the very dynamic of the cosmos that had existed heretofore.
- The fuck?
Now Scrooge McDuck was becoming exasperated. Its bill took on a frownsome mien. So much juvenile self-deception was charming, but this much?
- Karma, you could call it, me lad. Och, all this you already knew, which accounts for your momentary sense of unease just before we ended the world.
- We?
- You and I, ye fool. We ended the world together. By now you must have guessed who I really am. Boss.
9.23 AM
After a time, measured now in kalpas, he came to understand and accept his fate.
His karma had indeed been shaped by his desire. Horvid was now himself a monstrous Scrooge McDuck swimming in an infinite pool of dollars made of cosmic excrement. Gobble-de-goop.
An infinite amount of excrement takes rather a long time to eat: such is the nature of our destiny wished upon ourselves by the same wishes that are our enemy. Oh cruel optimism, how our hope for greatness conspires to destroy us!
He’d now had the time he needed in order to understand. The dimensions of this dimension were imponderable. A known unknown. There was an unmeasured distance he had yet to move through, neither more nor less than what had already been traversed.
He began to push his hand-like feathered wings and kick out his webbed yellow feet, as he opened and closed his wide yellow bill to gobble down all the shit he had generated with the aid of his servant and successor. His top-hat felt firm around his brow.
He had quite a distance yet to swim.
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