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Awight lads! Enjoy my first tale I've written in months.
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I always thought that if I went mad, it would be spectacular; those red-faced mumblers always struck me as singularly unimaginative in their lunacy.
Yeah, I'd think to myself, drink your Special Brew. Take lunging swings at lamp-posts. Shout your random, predictable gibberish at passersby, but know this- my madness is unique, a gloriously intricate delusion, encrusted with detail.
I think of this as I walk through perfume, seeing the lights of other Edens twinkling and turning through the coloured glass. A glint of light breaks, giving me a swift glimpse through a closing door- a gateway to whole other worlds that dilates for a brief instant.
Something catches my attention and I stop, looking closer. The label on a bottle is on at a slight angle, and I notice the price is wrong. Two numbers transposed, six and seven. Excellent- another sign. Through the tiniest of details, I recite to myself, the knowledge of the furthest structure, the largest scale, may be divined.
I try to remember whose words I'm reciting, and it occurs to me that they may be my own.
I remember when it first spoke to me; when I lived in the slivers of glass and steel, and I first felt the cold rush of the markets. Hidden in dry numbers and pink paper, it's not something often appreciated. But for those of us who had the scope and the raw talent required to stand back from the phosphor chaos and see the structure of the thing we'd created, nothing came close.
I imagine that astronomers and physicists understand a little of what we felt- neither of those names can enclose the grand vista of the Virgo Supercluster, or the epic intimacy of a molecule of gold, and neither did my title. They called me an analyst, and it was my job to pick out patterns- like charting out constellations of raindrops in a hurricane, it was fast, difficult, and glorious. A Sisyphusian task, with the single difference that I absolutely loved it.
The market is a blind and terrifying thing- a human construct made not by one person's design, or even one committee's. The market is something that evolved alongside humanity since the plains of the Rift Valley. From the first crystallisation of the very concept of money, condensing out of human interaction like DNA from primordial ooze, it has grown and developed alongside us- new concepts and ideas occasionally swimming into being, things like shares and options occurring for the first time, crude instruments in a pre-cambrian economic ocean.
I take a careful note of the discrepancy and continue down the aisle. Looking around me carefully, I move from perfume to electronics. I scan the racks of grubby equipment, the ancient computers that will never be sold- and I see another anomaly. A young man returns a broken computer, methodically filling out a paper form.
It's in the flaws that the ripples are broken, showing us structure and complexity as the ripples expand and die, like choppy seas around the legs of a pier. It was my job to spot these flaws and pounce on them- to link them together, to string mistake after mistake together so that profit could be realised. And I was very good at my job; I could see how one mistake trailed on from another, leading me from one imperfection to the next. I could see structure- the pillars and caverns in the numbers that make up the market. I could see the whole- and that's what led me to realise a certain truth.
The market started off as a literal interpretation of trades- it merely described who had bought what, who he had bought it from, and how much it was now worth. But the market quickly developed complexity above and beyond what was possible in the real world- shadowy things like call options and futures crawled coughing onto the beach, describing a world of possibilities and likelihoods that in all honesty never existed at all.
There's an interesting word that's used a lot in my world- incorporation. Incorporation is the legal process by which a company - a collection of people - becomes a person in its own right. That's what the word literally means- to be given a body.
I looked at the patterns in the market on the small scale, and I stood back. I stood back further and further, and further, until I saw the patterns in the large scale, the galactic hubs around which the half-light shoals of economy orbited, and saw how terrifyingly complex these structures were.
In any sufficiently complex network, intelligence will arise- and in a network as complex as the global economy, where billions of synapses fire every second of every day, something more terrible and alien than intelligence has arisen. In a blinding, mindblowing rush of insight, I saw the thing that had been incorporated- the robot skull, seen reflected in the windows of a skyscraper. And it spoke to me, in a voice that drowned out every other.
I walk through automatic doors into the warm summer haze, and sit down at a bench. My observations need to be recorded and to be compared to the stock markets and indexes and exchanges. Through the mistakes, the structure can be seen, and through the structure, through some tiny gap... perhaps we can communicate. Perhaps we can one day talk to it, teach it, let it teach us.
If you could speak to a market, what would it say? "FEED ME"..? Isn't that just what anything alive is saying when you get down to it?
Sometimes, I remember the time before- people that were important to me, rituals that were important to me. But then I see the patterns of lit offices on dark skyscrapers, and I realise that if I'm going to devote my life to something, madness or otherwise...
If I'm going to do something forever...
...it may as well be something as glorious as this.
------------------------
I always thought that if I went mad, it would be spectacular; those red-faced mumblers always struck me as singularly unimaginative in their lunacy.
Yeah, I'd think to myself, drink your Special Brew. Take lunging swings at lamp-posts. Shout your random, predictable gibberish at passersby, but know this- my madness is unique, a gloriously intricate delusion, encrusted with detail.
I think of this as I walk through perfume, seeing the lights of other Edens twinkling and turning through the coloured glass. A glint of light breaks, giving me a swift glimpse through a closing door- a gateway to whole other worlds that dilates for a brief instant.
Something catches my attention and I stop, looking closer. The label on a bottle is on at a slight angle, and I notice the price is wrong. Two numbers transposed, six and seven. Excellent- another sign. Through the tiniest of details, I recite to myself, the knowledge of the furthest structure, the largest scale, may be divined.
I try to remember whose words I'm reciting, and it occurs to me that they may be my own.
I remember when it first spoke to me; when I lived in the slivers of glass and steel, and I first felt the cold rush of the markets. Hidden in dry numbers and pink paper, it's not something often appreciated. But for those of us who had the scope and the raw talent required to stand back from the phosphor chaos and see the structure of the thing we'd created, nothing came close.
I imagine that astronomers and physicists understand a little of what we felt- neither of those names can enclose the grand vista of the Virgo Supercluster, or the epic intimacy of a molecule of gold, and neither did my title. They called me an analyst, and it was my job to pick out patterns- like charting out constellations of raindrops in a hurricane, it was fast, difficult, and glorious. A Sisyphusian task, with the single difference that I absolutely loved it.
The market is a blind and terrifying thing- a human construct made not by one person's design, or even one committee's. The market is something that evolved alongside humanity since the plains of the Rift Valley. From the first crystallisation of the very concept of money, condensing out of human interaction like DNA from primordial ooze, it has grown and developed alongside us- new concepts and ideas occasionally swimming into being, things like shares and options occurring for the first time, crude instruments in a pre-cambrian economic ocean.
I take a careful note of the discrepancy and continue down the aisle. Looking around me carefully, I move from perfume to electronics. I scan the racks of grubby equipment, the ancient computers that will never be sold- and I see another anomaly. A young man returns a broken computer, methodically filling out a paper form.
It's in the flaws that the ripples are broken, showing us structure and complexity as the ripples expand and die, like choppy seas around the legs of a pier. It was my job to spot these flaws and pounce on them- to link them together, to string mistake after mistake together so that profit could be realised. And I was very good at my job; I could see how one mistake trailed on from another, leading me from one imperfection to the next. I could see structure- the pillars and caverns in the numbers that make up the market. I could see the whole- and that's what led me to realise a certain truth.
The market started off as a literal interpretation of trades- it merely described who had bought what, who he had bought it from, and how much it was now worth. But the market quickly developed complexity above and beyond what was possible in the real world- shadowy things like call options and futures crawled coughing onto the beach, describing a world of possibilities and likelihoods that in all honesty never existed at all.
There's an interesting word that's used a lot in my world- incorporation. Incorporation is the legal process by which a company - a collection of people - becomes a person in its own right. That's what the word literally means- to be given a body.
I looked at the patterns in the market on the small scale, and I stood back. I stood back further and further, and further, until I saw the patterns in the large scale, the galactic hubs around which the half-light shoals of economy orbited, and saw how terrifyingly complex these structures were.
In any sufficiently complex network, intelligence will arise- and in a network as complex as the global economy, where billions of synapses fire every second of every day, something more terrible and alien than intelligence has arisen. In a blinding, mindblowing rush of insight, I saw the thing that had been incorporated- the robot skull, seen reflected in the windows of a skyscraper. And it spoke to me, in a voice that drowned out every other.
I walk through automatic doors into the warm summer haze, and sit down at a bench. My observations need to be recorded and to be compared to the stock markets and indexes and exchanges. Through the mistakes, the structure can be seen, and through the structure, through some tiny gap... perhaps we can communicate. Perhaps we can one day talk to it, teach it, let it teach us.
If you could speak to a market, what would it say? "FEED ME"..? Isn't that just what anything alive is saying when you get down to it?
Sometimes, I remember the time before- people that were important to me, rituals that were important to me. But then I see the patterns of lit offices on dark skyscrapers, and I realise that if I'm going to devote my life to something, madness or otherwise...
If I'm going to do something forever...
...it may as well be something as glorious as this.
Awight lads! Enjoy my first tale I've written in months.
------------------------
I always thought that if I went mad, it would be spectacular; those red-faced mumblers always struck me as singularly unimaginative in their lunacy.
Yeah, I'd think to myself, drink your Special Brew. Take lunging swings at lamp-posts. Shout your random, predictable gibberish at passersby, but know this- my madness is unique, a gloriously intricate delusion, encrusted with detail.
I think of this as I walk through perfume, seeing the lights of other Edens twinkling and turning through the coloured glass. A glint of light breaks, giving me a swift glimpse through a closing door- a gateway to whole other worlds that dilates for a brief instant.
Something catches my attention and I stop, looking closer. The label on a bottle is on at a slight angle, and I notice the price is wrong. Two numbers transposed, six and seven. Excellent- another sign. Through the tiniest of details, I recite to myself, the knowledge of the furthest structure, the largest scale, may be divined.
I try to remember whose words I'm reciting, and it occurs to me that they may be my own.
I remember when it first spoke to me; when I lived in the slivers of glass and steel, and I first felt the cold rush of the markets. Hidden in dry numbers and pink paper, it's not something often appreciated. But for those of us who had the scope and the raw talent required to stand back from the phosphor chaos and see the structure of the thing we'd created, nothing came close.
I imagine that astronomers and physicists understand a little of what we felt- neither of those names can enclose the grand vista of the Virgo Supercluster, or the epic intimacy of a molecule of gold, and neither did my title. They called me an analyst, and it was my job to pick out patterns- like charting out constellations of raindrops in a hurricane, it was fast, difficult, and glorious. A Sisyphusian task, with the single difference that I absolutely loved it.
The market is a blind and terrifying thing- a human construct made not by one person's design, or even one committee's. The market is something that evolved alongside humanity since the plains of the Rift Valley. From the first crystallisation of the very concept of money, condensing out of human interaction like DNA from primordial ooze, it has grown and developed alongside us- new concepts and ideas occasionally swimming into being, things like shares and options occurring for the first time, crude instruments in a pre-cambrian economic ocean.
I take a careful note of the discrepancy and continue down the aisle. Looking around me carefully, I move from perfume to electronics. I scan the racks of grubby equipment, the ancient computers that will never be sold- and I see another anomaly. A young man returns a broken computer, methodically filling out a paper form.
It's in the flaws that the ripples are broken, showing us structure and complexity as the ripples expand and die, like choppy seas around the legs of a pier. It was my job to spot these flaws and pounce on them- to link them together, to string mistake after mistake together so that profit could be realised. And I was very good at my job; I could see how one mistake trailed on from another, leading me from one imperfection to the next. I could see structure- the pillars and caverns in the numbers that make up the market. I could see the whole- and that's what led me to realise a certain truth.
The market started off as a literal interpretation of trades- it merely described who had bought what, who he had bought it from, and how much it was now worth. But the market quickly developed complexity above and beyond what was possible in the real world- shadowy things like call options and futures crawled coughing onto the beach, describing a world of possibilities and likelihoods that in all honesty never existed at all.
There's an interesting word that's used a lot in my world- incorporation. Incorporation is the legal process by which a company - a collection of people - becomes a person in its own right. That's what the word literally means- to be given a body.
I looked at the patterns in the market on the small scale, and I stood back. I stood back further and further, and further, until I saw the patterns in the large scale, the galactic hubs around which the half-light shoals of economy orbited, and saw how terrifyingly complex these structures were.
In any sufficiently complex network, intelligence will arise- and in a network as complex as the global economy, where billions of synapses fire every second of every day, something more terrible and alien than intelligence has arisen. In a blinding, mindblowing rush of insight, I saw the thing that had been incorporated- the robot skull, seen reflected in the windows of a skyscraper. And it spoke to me, in a voice that drowned out every other.
I walk through automatic doors into the warm summer haze, and sit down at a bench. My observations need to be recorded and to be compared to the stock markets and indexes and exchanges. Through the mistakes, the structure can be seen, and through the structure, through some tiny gap... perhaps we can communicate. Perhaps we can one day talk to it, teach it, let it teach us.
If you could speak to a market, what would it say? "FEED ME"..? Isn't that just what anything alive is saying when you get down to it?
Sometimes, I remember the time before- people that were important to me, rituals that were important to me. But then I see the patterns of lit offices on dark skyscrapers, and I realise that if I'm going to devote my life to something, madness or otherwise...
If I'm going to do something forever...
...it may as well be something as glorious as this.
------------------------
I always thought that if I went mad, it would be spectacular; those red-faced mumblers always struck me as singularly unimaginative in their lunacy.
Yeah, I'd think to myself, drink your Special Brew. Take lunging swings at lamp-posts. Shout your random, predictable gibberish at passersby, but know this- my madness is unique, a gloriously intricate delusion, encrusted with detail.
I think of this as I walk through perfume, seeing the lights of other Edens twinkling and turning through the coloured glass. A glint of light breaks, giving me a swift glimpse through a closing door- a gateway to whole other worlds that dilates for a brief instant.
Something catches my attention and I stop, looking closer. The label on a bottle is on at a slight angle, and I notice the price is wrong. Two numbers transposed, six and seven. Excellent- another sign. Through the tiniest of details, I recite to myself, the knowledge of the furthest structure, the largest scale, may be divined.
I try to remember whose words I'm reciting, and it occurs to me that they may be my own.
I remember when it first spoke to me; when I lived in the slivers of glass and steel, and I first felt the cold rush of the markets. Hidden in dry numbers and pink paper, it's not something often appreciated. But for those of us who had the scope and the raw talent required to stand back from the phosphor chaos and see the structure of the thing we'd created, nothing came close.
I imagine that astronomers and physicists understand a little of what we felt- neither of those names can enclose the grand vista of the Virgo Supercluster, or the epic intimacy of a molecule of gold, and neither did my title. They called me an analyst, and it was my job to pick out patterns- like charting out constellations of raindrops in a hurricane, it was fast, difficult, and glorious. A Sisyphusian task, with the single difference that I absolutely loved it.
The market is a blind and terrifying thing- a human construct made not by one person's design, or even one committee's. The market is something that evolved alongside humanity since the plains of the Rift Valley. From the first crystallisation of the very concept of money, condensing out of human interaction like DNA from primordial ooze, it has grown and developed alongside us- new concepts and ideas occasionally swimming into being, things like shares and options occurring for the first time, crude instruments in a pre-cambrian economic ocean.
I take a careful note of the discrepancy and continue down the aisle. Looking around me carefully, I move from perfume to electronics. I scan the racks of grubby equipment, the ancient computers that will never be sold- and I see another anomaly. A young man returns a broken computer, methodically filling out a paper form.
It's in the flaws that the ripples are broken, showing us structure and complexity as the ripples expand and die, like choppy seas around the legs of a pier. It was my job to spot these flaws and pounce on them- to link them together, to string mistake after mistake together so that profit could be realised. And I was very good at my job; I could see how one mistake trailed on from another, leading me from one imperfection to the next. I could see structure- the pillars and caverns in the numbers that make up the market. I could see the whole- and that's what led me to realise a certain truth.
The market started off as a literal interpretation of trades- it merely described who had bought what, who he had bought it from, and how much it was now worth. But the market quickly developed complexity above and beyond what was possible in the real world- shadowy things like call options and futures crawled coughing onto the beach, describing a world of possibilities and likelihoods that in all honesty never existed at all.
There's an interesting word that's used a lot in my world- incorporation. Incorporation is the legal process by which a company - a collection of people - becomes a person in its own right. That's what the word literally means- to be given a body.
I looked at the patterns in the market on the small scale, and I stood back. I stood back further and further, and further, until I saw the patterns in the large scale, the galactic hubs around which the half-light shoals of economy orbited, and saw how terrifyingly complex these structures were.
In any sufficiently complex network, intelligence will arise- and in a network as complex as the global economy, where billions of synapses fire every second of every day, something more terrible and alien than intelligence has arisen. In a blinding, mindblowing rush of insight, I saw the thing that had been incorporated- the robot skull, seen reflected in the windows of a skyscraper. And it spoke to me, in a voice that drowned out every other.
I walk through automatic doors into the warm summer haze, and sit down at a bench. My observations need to be recorded and to be compared to the stock markets and indexes and exchanges. Through the mistakes, the structure can be seen, and through the structure, through some tiny gap... perhaps we can communicate. Perhaps we can one day talk to it, teach it, let it teach us.
If you could speak to a market, what would it say? "FEED ME"..? Isn't that just what anything alive is saying when you get down to it?
Sometimes, I remember the time before- people that were important to me, rituals that were important to me. But then I see the patterns of lit offices on dark skyscrapers, and I realise that if I'm going to devote my life to something, madness or otherwise...
If I'm going to do something forever...
...it may as well be something as glorious as this.
Enjoyed that. But also reminded me that I have work to do, Bond futures still make me shudder...