Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

He thrust out a foot to kick someone’s imaginary butt.

“My babies pwned the markets! Damn, I was proud!”

“So you bought AvN Soft back,” Dagmar said. “You’re your own mysterious foreign backers.”

Charlie gave a triumphant little laugh.

“Damn right. And I kicked BJ the fuck out and changed the locks and got a security specialist to wipe him from the computers before he could do me any damage.” He pointed the bottle at her. “He had trapdoors everywhere, you know that? He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control.” He shook his head. “Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!”

Dagmar ran fingers through her gray hair and let herself fall into the huge, soft cushions of the couch. She could imagine BJ angry; she could imagine him vindictive.

But she couldn’t imagine him destructive. That wasn’t his history-his wreckage of Lost Empire had been an accident. If he had trapdoors into AvN Soft, it was to keep track of things.

It was useless, though, to try to convince Charlie of that.

“You didn’t put your bots on the market for AvN Soft,” Dagmar said.

“I couldn’t.” Charlie looked embarrassed. “All I had was the original one on my home computer. And that one wasn’t making that much money-it hadn’t evolved in the right direction. It was the agents I’d released into the wild that were making the money for me, and I didn’t even know where they were. I had no way of keeping track of them.”

She gazed up at him in awe.

“You’re out of your mind, you know that?” she said.

“Yeah, probably.” He waved a hand dismissively. “The annoying thing is that I can’t take credit for any of it. It all has to stay secret.”

Dagmar felt anger enter her voice.

“You really want to take credit for what happened to Chile?” she asked. “Bolivia? Indonesia?”

A haunted look crossed Charlie’s face.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

He put the Coke down and flopped cross-legged onto his cushion.

“The bots were doing well for me,” he said. “Profits were averaging something like twenty million each quarter. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Once I got AvN Soft on its feet, all the excess was just icing on the cake. I invested in Austin’s company and several others. I contributed to a lot of charities and foundations. I tried to be a force for good in the world.

“And then, back in June”-face turning blank-“the bots leveled.”

Leveled. A term from gaming, where a character cashed in experience points and gained a host of new magical abilities.

“The agents started crashing whole countries,” Charlie said. “The day that Indonesia started to go down-it was a Sunday-I saw all this cash sitting in the offshore account, and I knew that something bad had to have happened somewhere, on the other side of the date line, where it was already Monday.” He looked up at Dagmar. “I would have warned you if I’d known you would head for Jakarta that day. It was that afternoon that the real Chinese traders made their move and finished what the bots had started.”

“There really are Chinese traders?” Dagmar asked.

Charlie nodded. “Oh yeah. And American traders, European traders… they’ve been following the bots’ action through the currency markets. In the beginning, the bots didn’t have enough muscle to really take down a whole country. But now…” He looked at her. “Back in ’ninety-two, George Soros crashed the English pound with ten billion in positions. The bots now have twice as much money as Soros did.”

“More than twelve billion?”

“More than twenty now. Now that Chile’s burned.”

Suddenly Dagmar’s mouth was dry. “Can I have one of your Cokes?” she asked.

“Be my guest.”

Dagmar got a Coke from the fridge and walked to the window. She pushed back the gold curtain and looked out on Los Angeles, the tall glass buildings of downtown as solid and perfect and permanent as the Royal Jakarta Hotel.

In the blue sky she thought she saw the pillar of smoke above Glodok. She blinked away tears.

“Dagmar.” Charlie’s voice was soft. “I won’t have you killed. I don’t do that.”

“You kill whole countries.”

“I…” Charlie’s voice faded to a whisper. “I can’t stop the agents. I thought I could, but it isn’t going to work.”

She turned to face him. Charlie’s hands had turned into fists. She could see the tendons standing out on his forearms.

“It could be the dollar next,” he said. “The ruble. The yen, the yuan.” He gave her a wild look. “The bots don’t stop. They just go on winning.”

“It’s not illegal to use a machine to trade online,” Dagmar said.

“It’s illegal when the agent is in someone else’s computer,” Charlie said. “And when they’re using a fictional identity.” He gave a growl of frustration. “The bots don’t know what’s legal and what’s not. All they know is to keep on trading.” He scrubbed his neck with his hand, as if he were trying to remove a stain. “The Indonesian and Bolivian currencies were weak. But the Chilean currency wasn’t-that means the bots now have enough clout to manufacture a currency crisis!”

His eyes were wild. “This goes on, I could own all the money in the world!” he said. “And then the money-mine and everyone else’s-would be worthless!”

Charlie looked down at the room’s Oriental carpet and traced its flowery pattern with his fingers.

“Money isn’t anything real,” he said. “It’s just an idea. Even gold only has value because everyone agrees it does. If a piece of software can get all the money for itself, that shows everyone that the money is a sham. It’s nothing. It’s like a magician revealing his trick-once you see it, it’s not interesting anymore.”

Charlie slumped on his pillow, his mobile hands silent in his lap, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

“I don’t understand how the software agents know enough to do this,” Dagmar said. She remembered BJ’s arguments against this even happening. “Real markets are supposed to be self-correcting. They’re incredibly complex. They’re not Lost Empire.”

“Markets are self-correcting over time,” Charlie said. “The invisible hand and all that. But in the short term, there can be oscillations. And if the bots are smart enough to anticipate the correction, they can make money there, too.”

He looked up, hands forming models in the air. “The bots are very single-minded. They evolve. The ones that make mistakes either learn from them or lose everything and go out of business. They’ve been on the loose for four years now-they’ve got massive amounts of empirical data, and they talk to each other.” He shrugged, then looked down at the floor again. “I couldn’t tell you how they know what to do,” he said. “I’m not in charge anymore.”

“Why do the Maffya want to kill you?” Dagmar asked.

He looked up. His eyes were filled with a weary amusement.

“The bots raped and plundered them,” he said. “It was some dodgy offshore scheme, I don’t know exactly what. But I have something like four million in Maffya dollars.”

“So when I asked you about it,” Dagmar said, “the day after Austin got killed, you lied to me.”

“I didn’t know,” Charlie said. “The bots don’t tell me where or how they trade, they just send me half the profits. But when you asked if the killer was after me instead of Austin, I started checking. And as far as I can tell, a certain day’s deposits in Cayman rightfully belong to a bunch of Russian criminals.” He waved the hand with the empty Coke bottle. “Apparently they have enough illicit clout to find out who Forlorn Hope belongs to.”