Kim Robinson - New York 2140

“I thought it was programming. All the programs knitted together into one kind of mastermind program. That’s what you said.”

“Like Gaia, Mutt. It’s like Gaia is everything living on Earth influencing everything else and the rocks and air and such. Like the cloud, maybe. But they’re both metaphors. There’s no one actually home in either case.”

“If you say so. But look, you put your tap in, through your own covert channel no less, and next thing we know we’re trapped in a container decked out like some kind of limbo. Maybe the cloud killed us, and this is us dead.”

“No. That was Waiting for Godot . We’re just in a container somewhere. Somewhere with rushing water sounds outside the walls, locked in and so on. Bad food.”

“Limbo might have bad food.”

“Mutt, please. Why after fourteen years of brute literal-mindedness would you choose now to go metaphysical on me? I’m not sure I can stand it.”

Mutt shrugs. “It’s mysterious, that’s all. Highly mysterious.”

Jeff can only nod to this.

“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.”

Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.”

Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?”

“Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.”

“Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?”

“It wasn’t that much. Only a few billion.”

“Per day?”

“Well, per hour.”

Mutt finds himself standing up, looking at Jeff, who is regarding the floor. “And you wonder why someone came after us?”

Jeff shrugged. “There were other tweaks I did that might have been, you know, even more of a freak-out.”

“More than stealing a few billion dollars an hour?”

“It wasn’t stealing, it was redirecting. To the SEC no less. I’m not sure that kind of thing isn’t happening all the time. If it was, who would know? Would the SEC know? These are fictional trillions, they’re derivatives and securities and the nth tranche of a jumble bond. If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know. Some bank accounts in a tax haven would grow and no one would be the wiser.”

“Why did you do it, then?”

“To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for God’s sake!”

“So you did want them to notice.”

“I guess so. Yeah, I did. The SEC I did. I did all sorts of stuff. That might not even be what got noticed.”

“No? What else did you do?”

“I killed all those tax havens.”

Mutt stares at him. “Killed them?”

“I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to. You know how there’s about ten terror sponsor countries that you can’t wire money to? I added all the tax havens to that list.”

“You mean like England?”

“All of them.”

“So how’s the world economy supposed to work? Money can’t move if it can’t move to tax havens.”

“It shouldn’t be that way. There shouldn’t be tax havens.”

Mutt throws up his hands. “What else did you do? If I may ask.”

“I pikettied the U.S. tax code.”

“Meaning?”

“Sharp progressive tax on capital assets. All capital assets in the United States, taxed at a progressive rate that goes to ninety percent of any holdings over one hundred million.”

Mutt goes and sits down on his bed. “So this would be, like…” He makes a cutting motion with his hand.

“It would be like what Keynes called the euthanasia of the rentier. Yes. He fully expected it to happen, and that was two centuries ago.”

“Didn’t he also say that most supposedly smart economists are idiots working from ideas that are centuries old?”

“He did say something like that, yes. And he was right.”

“So now you’re doing it too?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Keynes is timeless.”

Mutt shakes his head. “Decapitation of the oligarchy, isn’t that another term for it? Meaning the guillotine, right?”

“But just their money,” Jeff says. “We cut off their money. Their excess money. Everyone is left their last five million. Five million dollars, I mean that’s enough, right?”

“There’s never enough money.”

“That’s what people say, but it’s not true! After a while you’re buying marble toilet seats and flying your private plane to the moon trying to use your excess money, but really all it gets you is bodyguards and accountants and crazy children and sleepless nights and acid reflux! It’s too much, and too much is a curse! It’s a fucking Midas touch.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’d have to give it a try to see. I’d volunteer to try it and report back to you.”

“Everyone thinks that. But no one makes it work.”

“They do too. They give it away, do good works, eat well, exercise.”

“No way. They stress and go crazy. And their kids go even crazier. No, it’s doing them a favor!”

“Decapitation, the great favor! People lining up at the foot of that guillotine. Please, me first! Chop my neck right here!”

Jeff sighs. “I think after a while it would catch on. People would see the sense of it.”

“All these heads rolling on the ground, their faces looking at each other, Hey, this is great! What a good idea!”

“Food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s all you need.”

“We have those here,” Mutt points out.

Jeff heaves another sigh.

“It’s not all we need,” Mutt persists.

“All right already! It seemed like a good idea!”

“But you tipped your hand. And it was never going to hold. It was like spraying graffiti on the wall somewhere.”

Jeff nods. “Well… pretty scary graffiti, for whoever to do this to us.”

“I’ll grant you that. Actually I’m surprised we’re not dead.”

“No one killed Piketty. He had a very successful book tour if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s because it was a hundred years ago, and it was a book. No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them. It’s laws people care about. And you were tweaking the laws. You wrote your graffiti right into the laws.”

“I tried,” Jeff says. “By God, I tried. So I wonder who noticed first. And how word got to whoever rounded us up.”

Mutt shakes his head. “We might have been rendered. I feel kind of chopped up, now that you mention it. We could be in Uruguay. At the bottom of the Plata or whatnot.”

Jeff frowns. “It doesn’t feel like government,” he says. “This room’s too nice.”

“You think? Nice?”

“Effective. Kind of plushly hermetic. Good tight seals. Waterproof, that’s not so easy. Food slot also waterproofed, food twice a day, it’s weird.”

“Navy does it all the time. We could be in a nuclear sub, stay underwater five years.”

“They stay under that long?”

“Five years and a day.”

“Nah,” Jeff says after a while. “I don’t think we’re moving.”

“No shit.”