Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

“Where’s that scoundrel, Rick?” said Tororo with his hands on his hips in mock indignation. It was an odd gesture that Amon supposed he had picked up from American movies.

“Good question,” said Amon. “I called him this morning to find out but didn’t get a good answer.”

At work, Amon always spoke instead of texting, using properly pronounced words (which were more expensive than slurring ) in order to make professional communications smoother and avoid giving his colleagues the false impression that he was broke.

“Answers! From Rick?” said Tororo. “You might get better answers from a poker-shark if you asked him whether he’s bluffing.” Freg laughed thunderously. Amon didn’t even snicker. No one except Freg ever seemed to find Tororo funny, not even Tororo himself.

“Would you like me to try calling him?” suggested Freg with a soft smile.

“No, that’s fine. I’m sure he’ll be here in a moment.”

“Yeah, I bet he’ll arrive here in a moment, just not a moment any time soon.” Freg laughed again. Amon just stared blankly at them, irritation simmering under his skin. It wasn’t Tororo’s inane humor that was bothering him. It was that rumors about Rick’s tardiness were starting to circulate.

“Feeling nervous about the evaluation results?” asked Freg, thoughtfully noticing Amon’s brief reverie. “I know I am.”

“You would be, Freggy,” said Tororo. “Anyone as trigger-happy as you ought to be. How many dozen passersby got dusted in your crossfire this year?” Freg laughed, but this time it sounded curt and hollow.

“Come on Tororo,” said Freg, almost pleadingly. “I know you’re just as nervous as me. Our evaluations come together.”

“To my chagrin ,” said Tororo, raising an eyebrow at Amon, and Freg gave another mirthless chuckle.

“I am a bit nervous to be honest,” said Amon. “It’s hard to keep pace after a promotion. I can only hope the overtime I put in will make up for…”

Sensing the implication of the unfinished sentence, the two giants were briefly lost for words. Only the sound of the departing nightshift’s stifled chit-chat and shuffling footsteps remained.

“Well, I guess we should get to it,” said Amon, breaking the silence. There were still a few minutes until start time and Tororo’s lower lip quivered as though he had something to add, but Amon began edging towards his chair. Taking the cue, the two men bowed and headed for their seats.

It was 8:25 when Amon sat down. Only five minutes to go and Rick was nowhere in sight. Just to make sure he hadn’t somehow arrived early and turned invisible in his seat, Amon opened up the squad attendance diagram. An aerial view of the square of chairs showed a glowing dot of light for present, a black dot for absent. In the seat directly right of Amon, there was a black dot. Rick was most definitely late.

Raised in the same BioPen, Amon and Rick had been good friends since childhood. Both were accepted into the Tokyo branch of GATA, and even ended up as partners in the same squad of the Liquidation Ministry. Their like-minded intimacy had made them an effective team. In their seven years serving as Liquidators, Amon and Rick had apprehended thousands of bankrupts quickly and discretely, earning them generous bonuses and recognition from ministry execs. Yet in the end, it was Amon who got the big reward, receiving a promotion to Identity Executioner last year. Now he had a higher salary and more authority, not to mention privileged access to the top-secret Death Codes. And now that he was Rick’s boss, a strain had appeared in their relationship for the first time ever.

During their first six years at GATA, both had been diligent and ambitious workers. But ever since Amon was promoted, Rick’s performance had gradually deteriorated. While Amon continued to give the ministry his all and do overtime at every chance, Rick was showing up late, sometimes dreary-eyed and lethargic, perhaps even hungover. He was calling in sick, admittedly within his assigned number of rest days, but often enough to suggest laziness. In the office, Amon sometimes caught him engaged in social communications and he frequently took extended breaks. If this slacking streak had happened last summer, Amon wouldn’t have been personally offended, though perhaps concerned for his friend’s job. Yet everything had changed when Amon became his supervisor: Rick’s blunders were Amon’s blunders, Rick’s negligence Amon’s.

Amon held his tongue for months as Rick’s absences came with greater frequency, his arrival time later and later, his idling longer. He had finally texted Rick the previous night to ask him to be on time—just this once—to receive their evaluation results. But Rick had ignored him, and Amon was beginning to suspect that he was jealous. Whatever his motives, Rick was putting Amon’s career—and thus his dream—in jeopardy. Now, in his efforts to rein him in, Amon had spent his most expensive morning in years, maybe ever. Even more disturbing, Mayuko had suddenly reappeared in his life. He couldn’t fathom why she would be in that apartment with Rick, on a weekday morning, in caring embrace, and gritted his teeth when a lewd image of what they might have been doing the night before flashed before his mind’s eye…

There’s nothing to be done , Amon consoled himself and tried his best to relax in the spare minutes that remained until his shift began. He sunk into his chair. It was ergonomically molded to his contours, with armrests for his entire forearm to the tip of his fingers, so he could twitch out commands to the network for hours on end without discomfort. Ahhhh , he exhaled long and slow and inhaled deeply several times in succession. Deep breathing was an avoidable expense in principle, but Amon needed to clear his head before work. While some big companies compensated staff for all their actions on the job to keep their minds off personal accounting and on their duties, GATA only included a flat action allowance in the salary. They also offered licensing fee exemptions for cost-intensive missions, but this didn’t apply in the office. Amon avoided obvious wastes of creditime like lifelogging, massaging his forehead, talking to himself, and surfing the net so as to never exceed the allowance (he had never come close). But to boost his efficiency, he allowed himself to take it easy on frugality while working, letting his eyelids blink away, using the washroom regularly, and even taking short strolls around the office. He carefully timed such breaks for when his focus was lagging and saw them not as lapses of the will, but cleverly-calculated investments that would pay off in bonuses and promotion, for he knew that sometimes one had to spend money to make it, offer up pecuniary sacrifices for the greater savings. Enacting this respiration ritual the moment he arrived each morning eased him into the workflow, and he savored every molecule of oxygen.

Eight-thirty. Shift start. Amon logged on to the Liquidator network and opened up Illiquidity Alert. A list of random combinations of letters and numerals appeared in the air about a meter in front of him. These were the names of people that Illiquidity Alert had judged to be at risk of bankruptcy and then encrypted to make them anonymous. The program sorted their alphanumeric codenames in order of bankruptcy risk, with people at high risk on the top and low risk on the bottom. Formally, the list was entitled the Asset Integrity and Monetary Life Quality Incertitude Registry , but Liquidators usually just called it the Gutter .

Amon raised his index finger to scroll down. The top of the list was not his particular concern. The names there were constantly appearing, exchanging spots and disappearing as many people stumbled into the upper range of the bankruptcy danger zone, received an automated warning notice from the Liquidation Ministry, and quickly climbed back onto sure financial footing. Ministry statistics showed that dipping into the Gutter served as positive reinforcement, with nearly 90 percent who did so going on to live long, creditable lives. The people Amon had to watch closely were a more derelict breed. Illiquidity Alert could pick out candidates for the Gutter using a formula that pitted their assets and earnings against their debt and expenditures, but it was unable to predict which ones were likely to cash crash. This required intuition and interpretation, something computers had never figured out. When he wasn’t on liquidation missions, Amon’s job was to scan the Gutter, judge which subjects were most likely to go bankrupt, and mark them as critically illiquid. This was not an easy judgment however, since Liquidators were only given a limited amount of information about the individuals by the House of Blinding. Although the technical details of how the House of Blinding operated went beyond Amon’s expertise, he knew enough about it to do his job, and that was all that was expected of him.