Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

“We’re hunting for jokes.” Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.”

“Discover what?”

“The face of God. What else would we be looking for?”

Perched on the lounger, pushing one of Raj’s plastic toys around with his toe, Jaz tried to form sentences for Fenton Willis, trying to explain why he’d come to be afraid of Cy Bachman and the face of God. “It’s not a question of conscience, Fenton. I know you have no time for that — and of course neither does … Well, yes, I am kind of going on my gut.… No, Walter’s robust. I’m not disputing that. It’s a very powerful model.”

That was the problem: Walter’s power. The power to affect the things it observed, to alter the course of events with its predictions.

It seemed impossible. After the visit to the Neue Galerie, Jaz started to suspect Bachman was a crank. He’d call Jaz into his office and initiate esoteric and largely one-sided discussions of recursivity, noncomputability, the limits of mathematical knowledge. At times he was openly mystical, wanting to discuss the Fibonacci sequence, Kondratiev waves, predestination. He’d make gnomic pronouncements ( When price meets time, change is imminent ) and read aloud from books that appeared to have nothing to do with finance: the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. For a man who worked with computers he had a strong taste for pen and paper. His desk was frequently covered with hand-drawn charts, often hexagons, plotted with tiny numerals. Once he showed Jaz a graph plotting the Dow Jones Industrial Average against phases of Saturn, claiming that he was “tinkering” with the idea that all significant cycles in stocks and commodities were either multiples or harmonics of something called the Jupiter-Saturn cycle. Occasionally, he’d mention his house in Montauk, imagining his retirement there, or proposing to sell it and buy somewhere in Europe, possibly Berlin. “I think that’s the only place I could truly understand the past,” he said once. “But what about the future? Is the future even possible there? Maybe Mumbai or Beijing?”

Why he chose him as his interlocutor, Jaz couldn’t tell. There were surely other people in the firm better able to follow the forking paths of his conversation. Sometimes he seemed manic, staring out his window at the forest of lighted bank-tower windows like a cartoon supervillain in his mountain hideaway. At other times he could be despondent, slumped in his chair, muttering about the world being a hall of mirrors, a puzzle with no solution. Once Jaz found him at the window with his arms outspread, a silk-suited Cristo Redentor blessing Broad Street.

“Why do you do this work, Jaz? Strange I’ve never asked you before.”

“No mystery. I have a wife, a son. I want to give them a good life.”

“Is that all?”

“And of course because it’s interesting.”

“Oh, come on, that’s one of your dishwater words. A map of Brooklyn is interesting . A documentary on penguins is interesting . Not a life. Interesting isn’t the reason you get up in the morning. Tell me, do you believe in God?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?” He paused. “I see. Well, aren’t you going to ask me the same thing?”

“OK. Do you believe in God?”

“ Interesting you should ask, Jaz. I think the real question is whether God believes in me.”

He began to laugh, a shrill ascending scale. Jaz was irritated. Raj had kept him awake much of the night, and the previous day the latest in their long series of nannies had quit. He had no patience to spare for Bachman’s metaphysical jokes.

“Look, Cy. You want to know why I’m doing this? Because with luck it’ll make Fenton a lot of money, and he’ll give some of it to me. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Walter is profound, but you know what? I don’t care. I just want to build a trading model, I don’t need to save the world.”

Bachman sat down at his desk. For a long time, he was completely silent, rocking slightly from side to side on his chair, steepling his long fingers.

“I’m sorry, Cy. I’m sleep-deprived. My son — I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Next month we’re going to go live with Walter. Small volumes initially, but if it works as it’s been doing in testing, we’ll soon step up.”

“OK. Right.”

“That’ll be all.”

Jaz left feeling angry. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? That night he tried to explain to Lisa what had happened. Having never met Bachman, she’d formed a romantic picture of him as some kind of unworldly scholar, toiling away in his office like a medieval alchemist. Jaz would remind her of the custom-tailored suits, the handmade shoes, but she couldn’t shake the image of a banker who wasn’t primarily motivated by money.

“Did you really shout at him?” she asked.

“I told him I wasn’t interested in his theories.”

“Oh, Jaz, why? He sounds like the most interesting guy in the place.”

“Interesting? Christ.”

“Are you going to get fired?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe he’ll just find someone else to rant at when he’s bored. I’m not sure he’s got any kind of home life. There’s no wife, no kids. It’s possible all he does is think up new ways to look for God in unemployment figures.”

Bachman didn’t fire him. The stream of data continued. Gas volumes pumped through the BTC and Druzhba pipelines, racial assaults in Australia, coltan mining yields in the DRC free zones, incidence of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in those same zones, hourly volume of technology stocks traded on the Nikkei … Jaz was no longer analyzing these clusters himself, just feeding them into Walter, which was unearthing connections at an alarming rate. Everything seemed to be linked to everything else: the net worth of retirees in Boca Raton, Florida, oscillating in harmony with the volume of cargo arriving at the port of Long Beach, Southwestern home repossessions tracking the number of avatars in the most popular online game worlds in Asia. At first Jaz had wondered whether the model was a hoax, something that existed only in Cy Bachman’s imagination. Now he found himself disturbed by its power. What would happen when they started trading? Like dipping your hands into a river and pulling out a fish, Bachman said. What ripples would Walter create?

Almost in passing, Bachman told him that he was already preparing for what he termed Walter 2. The firm had paid to install equipment inside the New York Stock Exchange, a necessity for high-frequency trading, in which a few milliseconds’ lag could destroy competitive advantage. In what seemed to be a gesture of reconciliation, Bachman invited him to watch the technicians connecting their system at a high-security data center in New Jersey, which also housed the NYSE matching engines, the computers that sorted through bids and offers to complete trades. The windblown site was on a bleak industrial park two hours outside the city, a low shed whose anonymous construction was designed to prevent its becoming a target for terrorist attack. As the limo waited in the parking lot, they walked between racks of humming machines, accompanied by a nervous NYSE employee who would evidently have much preferred it if Bachman didn’t run his fingers caressingly across the hardware as he passed, like a small boy trailing a stick along a fence.

He asked Jaz to imagine a Walter whose time horizons were in the order of milliseconds. A pattern could be identified on the first cycle, matched with others on the second or third, used to trade on the fourth and then would vanish back into entropy. The speed of light itself, the ultimate physical horizon, would be part of their daily lives as traders. As the data center manager hovered behind them, he began to talk about Walter’s ability to split trades into thousands of pieces, to disguise the positions the firm was taking from their competitors. “It has an effect we’ve not properly understood. We’re inducing stable feedback in the markets, propagating the trends we want, dampening down the others. It’s not just reacting, Jaz. We’re making the market, creating our own reality. And when we use Walter at high speed, the effect will be profound. Of course, when the regulators catch up, they’ll say we’re gaming the system. And they’ll be right. We are gaming the system. After all, there’s no social value to it. Markets are supposed to allow us to allocate resources efficiently. They’re supposed to be useful. But it’s nothing to do with allocating resources anymore. We’re not turning around container ships or varying toothpaste production at the speed of light. It’s a glass-bead game, and I sometimes think I’m the only one who has a worthwhile reason for playing it.”