Preview

1.

She kissed her love as the sun set but tasted only tobacco. They were standing together on the bustling concrete boardwalk that hemmed the city from the beach. Flip-flopped foot traffic flowed around them as if they didn’t exist - as if they were young lovers stuck upon their own island of time. Through one distracted eye she caught the sun’s final flash - a red line that smeared blood from the sky. She broke from the kiss.

Marco was a cheap date. She had seen the stress at the edges of his eyes when the bill had arrived. Had felt affection for his feigned indifference and total insistence on picking up the check. Money: so precious to him when to her it meant nothing. The dinner had cost orders of magnitude less than her portfolio’s price movement on any given day. About five millionths of one percent of her book she calculated in the back of her mind.

“What are you thinking about my love?” He asked.

“Nothing.” She said, hugging closer. “Thank you for dinner.”

She knew she needed to break up with him. Had known it for a while. But she was dragging the present with her as far into the future as she could.

“Will you miss this city?” Marco asked.

“I’ll be back soon enough.”

Bicycles pedaled through the sepia glow along the winding concrete path between the boardwalk and the sea. Palm trees carved stark silhouettes. She watched the bicycle vectors through space, imagining their wake in time. Wavefronts of coincidence and creation emerging at all points behind them and ahead, but collapsed only to now, only to this. The entirety of the past and the future mere illusion.

“But you can’t wait for me.” She insisted.

“What if I came with you?”

“Your time is here Marco. Mine is elsewhere.”

He thought about this. It was one of the things she liked most about him. He always thought before he reacted. In another life his mind could have been honed to greatness.

He nodded slowly.

He was a musician - an artist - and a good looking man in LA - what they had together was real, but he was on a rising tide, and she knew that his burning affection for her would soon smolder beneath relentless waves of lovers and liaisons. He wasn’t going to shed a tear. It wasn’t his style. She would never have dated him if it was.

He kissed her on the forehead - a baptism: “Enigma is your name.”

“Enigma Dandieu, can you imagine?”

“It would be a good step in your career as a super villain.” He said, teasing. Mostly.

“You would have made an incredible henchman.”

“I’ll always be your henchman.” He looked her in the eye and paused for a few beats… those blue eyes... “Unless, like I’m dating someone else or something.” He added unnecessarily.

She punched his chest. “Just burp on my dreams.”

“Hey, you’re the one bringing things to a terminus.”

“Ugh. I know.” She broke from the hug and straightened her jacket, a silk mini tuxedo coat with velvet lapels like daggers. The California air freshened as she stepped away from his nicotine musk. A sea breeze off the Pacific. She took his hand to lead him away from the beach-side restaurant down the boardwalk towards Santa Monica.

“How long’s the flight to Tokyo?” He asked.

She considered the question, feeling the gears in her mind start to shift, the patterns overlapping, the edge coming to the fore - the conversations she needed to have with Shintaro. The terms of the deal she needed to offer Tatsuma. The changes in cash flow. “It should be about 14 hours door-to-door.” She answered after a moment. “If I’m lucky.”

“I’m surprised your company doesn’t fly you. You’re a hotshot. Surely they have a private jet.”

A wry smile crossed her lips, the thought of The House having a jet.

“We’re not that kind of company...”

“But surely you can afford it.”

“Ha. That’s most certainly not the point.”

“How much would it cost? Do you know?”

“What?”

“To fly private to Japan?”

“Hmm… probably about one fifty. More if you were in a hurry.”

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars?!”

“Give or take. Depends on whether you own the jet.”

“Fuck.”

About seven thousandth of one percent of her portfolio she calculated.

“Wow... that’s more than I’ve made in my entire lifetime probably.”

She turned back to him and pulled him down by the neck to kiss him on the forehead - a baptism: “Money isn’t everything.”

“Have you ever flown private before?” He asked.

She shrugged. “It’s come up. A few times. For short haul flights. They’re kind of underwhelming. Like airborne limousines with incredibly awkward bathrooms.”

He nodded, not believing her. “Do you at least fly business class?”

“Of course. We’re thrifty darling, we’re not psychotic.”

* * *

She was approaching her thirteenth year as an employee of The House. The House was founded in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression. For a while it had been ironically referred to as the Timing Fund for this inauspicious moment of inception, but decades later the name cut too close to the bone, and was discarded for its lack of opacity. You may have heard of The House if you pay close attention to the news, or work in finance. Publicly, The House’s core enterprise is known by a different name, but to insiders it’s only ever called The House. In the popular imagination it’s one of those staid, dry, back-of-the-room, middlemen sorts of companies, that nobody quite understands, and that fewer still are interested in. But through a gordian knot of subsidiaries, shells, associates, members, partners, investments, investors, and holdings, The House is one of the ten most powerful organizations on earth. The others mostly being companies that we own major stakes in, or governments that those companies more or less control.

Of course power is heavily overstated. The tides of humanity are governed by coincidence, chaos, and hive optimization. We find reassurance in the idea of captains and levers, and of people holding more control over the world than ourselves, but the truth is infinitely complex, and power scales surprisingly weakly.

But The House does have power. For what it’s worth.

The House always wins.

* * *

Marco waved goodbye to her with a final, stoic, bewildered sort of a look. From the back seat of her limousine she watched him for a few blinks as he faded to a darkened mass beneath a sulfur streetlight. Then she took her laptop from her bag to answer emails.

The first was from Shintaro.

Miss Tallulah,

We’re going to need to short the ancestors of Dow Chemical and Standard Oil. At least $100 mil a piece. $200 mil would be better. We must eviscerate Dow.

Currencies will have to be calibrated for blood loss. We still need to do a lot more work on that. VWX moves should be predictable but we should optimise beyond them. For longs we must include Pantikapaion Chemical and a small outfit called Banthour. Their line is crystal clear to me.

See you in a few days. Don’t trust Tatsuma, he’s the worst cannibal in The House.

S.

She thought about her reply for a minute, watching West LA’s beige world of strip malls and stucco pass her by in a sooty blur.

Shintaro san,

Thank you for the additional thoughts. Thrilled you’re on this deal. Will look further into Pan Chem. Banthour is high on the radar.

Tatsuma’s reputation precedes him. Fear not - I will keep a tight grip on my cutlery. I also make for a poor tooth pick.

See you on the near side,

Tallie

2.

She arrived at the check-in counter at LAX and upgraded herself to first class. She wanted a proper sleep before arriving in Tokyo, and Marco’s quizzing about private jets had made her feel like a cheapskate. You only live once. Probably. She put the seat upgrade on to her personal account. She was likely senior enough in The House that nobody would question her expenses, but a first class flight was perceived as awfully gauche and somewhat dangerous.

She was briskly escorted through security to the first class lounge, where she opened her computer to work during the thirty minutes she had before departure. The trade she was planning to make required almost nine billion dollars atop the entirety of her existing capital. It would be her largest trade to date. The problem was that she wasn’t sure that an extra nine billion would be enough.

Marius, her mentor, had always hammered into her that bigger was better: “Take what you think the right price is, and add ten percent to it. Otherwise you’ll underbid.” She was stewing on this. Borrowing $9.9 billion - let’s just round to ten - was a lot for a trader of her seniority. But the upside…

A man entering the lounge caught her attention.

He wore a leather jacket and a shrunken black tee that betrayed a cantilevered gut exceeding slightly-too-tight jeans.

Seeing her, his head tilted in recognition and he made a beeline towards her.

“Are you going to miss this city?” He asked Tallulah, collapsing into the chair opposite.

“No. Have we met?”

“Meeting is such a quaint concept. What’s the difference between knowing someone for a moment or knowing them for a lifetime?”

“There’s a lot more choice involved in knowing someone for a lifetime.”

“Ahh, but then you don’t have any choice with knowing family… You don’t have any family.” The sentence was almost posed as a question, but was enough like a statement that her guard went up to her battlements.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, wrong foot. I’m Fred. You can call me Fred. I’m looking to make a trade, and I was told to keep an eye out for you.”

Tallie tasted venom. “A trade? Why do you presume I’m in the market for what you’re trading?”

A cheshire cat grin: “Tallie, Tallie, I’m so sorry, I’ve made such a hash of this. My mother always used to tell me, think before you speak. I’m still working on that. So here’s the thinking that came first: I have some Antecedent Options from the ‘70s. Reach back to ‘65. Heard you might be interested. Heard you were making a play.”

“Antecedents? What volume.”

“$26 million. Local frame.”

Tallie’s eyebrows lifted. The man took this as an approval to signal the waitress for a drink: “A beer. European. No IPAs or Californian shit.”

“Stella Artois?” The waitress suggested.

“Fine.”

The man sat back and scratched his chest, his eyes not wavering from hers. “So, are you interested?”

Tallie crossed her arms skeptically. “Look… Fred. I don’t do business in airline lounges with strangers without provenance. Most especially when they know who I am but haven’t had the manners to make an appointment through a regular channel. So…” she inspected her nails. “Who the fuck are you, how do you know about what I do, and what makes you think I’d be interested in trading with you?”

His same Cheshire smile was joined by hands up in surrender. “I am genuinely sorry to have made such a bad impression. But I understand - to some extent - how a deal like this works, and I don’t trust any of the vipers that work out of your shop. So I thought… discretion, you know?

“I’m an entrepreneur by trade,” he continued, leaning back in his chair in a self-satisfied way “developed a bunch of ad technology back in the day, high speed digital marketing stuff. I sold my company and made a bit… A friend of mine, he knew about your industry and saw this… distressed opportunity let’s call it, someone needing to sell a lot in a hurry, and this friend of mine, he knew I was looking at where to park some cash. This friend he says to me: ‘How would you like to own history?’

“I mean what a pitch. Are you kidding? Own history? I lapped it up. I’m an engineer you see, by training. Had some understanding of physics and whatnot. Enough to get myself in trouble. So this alternate perception of time really caught my imagination. History as residual matter annihilation? Tradable pasts? Shit was catnip to me.

“So…” he sighed, “like a fucking idiot I bought 100 million dollars worth of magic beans. Paid in cash. Then, right after the trade - maybe unrelated - this friend of mine goes AWOL, like totally off the map. Never heard from him again. And so I spend the next few years completely ashamed of myself, thinking I had parked my once-in-a-lifetime windfall into buying the Brooklyn Bridge, you know what I mean?”

Tallie nodded once, curtly.

“But then I start getting calls. Strangers. In real nice suits. Weird stuff. People in blacked out cars, appearing then vanishing. Offering me serious money for these antecedent options. I start to realize that these things might not be magic beans after all.”

The waitress placed the beer and a coaster on the low table in front of the man. He snatched it immediately and took a long gulp. “You sure you don’t want to join me?”

She shook her head.

He shrugged and drank more, “So I started to get a bit smarter about what I actually owned. Tried to understand how it could affect things. Like how the past might impact the future. Or the present impact the… past or… whatever. Met some people in your industry. Used some of those mysterious contacts I had made. I’m not a boat shaker -” his hands went up in surrender again, “- just a capitalist. But that’s kind of what brought me to this juncture. To this exact present. If you follow me.”

“And how the fuck did you find me at LAX?”

“Ahh, well. That part wasn’t so hard. I’m a bit annoyed you decided to fly first class though. I thought that wasn’t the style of you guys.” He looked around the room and the elegant settings - low tables and comfortable chairs in muted colors, gentle lighting - “that tells me something about you I think. Or is that a false signal?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“No, I guess I didn’t. Anyway…” He necked half of the remaining beer then burped softly and wiped his mouth. “I decided to come to you in person rather than through an agent so you could take something of a measure of me. Not sure if that was a mistake or not… I mean I didn’t want to interrupt your nice dinner you had earlier with your boyfriend. But here’s my card.” he tried to hand her a card. She remained passive, so he placed it in front of her. It was a blank piece of cardboard with an encrypted email address written on it in ballpoint pen: Fredv89261x@protonmail.com. Tallie felt her blood boil.

“Drop me a line some time and I’ll send you my proofs and particulars. I do really want to make this deal,” the man said breezily. “I already have a good sense of the assets I’d like to sell. And I’d like to do a few pasts swaps - this won’t be a pure cash transaction - and I’m led to believe that you could facilitate that. So, anyway… it’s been a pleasure meeting you Tallie. I really am sorry for the rudeness and the subterfuge. It isn’t my style, but then this isn’t a normal business.”

He offered a handshake then thought better of it and looked towards the door. As he twisted his head she saw beads of sweat on the edges of his brow. He smiled furtively and was revealed to her. The lens inverted and the picture zoomed away and up, leaving him as a balding worm at her feet.

“You’re trying to change your fortune.” She said to him slowly - calmly but with menace. “Change your past.”

He paused mid standing. “Just… just small tweaks.”

“You’ve spoken to a lineweaver.”

He returned carefully to his seat. “Yes. That’s who gave me your name. You were recommended, amongst others.”

Tallie tilted her head on its side and gave him her most reptilian stare. The man was desperate.

“...I know that this sort of commission doesn’t come cheap or - or…” He began to get flustered. “But when I heard what you were working on I knew that I fortuitously had something that you could trade so -”

“How did you know what I was working on?”

“I… paid for some information.”

“To your lineweaver?”

“No. I can’t say. I just knew that the pasts I own are extremely valuable, that you can use them. Trade them. But I was told that I had to find someone who was working a play in the right reference frame.”

“Hmm.” She calmed herself and carefully stretched her arms, conveying maximum disinterest. “I don’t normally do over the counter trades. It’s not really how I make money.”

His eyes followed across her arms, then down her breasts, all the way to her legs. He’s straight, she noted.

“What’s so bad about your life now that you want to change?” She asked.

His eyes snapped back to hers. “Did you grow up in poverty?”

She didn’t answer.

“I did.” He nodded, “Not real poverty, like in Africa or Bangladesh or… whatever, but there were chances that I missed. Opportunities that I should have been given.”

“But you say that you’re successful now. You don’t think that’s attributable to those hardships?”

“Maybe it is. But I could be more successful.”

“Yes, and you could be less successful too.”

“I think I have enough capital to weight that in my favor -”

“That’s to be seen.” She took a long breath and paused for a few heartbeats. “And frankly not my concern. I’m open to considering making this trade for you.”

“Great, that’s…”

“But I’ll need your lineweaver’s full analysis. And none of this James Bond shit. And if you ever, ever attempt to intimidate me again, or have me fucking followed, there will be consequences.”

“I understand. That wasn’t my…”

“Now fuck off, take my card -” she reached into her bag “- only contact me by email, and have a nice fucking day.”

He took her card and stared at it in his hands. Like she had handed him his death warrant. Perhaps she had she realized - not caring. Did she care? No, she decided.

“Yeah. Ok.” He put her card in his wallet and threw a $20 note on the table. “Enjoy Japan.”