The Barren Planet

The recession began on a Monday with a junior analyst in an obscure New Boston brokerage. At 9:32:07 he found a quarter-point dip on a hyperderivitive of a tertiary economic indicator. A cursory check found similar dips in adjacent verticals. All his mathematical and statistical training told him the dip was a fluctuation, a bit of background noise that had no real effect on the economy. But sometimes, he’d always believed, a man has to go with his gut. By 9:42:23 he had posted a commentary on his firm’s blog titled, Are We in a Recession. (He forgot the question mark.) “The major indicators are going up. But is the market headed for the second moon or the void between the stars?” At 9:45:07, the feed curator of Stockman Financial News scanned the post and ordered it moved to the top, declaring it, well-written, authoritative without being megalomaniacal, and sexy the way the girl next door looks, the more you look at her. The assistant protested that the post was predicated on faulty...

Between support calls, Schultz did what his supervisors called ‘bitwork’. A fragment of an empty form would appear in his work area. Portions of entry fields were covered so that the visible fragments of data made no sense. Schultz’s job was to copy the fragmented bits to a second set of entry fields which were marked to match the first. None of it made sense, but the most baffling part of the job was that he always had to reverse the order of the characters. The only reason given for such nonsensical work was ‘security’. If he could make a coherent guess about what the text said, it was a good day. If he could fit a dirty word into one of the spaces, it was a very good day. Schultz’s message queue pinged. The sound was the repeating, ascending scale of a management directive. The alert would continue until he played the message. Ignoring the directive wasn’t an option. In the coming days any supervisor might question him at any moment. “How many pens are you allowed per year, Schultz?...