Authors: David Wingrove
Jake had never seen them before; never, in all his travels in the datscape, encountered anything like them. You met all kinds of weird and crazy avatars but he had rarely come across any that
were quite so hostile as this pair. It was like they were physically blocking his way.
Only this was the datscape. It wasn’t etiquette, but he could walk right through them if he wished.
‘Who are they?’
‘We’re tracing now,’ Joel, the senior engineer, answered.
‘Hi Joel… Where’s George?’
‘He’s been called away.’
‘Ah…’
Three seconds passed. The two giant beetles held their position.
‘They work for the
Chung Kuo Ts’ang K’u
, the China Storehouse. It seems they’ve had a corporate redesign. The dat’s crawling with them.’
‘Well, can you ask them to fuck off out of my way?’
Joel sounded amused. ‘We’ll ask them nicely.’
A further ten seconds passed. The beetles moved aside. But even as Jake made his way past, he sensed them turn and watch him go, as if interested in him for some particular reason. Only, again,
why should that be?
I’m getting paranoid, he thought. I’ve been watching too much
Ubik
, that’s what it is.
And walked on, following the wind.
The pressure on the Market was sustained for the best part of six hours, and then it eased. Ten minutes later it was gone. The ‘air’ inside the datscape was
untroubled once more. The wind had ceased to blow.
‘What’s the damage?’ Jake asked as he peeled out of his suit.
‘To us? Not much. A couple of hundred million…’
‘And the Market in general?’
‘Three or four trillion.’
Jake had followed the wind. He had traced it back to source, only whenever he thought he’d got there, the source had vanished. The wind had changed. Was blowing from somewhere else.
Weird, he thought. Really fucking bizarre.
But others had reported the same experience. And MAT, which recorded everything, had no answers either. Again there was a randomness to things that was hard to understand.
Because who in their right mind would want to lose money? Who could possibly benefit by depressing the Market and driving down prices? Who but a madman? And madmen generally didn’t have
the money to operate at this level. So that ruled that one out.
Jake went home, to find that Kate had been and gone.
‘She said she’ll be back later,’ Trish advised him. ‘I believe she’s gone shopping. She said she needed a few things.’
Jake felt tired now. He had had barely three hours’ sleep last night, and what with the nervous tension of the day…
‘Trish… I’m going to put my head down for a bit. Wake me if it’s anything important. Otherwise, say that I’m out… that I’m… well, shopping with
Kate.’
Only sleep didn’t come easy. His mind wouldn’t let go of the problem.
In the end he got up again and, making himself some coffee, sat there with an old-fashioned pen and notebook, jotting down anything that came into his head.
So what
did
he know?
The red beetles for a start. He hadn’t liked the red beetles. And not just the first two he’d run into, but the rest of them. A regular infestation, it had been.
That was how some companies liked it, of course. They wanted to emphasize that their employees were team players, not mavericks. But you could take that too far.
What had Joel said? The
Chung Kuo Ts’ang K’u
… the China Storehouse. He’d look into that one for a start.
Not that there was necessarily any connection. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it didn’t fit with the rest of it. It was too upfront. Too easy to check on.
It was probably only coincidence that they’d had a corporate redesign at the same time this had blown up. As for their belligerence…
Jake smiled. They probably weren’t very nice people. After all, it took all sorts to make a market.
So what else?
He had barely got going when Kate returned.
‘Hey,’ he said, getting up and going over to her. ‘I’m really sorry about this morning.’
She let herself be kissed and fussed over. Jake sat her down and poured her a glass of wine, then sat across from her.
‘Well? Were they pleased?’
Kate lit up. ‘They were just so happy. I thought Mum was going to explode with happiness.’
‘And your dad?’
‘You know how he is. All very laid back. But I could see he was excited. Deep down. He likes you, Jake. They both like you.’
‘And I like them… which is why we ought to have them round. For a special celebratory dinner. Would you like that?’
‘I’d love it.’
‘Then you can organize it. Get what you want. Something special, maybe.’
‘Can I?’
‘Sure.’
She hesitated, then asked, ‘What was it? Why did you have to go in so early?’
‘There’s been a bit of a run, that’s all.’
‘But I thought the Market was fine. I thought… well, everything seems so rosy. All the signs…’
‘Are good. So don’t worry. It’ll right itself. We just have to calm the jitters, that’s all. Make sure that people don’t lose confidence.’
Kate smiled. She was reassured. Just like that. If Jake said it was okay, it was okay. She trusted him.
But Jake himself was worried, not by the severity of things – he’d seen the Market in good times and bad – but by the lack of explanation. The fact that they had no idea where
this was coming from.
‘Kate?’
‘Yes, my love?’
‘I might have to go in again… later on. They might need me.’
‘Okay.’
She didn’t argue. Didn’t sulk. And that was why she’d make such a good wife, he realized. He was just so lucky in that regard. He knew other
logins
whose marriages were
really under pressure. Others who had split up. But Kate wasn’t like that. She understood him.
‘Jake?’
‘Yes…’
‘Let’s skip dinner. Let’s just go straight to bed again, eh?’
He should have slept. Tired as he was, he ought to have slept. Only he couldn’t. Something was happening in the world, something big, and he couldn’t shake that
from his mind. Even as Kate slept on beside him, her gentle snoring filling the room, Jake found himself thinking back and analysing the situation, reminding himself just how they had got to this
point.
The Oil Crash of 2022 had been the turning point, the ‘make or break’ moment for them all. Jake had been three when it had happened, and had experienced, through infant eyes, the
bewilderment of the months that followed. It was globally catastrophic, but the problems had been there a long time, a decade and more before he was born, in those heady days when China had first
emerged as an economic superpower.
It was hard to think of now, but only sixty years ago China had been a Third World country, militarily strong but powerless economically; at best a sleeping giant whom no one thought could
escape the lethargy of its recent past, nor the tight control of its communist regime.
Deng Hsiao Ping had changed that. He had freed China from its shackles, and in the next three decades, China had grown… and grown and grown.
And therein lay the seeds of future problems.
At first that growth was beneficial, and not just to China. For as China became the manufacturing hub of the world economy, so prices came down. In that first golden glow of globalization,
everything looked rosy. Four hundred million Chinese were raised from poverty. China boomed. But the cracks in the great edifice were there from the outset.
By 2009 the United States’ net international debts had reached a staggering three trillion dollars. At the same time, China, by maintaining an artificially low exchange rate, had built its
own foreign exchange reserves up past the two trillion dollars mark. In one sense this was a good thing. China’s purchase of low yield US bonds and bills had kept money cheap and
international interest rates low. They had fuelled the boom. But it could not go on.
For a time things held together, even as recession slowed China’s growth from the steady 10 per cent it had enjoyed. But the cracks were growing larger. As China’s trade had grown
– as its vast infrastructure had expanded, filling the eastern coastal plains – so its voracious need for raw materials had grown with it. Slowly the negatives had begun to outweigh the
positives.
Meanwhile, in America, the protectionist lobby, suspicious to the point of paranoia over China’s intentions, grew more and more vociferous. The Republicans, coming to power in the shadow
of the deepest recession in memory, wanted to do away with free trade. In a frenzy of nationalistic rhetoric, they sought to replace globalization with protectionist tariffs. They wanted to pull up
the economic drawbridge, just as their predecessors had after the Wall Street Crash of the late 1920s. ‘Buy American’ was their slogan.
It was a mistake. When the inevitable crisis came there was not the will to solve it. The USA reintroduced tariffs in 2016 and in the years after the world came close to war, not once but on
three separate occasions.
Africa was the first flashpoint.
China’s links to Africa went back to the 1960s and the years of the Cultural Revolution. Back then the USA and Russia, locked into Cold War mentalities, had used Africa as a covert
battlefield, their opposed ideologies tending to destroy whatever they came into contact with. China, however, took a different path. It had helped build infrastructure, becoming Africa’s
friend. Then, in 2000, with a new industrial revolution taking place at home, the Chinese once again looked to Africa, investing billions of dollars and sending hundreds of thousands of workers to
kick-start African industry. That was just the start. By 2018 over forty million Chinese had emigrated there and close on two hundred and fifty billion dollars had been invested.
It was hardly altruistic. China
needed
Africa. Needed its untapped resources – its platinum and copper, its iron ore and gold, its coal and wood. And more than anything, its
oil.
As push came to shove and the price of oil per barrel soared to four hundred dollars, the USA responded angrily. In a session of the United Nations in March 2019, perhaps frustrated at being
shut out of the by-now lucrative African market, it had accused China of ‘colonizing’ the dark continent. More than that, it had demanded that China’s ‘special
relationship’ with thirty-eight African states be examined by the World Trade Organization and those countries ‘opened up’ to international trade.
China’s response had been blunt, and memorable. Their delegate had stood and, in perfect English, told the American delegate: ‘Go fuck yourself !’
What had followed was six months of tit-for-tat legislation, each of the two great superpowers vying to outdo the other in sheer pettiness. By Christmas 2019, any pretence of being trading
partners was gone. As, effectively, was globalization. The days of free trade were over. Protectionism was now the key. The world economy began its slow slide.
Then, two years later, another flashpoint.
By then the recession was beginning to bite. America’s close neighbours (Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador), facing a massive economic downturn,
did what had been unimaginable only ten years earlier and linked themselves politically with the now rampantly right-wing giant that had for so long dictated their policies. Plebiscites were held,
and in all seven countries an overwhelming yes vote was delivered. On 29th October 2021 the United States of America became the ‘Fifty-Seven States’. Over the next three years it was to
add another twelve – including its biggest neighbour, Canada.
Before then, however, one other event threatened to shake the tree, and once more it was to do with oil.
Back in the heady days of expansion – in 2008 – China had struck a deal with its neighbour Burma, to build a nine-hundred-mile-long oil line from Kyaukphyu, on Burma’s western
coast, through Mandalay to Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province.
It was a visionary venture, for until then, 80 per cent of China’s oil had had to come through the Strait of Malacca, a channel of water about five hundred miles in length that was
‘policed’ at one end by the US naval base at Changi in Singapore, and at the other by the US Indian Ocean Fleet, operating out of Diego Garcia.
For China this was equivalent to the US having its fingers on their windpipe, even with the extra oil from Burma. It could not be tolerated, and led to the fast-track construction of a Chinese
deep-sea fleet, further raising military tensions.
Even so, all might have been well and the balance kept, except that in November 2021, just four weeks after the formation of the Fifty-Seven, the Attorney General of the United States expelled
more than fifty Chinese embassy officials in response to yet another Chinese spy plot.
China followed suit, expelling more than two hundred Americans.
Stubbornness became belligerence. By the end of that first week, and in the shadow of a further twenty dollar rise in oil prices, the US threatened to blockade the Strait of Malacca unless China
backed down.
It was now a matter of face.
For the next four days, as shipping ground to a halt, China was entirely dependent on its Burmese pipeline. War seemed imminent. And then it happened. The oil pipe was attacked and blown up,
thirty miles south-west of Mandalay.
The United States denied any involvement. In fact, it protested its innocence. Even so, the world held its breath.
At urgent meetings over the next forty-eight hours, senior officials from both sides desperately cobbled together a peace. A treaty was signed. The world drew back from the edge.
Only the damage had been done.
China, in particular, was suffering now. While the slowdown had not been as catastrophic as some had predicted, it
had
caused problems, especially in the countryside, where the margin
between eating and starvation had always been slender.
For years there had been local uprisings against corrupt officials. China’s communist elite had accepted this as the price of modernization. Now, however, as the markets slumped and oil
prices reached a peak, that fragile margin vanished. The spectre of starvation faced the seven hundred million who lived in rural China and the revolts began.