Savas stood up. “Then it’s about damn time they opened up and worked with us. Tomorrow morning we’ll get this moving.”
Cohen grabbed his arm. “Are you sure about that? I think you might be overestimating the influence the FBI has on the NSA. They’re so frighteningly close to Big Brother, we’re not going to have much pull.”
Lightfoote nodded. “And they aren’t going to look at my little enterprise as anything remotely useful compared to the fleet of processors they have. From a certain perspective, they’re right.”
“So, what then? We wait here helplessly for the NSA to formulate a cure and perhaps share it with us? If this thing shuts us down, we’re crippled to investigate the killings and abductions, anything at all really. We can’t remain that vulnerable!”
“Try the NSA, John,” said Cohen, walking up to Lightfoote. “Meanwhile, I suggest that you leave the leash off Angel. Don’t rescind your madwoman decree.” Cohen took Lightfoote’s shoulders in her hands, squaring up to face her. “Angel, why don’t you see what you can do about this thing. Assume we’re on our own. Assume it’s a matter of life and death.”
Savas nodded. Lightfoote stared between them and then back at her server.
“Okay. But be careful what you ask for.”
17
In an unprecedented turn of events, the major world stock exchanges were forced to suspend trading as markets oscillated wildly and company fortunes were obliterated and made in instants.
Beginning almost immediately after the opening bell was rung at the New York Stock Exchange, and despite normal after-hours trading the night before, chaos hit the floor as share prices of everything from Fortune 500 companies to bundled options on the futures market dropped or increased thousands of percentage points in seconds. The changes swung back and forth, even on individual stocks, at the speed of the electronic trading computers.
“The system went haywire,” said Brian Gunter, an analyst from Brookmans. “It was faster than the human mind could follow. All in electronic trading, across the board stock dumps and purchases, seemingly at random.”
It appears that automated trade-halting safeguards designed to prevent massive stock fluctuations either did not function as expected or were unable to handle the volume and nature of the spurious trades.
“We are assuming a major malfunction,” said Gordon Jones, a technical support specialist working for the NASDAQ exchange. “Either the safeguards to prevent market meltdowns failed, or something more systematic occurred. With current software, trades are executed in less than a half a millionth of a second. Feedback loops at those speeds can lead to major problems on time scales human beings can’t react to. It’s a very nonlinear system.”
While there had been previous scares such as the rogue program from Knight Capital that nearly halted trading in 2012, no glitch in the now-ubiquitous trading computers had caused anything approaching what took place today. Representatives from the world exchanges have been in conference calls since trading was halted in the early morning.
Washington Post financial correspondent Angela Kong explained: “World leaders are involved. It is an unusual crisis. You have a majority of the largest companies in the world now worth pennies on paper, or rather, worth nothing in the digital systems storing their valuations. We’re talking IBM, Apple, Google, GE — you name it. They’re wiped out. Meanwhile, there are a host of nothing companies, green energy, solar, drug companies in India that have instantly grown to the size of Google. It’s economic chaos. There is talk of a market reset.”
Kong quoted sources within the administration stating that, once the market software had been fixed, there were plans to resume trading at the prices on shares at which the exchanges had opened this morning. The move would be unprecedented, and is not without vocal critics in the government and private sector. However, consensus seemed to be building that only through such action could an unparalleled market collapse be staved off.
In an ominous repeat, the malfunction of the trading software that led to the trading halt in the US markets spread to every exchange across the world. One by one, as each of the major exchanges opened, chaos ensued and trading was stopped. Markets in Asia have not yet opened, but already the Nikkei and Shanghai Stock Exchange are being prepared for an unscheduled shut down to prevent further chaos in the world financial system.
First term senator and political firebrand Nathan Schelot — who rose to power on an election in California rocked by accusations of fraud — was vocal on Capitol Hill following the Press Secretary’s minimal statement on the crisis at noon.
“And is this the leadership we need in a time of turmoil? Now you see the product of a runaway, capitalistic system. When will we regulate the bidding bots, the electronic microsecond trading that has turned our once human economy into a cyborg market? Robots take our jobs and now they are taking over our corporate structures. We are not in control anymore, and if something isn’t done soon, everything this nation has built will come crashing down.”
They have been heralded for years as the next wave in machine displacement of human workers. They are the programs that have been written to produce news articles, financial reports, sports summaries, even law briefs. Light years ahead of the clumsy text and speech generators of a generation ago, they are now increasingly used by all the major media outlets to fill the seemingly insatiable appetite for online content.
They are even the seeds of new businesses, as Image Council’s Jeff Philips has deluged the publishing industry with manuals and fact guides created only by computer algorithms that write books based on the contents of databases and fact lists.
But today a major bug has turned these time-saving tools into seemingly independent intelligences as thousands of unapproved and propagandistic news stories swamped online publishing sites, hijacking a significant fraction of the news reported.
While the chaos on Wall Street was the story of the day, for several hours the New York Times sported a headline criticizing income inequality in a thousand-word manifesto.
“It’s clear that we have some hackers playing with our system,” said Executive editor Jerry Wilbur. “The writing seems to be similar to taking a fourth grader’s dictionary and throwing it into a dishwasher. Nevertheless, it took some time to pull it.”
Despite the high profile nature of the breach, the Times was hardly alone. Most of the major news feeds and even news flagship websites were drowned in a cascade of articles focused on financial statistics and world economic problems. The automated systems adopted a Marxist bent that seemed funny to many except for the problems caused.
“Income inequality? Corporate welfare? Lobbying and money? All very interesting to some left-wingers and it was cute to see the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page moaning about the evils of capitalism,” said a source at a competing publication. “But this shut down our news systems as well. This was a global problem that cost man-hours and will total in the millions to fix. We’re still flushing these bot-articles out. They haven’t stopped. Only when the companies running them shut things down will it end. Meanwhile, we’re unplugging from their services. Right now, they’re drowning us.”