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Crashing Down

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

—H.L.Mencken

Two expansive storms of immense power swirled outside the gates of the White House. Above, fluffy white flat-bottomed cumulonimbus clouds grew ever more dense and taller as they darkened into thunderheads. The cold front squall line driving their formation crawled eastward, unstoppable in its power, preparing to engulf the entire Eastern Seaboard.

Below this gale, an enormous crowd of people, far grimmer and angrier than the thunderheads, also grew to a density that surged with impending violence. The squall line here was complex and transient, forming every time a cluster of Red party members and a cluster of Blue or Green party members found themselves in juxtaposition, then dissolving as they backed away.

Backing away from one’s enemies soon lost effectiveness. The crowd congealed into an immobile mass stretching from the sidewalk in front of the White House’s north lawn across Pennsylvania Avenue, then across the entirety of Lafayette Park, all the way to H Street.

People of diverse affiliations had climbed onto the statue of Andrew Jackson, a depiction of him while he sat astride his horse as it reared on its back legs at the Battle of New Orleans. This had been the first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs; the artist who had created the statue had, in a fashion embodying the essence of the early American psyche, created it in this presumably impossible way simply because no one had told him it could not be done. The statue disregarded the indignity of the new occupants climbing over it, and at the end of the day, it emerged from the ordeal mostly unscathed.

One of the cannons flanking Jackson had been occupied by Reds, balancing precariously on the barrel while waving placards demanding President! President! and Speech! Speech!

Another cannon had been conquered by the Blues, waving their own signs offering, He’s Dead! He’s Dead! and Elections! Elections!

Jonathan Kuffman, tall and lean with a slight stoop from decades of hard physical labor, stood halfway between the cannons. Beside him stood his much shorter wife and his very short seven-year-old son. While he was a good and true Red voter, he had brought no placard. He was not particularly interested in politics. He would not have come at all, except his wife had made it very clear that she would come with or without him. His dark suspicion that this outing would not see a peaceful conclusion compelled him to accompany her from their home in northern Arizona.

He’d also tried to leave their son at home with his mother. He’d lost that battle as well.

Now he stood on his toes, his eyes scanning every direction with increasing urgency for an escape route. His wife, a true Blue, had brought an Elections Now placard, but when she realized her husband was right that they were standing in the hot zone of an impending riot, she reluctantly accepted his forceful request and dropped the sign on the ground. As they moved away, a pair of Reds saw the discarded poster and vented a small amount of their rage destroying it.

To Jonathan’s left, a Blue swung his sign at a Red. The intended victim dodged, and the placard came round with hideous force, on course to strike his wife in the neck. Jonathan was out of position to do anything except watch in horror.

Then a huge bear of a man with the short, clipped haircut of a Marine stepped sideways and took the improvised weapon in his gut. Without even wincing, he grabbed the sign and tore it into pieces, breaking the pole into lengths too small to offer even a short club before he grabbed the attacker by the neck and lifted him gently off his feet. “Please go,” the stranger suggested politely.

The once-furious assailant saw something in the stranger’s eyes, shuddered, and achieved a semblance of calm. Placed once more on his feet, he backed slowly away, pushing through the crowd, even as the crowd pushed back.

Jonathan stepped up to his family’s savior. He used a word he had found increasingly less useful in recent times. “Thanks.” Another person might have gushed in their sincerity, but Jonathan never gushed. “’Preciate it.”

The stranger smiled. “No problem.” He stuck out his hand. “My name is Wolf, by the way. Wolf Griffin.”

The Arizonan smiled. “Jonathan,” he offered. “Thoughts about how to get out? Drinks on me after.”

Wolf’s smile turned grim. “If we get out, I’ll settle for a lemonade.”

A ripple moved through the crowd. A two-story-tall scaffold, hastily erected on the White House’s north lawn, lit up under the glare of powerful floodlights as the sky continued to darken. A tall man, straight and proud, climbed the steps to the small podium at the top.

A chant arose among the excited Reds. “The President! The President!”

Colin Wheeler looked at the standing-room-only crowd in the largest auditorium on the isle ship BrainTrust University. He nudged the elegant young woman standing stiffly beside him. With barely controlled mirth, he replied to her earlier concerns. “And you thought nobody would be interested?”

Erika Everest, a lovely pale redhead with a soft Irish burr, shook her head, dumbfounded. “But, what I’m going to talk about is so geeky and mathematically abstruse, how could there be more than a half-dozen people anywhere who could listen without falling asleep?”

Colin chuckled. “You still don’t understand the BrainTrust, do you? Erika, these are the one-percenters of engineering and math. In the world as a whole, with almost ten billion people, there are thousands who would go into raptures over your math, and many of them are right here.” He waved his hand over the crowd. “Showtime.”

He stepped onto the stage. “Welcome to our quarterly Visiting Scholar’s Presentation. This year we have Dr. Erika Everest.” He paused to let the applause die down. “I know many of you think that degrees in anything other than chemical, nuclear, computer, or aeronautical engineering are a waste of time. Erika used to complain when she worked as a statistician that she had acquired two degrees in economics that she’d never use.”

This got a round of quiet laughter before Colin continued. “But then she met a group of computer geeks and economists in Silicon Valley working on the cryptocurrency that would one day be known as SmartCoin, and our world changed.” He paused. “So, let us welcome the lady now known as The Conqueror of the Boom/Bust, Dr. Erika Everest, as she presents a short intro to her groundbreaking work, A Game Theoretic Analysis of Incentives to Address the Oracle Problem.”

A huge round of applause arose as Erika appeared. She started off a little shaky but grew stronger as she absorbed the enthusiasm of the crowd.

As her first action, she popped a small window in the corner of the presentation’s wall screen displaying 1.0000SC in bold gold letters. The display pulsed, first fading out, then returning with the same number. She licked her lips. “As it happens, according to Moody’s projections, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that we’ll see an adjustment in the SmartCoin currency while we’re talking, so I thought it would be fun to watch. I’ve asked the audio-visual people to give me a connection to the outside world just big enough to drive this screen since as you’ve already noticed, other than that, both the cell network and wifi have been turned off for this lecture. Anyway, if one of you sees our SmartCoin in the corner change, please shout out.”

The crowd murmured agreement.

With that, Erika waved a finger at the screen and criteria began appearing. “Let’s begin with a list of requirements that must be addressed to minimize the currency volatilities leading to John Maynard Keynes’s boom/bust cycle and all its horrors.”

Wolf muttered to Jonathan as the President for Life climbed the steps, “Let’s try to sidle over in that direction.” He pointed toward the eastern edge of the field, where a line of Marines stood at parade rest, although their weapons were clearly ready and in immaculate condition. “The major in charge over there is a friend of mine. If we can get to him, we’ll be in the clear.” Wolf led the way, Jonathan’s wife behind him, their son behind her, and Jonathan bringing up the tail. Jonathan’s hand rose and fell behind his back, brushing the pistol he had brought just in case, tucked under his denim jacket.

The going was slow, even with Wolf in the lead, pressing through crowds of Blues, Reds, and confused bystanders.

Major Drew Moreno paced behind the line of Marines he found himself commanding here on the eastern side of Lafayette Park. He continued to puzzle over his presence.

Until recently, he’d been with the Border Patrol, keeping illegals out of the country when they penetrated the defenses. They sometimes cut through the slats in the Wall, or hopped over using traditional vertical-crack climbing techniques. Occasionally, they simply flew over it in a cheap hang-glider.

That job had fallen into irrelevance after the Border Patrol, under his direction, blew up half the Wall to allow trucks with Black Rubola vaccine into the country. Now, without the Wall, more people were coming in—though still not very many since the desert was a dangerous expanse of land to cross, so most people continued to cross at the official entry points—but no one seemed to care much. Since over half the truck drivers who’d saved America from extermination were Mexicans, even Drew felt more gratitude than anger. He’d been considering retiring, possibly to a remote country in case the authorities ever figured out the key role he had personally played in the Wall’s destruction.

But instead of being jailed for treason, he’d been recalled to active duty and given a platoon to protect the President for Life. The closest anyone came to explaining why he of all people had been assigned to this duty was his commanding officer’s dry observation that Drew had some of the highest loyalty ratings he’d ever seen.

Drew had not mentioned that his loyalty had deteriorated considerably during the Black Rubola plague, when the politicians had sat with their thumbs up their asses while his family members died and the BrainTrust saved the country.

Despite that, Drew was happy to serve.

His happiness depended, however, on who received his service. Like all current Marines, he’d sworn a personal loyalty oath to the President. That oath did not cover the Chief Advisor, who’d been running day-to-day operations for years, however.

Indeed, Drew had concluded, after the plagues struck and no effective action had been issued from the White House, that the Chief Advisor had to go.

If it were true that the President had died and the Advisor was the sole power, all those loyalty oaths had expired. Drew had met with each of his men one-on-one to make sure they understood this as well as he did, and to make sure they understood that if the major concluded that the Advisor was engaged in some sort of a coup, they would have to follow him as he ordered them to defend the nation and the Constitution. Since every one of his men knew someone who’d died in the plagues, they agreed readily.

As the major continued to scan the scene, his unhappiness grew ever greater. It became increasingly clear that in order to protect the President—if and when he showed up—Drew would have to fire into this crowd. He was prepared to do so if necessary, but he didn’t like it.

Another thing he didn’t like was the screen of troops in front of the podium, for they were not troops. He recognized the one in the center—Darron something-or-other, the administration’s chief interrogator, normally in charge of the strict interrogation team. Drew had never liked the existence of that team, yet here they were, armed with assault rifles they clearly didn’t know how to use properly, acting as the front line of defense.

It made him wonder whether they were there to defend the President or the man they worked for, the Chief Advisor.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the crowd, another platoon of troops was led by another major Drew recognized, a jackass who’d never learned to do anything except kiss ass and obey the stupidest order in the stupidest way possible.

And none of this included the possible ways a lesser disaster could be amplified into a giant catastrophe by the helicopter gunships circling overhead, loaded with Gatling guns and Rockeye bomblets that could wipe out the entire crowd in about three seconds.

The number of ways this could devolve into a clusterfuck simply boggled the mind.

When the floodlights came up and illuminated the President climbing the stairs to give his monthly address, Drew breathed an immense sigh of relief. Perhaps nothing disastrous would happen after all.

But if the President’s arrival meant the situation would soon calm down, why did Darron look more anxious and worried?

Micky Palermo was walking past the auditorium, keeping an eye on the saber-tooth despite knowing it could not enter the passage, when his best friend Jerry Rutger snagged his arm. Jerry spoke urgently as large numbers of students swept past them into the auditorium. “Aren’t you coming to the talk?”

Micky shrugged his friend’s hand off. “A talk about the Oracle problem? I don’t even know what that is. Why would I care?”

Jerry frowned in exasperation. “In order to prevent boom/busts, you have to adjust the currency availability in response to inflation and deflation. The ‘Oracle Problem’ is the task of measuring the inflation/deflation so you can respond to it correctly. Dr. Everest is the one who solved it.” He held up his tablet so Jerry could see the notification about the presentation.

Micky rolled his eyes. “I just can’t . . . ” His voice faded as his eyes wandered to the image of the speaker. “She’s a looker, isn’t she?”

It was Jerry’s turn to roll his eyes. “Yeah, Micky. Now will you come along? You’re the math geek, not me, so you’ll probably get more out of the presentation than I will.”

Tearing his eyes away from the screen, Micky allowed Jerry to herd him into the room.

Micky watched Dr. Everest, mesmerized, until she started talking about the basic SmartCoin algorithm. “As many of you hopefully already know, when the servers running the blockchain detect deflation, they manufacture additional coin and disperse it to all the current holdings of currency. Some of you have probably noticed, when you’ve saved a SmartCoin for a while, your account might show an extra ten-thousandth of a coin.”

Micky nodded and whispered, “Yeah, I’ve seen that.”

Erika continued, “We increase the amount of currency every time we see a thousandth of a percent of deflation, so the increase is gradual enough to be unnoticed in most circumstances. The important thing about the SmartCoin deflation algorithm is, it is fair in a strict sense: the newly minted money goes to the people holding the currency.” She paused to sip some water. “This is distinct from the way wealth is redistributed by an organization like the American Fed, which takes wealth from those people trying to save money and gives it to the government.”

Micky whispered to Jerry, “I can see how SmartCoin works for deflation, but what about when there’s inflation? They can’t remove currency, can they? People would stop using SmartCoin if the system took money away from them.”

Jerry whispered back, “True but not relevant. I’ll explain later.”

Micky nodded.

Erika had moved on. “The difficulty with these adjustments is, of course, knowing about the deflation or inflation in the first place.” She continued to explain, patiently answering a number of questions from the audience.

After checking the crowd for additional questions, she clapped louder, her eyes gleaming. “Okay, then! Let’s dive into the math!”

The entire riot-ready crowd held its breath as the President reached the podium. Blues watched in despair while Reds started pumping their placards in excitement while chanting, “Speech! Speech!”

Darron craned his neck over his shoulder to watch as the speaker started to address the waiting multitudes. Darron was one of no more than a dozen people who knew the truth of what was happening here. He rubbed his forehead, although sweat had not yet broken out. He had argued with the Chief Advisor at great length about being put between the crowd and the speaker. This was not his thing, Darron had explained. The Advisor had insisted it was his thing, that Darron enjoyed violence more than anyone else he knew. Darron had agreed, but then pointed out that he only used violence on people who were tied up, and only on one person at a time. It was different.

In the end, the Chief Advisor had explained that Darron was the only person he trusted to protect him if things went suddenly south.

From Darron’s perspective, this made perfect sense. Darron was necessarily loyal to the Chief Advisor, far beyond the call of duty. If anyone did an audit of the strict interrogations he’d been running . . .  He shuddered. If he were lucky, they’d throw him in jail forever. If he was not, well, his personal nightmare saw him locked in a torture room, worked over by the best of his men as part of their plea bargain.

So here Darron stood with the members of his interrogation team by his side, swinging a machine gun he’d just spent half an hour learning to use.

Miraculously, it looked like the speech was going to go off without a hitch. He started to relax. Then the speaker paused dramatically before saying, “Listen carefully, now. I have important news.”

Darron stiffened: this was off-script. He glanced sideways at the Chief Advisor, who was standing at the bottom of the scaffolding steps. He looked like he’d just been zinged with all the electrical power in the city.

The speaker continued, his voice booming through the microphones. “The President is dead. I’m an actor who was hired by the Chief Advisor to trick you.”

For a moment, you could have heard dandelion seeds waft through the air over Pennsylvania Avenue.

Then the noise began.

Equations flowed from the virtual point of Dr. Everest’s fingertip, explaining the response of the price level algorithm under diverse pressures.

Much against his will, Micky found himself being drawn into the math. As Jerry had pointed out, he was one of the BrainTrust’s premier math geeks, and he couldn’t help being fascinated.

Then the number in the corner of the wallscreen blinked, breaking him from his near-trance. He was the first to raise his hand. “Dr. Everest, the number changed.”

Everyone looked to see the new value of the SmartCoin account. It had grown from 1.0000SC to 1.0001SC.

Erika glanced over. “Excellent. As predicted, the costs of goods bought and sold through the SmartCoin network has fallen enough to trigger the creation of more currency. As you can see, the holder of this coin—me, actually—now has slightly more money. So though the real price of goods has fallen, the nominal price will stay approximately the same.”

Someone in the audience asked, “What caused the deflation?”

Erika shrugged. “There are dozens of reasons we might see deflation. One is if the effective amount of currency in circulation falls so each remaining coin can buy more goods. This can be caused, for example, when people choose to slow their spending, such as if they decide to pay off their credit card debt.” She shrugged. “In the absence of other volatility, however, the tendency in a technological society is for currency to deflate simply because productivity increases. As productivity rises, costs fall, so a single coin can buy more.”

Someone in the audience objected. “But productivity metrics throughout Western civilization show that productivity effectively flattened years ago. There are almost no productivity improvements anymore.”

Dr. Everest pointed at the speaker and smiled. “True, but the SmartCoin network has less exposure to Western civilization than other currencies. SmartCoin is used most heavily in Third World nations, where productivity continues to climb as they adopt basic tech. And of course, the heaviest single user of SmartCoin is the BrainTrust, where productivity continues to rise on an exponential curve.”

Micky raised his hand again, but this time just about everyone in the auditorium raised theirs at the same time. A general cry arose, diverse voices alerting the speaker with variations on one theme. “Look! The number changed again!”

The SmartCoin’s value had gone from 1.0001 to 1.0002.

Dr. Everest stared at the number, and her pale hand rose to her throat as her eyes widened. She swallowed. “Well, that was unexpected.”

Major Drew Moreno stared in horror as the crowd surged, screaming, against the fence separating the North Lawn from Pennsylvania Ave. He spoke with much greater calm than he felt. “Steady, men. Hold your fire.” At least, he thought, hold it until I figure out who the hell to shoot.

He heard muffled sounds scattered through the crowd that might have been gunfire, but in the absence of spotting a person with a gun shooting another person, he was reluctant to engage. He went to his best sniper and pulled him off the line. “If we see someone about to commit murder, I’m depending on you to take them down. Can you do that for me?”

The young man, pale but determined, nodded. “Oorah!”

It didn’t take long to identify the most dangerous prick in the mess. Up on the North Lawn, as the first people managed to climb over the backs of the broken and beaten first line of citizens at the fence, the chief interrogator panicked. He hosed down the intruders and his men followed suit, shooting into the packed crowd with no plan except slaughter.

Drew pointed at the Interrogator. “Kill that bastard!”

His sniper fired, and Darron fell over on his back.

Darron’s men somehow managed to figure out that the shot had come from Drew’s Marines. They raised their guns and started firing through the crowd at him. They were ineffectual as much because they were poor marksmen as because they were panicked, and also, the crowd was soaking up far too many bullets.

Drew had little choice. “Men, you see the line of bastards shooting at us? I was right, the Chief Advisor is attempting a coup! Take them down!”

Even as his team started firing as carefully as they could to minimize civilian casualties, Drew saw the next problem. The idiot in charge of the Marines on the west side of the park had seen the interrogator shooting at him and his men shooting back, and decided that Drew was the one fomenting a rebellion. The idiot’s men raised their rifles and began firing on Drew’s position.

Darron’s team was mostly down, and the survivors were now running. One fell as Drew watched, shot in the back, not by his own men, but by someone in the crowd.

Time to change tactics. Drew commanded, “Check fire! Everybody get down!” As his men went prone, Drew spoke quietly to his sniper. “If you get a clear shot, take out that traitorous major over there. But only if it’s a clear shot.”

His sniper eyed him doubtfully. “Not much chance of a clear shot here.”

Drew nodded. “But those are your orders. Be patient.”

As Drew watched, the situation deteriorated even more. Some of the people the Marines on the west side had shot had armed friends. One Marine went down in the face of fire from the crowd, then another. The hesitation the Marines had felt before evaporated. They fired back in earnest, creating a bloodbath of packed meat that had once been human beings.

Drew tried desperately to figure out what to do next.

The Chief Advisor stared with unspeakable rage at the faux President at the podium, then turned to the closest Secret Service agent, a member of his detail. “Kill him!” he ordered, pointing up the steps.

The agent stared back at him with puzzlement that slowly turned thoughtful, and the Advisor realized giving the agent such an order had not been his brightest move. The agent looked like he was considering shooting him, as if he were responsible for this hoax.

Of course, since the Advisor was responsible for the hoax, the possibility that the agent would arrive at this conclusion was perhaps his foremost problem—a problem even bigger than the mob tearing down the fence.

The Advisor turned to shout for Darron, only to watch the chief interrogator fall as he got hit by . . .  Oh, Christ, he’d been shot by one of the Marines.

Moments later, Darron’s men broke. One of them ran toward him. The Advisor started to shout for the interrogator to go up and shoot the actor lying flat at the podium, but the man tossed his rifle aside to enable a faster withdrawal.

The Advisor felt the Secret Service agent step up behind him. He tensed, expecting to hear and feel a bullet, but he’d underestimated the Service.

The agent said quietly, “Sir, we should withdraw to the White House until we understand what’s happening.”

The Advisor stared at him for a moment, then nodded crisply. “Quite right.” He walked with confident haste back to the building as his security team formed up around him.

Wolf scanned the situation with the eyes of a professional though his heart kept trying to leap in his throat.

The crowd was shifting to the east, away from the Marines shooting them, growing into an impossibly denser mass between Wolf’s little group and Drew’s east-side Marines. Reaching his friend Drew had become an unattainable objective.

Searching the situation for something useful he could do, Wolf concluded the main source of slaughter was the west-side Marines, and specifically the major who was encouraging them. If he could take out that major . . . 

His eyes settled on Jonathan, who had pulled a pistol from somewhere and was swinging the firearm wildly, trying to protect his family. Wolf stepped around the wife and child and laid his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “Put your arm down, friend. You can’t make things better with your gun, but perhaps I can. Please give it to me.”

Eventually, Jonathan’s eyes settled on Wolf’s face, and a look of sanity entered them. He handed Wolf the gun.

Wolf gripped his arm. “Stay here with your family. Let me see if I can start fixing this.” He pushed toward the west-side Marines through the crowd streaming in the opposite direction until he had enough clearance to take a decent shot. He knelt, steadied, and fired.

His bullets hit the major in the chest. The major’s body armor stopped them but knocked him down, taking him out of the action.

The problem with getting a clear shot at the Marines was, of course, the Marines now had a clear shot at him. He hit the dirt and prayed.

Surprisingly, his prayer was answered. As he fired, Mother Nature drowned the sound of his shots in a crescendo of thunder as the storm burst to life. Rain pummeled the city, the drops falling so thickly you could barely see your outstretched hand through eyes shuttered against the violent splashing of the water.

After a moment, the rain lessened enough to allow Wolf to look up and see lightning cascade in giant arcs across the sky from horizon to horizon, forming the spiderweb outline of an inverted bowl above the crowd.

In a moment of silence between thunderclaps, Wolf heard another staccato roar behind him when Drew’s troops started firing. Wolf looked around and saw Drew leading them across the field, their weapons pointed straight into the air as they used the sound and their disciplined momentum to push through to the other Marine force. Between the fall of their commander and the pelting of the storm, the west-side soldiers had paused for a moment, and Drew was risking his team to reach them, take charge, and call a halt to the slaughter.

The west-side troops, seeing they were not being attacked by Drew’s platoon, continued to hold their fire. Soon Drew had them backing away from the thinning crowd.

Wolf started to push himself up, grunted with pain, and lay back down on his stomach. A fierce burning ran down his back: one of the Marines firing at him had connected.

A female voice that sounded like a drill sergeant’s yelled over the noise of the rain and the thunder and the crowd. “Stay down! You’ve been hit.”

Jonathan knelt next to him. “Better listen to her,” he said with considerable pride. “She’s a nurse. She’s also my wife.”

The drill sergeant/nurse inspected his back. “It’s a flesh wound, but it’s the longest flesh wound I’ve ever seen.” She touched his shoulder blade. “From here,” she ran her hand down to his buttock, “to here.” She turned to Jonathan. “Take off your shirt and cut it into strips with that ridiculous knife of yours.”

As Jonathan meekly cut his shirt up and she started working on Wolf with the makeshift bandages, she muttered, “Men. Always trying to be the hero. Unbelievable.”

The rain saved tremendous numbers of lives that day, not just Wolf’s. The foremost survivors of the crowd, having pushed down the fence and stomped over the bodies of those in the first wave, had started running after the Chief Advisor and his small security team. The Secret Service called in the overhead gunships to mow down the rioters. At that moment, the storm erupted. The crowd slowed to a stop, and the copter gunners, who couldn’t see a damn thing through the rain, held their fire.

The Chief Advisor made it back to the White House intact. Shaking off the rain that had soaked him to the bone, he muttered, “Well, that could have gone better.”

Dr. Everest forced herself to lower her hand from her throat and speak calmly. “You’re getting quite a treat. Never in history has the SmartCoin system made two deflationary adjustments to the currency in such a short period of time.”

The displayed winked again and returned with 1.0003.

Erika grabbed the edge of the podium in horror.

A young woman’s voice rose from the audience. “Dr. Everest, could someone have broken your Oracle algorithm?”

Erika nodded. “It’s not impossible. I hope that that’s what’s happening because that would merely be a disaster.” She took a sip of water and noticed her hand was trembling. “But this is almost certainly not an attack on SmartCoin. Something far more terrible than that has happened.”

She choked as she spoke her next words, addressed to the people at the sides of the stage. “Folks, could you turn the wifi and cell networks back on, please? We need to see the news. I’m afraid we’ll be cutting our lecture short.”

The young woman called, “Why? What’s wrong?”

Erika looked out at the crowd grimly. “Something terrible has just happened in the world, and it has triggered a long-overdue global economic readjustment.”

Another voice shouted, “Uh, what does that mean?”

Erika stared hard at the speaker far in the back of the room. “It means the world’s financial systems have just shattered. We’re looking at the beginning of an economic calamity far worse than the 1929 Great Depression. It will be like nothing you have ever imagined in your darkest nightmares.”

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