THE SUM OF ALL PARTS
A throng of young male traders crowded around the deeply varnished desk in the corner office of New York’s most prestigious hedge fund. None of them ever missed Friday mornings when they’d watch Amy Roach in her latest performance of mastery and madness.
Gripping the non-office-sized hunting knife, she began bouncing the point between her spread fingers. A morning show of Stabscotch—the game known also as Nerve, or simply the Stab Between the Fingers Game. Elegantly freckled and pale-faced, her cheeks edged with a gentle sharpness, Amy watched the dangerous display through the dark focus of her green eyes. Whatever Sinatra did to an audience on stage, she did to any opponent in a space built for intelligent combat. Always in command.
The murmurs shifted to disbelieving jeers as her pace intensified. The blade thumped fast, a furious rhythm scarring the expensive wood. Amy squinted slightly as she doubled to 240 strikes per minute. 480... Even the young men of impenetrable masculinity gasped when she calmly closed her eyes. Like a combat monk, she sat eyes shut, the knife stabbing in flawless cycles of violence that refused to injure her elegant hand.
Until the two-beep crisis call erupted from her desk phone. She didn’t see the flashing red as much as she felt it.
half-forgotten candle charts; iron’s fall overnight, a pattern almost recognized. Mandelbrot Set?
What was that shape? She didn’t know it but she felt it—like the chimes under chalkway, data ripping a hole through the floor.
The knife passed 500 beats per minute just as the Dow lost its hydraulics.
Red. Beep. Urgency now.
The knife plunged into the back of her palm as the jeering men fell silent. It was right in the centre. For a moment she wondered why nothing hurt.
*********************************************************************************************************** When Shelley Roach died her husband, Jack, chose to keep living. He didn’t want to, but he still had the kid. This crying and crazy black-haired four-year-old. He loved his daughter exactly as much as he hurt from the loss.
He would learn before she was only seven that she had an IQ two points higher than Einstein, and he loved her more every day they took on the world as a team. More after she’d read her hundredth book. More again after her first day of school. More still before she went to high school and got so anxious she couldn’t sleep for days. Those nights he’d sit outside her bedroom, his back against her door.
“Dad,” she whispered, “tell me how much you love me and how much you loved Mum.”
Jack would lean into the door jam and whisper between the cracks.
“I love you. I love you repeatedly every day.
More joy, more comfort, more safety—these things I’ll find for you. I love your scissors and glue, your tiny paper folding too. I love your scribbles and crayons. I sew these seeds for you. I love you with all five senses.
I love you through my sixth; the magic one. Real magic, you know.”
“Magic isn’t real, Daddy,” she softly muttered before telling him that she loved him too.
“You’re magic,” he whispered finally. “Bedtime, sweetheart. I’m right here.”
************************************************************************************************************
Justin pressed gauze with the flat of his palm, voice low. “Hands are more resilient than they look. Unless you hit an artery, you can lose a lot of blood before it matters. Steady pressure.”
The Marley Room was electric with panic by the time she entered, her hand bound tight. Amy was the thirteenth person inside but immediately the most looked-upon. The Managing Director transfixed by the wall of falling graphs. A 21% loss and counting.
“Amy. What the fuck is happening?” He looked more panicked than she had ever seen him. Amy wasnt prone to panic. If it was as bad as it looked she’d probably role played this numerous times.
Dow down eleven more points in two minutes. No room for gold if there’d be no market for a baker’s bread.
And then she saw it: the first fractal, like the first blip on enemy radar, the pinion of a shape birthed in her mind before collapse.
Indices rebound. A pattern. A cause? Was this the the economy or her internal decay?
false reality, seams splitting apart.. a storm unwinding itself into new fronts, a fractal.
A beep on her phone: Justin. No nuclear war. Her brain scanned the collapsing indices.
************************************************************************************************************
Of all the days of fatherhood, the afternoon after Amy was expelled from her high school was something Jack Roach would never forget.
Seventeen going on twenty-nine, Amy sat facing her dad managing a slump of affection with resting hands of defiance. The school captain expelled was certainly shocking, though to neither of them was it completely unexpected.
“Amy,” he exhaustedly relented, “I accept that whatever you did today was rationally correct and ontologically defensible, but I refuse to believe you uttered any words or acted in any way without understanding their consequence. So tell me—what act was it that you considered worth expulsion?”
Amy hadn’t seen him wind up so completely.
“It was just something I said to a teacher in dialogue about moral justification.” Jack had never seen her so sheepish before.
“Tell me what you said.”
Amy began circling the kitchen table, striding subtly for effect as she conveyed her conversation with some imaginary interlocutor.
“Who among you has ever thought a thing they’d never dare to say? Be bold, at least a few of you, raise your hand and recite the circumstances of this event in your mind. Step forth! I command one of you to stand tall right now.
Silence? Is this what is to be so? Silence universal and so made a lie. What silence is made in response to a truth impenetrable? What is this muck stifling our will to make shared—and in sharing more real—a secret we know but refuse to utter?
No one among you? No one will raise their hand?
Well if you must remain so softly reluctant, let me give you a truth of my own. Let my most distasteful and restless thoughts serve you as you conceive your difference to my character.
“Last night I dreamt of rape.”
“Stop,” Jack sighed almost angrily. “Darling, why do you need to break things?”
************************************************************************************************************
“Justin - palladium open today?”
“One forty-three. Down two.”
Flick files through mind..
“Brent crude?”
“Open 147 up one percent…and—hang on—down on the next print.”
“That can’t be right.”
No it certainly cant be right dear sport.
It was oil.
No one knew the precise price at which industrial civilization became unsustainable. As it turned out, it was $151.33 a barrel.
Justin stood in her doorway, watching her with the eyes of a man who knew the end had arrived.
“Do you know what’s happening?”
“Of course,” he said. “This isn’t a wave of losses. It’s the death throes of the industrial economy. Oil is in everything. If it….
Costs rise, goods too pricey, consumption collapse.
Lights out. Assets stranded. Markets flooded with the unemployed. Decay. Extinction. Abort”
She walked to the whiteboard and began to write. H(X) = - Σ p(x) p(x). Shannon’s law of entropy. Her voice was calm.
signal over memory, squared by decay - zero?
“Ok young Justin lets do this live. We’re going to build the offsetting tool. You’re going to code the derivative to price the collapse of informational certainty. If the system’s confidence decays, it pays out exponentially.”
Justin stared. “Wait - it could recover!”
She met his gaze, unblinking. “And we’ll be richer than Job.”
He swallowed. “It might not…”
Amy turned to her terminal, the motion unhurried.
“Then we’ll have done what we could,” she said. “A hedge is not a salvation. But it’s enough to be awake.”
Her finger rested over the Enter key for one last moment.
Then she lifted it away.
Not yet.
Screens convulsing red, percentages plunging like birds shot from flight; patterns falling, patterns
If they deployed the offsetting tool in isolation, it would be a footnote. Elegant but ancilliary to the larger extinction event. But if she loaded it with all of it - every dollar the firm had ever stolen or conjured - there was a chance it could slow the burn before the world slipped entirely off existence.
Her hands moved with the same detached grace she’d used to stab the desk that morning.
Command prompt. Root access. Master login. Go
She typed faster than Justin had ever seen, crossing through permission barriers designed to keep any one person from doing exactly this. How did she ever get credentials this deep.
The only partner cleared with the MD to shift ninety-five percent of the firm’s equity in a single keystroke. Three trillion US dollars. The number blinked in the allocation window, accusatorily. She felt no tremor in her fingers. She looked over her shoulder at Justin, whose face had gone white.
“Ready?” she called, her voice low and bright, like she was offering him a lift to lunch.
He swallowed, then wiped a trembling hand across his mouth. “Oh God,” he whispered; then wept.
Amy turned back to the screen, the cursor blinking patiently. Without ceremony, she keyed the allocation command. And the system accepted it. Three trillion committed to one last wager against entropy.
She exhaled and rested her bandaged hand flat against the desk, feeling the quiet certainty that whatever came next, it would not be a repeat of anything she had known before.
Three. Seven. Eleven. Why primes?
Then she slipped.
Not a fall. A quiet dislocation of something unhooking behind her eyes.
Crack.
Blip.
Pierced.
Bleed.
And then it stopped.
The world’s pulse ceased rythym mid-beat.
Screens flickering on low beam, men moving their mouths though stayed in silent dread.
No sound reached her. The chaos receded making the world seem thin.
A distant hum.
Recursion unspooling like a long strand of silk pulled free of the loom.
The patterns she had chased her whole life - the nested loops, the echoing fractals - suddenly revealed themselves in perfect clarity. Every movement she had ever made was an iteration, a repeated shape wearing different masks.
For one long instant, she saw every cycle from origin to collapse. And then she fell out of it.
Like losing balance in a dream. Like stepping off a ledge she hadn’t known was there.
The warmth of comprehension was gone, replaced by an arctic quiet that pressed against her skin. Her hand felt sore and tight but announced its discomfort as knowledge. Then sound.
Stay upright..
She knew because she smeled it. She had left the loop. The recursion was still running, but she was no longer inside it.
All around her, the old world churned in its illusions of continuity. It moved, but it wasn’t alive. It spoke, but it wasn’t aware.
Amy stood there, her breath cold in her chest, and understood she had become the only witness to the moment when the simulation stopped including her.
It was not madness. It was not revelation. It was simply the end of belonging to the pattern.
