He was surprised by her reaction. Then something odd flashed across his face, something that was both a smile and a look of understanding. “I wanted to say farewell. I realize I didn’t greet you properly when I came in.”
“I’m sorry. I can be a little jumpy sometimes.” Ariel reached out and took his hand firmly, striving for a business-like shake, but a millisecond after the touch, the premories started. Her initial flash of fear at the unexpected gave way to curiosity as Ariel found herself overwhelmed by images that were so much larger than those she was used to. Close-up and huge, like murals on a giant wall, with her so close that she couldn’t focus or make out the picture. Amidst the blur she sensed the immediate near future, and saw herself pulling her own hand away in confusion. As she tried to steady herself, lest she become engulfed in the intensity of the sensation, she pulled her hand back just as she had seen a second before.
Holy shit, she thought. She’d never in her life had something so immediate come at her, and she fought to regain her composure. As her gaze met Baldur’s eyes, she could have sworn she saw a look of understanding, and perhaps more. He looked bothered as well, and appeared to be struggling to regain his composure too.
“I am glad I met you,” he said. With that he turned and left the little conference room quickly, like he needed to use the restroom badly or had just remembered an important call he had to make. Ariel watched him go in silence, as the remaining board members left still talking among themselves, oblivious to the bit of drama that had just occurred.
There was no question that Baldur had just set off the most unusual premories that Ariel had ever experienced. Ariel considered whether it was because the man would somehow play an important role in her life. Was it possible that he too had her curse? On the other hand, she had been so shook that she might have imagined his response to her. Finding another person with precognitions like her own was incredibly unlikely. Ariel had decided long ago that what she could do had to be very rare, or the world would be so different.
So she needed to get a grip, and do her job and stop worrying about this future stuff. She needed to become far more familiar with exactly what Baldur’s professional needs were and do her best to see that her firm met them. She thought that it would also be a good idea to find a way to avoid touching him ever again.
5. In the Heart of Winter
Cillian McGrane needed another beer. The lovely lady with upswept light brown hair standing next to him preferred more champagne. Ariel flipped through the mental images she remembered from the files, and identified the woman as Nell Gallagher, a part-time actress from Donegal who had been seen often at Cillian’s side at social events. More specifically, Nell was one of several women who were often seen. Cillian had one ex-wife in heavily Catholic Ireland and Ariel guessed that he didn’t intend to have a second. Ariel was not the only lady present who did her homework. Nell looked up and recognized Ariel as well.
“Cillian. Isn’t this the girl from your stock company, the new person handling all your mumbo jumbo money making?” She said it loudly, in the friendliest of ways, making it clear that she had no objection to being overheard or to mumbo jumbo money making. Cillian turned to greet Ariel.
“I do believe it is,” he said.
“Thanks for the invitation, Mr. McGrane,” Ariel said.
“Please, I’m Cillian. Mr. McGrane is my stuffy ol’ da, thank you.” He smiled to soften his rebuke. “I’m so glad that you came. I know that Eoin is out of town and I’m so far out in the country, I wasn’t sure you’d brave the drive alone.” He gestured around to the beautiful grounds of the estate. “Gorgeous afternoon for mid-winter now, isn’t it? At least the sun is out for a while. And so much better to meet you here than at some boring meeting, right?”
Ariel nodded, thinking of the awkward presentation in the d4 boardroom.
“Plus, you come to my party, you get to have a little a taste of what the money you help me make goes for, isn’t that so?” He gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Try the lobster wrapped in bacon.”
His phone buzzed softly in his pocket.
“Damn thing never lets me be,” he muttered, pulling out the offending gadget to glare at the name of the interrupter. His face softened as he read it. “Oh, sorry. I have to take this.” He looked at Nell and waggled his fingers towards Ariel. “Would you mind, dear…”
“Of course not,” Nell smiled as Cillian headed off to talk privately. She turned to Ariel. “Let me show you the stables. It’s just a short walk and they’re quite remarkable.”
Ariel had never understood the fascination some people had with horses and she couldn’t imagine any stable, anywhere, remarkable enough that she wanted to put up with smelling all that horse shit just to look around. But she had enough social skills to know that would be a poor choice for a response.
“Sure,” she smiled back and off the two women went.
“Cillian has become such a big fan of your company and what it does. I worry a little that he’s placing too much faith in you.” Nell said it lightly as they walked but Ariel understood the implied question behind it, and the woman’s protectiveness towards a man who appeared to be her friend.
“There’s always risk involved when investing in stocks,” Ariel agreed. Nell seemed a little too sharp to try to dazzle. “We do reduce that risk considerably though. I trust that Cillian has financial advisors who push him to keep his portfolio well diversified?”
“Oh he does, he does.” Nell nodded as she made her way confidently down the stone path in stylish boots that complimented her skirt and glittery sweater. “The more he wins with you guys, though, the more he tries to override their advice. So what is it you do exactly? You send his transactions faster than the speed of light so that they beat out everybody else’s?”
Ariel winced. Okay, so science wasn’t Nell’s strong suit. “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, as least as far as we know.” She worked hard to make sure that there was no condescension in her voice as her own foot wobbled on a loose cobblestone in her tiny heels. She found herself wishing that she had chosen something more substantial to wear than the silly sparkly cocktail dress she’d managed to find on sale last week when she’d been invited to this party.
“At best electronic signals travel near the speed of light, which is about one-hundred eighty-six-thousand miles a second. So it’s like a little over a second for information to get to the moon, which is about three-hundred-thousand miles away,” Ariel said. She knew she was throwing out too many facts when she saw Nell’s eyes start to glaze over the way most people’s did when numbers came flying at them. “My point is that we design our hardware to minimize the path the information has to travel. A slightly shorter path gets our customer’s stock order in just a little bit quicker.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Nell was thinking while she walked. “If what you’re saying is true, then it takes a whole hundredth of a second just for information to go from Dublin to New York, because that’s about three thousand miles. Cillian ought to be losing every time he places an order just because he lives so far away. “
“That’s right.” Ariel was happy to discover that this woman could not only follow along but she could do simple division in her head while she did it. “But Cillian isn’t making the decisions. The other thing we do for Cillian is we design software to think for him. In fact, our programs take in data, analyze it, and issue buy and sell orders based on Cillian’s criteria, but far faster than he or any other human ever could. It, the machine with our software, lives right on Wall Street and right next to the London Stock Exchange. You’re exactly right, Nell. Milliseconds do matter and we make Cillian faster every single way that we can. He still won’t always come out on top in a trade, but he will more often than not, which is what investing is all about.”
“Oh,” Nell said it like she was surprised to find the mumbo-jumbo was quite so simple. “So what happens when everybody starts using your fancy high frequency tech
niques and they are all super fast? Then who wins?”
“Ummmm, hopefully we keep developing new and better ideas. I think that we will. I have to admit that right now the way the system is set up you have to have a certain amount of capital to begin with in order to maximize the benefit of what we offer.”
Nell nodded. “You mean that it’s easier to use your techniques to get richer when you’re already rich.”
Ariel had considered the ethics of this part of her job already. “Yes. That is a fact. You don’t take a job finding ways for people to be more successful at investing if you want to open a soup kitchen. Look Nell, I’m a good person, but I’m also good at this and it pays my bills.”
“Hey, I meant no offense,” Nell said. “I mean, I party with a man who likes to show off the money you make for him, so I am most definitely not throwing rocks here.”
They were at the door to the stable. Nell paused.
“Aren’t we going in?” Ariel asked.
“I don’t see why we should,” Nell laughed. “I’d hate to see you step in horseshit in those little shoes of yours and judging from your reaction to my invitation I don’t think you particularly like horses. I just wanted the chance to visit. Let’s walk back and I’ll introduce you to Cillian’s financial advisors. You can sweet-talk them for a while. I need to get back to the guests.”
Ariel agreed, and made a mental note not to underestimate this woman.
Mikkel Nygaard came to Dublin in late January, specifically for the purpose of meeting Ariel. Of the three men, Ariel thought that he seemed to have the least discretionary time for appearances, and he seemed to be the most irritated at having been handed off to a newcomer.
He met privately with Eoin first.
“Not to worry, lass,” Eoin had assured her the day before. “I expected that he’d want to complain to me privately before he met you. This one doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. Well, neither does Baldur either, really, but this one, Mikkel, he takes his money even more seriously, if possible. I’m going make it clear that nothing is changed for the worse for him. You, when you meet with him you let him see how sharp you are and then let him figure out for himself how he’s going to be getting even better service from us.”
Right. Act intelligent. Ariel was more nervous than she wanted to let on as she sat across the small wooden table from the man in one of the smaller conference rooms in Ullow’s Dublin office.
She supposed that he looked more or less Danish, with non-descript medium to light brown shaggy hair that could have benefitted from a stylist. His average build went with a body that seemed used to physical activity, and Ariel got a sense of solid strength from the way that he held himself. His dress was only slightly more businesslike than the flannel shirt and jeans he had been wearing in the photo, and she was certain that this was not a man who chose to spend his time in the world of high finance. His skin was on the fair side but his very dark brown eyes gave evidence of his Inuit heritage. Ariel studied those eyes, thinking that she had never seen irises that close to being black.
His dark eyes bored back into hers.
“What do you think about the specific order-handling treatment that successful HFT techniques rely on?” he asked with no introduction or greeting as a preamble.
“I think that some protocols have to be in place to decide which stock orders to handle first. The current system isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done. Yes, it benefits high frequency traders, but frankly I think the most savvy can and always will find a way to take advantage of any set of rules, and you can’t run a market without rules.”
Mikkel was watching her carefully. “So you’ve thought about this.” He said it as a statement.
“Yes. Quite a bit. It is what I do for a living.” The instantaneous fluctuations in the stock market and their implications for the buyers and sellers had fascinated Ariel ever since she had first learned of them. “I do have some reservations about some of the boutique order types now being designed and offered by the various electronic exchanges, but given that they do exist, I have no problem whatsoever using those order types to help my own customers make money.”
“That’s good to hear.” Mikkel stood up, indicating he’d concluded his business. “Good. You know your stuff. I won’t object to including you as part of the team. Tell Eoin that I’ll play nice as long as Ullow continues to abide by my rules.”
He offered his hand, perhaps to soften his words and his abrupt departure, but Ariel was taking no chances on touching another client. She turned away as though she didn’t notice.
“Thanks. In that case I’ll let Eoin know that I don’t object to being on your team, either.” She said it as she rose to walk out of the door. She tried to smile a little to take the sharpness out of her voice, but she was less successful than she had hoped. Mikkel raised a single eyebrow, and looked amused as she left.
Later, as Ariel thought more about her handshake with Baldur, she started to wonder if it wouldn’t be logical for her to be touching more people, not less. Not random people, of course, but Mikkel and Cillian and Eoin and anyone else who could possibly be involved with her future and the uncertainties she had encountered when Baldur took her hand.
Because if they all set off such a reaction on her part, of huge images too close up for her to understand, then maybe they all were going to be involved in this whatever-it-was that was going to happen, and that would be very good to know from the start. And if her dealings with Baldur, and Baldur alone, were significant, then she needed to be aware of that as well.
Why? What’s the point here?
Ariel wasn’t so fond of broad philosophical questions. She was of the opinion that life should be simple, direct and fun. But okay. She could think this one through. She took a deep breath as she sat down at the tiny kitchen table that had come with her furnished apartment, and she reached for paper and pen. Maybe she could ignore cosmic issues with deep meaning if she just made a list. She did like making lists.
Priorities. She wrote it across the top in big, bold blue letters.
1. Stay alive.
She wrote it without hesitation. That’s not as dumb as it sounds, she thought. If I see danger, I need to protect myself. That’s healthy. People should want to stay alive, right? I probably should find a self-defense class here and get enrolled. And I definitely need to find a yoga studio.
2. Enjoy my life.
Ariel smiled as she wrote this one. For as long as she could remember, she had only wanted to be normal and to have fun. The way everyone else did, without knowing what the chances were that the cotton candy or the roller coaster ride would bring on a tummy ache.
Her smile faded as she considered the flash of premory that had come upon her suddenly when she had been handed the packet about a new assignment in Dublin. She had clearly seen herself knowing that she could play a role in saving the human race. From what?
3. Figure out how and why humanity is at risk in the first place.
She stared at her own words. What if I don’t like the answer? What if I wish that I’d never asked the question? She picked up the pen again.
4. I need to get those answers. Then, if I can do anything to make the survival of the human race more likely, I need to do it.
She wrote it firmly, in big strong letters. She picked up the pen again and realized that she was out of priorities.
She went back to the refrigerator and grabbed a carton of eggs. Looks like it was an omelet for dinner again tonight. As she broke the shells and dropped the three raw eggs into a little plastic bowl, she thought, Maybe saving my species should be listed ahead of keeping myself alive. Or least ahead of having fun.
Ariel turned her attention to chopping up an onion. She’d had enough philosophy for one evening.
“Slumming today?” Jake asked. He was one of the senior coders in the group, and loosely considered the coordinator for all work being done on Baldur’s project. He was one of those tall, chubby men with curly hair a
nd a gentle way about him that made the comparison to a teddy bear inevitable. Ariel had already established a friendly working relationship with him, even though he had pointed out more than once that Ariel spent too little time with the programmers.
“Just wondering if you guys will ever actually finish what you’re working on,” Ariel teased him back. Frankly she would like to ask him many more questions about his work, but Eoin had continued to discourage their interaction in myriad little ways.
“Of course we won’t,” Jake answered cheerfully. “Will Microsoft ever stop releasing frustrating new versions of Word? Will Google stop reinventing itself? This programming gig is long-term job security, baby. Better than building roads because you never run out of a place to put new software. You just buy a bigger computer.”
Ariel gave him an appreciative smile back. She liked Jake for his sense of humor and for the fact that he seemed impervious to office politics.
“Do you have a little time to tell me more about the current direction of Baldur’s latest requests for modifications?” Ariel asked. As she did so, she reached out in what she hoped was a friendly, sisterly way and touched Jake’s arm. “Because I really am trying to be of some use here, both to our company and to our mutual customer.”
Jake nodded, apparently impressed by Ariel’s sincerity.
“Okay. I’ll let the front office people in on some of the secrets.” He winked. “As you know, Baldur is mostly concerned with better tools for making quicker changes to his own parameters. Seriously, one minute he wants the defaults to go one way and two minutes later he wants to be able to change them to do something else, at least under certain conditions and then three minutes later he wants it all to go back to the way that it originally was. It sounds insane, because no one, I mean no one, has worthwhile new information on anything related to stocks that changes that rapidly.”
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