Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  So the world’s largest brokers decided to break Henry Fucking Jackson and take his shit. Which is how they also found out that he pledged the same collateral to them all. Never had so much money targeted one guy.

  The market only needed to go up a little to bankrupt him, given the size of his bets and the virtually limitless leverage brokers gave him. So the biggest banks and brokers, those Jackson hired in the first place, turned on him by buying the thirty stocks that made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

  They acted in unison the day after Thanksgiving, when trading is really light, buying the thirty Dow companies as if their McMansions depended on it. Jackson already shorted a few hundred billion shares of those thirty companies (which collectively have over a trillion shares) -- meaning they were not on the open market. That left far fewer shares still available, which helped them to buy enough shares to drive prices up. After making billions off Jackson’s bet against the Dow, they planned on squeezing his margin accounts to force him to post most collateral.

  Until Jackson’s hedge fund brought it to his attention.

  All thirty Dow companies rose after the opening bell while the rest of the market fell. Sensing an attack, Jackson immediately instructed all of his brokers to cover every short of every Dow company, which released them back onto the market. Many of the owners, eager to take advantage of an uptick in prices, sold while they could, flooding the market with billions of shares.

  Their attack probably would have worked were it not for the movie. Since when can a fucking movie move the market?

  Regolith 3D held its worldwide release the day before, and theaters were packed all holiday weekend. Since the movie naturally scared the shit out of people, stocks nose-dived the day after its Thanksgiving premier, except for the thirty Dow stocks, which stood out like an erection on trading charts. Jackson’s traders noticed the obvious and Jackson acted accordingly.

  The big brokers’ attack not only failed, but they now had a shitload of stock that no one wanted to buy. Selling at a loss only aggravated their growing insolvency.

  Jackson, however, made several billion because the Dow had fallen so much since he borrowed those shares the month before. Sure, he would have made a lot more if he had been able to sell them a month later, but several billion is still several billion.

  Not that their attempt did not freeze Jackson’s bowels, who immediately made every space expert worldwide a paid “consultant” to the Jackson Space Foundation. The more speeches, interviews, and articles they did, the more Jackson paid them. He hired public relations firms in their home countries to help them get the word out and to standardize their message. Like renaming the asteroid “The Planet Killer” and predicting billions of deaths if the government didn’t move faster. Because no one ever believed their government acted fast enough. Many astronomers were already doing this, since it would lead to bigger budgets in the future, but getting extra pay redoubled their efforts. The public was so alarmed that Jackson was able to do a “full Ginsberg” by appearing on five Sunday political talk shows right after Thanksgiving.

  Jackson won the argument: the sky was falling.

  Which pissed off every national government who now had terrified rioters demanding immediate action. Which is not what government does best. People accused their government of conspiracies and cover-ups, which the global space community promoted. The movie and its disastrous predictions dominated the news around the world. All the more so because the asteroid in the movie was 12 kilometers and the one coming at them was now only half that large, after having shed so much weight. As the longtime head of Spacewatch, Jackson’s father now had a field day appearing on one TV interview after another, urging people and governments to prepare for the worst. The professor soon had one of the world’s largest Twitter and Facebook followings.

  Then the Rock blasted off another hill’s worth of dirt, which would bring it within one million kilometers of Earth, right when billions of people started to pay attention. Now, catastrophe was not just unthinkable, but inevitable. The latest positional data predicted fragments striking open ocean, and thus wash away islands. Like, say, Wall Street on Manhattan Island. Around the world, stock markets shrieked like first day felons giving unlimited anal. Currencies of island nations, from Great Britain and Japan on down, went into free fall. Currency traders joked that the pound should be renamed the ounce.

  The problem with trading $500 trillion in derivatives in a $50 trillion global economy is that financial institutions lack the reserves to cover even a tiny fraction of their losses if shit happened. And shit was definitely happening.

  When asked how it felt to be the world’s most famous person, Jackson quipped, “Well, for one thing, Paris Hilton is pissed!”

  Ironically, as much as Jackson wanted to kill the big brokers like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, he instead had to keep them alive to function as intermediaries. When your bet against everyone prevails, the last thing you want to do is kill the bookie before you collect your money. And nobody knew better than Jackson that the markets had farther to fall after the impact.

  He could, however, cash out those bets against every other counterparty not rich enough to sustain greater losses later. Jackson didn’t know who would survive the impact and the inevitable global depression, so after Christmas he covered as many shorts and derivative contracts as possible, leaving only the brokers and the richest corporations, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds for later.

  And some of those pockets were deep. That Saudi prince lent him half a billion shares yet Citi went from trading in the 80’s in October to the single digits. Wealthy Arabs and Arab sovereign wealth funds alone lent him a couple trillion dollars worth of securities, which after the impact would probably trade for 95% less. Thousands of large international companies like IBM, Intel, and Mitsubishi unknowingly bet the survival of their companies by becoming counterparties against Jackson’s currency and commodity bets. The richest financial institutions in the world unexpectedly faced trillions in losses to one fucking guy.

  Jackson made everyone but the richest pay up before the impact. If they couldn’t pay, he had the courts freeze their assets and liquidate their companies before the courts were overwhelmed.

  But Jackson could still punish the brokers without killing them, so he bled them of liquidity, capital, and credibility. Fearing for their survival, the big American bank-brokers begged the Fed for interest-free loans so that Jackson wouldn’t kill them. The more the Fed loaned them, the more they could reduce their debts to Jackson, reducing his leverage over him. If the finance sector collapsed, the global economy would collapse, so the Fed and other central banks gave the mega-banks a few hundred billion in near-zero interest loans to prop them up. Not knowing this money went towards paying off Jackson, who held a sword to their throats.

  And if the main body missed, they could quickly recover.

  But, really, they were zombie banks at this point: dead, but still scaring people. Every lender was going to take a huge hit, and the bigger the lender, the larger their loan losses would be. Property loans, student loans, car loans, credit cards, corporate loans and lines of credit -- their typical losses were going to multiply overnight, when their ability to tap private markets to recapitalize was hardest. Even if they didn’t owe Jackson billions.

  In 2008, bankrupt Washington Mutual’s $300 billion in assets sold for just $2 billion. But that was back in the day when other banks had money.

  And no one on Earth was doing more to prepare for the Worst Case Scenario than Jackson. While Palin embraced denial, Jackson spent billions of his own money trying to relocate, shelter, and feed 100 million Democratic voters. Which made Cooper’s accusation of being money hungry intolerable.

  “Dude, your wife’s been piggybacking on my trades since Halloween. She has made mad money. She even convinced your campaign treasurer to short sell, so who the fuck are you to bitch to me about money?”

&nb
sp; That Cooper didn’t give a fuck was written all across his face.

  17

  “You ungrateful fuck! How much did I make you? I helped you out-fundraise Obama and Hillary in 2011. Even your wife made millions off my plays.”

  Cooper leaped out of his seat to get into Jackson’s face. They stood flaring nose to flaring nose.

  “That has nothing to do with it!”

  “Bullshit!” Jackson warned, resisting the urge to kick Cooper’s ass. The ingratitude was infuriating.

  Jackson helped raise hundreds of millions in early, hard money donations for Democrats from the defense and aerospace industries by working with a new defense-funded think tank, the George Washington Institute. Several hundred retired generals and admirals formally founded the think tank right after the 2008 elections and several instantly became TV pundits, serving different networks, but all expressing their consensus opinions on foreign policy and national security. Their official mission was to design a next generation military that was not just unchallenged, but unchallenge-able by making it as capable and as invulnerable as possible. Their unofficial mission was to prevent any future Iraqs, which they regarded as a disaster for the military, the economy, and for America. They regarded the occupation of Iraq as the most expensive foreign policy blunder in American history.

  They hit the political talk shows, wrote articles, gave speeches and interviews, and pushed their book, website, and video of their vision of a next-generation military. Showing worked better than telling. Facts tell, but stories sell. The illustrated book was okay, but the website and videos that compared their new military with the old one really brought the point home. Backed by a massive media campaign funded by the defense industry, the Institute was selling a compelling line of products. Which, apparently, is what it takes to sell taxpayers on trillions in new weapon systems.

  The retired generals and the defense industry CEOs co-opted Jackson early because he had the most advanced ultracapacitors, organic solar, and amorphous metal factories. They literally could not make what they wanted without him.

  Jackson’s slice of the pie was worth billions, so he convinced Democratic party leaders to publicly praise it. Daniel Cooper, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in particular, received thousands of maxed out campaign contributions worth millions from the defense industry, while millions more poured into the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, which can receive unlimited soft money.

  Unfortunately, this extensive public cheerleading by leading Democrats made Republicans reject it out-of-hand, like a father to a daughter’s prom date. Industry lobbyists tried to get the GOP back on board, but Palin refused to enrich the Democrat she rightly detested the most.

  Defense giants had spent years on research and development, but could not translate them into actual contracts because the occupation of Iraq drained the DOD’s budget. So they spent the entire Bush term churning out products from the 80’s while researching new ones. Even the “cutting edge” $143 million F-22 Raptor Fighter, which cost $44,000 an hour to fly, was designed 26 years ago.

  The think tank was presided by Major General Bob “Bulldog” Barker, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs that Rumsfeld drove out a month before 9/11. Bush tainted everything he touched, but one way or another, America would have a new president in 2009.

  The generals wanted to influence policy because Iraq and Afghanistan proved that even the best military can lose if its commander-in-chief is an idiot. A superior strategy can defeat superior technology. A great military with a bad commander can lose to a bad military with a great commander. Good armies win battles, but good generals win wars. Tactics win battles, but strategy wins wars. And what America needed were strategic weapons. Constantinople survived centuries of Muslim attacks until the Turks defeated it with just 70 long range artillery pieces. Constantinople, the valuable gateway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and where Europe meets Asia, is still part of Turkey several centuries later.

  What could be a strategic weapon today?

  The most radical change that the Institute advocated actually spent years on the DOD’s Militarily Critical Technologies List: amorphous metal. First discovered in the 1950s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s structural amorphous metals program has poured billions in university grants and company start-ups. Since 1998, companies like LiquidMetal used amorphous metal to make expensive golf clubs, tennis rackets, and knives that never needed sharpening.

  The defense industry helped the Institute redesign the entire U.S. military using amorphous metal for every ship, vehicle, and aircraft because only through great economies of scale could they make it affordable.

  Glass-metal was a natural for ship hulls because it’s very light, absorbed sound (when sandwiched between a foam layer), didn’t rust, resisted fire, was several times harder to puncture than conventional hulls, and had several times the structural integrity. They replaced diesel fuel with compressed hydrogen gas, which has twice the energy content of diesel, to further raise the thrust-to-weight ratio. Hydrogen gas is also lighter-than-air, so a ship full of it was literally lifted up a bit, rather than millions of gallons of diesel fuel that literally weighed a ship down.

  So much thrust pushing so little weight enabled designers to scale up the “double-M” hulls already used in Navy surface-effect fast-attack boats. They sought to out-perform the Australia-based Austal trimaran littoral combat ship called the Independence. The Alabama-built, aluminum, tri-hulled, 418-foot warship had a sustainable speed of 45 knots (52 mph) and used steerable waterjets instead of propellers and rudders.

  Using amorphous metal, Jackson had already built a double-M ship because if it can go twice as fast, it can delivery twice as much. Now the defense industry wanted to apply Jackson’s hulls to warships, and he wanted to fucking let them.

  The more a ship sits in the water, the more it drags, so Jackson had his designers get it above water as much as possible like a surface-effects ship. The double-M provides a much smoother, faster ride at high speeds in rough seas over conventional hulls by spreading its weight over a wider area. The wider the ship, the more stable it becomes in rough seas and the harder to capsize.

  Military analysts loved it because double-M hulls reduced the strength and length of a ship’s wake, which makes it safer since spy satellites don’t actually look for ships, but their wakes, which look like a long white scratch on the surface of a dark blue sea. Its wider design disperses the wake over more water, like the foam from waves, rather than an unnaturally long straight line.

  If it can’t be seen, it can’t be killed.

  The double-M hull channeled air into four arcs that provided lift and reduced draft. The more a ship can be lifted out of the water, the easier it becomes to increase its speed. In a virtuous cycle, faster speed gave the ship greater lift, and greater lift channeled more air, literally lifting the ship up, which increased its speed. The new lighter hull, with oversized hydrogen-fueled turbines, had a fraction of the draft of older designs, which enabled the new ships to operate far closer to shore and up rivers.

  Given that Beijing sat along a river 60 miles from the ocean, which westerners a century before used to take the capital, this low-draft capability opened up new war scenarios. Or, in Beijing’s case, old war scenarios. Mimicking the radar signature of civilian ships, under cover of night and stormy weather, battalions’ worth of armored vehicles could be quickly transported via low-draft cargo ships right to Beijing. Marines could now invade where they could not before, forcing the enemy to spread themselves thin defending greater terrain. Such an ability can not only win wars, but can prevent them.

  Now that was a strategic weapon.

  The Institute showed the Navy how it could have several times the combat presence at a fraction of the cost. The US Navy has 280 ships, but few are deployed at any given time, and most of the combat ships protect vulnerable aircraft carriers. The new ships could reach their patrol area in half the time and stay several times as long with limit
less hydrogen fuel split from sea water. Without having to defend aircraft carriers, the Navy could cover several times the ocean with a fraction of its current inventory.

  Anything that can be found can be killed. A smaller, faster, stealthier ship that left a smaller wake would be a bitch to find, even with radar and spy satellites.

  Speed not only makes a ship harder to find, but also harder to kill. Supercavitating torpedoes, like the Russian VA-111 Shkval, are capable of 200 knots. With supercavitation, the torpedo actually glides through a thin air bubble and the water around it is literally vaporized to form small bubbles of gas to reduce drag. These monsters are 27 feet long, weigh almost 6000 pounds, can fit a nuclear warhead, and have a range of 7 kilometers. A suicide diesel sub could take out an entire aircraft carrier battle group with nuclear-tipped supercavitators.

  But who wants to use a nuke and miss?

  Supercavitating torpedoes have great speed, but they do not have great range. A fast ship could drop wide “torpedo nets” and attempt to out-distance it by running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The faster the ship, the closer the sub would have to be before launching. Yet the closer the sub, the more likely it would be detected.

  Speed gives the Navy a strategic advantage because enemies don’t go to war against forces they can’t defeat. The lower the enemy’s confidence of success, the less likely they would attack in the first place. Especially with micro-nukes. The new ships may not be able to outrun a faster torpedo, but they may be able to out-distance it. And that reduced the incentive to buy the expensive subs capable of actually launch supercavitators.

  Maximizing the weight-to-thrust ratio meant huge turbine engines, which also generated a lot of electricity. And without having to worry about conserving fuel, they could generate as much electricity as they wanted. Which solved a problem that long vexed the Navy.