One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  On the March 20, the British government had to admit that there was a connection between mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which forced the EU to pass a worldwide export ban and brought about the slaughter of 4.5 million cattle. There were no more doubts that BSE was the result of cattle being unsuitably fed.

  “It’s high time that we stop such politicians,” McCaine said grimly, crumbled the newspaper together and threw it away. John was impressed when McCaine got it into the wastebasket from a distance of seven meters.

  As a result of all these bad headlines, the public had more or less lost interest to the activities and motives of Fontanelli Enterprises. Most people didn’t realize that the shopping spree had just begun.

  McCaine pretty much followed the recommendations of their analysts. And John followed McCaine. They bought large companies, small companies, food companies, chemical companies, transportation companies, airlines, telephone networks, manufacturers of electronic components, steel manufacturers, machine companies, paper mills, mines, steel mills, nuclear power plants, software firms, supermarket chains, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies.

  McCaine apparently had given up on sleep, and seemed to have four arms with which he held eight phones all at once. One conference came after another, from early morning to late at night at an unbelievable tempo. John learnt to operate the controls for the video conference system better than the remote for his own TV. On some days there were a dozen delegations at once waiting in the reception area, attended to by an army of young hostesses as they waited for the large double doors to open to let the next group enter. Some of them had flights of up to twelve, fourteen or even twenty hours behind them just for a half-hour meeting. They formed holdings, which in turn bought companies to restructure them, to disassemble them and to reorganize them again. They signed cooperation agreements with companies that couldn’t be bought, such as those privately owned. They purchased rights, patents, licenses, and concessions. They bought land, properties, farms, and plantations.

  A young designer developed a new elegant company logo, using part of Giacomo’s signature on the testament, which was basically a contoured deep-red lower-case f on a white background. This simple logo was about to conquer the world.

  What at first glance looked like a general store of companies was, upon closer inspection, a complicated wickerwork of strategically interdependent entities — but there was no one able to look so closely into the conglomerate’s structure, as Fontanelli Enterprises was privately owned, and it was not obliged to make its financial statements public. For the most part unnoticed, they had secured a monopoly on many low-key but vital raw materials, such as tungsten, tellurium, and molybdenum, and a significant market share in selenium and lithium. The investment in energy production and distribution was enormous and encompassed every form of energy production. They owned nuclear power plants, but also firms that manufactured the control rods for the reactors, and the beryllium they were made of. They owned oil fields, refineries, pipelines, and tanker fleets, and, above all, they owned rights all over the world to potential oilfields.

  “Every idiot invests in Internet bookkeeping and software firms these days. That’s how you can earn millions on companies that aren’t earning a cent of profit,” McCaine said. “But when you get down to the essence of it then only things like energy, raw materials, food, and water have true value.”

  But despite that, Fontanelli Enterprises was represented in other areas too. They had bought a large Italian fashion company, secured shares in a renowned advertisement agency. What raised a lot of eyebrows was its purchase of ten European music companies at once to forge them together into one. This, McCaine had explained, serves two purposes: to confuse outside observers and to make a slight profit. They would be sold again as soon as their profitability was used up.

  “We must,” he explained, “raise our yield above all else. You can do the math; if we achieve a yield of thirty percent, the whole world will belong to us in twenty years.”

  They made headlines again. This time with a spectacular real estate purchase: they bought 40 Wall Street. It had been the tallest building in New York for one year before the Chrysler Building surpassed it and had also been empty since the stock market crash of 1987. It cost them a little more than a half a billion dollars. The renovations on the building began right away, and it was already being listed as the Fontanelli Tower in the 1997 edition of the New York City map.

  “Donald Trump wanted to buy it too,” McCaine told John who had done the negotiations. “He had even offered more than what we paid. So I called the mayor and a few city council members and told them that we needed precisely this building to do our business and that if it wasn’t possible we would be forced to relocate our North American center of operations to another city such as Atlanta or Chicago.” He smiled evilly. “That’s all it took.”

  In the evening, with London’s lights as a backdrop, the large conference room had the aura of a cathedral. The current group of people, energetic and chatty while they had been sitting in the waiting room, was now dead silent around the giant table.

  McCaine got straight to the point. “What I want is that you, with the help of the most modern methods available, develop a computer program that will simulate all important developments in the world. This should include such elements as population growth, energy reserves, raw material reserves, pollution, and so forth. It should be the most accurate program of its kind and be capable of calculating any changing variables up to 50 years into the future.”

  “That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do for years,” said one of the guests.

  “And what has prevented you so far?”

  “Lack of money, what else?” Professor Harlan Collins was a gaunt man in his early forties and he looked like it wasn’t just his work that he didn’t have enough money for. His suit was wrinkled and he wore a threadbare turtleneck instead of a shirt and his hair looked as if it had not seen a comb for some time. He was an ecologist and cybernetic engineer and he was head of the Institute for Future Research in Hartford, way up near Northwich, England. According to McCaine, he was a top authority in his field.

  John had never heard of him before, but that didn’t mean much. He stayed in the background and observed and listened and looked through the papers the professor had brought with him. He let McCaine do the talking.

  “What exactly does that mean?” McCaine asked. “Don’t you have enough computers?”

  Collins waved the idea away dismissively. “Computers aren’t the main problem. Every personal computer today has more processing power than Forrester and Meadows had available to them. No, what we need mainly is money to hire competent people. We have to gather data, examine them, and check each number for plausibility. You can’t hope for accuracy when your models are based on faulty data. That’s actually very logical, but I spend most of my time traveling around and trying to convince financial backers of this.”

  “Not anymore,” said McCaine. He leaned back. “If we come to a mutual agreement, that is. You will return to your institute and continue what you are now working on and you will get whatever money you need from us.”

  The professor’s eyes opened wider. “Now that’s what I call an offer. What do I have to do? Sign in my own blood?”

  McCaine let out a snort. “You might have heard that we are here to try to fulfill a prophecy. We want to restore humanity’s lost future. Fate handed us with a trillion dollars to help accomplish this.”

  “I love projects with a generous budget,” the scientist said. “Yes, I heard of the prophecy.”

  “Fine. Tell me, what is your opinion about us having lost our future?”

  “Fundamentally, I know too much about research that deals with the future to make such a presumption.”

  “You astonish me.” McCaine pulled one of the laptops closer to him. He opened a program and pointed at a graph being projected onto a huge screen on the wall. “
I take it that you know this line?”

  The professor looked. “Yes, of course, that is the standard run from WORLD3.”

  “Slightly modified. Do you see the red line that ends in 1996? WORLD3 was developed in 1971 to predict the future. I have integrated the actual developments since then into the program. Up till now the predicted and the real lines conform rather disconcertingly, don’t you think?”

  Professor Collins couldn’t help but to smile patiently. “Well, yes, you can see it this way … or that way. You do realize that both WORLD2 and WORLD3 are far outdated.”

  “What?” McCaine was visibly confused.

  “Both models combine all of earth’s countries into one operative unit, without any regional differences. I remember that the models were criticized and examined in the University of Sussex, and it was found that they are oversensitive to changing parameters, which results in large margins of error. On the other hand, you show that the normal behavior — the famous limit to growth — is almost independent from the input data. In other words, the behavior appears to be the result of a cybernetic correlation rather than the input data.”

  “Appears?” McCaine repeated. “That doesn’t sound like a thorough examination of the problem.”

  “I think Aurelio Peccei and the other members of the Club of Rome were chiefly interested in just getting a global debate going. WORLD3 and its predictions were ideal for this, naturally.”

  McCaine jumped up and paced back and forth in front of the big panorama windows. “What about the Mesarovic and Pestel models? They take regional differences into account.”

  “The World Integrated Model, yes. You really seem to have studied this material very well if you can remember that. Then you must also know that the WIM takes far less account of the environment than the WORLD models. That had often been a source for criticism, and at any rate, back then the reason given was its enormous complexity.”

  “But doesn’t an accurate model have to be necessarily complex?”

  “Sure. But above else it must be plausible. You have to be able to comprehend what it is doing otherwise you might as well look into a crystal ball.”

  McCaine pulled out a thick tome from a drawer and tossed it on the table. “Which is what the authors of this study have done, if you ask me. I take it you know this work?”

  “Naturally … Global 2000. It’s the study President Carter commissioned. It’s perhaps the most bought and least read book in the world.”

  “And, what do you think about it?”

  “Well, it is, in effect, a collection of opinions from diverse experts, augmented by not so well documented model calculations. This doesn’t necessarily have to be any worse. But its greatest drawback is the limited time period it covers, which goes only up to the year 2000. It is today’s consensus that true upheavals are expected in the beginning of the next century — if they are to occur at all.”

  “Exactly. And I want to know what sort of upheavals,” McCaine said.

  “And what will you do then, once you know?”

  “With the help of your model I want to find out how to avoid the catastrophe.”

  The scientist looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. “Very well. What requirements do you want us to meet?”

  McCaine didn’t hesitate for a moment. “First, it must be a cybernetic model, and it doesn’t matter how complex and how expensive. I want no guesses, no intuitions, and no conjectures. Everything must be quantified and intertwined and result in crystal clear outcomes based on the computer calculations.”

  “We’re working on just such a model, which I assume you know about — otherwise you wouldn’t have invited me.”

  “Correct. Second, you will report to me first. I will decide when results are to be made public.”

  Professor Collins sucked air through his teeth. “That is tough. I suppose I can’t get you to change your mind on that point?”

  “You can bet on it. Third…“

  “How much more?”

  “Only this last point. I want to know the truth. No politically corrected statements. No tinkering with the measurements, no propaganda, only the truth.”

  It was not long after that the jumbo jet was finished. They had bought it for 400 million dollars and had it rebuilt at the LHT wharf in Fuhlsbüttel, on the outskirts of Hamburg, Germany. It was turned into a comfortable flying command center — complete with offices, conference room, bar, bedrooms, and guestrooms. It had a satellite communications system and a whole slew of other equipment. To match the image of the conglomerate, the entire plane was painted snow-white with the dark-red elegantly curved f on the tailfin. Since this symbol resembled somewhat the number one, the personnel began to give it a nickname later adopted by all aircrew and control tower personnel across the globe: Moneyforce 1.

  From then on, they often spent weeks flying all over the world, going from one conference or site visit to the next. John started to enjoy acting like a businessman, flying to some spot on the globe with his own plane, being accompanied by beautiful people in stretch limousines, being important, looked up to. He began to enjoy sitting in nice conference rooms at giant tables made from exotic wood and listening to reports given by nervous older gentlemen, and he started enjoying it even more so when he began to understand some of the numbers that were being talked about or that appeared on an overhead projector screen. Once or twice he even asked a question, which would sometimes be meekly answered, but for the most part he would remain silent and left the talking, as usual, to McCaine. In time, because of his silence, John as acquired the reputation of being mysterious and unapproachable.

  John Fontanelli may have been as good as unapproachable for journalists and solicitors, but not for his family and friends. He still had a personal secretariat, but with different personnel, and they worked on the same principles as the one the Vacchis had started. Even the list that the employees used to determine which calls and letters to forward to him was the same. The letters and packages were, however, checked for bombs. It took the third or fourth phone call for John’s mother to realize that he was on a plane, which she could hardly believe. It was uncanny how quickly letters were forwarded to him, regardless where in the world he was. It was as if they had a clairvoyant who knew where the aircraft would land even before they themselves did. That was how John got a copy of Marvin’s first CD.

  John opened the small cushioned package with curiosity and had to grin when he pulled a CD out. Wasted Future was the title. The cover showed Marvin in a garbage dump with an angst-ridden expression. The note said, Dear John, here is my first step to a hopefully meteoric career. It was signed by Marvin and Constantina, who was credited on the CD under vocals.

  Very interesting. John left everything lying on the table and went to the plane’s salon, which was equipped with a $50,000 hi-fi system. He put the CD into the player and was very curious when he pushed the play button. The CD was, to put it in one word, terrible. The sound coming out of the speakers was a mix of thudding noise in which the bass guitar stood out like a sore thumb while the vocals were helplessly drowned by too much echo and general racket. The melody just stomped and rolled along in a monotone rhythm, and when there was a recognizable melody it was so close to an existing song that it came close to plagiarism. Almost nothing could be heard of Constantina’s singing, but the little that could be was enough to know that it was also no great loss to have her voice drowned in the cacophonous jumble of instruments.

  Shuddering from the experience, John took the CD out of the player a half hour later. He just couldn’t listen to the rest, and he had even pushed the advance button to skip a few of the songs. He felt guilty at having been partly responsible for introducing the world to what would not only be the first but undoubtedly the last step in Marvin’s career as a rock star. It meant that Marvin would soon need more money.

  He tossed the package, card, and CD into the trashcan and called his secretary. He told her to strike Marvin’s name fr
om the mailing list.

  $24,000,000,000,000

  IT WAS A bright sunny day towards the end of April, the first real spring day. The castle was more magnificent than ever before, as if it really was the center of the world.

  Marco was beaming too. With the communications mic in his ear, the walkie-talkie ready in one hand, and pistol in the shoulder holster, he felt deeply happy.

  “You really seem to like it here in England,” John told him.

  “Yes,” Marco replied. “But it’s not really England but Karen.”

  “Karen?”

  “Karen O’Neal. Maybe you remember her. She was Mr. McCaine’s secretary in his old firm.” Marco beamed again. “We’re together now.”

  “Ah,” John said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Marco’s hand went to the ear and pressed the earphone further in. “The prime minister’s car just came through the gate.”

  Marco’s euphoria was something all the money in the world couldn’t buy.

  Since his experience with Constantina, John had become wary of women and couldn’t shake the feeling. He knew that he could get the most beautiful women into his bed, with or without paying, but ever since he got to England he stayed clear of women. With every smile and every flirtatious look he cringed with suspicion. He couldn’t ditch the feeling that they weren’t interested in him but his money. Sometimes it didn’t even take a smile. Like back then with the female reporter in the Vacchi archives, the one who had made the legacy public. She wasn’t even his type. Not even close. God knows why he was even still thinking about her.

  They went outside. The prime minister’s dark gray Jaguar came rolling over the low hill. The peacocks stood between the flowerbeds and, almost as if they had been ordered to do so, spread apart their tails presenting a rainbow of feathers to the visitor. John took in a deep breath, wiped his hand on his trousers inconspicuously and felt his heart pounding.