Maiden Lane

by Christopher Blankley

  “Understand what?” Eve looks at me, ignoring Logan.

  “The answer to your question! What lies at the end of Maiden Lane?”

  “We all know the answer to that!” Logan sighs. “A bloody great supercomputer called Red Shield!”

  “No, no, that’s not it,” I insist.

  Logan’s disgust turns to concern. He’s studying me, trying to figure out if I’ve had an epiphany, or an aneurysm. He knows very well what lies at the end of Maiden Lane. What am I talking about?

  “I mean, that might very well be what’s physically located at the end of Maiden Lane. But that’s not the answer to the question,” I go on.

  “Then what is?” Eve asks, curious.

  “Another question: which end?”

  “Which end of what?” Logan asks. He’s back to being disgusted.

  “Maiden Lane. What lies at the end of Maiden Lane? Which end do you mean? Maiden Lane is a two-way street – it has two ends. I made that mistake the first time I stepped foot on it, I looked east first, saw nothing, then looked west. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now I understand, it’s the answer to everything! I under what’s wrong with Junior! How to save the economy! Why Megalytics doesn’t work on money! The answer was already there, hidden in your question, I just couldn’t see it. Until now.”

  There’s silence. Even the agents with the machine guns have lowered their weapons to watch me for sudden signs of insanity. Nobody gets it. Nobody should. There really isn’t time to explain.

  Eve is the first to react. “You mean, you know how to fix it? You really think you can stop all this?”

  I laugh. “I’m sure of it.”

  Eve grabs my hand. “Then, there’s no time to-”

  Logan clears his throat. He waves his gun about, reminding everyone that it’s still there. His agents snap their rifles back to their shoulders. “If it’s not too much trouble, we’re not totally finished here.”

  “But Logan, don’t you understand? I can fix it! I can fix everything! I can stop all of this!”

  Logan doesn’t move. He doesn’t lower the gun.

  “Isn’t that what all of this has been about?” I ask.

  Again, Logan doesn’t answer.

  “You WANT me to stop this, right? Logan? You want Red Shield restored.”

  Nothing.

  “Logan?”

  “No.” It’s Eve who answers. “No, they’ve never trusted it. None of the First Foundation. They only cooperated with the Second Foundation because they thought it would never work. Fixing Junior would put an end to their long-predicted apocalypse. Deny them their ascension.”

  “But the whole economy is going to crash! People are going to suffer. The end-of-the-world is nigh.”

  “They don’t care,” Eve growls. “It’s all part of Rothschild’s plan. It must be.”

  “If the end-of-the-world is now,” Logan says, softly and slowly. “Then who are we to interfere?”

  “But I can fix it. I can fix the whole thing. Stop the collapse.”

  “And deny Rothschild his true vision?” Logan looks at me, eyebrow raised.

  “You’re insane!” I step back. He still has the gun pointed at me.

  “No,” Logan shakes his head. “But I can’t let you interfere...”

  The gun comes up. I quickly put myself between Logan and Eve. If he’s going to shoot anyone, he’s going to have to shoot me. But he doesn’t get the chance. Down the street, the sound of drums and horns suddenly erupts. The protest – the parade – from further up on Broadway is rounding the bend. The whole marching crowd, giant balloons, naked orange man and all are turning off Broadway, heading toward City Hall. Suddenly, our private conversation, replete with automatic weapons and the desire to do us harm, has become a lot less private. The Secret Service agents look at each other, to Logan and at the protesters as they close in.

  Logan turns to me in a panic. He wants to shoot but knows he can’t. He glances back at the approaching crowd. Is there time? When he looks back, Eve and I are already gone.

  “After them!” he shouts. And the agent’s sling their weapons, sprinting close behind.

  Chapter 22

  “This way!” Eve calls back to me. We run. I’m following Eve. There are men right behind us. We’re running away from the safety of the protest. That doesn’t seem wise. Still, I’m focused on outrunning our pursuers.

  We turn a corner, and there’s the Freedom Tower. We’re here! Finally at the end of Maiden Lane. Eve doesn’t stop to look around, she’s running, heading down into the World Trade Center Memorial. After a momentary pause, I follow, really pouring on the speed.

  She comes to a halt beside the south reflecting pool. I almost topple over her. I look back. Our pursuers are gone. Maybe we out ran them, maybe they don’t dare follow us into the Memorial. Either way, we’re suddenly alone.

  Eve pants, doubled over, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.

  “Now what?” I ask, looking around.

  Eve straightens and pulls a coin out of her pocket. At first I think it’s a quarter, but it’s too large. Looking closer, it’s a dollar coin. But not one of the new, aluminum ones with a president’s face on it, but a real, old dollar coin. Maybe even made of silver.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “Okay, don’t freak out,” Eve says, still breathing hard. “But this next part gets a little bit James Bond.”

  And she tosses the coin into the reflecting pool.

  It hits the water with a satisfying spelunk. It was a real coin all right, nice and heavy.

  Nothing happens. I look at Eve, she looks at me. She smiles.

  Then everything happens all at once.

  The waterfalls down the sides of the pool cut out, like someone somewhere turned off a faucet. What water is in the bottom of the pool quickly drains, and a hidden section of the wall below our feet moves out, forming a staircase down into the pool. From inside the central hollow, light streams up and out. A door is opening, like great blast doors on a missile silo. Down through the crack, I can see the blades of a very familiar helicopter. Men in uniforms are running about.

  James Bond is right.

  When the mechanism is finally complete, slick, wet stairs lead all the way down into the center of the reflecting pool. Eve wastes no time, leaping over the railing and hoping down each gargantuan step.

  I look around, wondering if anyone else is seeing this. Nobody is there. I’m all alone, standing at the edge of the pool. I remember the men with guns and gingerly hop over the railing.

  Down underneath the reflecting pool, it’s a hive of activity.

  Nobody pays us any attention. I stumble dumbstruck across the helipad, looking at everything. Soldiers are refueling the helicopter, unloading supply vehicles. It looks like the whole place is getting ready for the long haul. Or a siege. That thought is slightly disconcerting.

  Eve grabs me by the arm. I’ve wandered off. “This way,” she says.

  She leads me to a set of bombproof doors. I understand logically that this was once a basement level of the old World Trade Center Tower 2, but I can’t quite make what I’m seeing all around me jibe with that reality. Through the giant doors, we’re inside a long, glass corridor. To either side are racks of computers. It’s like walking between infinity mirrors. To the left and right, hardware seems to go on forever. Everywhere lights are flashing.

  “This is Junior?” I ask.

  “Some of it, yes,” Eve has me by the hand. I’m not moving fast enough. “There’s sixteen rooms like this on this floor, and fourteen more floors under our feet. And that’s just this tower.”

  “I can’t believe it!” And I can’t. I stop in my tracks, marveling at it all.

  “There’s no time to sightsee,” Eve protests, pulling on my hand.

  “But...” I sigh. “You did all this? To replace one clockwork computer?”

  “Yes!” Eve tugs on me angrily. “I already told you.”

&nb
sp; “But now I understand what you really did, it’s just so much more amazing.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “Yes, yes,” I relent. “Let’s go.”

  The corridor leads to a command center. Something right out of War Games. Giant screens take up two or three stories of wall space. All of them are showing market indicators, all pointing down. Hundreds of military personnel are manning bank after bank of workstations. They could be landing the Apollo space capsule or fighting the Third World War. It’s rather hard to tell.

  There’s a command deck in the command center. Eve pulls me across the floor toward this. There, half a dozen Generals are gathered, all in their fine uniforms, sporting chests full of medals. In amongst them, I see President Tusk. I pull back hard on Eve’s hand.

  “It’s okay,” she assures.

  A General notices me. “Who’s this guy?”

  “Hey, he looks like-” another add.

  “He’s not!” Eve holds up a commanding hand.

  “What’s that clown doing here?” Tusk bellows, the instant he sees me. “Get him out of here! Guards!”

  Men with guns close in.

  “No! Wait!” Eve calls out. “You have to listen! Gant can fix Junior! He’s figured it all out!”

  Tusk raises a hand. The guards stop advancing.

  Instead, Eve and I climb up onto the command deck. The Generals look suspicious. Tusk looks bemused.

  “So, you know how to fix it, huh?” Tusk smirks. “You figured it out? They said you were a smart one, but I had my doubts.”

  “I have. I know how to save the economy.”

  “Eve’s little fantasy game finally paid out?”

  “No, it had nothing to do with that.”

  “No?”

  “No. But the question that it proposed was certainly the right question to ask. I’m guessing Junior’s Rubric suggested it?”

  Eve looks at me, confused. “Of course.”

  “What lies at the end of Maiden Lane?” I ask the gathered generals. “That’s what it asked.”

  “Well, here we are,” Tusk chuckles, looking around the room. “At the end of Maiden Lane.”

  “Yes, but that’s not what Junior meant. I mean, at a certain level, that’s true, this facility lies at the end of Maiden Lane. But think of the question another way: What lies at the end of Maiden Lane? If you travel down Maiden Lane, where are you when the journey is done?”

  Tusk is confused. I look at Eve. She’s confused too. But one of the Generals gets it. A Marine. “With some sort of solution to this damned economic crisis,” he says.

  “What lies at the end of Maiden Lane? A solution to our crisis. And what has gone wrong?”

  “Red Shield has gone offline?” Eve answers, playing along. “And Junior can’t do what Red Shield could?”

  “Exactly. And why?”

  “Because Megalytics doesn’t work with money.”

  “Correct. And that’s why you need me. Because, despite all this,” I wave around at the command center. “I’m still the world’s foremost expert on Megalytics.”

  “We already know all this, smart guy,” Tusk complains. “How about you get to the part where you fix Junior?”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” I answer.

  “What?” Tusk almost explodes.

  “What?” Eve echoes. “You said that you figured it out, that you know how to fix Junior!”

  “No, I never said that,” I correct. “I said I can stop the economy from collapsing. I can’t fix Junior. Junior is working fine. Better than fine, in fact. It’s truly amazing!”

  “But how can you fix the economic collapse,” one of the generals asks. A navy man, so I guess that makes him an admiral. “Without reprogramming Junior to replace the functions of Red Shield? There’s no time to build another computer.”

  “Oh no, we don’t need to build another computer,” I dismiss. “We have all the computing power here that we’ll ever need. More, in fact, than we need. That’s sort of the problem. No, what we have to think about is why Junior – a purpose-built Megalytic computer – can’t replace the functions of Rothschild’s original machine.”

  “Because you’re crappy math doesn’t work on money,” Tusk growls. “We just went over that.”

  “Right. Megalytics doesn’t work on money. Up until this evening, even I had no idea why that was true. Why doesn’t the math of really big numbers work on the really big numbers of money and finance? Are the numbers not big enough? Absolutely not. Too big? Not a chance. I mean, Megalytics should work on money.” I turn to Eve. “As you said, the math was formulated studying a machine doing exactly that. What’s the disconnect? And then it hit me, standing up there, with my former best friend point a gun at me that I, just an hour before, had been pointing at him. It’s a two-way street – Maiden Lane. There’s two ends of the street.”

  Silence again, just like before. A General speaks up. “You’re not making a whole hell of a lot of sense.”

  “Sorry, let me explain. What if Megalytics doesn’t work on money, because Megalytics doesn’t work on Megalytics?”

  “Now you’re just rephrasing the same nonsense,” Tusk says.

  “No, think about it. What is money?” I ask everyone. Nobody speaks.

  Then a brave General, Air Force, answers tentatively, “A medium of exchange?”

  “Yes! Thank you! And?”

  “A store of value,” Eve adds. She’s catching on.

  “Correct! And?” I look between the confused faces watching me. “And? No one? A unit of account. It’s this last one that’s interesting. The standard unit of measurement for market value – we think about the value of things in terms of dollars and cents, even though dollars and cents have no intrinsic value themselves. Money is data, data we use to understand economic wealth. That’s where Megalytics and money break down.”

  “But Megalytics works on other forms of data. Junior consumes it by the petabyte.”

  “Right. And that’s the point. A Megalytic computer requires vast amount of data to process its predictions. After all, Megalytics is the math of really big numbers. Really, really, really big numbers.”

  “You’re trying my patience, Gant,” Tusk is watching me from behind squinting eyes.

  “But what if there’s already a computer processing that data, making predictions of its own, faster than Junior can make them?”

  “There’s another Junior?” A General panics. “The Russians?”

  “You mean like Rothschild’s original computer?” Eve answers, ignoring the General. “But it’s totally broken.”

  “No,” I shake my head. “Not Red Shield. But the computer you studied to design Junior. The computer on which all of Megalytics is based.”

  “But that’s...” Eve looks at me, worried. Her concern quickly turns to skepticism. “But that was Red Shield. We developed Megalytics, studying the daily function of Rothschild’s machine.”

  “No, you developed the mathematics of Megalytics, studying the daily EFFECT of Rothschild’s. Not its function. As you said yourself, Red Shield’s function is extremely primitive, it’s the results that are remarkable. You developed the mathematics studying the effects that Red Shield produced, not its function. That’s simple. So simple, you’ve totally overlooked it.”

  “But...” Eve begins to protest. “Our best minds...”

  “Are maybe too smart of their own good. Me too, up until now. We don’t see the answer because it’s right in front of our face. It’s true that the Second Foundation formulated Megalytics studying the most powerful Megalytic computer ever created, it’s just that computer is not Red Shield. It’s the world economy itself. You weren’t studying the predictive capabilities of a Victorian difference engine, you were studying a machine much older and more powerful: the predictive capabilities of a billion humans, performing a billion transactions, involved in free exchange, day after day after day.”

  “You mean, it’s...” Tusk begins, looks up at the gian
t screens.

  “An economy in a bottle!” I complete, in awe of the achievement myself. “Isn’t it amazing? A machine of quantum gates and 3D storage, replicating the value-added effect of a global economy, mimicking a billion transactions a second, predicting everything from the price of bananas to how much to invest in cancer research, all reproduced in copper and steel.”

  “But it can predict far more than the price of bananas,” Tusk says.

  “Exactly. All that economic processing power, with the ability to run custom code – not just economic models...of course it can predict a single mathematician’s movements around the city of New York. I can only imagine what it can’t predict.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why it can’t replicate the function of the original Red Shield,” the Admiral says.

  “Yes it does. Maiden Lane is a two-way street, remember? An economy can’t make predictive decisions on an economy that’s making predictive decisions without that economy knowing that the other economy is making predictive decisions. Understand?”

  Nobody answers. “No,” Eve finally replies.

  I groan in frustration. I grab Eve by the shoulders, turning her to face me. “We’re walking down the corridor toward each other. We both need to move to one side so we can pass each other. You predict that I’m going to step to my left, so you do the same, moving to your left, leaving enough room for me to get by. But if you can’t see me, you don’t which way I stepped, left or right. You probably don’t even know there’s a decision to be made, so you keep walking down the middle of the corridor. That totally invalidates my ability to make a predictive decision, because I’m making it on a false pretense. If you don’t have the full dataset, it invalidates my predictive capabilities too. Don’t you see? It’s a feedback loop. My decision has to be based on your predictive capability to formulate a decision which, in turn, has to be based on my predictive capability to formulate a decision. And that’s the battle Junior and the world economy are locked in: They’re both walking down the corridor, toward each other, guessing who’s going to dodge left and who’s going to dodge right. Except that world economy doesn’t know that Junior is there. That’s why the whole thing is going wrong so fast. The world economy and Junior are dancing left and right, always blocking each other’s attempt to correct. It’s a positive feedback look. Except it’s happening a million times per second.”