Ryan Ward watched on horseback as the dawn colors claimed the sky. The sun was not yet risen and a chill pervaded all. Below the squat mesa on which Ryan’s horse stood, the West Texas scrubland was a dark watercolor of umber and viridian that would become sienna and olive when the arid plains were fully undressed in day’s light. A pickup truck a mile off, travelling parallel to the horizon, spit a dust plume from its wheels as it drove north on the county road. The truck drove out of Ryan’s sight but the dust remained, hovering.
A few hours earlier, Ryan awoke to an alarm he had set to trigger in response to any sudden and massive global market fluctuation. This alarm wasn’t meant to warn him of danger to his assets, he no longer played that game, it was meant to warn him of a danger more serious: possible financial system collapse.
He saw that the electricity was off for virtually all of the United States except Texas. That Texas was unaffected, Ryan thought, would make these Texans even more insufferable about their state pride. Well, looks like they got this one right, so can’t blame them. He had saddled his favorite horse, Ukase, and came out here to think.
The exchange rate of the euro and the dollar was the particular marker that triggered Ryan’s alarm. Others soon followed. Ryan’s first task was to figure out if this was a normal market reaction to the obvious financial damage that would arise from a nation without electricity or if it was being amplified by concerted action to unseat the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. What he discovered convinced him it was.
Worse, there were widespread reports of irrational behavior that went well beyond what would be expected during a financial crisis: scores of murders, assaults, and even unprompted proclamations by high-ranking national officials that steered their country toward armed conflict. In most cases, the report would mention an individual acted psychotic or delusional. Ryan saw the same fingerprint over and over, reports of the culprit ‘seeing things’ or ‘talking to an imaginary person’.
Well, shit, something serious is going down.
Ryan had spent years as a trader in the hedge fund industry before he had made his nut and decided to unplug. If money was the world’s blood, he had been working close to the heart. Coding high-frequency trading algorithms, implementing cryptocurrencies as self-executing hedges, working currency and commodity desks, creating banking system models that simulated financial disaster within the Basel III framework, mapping dark wealth ecosystems, all these and more had been Ryan’s expertise during his time as a hired gun for some of the world’s elite money managers.
Ryan had come to appreciate the benefits of this financial vascular system while coming to understand the real danger of something throwing a clot and bringing it all down. At first, to Ryan, it seemed like a system that used a dollar to create a hundred dollars of economic activity was dangerously unstable. In time, Ryan accepted the trust and industry the system afforded, even if he begrudged his own lack of personal control regarding the process. He may not directly receive the dividends of owning the plumbing to the world’s de-facto monetary system, but without that system, he would not have made as much money as he did.
But not everyone was agreeable to extending this circulatory system to the farthest reaches of modern civilization, and that was why he unplugged and prepared for the worst. After leaving the game five years ago, Ryan had become ‘one of those guys’: a survivalist. A prepper.
He found some nice acreage between Abilene and San Angelo and built a house. He dabbled in horses. He became a gun enthusiast. He learned how to gut a chicken. He applied his formidable computer programming acumen to hacking. He bought an airplane. He bought some other land that no one knew about in case he had to bug out.
So after the massive drop in value of the dollar against the euro, Ryan tested several hypotheses and found evidence that this catastrophe was being used as a catalyst for a coup on the western financial system’s hegemony. Whether or not the blackout was engineered or coincidental, a host of precise actions were being taken to amplify its financial effect. Like a laser-guided airstrike aimed at a particular window of a building, the moves being made carried an embedded signal that the ones making the moves did so with intent and knowledge of the target.
The clot in the system was dislodged, and soon it would find a coronary artery.
Ryan had come out into the brisk pre-dawn atop Ukase to clear his mind and think. Now he had thought it through and concluded: this probably means war.
A pinpoint blaze of sun appeared on the horizon, an odd lighthouse on the wastelands. Ryan steered Ukase gently down the slope toward his shelter in advance of the gathering heat.