Slow Up

CHAPTER TWO Chapter 2: Gregoris @ 3.2x nhs

CHAPTER TWO

Chapter 2: Gregoris @ 3.2x nhs

Gregoris reviewed the data for the next stock market opening. He speed-read the summaries the AI had given him of the business news in Asia, and opened up two interviews with a couple of important CEOs from the region.

The videos took their merry time loading. He tapped and tapped, the loading icon swirling, mocking him in his face.

Damn!

When would they get this stupid computer fixed?

Five seconds to load a damn video?

Five whole seconds?

Gregoris shifted his attention back to the summaries. His eyes scanned the text, making sure he kept the beginnings and endings of the lines in his peripheral vision. He scanned at a steady, swift pace. He had to consciously force himself not to skip over lines, as he usually did. Dyslexia was a b***h in that way. It was easy for his gaze to drift and gloss over entire paragraphs without him noticing.

And then he’d have to go back and re-read them.

Waste of time.

He absorbed half a page of distilled data when the videos finally decided to load.

Perfect.

He watched. They were translated from Mandarin and Korean by AIs. The video itself was edited, again by an AI. Chopped down to the important bits, there were no pauses, no idle sitting up and looking around, no introductions. Just plain information.

And it was also played at 3.2 times the normal speed.

Gregoris skipped ahead with his keyboard, taking in the important questions, watching intently at the man’s expressions while taking in the translated text.

He swiped back and forth in the video’s timeline, re-watching bits, skipping back to parts.

Then he got it.

The subtext, the meaning, the gist, call it what you want. He got what the hard data couldn’t tell you. What data mining algorithms couldn’t dig up.

Shijie was about to launch a new tech product. Their CEO was basically squirming not to reveal that bit of info.

That meant it was too soon.

He picked up the phone and speed-dialled the stock buyers division.

In the time it took the human to pick up on the other line, he absorbed two more pages of the distilled news from the region.

“Yeah?”

No pleasantries. He had been clear on that with all of his business acquaintances. “Buy 320 million on Shijie.”

A pause. “Three-twenty? Did I hear that right? Jeez man, I’ll need to get approval for that kind of-”

“Then get it,” Gregoris said flatly.

“Okay, okay! Can I get some kind of data to back this up or something…” The man trailed off. His email had just received the data in question, the subtle pieces of the puzzle that led Gregoris to that particular decision.

“Read it, get approval and send me confirmation,” Gregoris said and hung up.

His clock beeped, the alarm to get to sleep.

Gregoris climbed up into his sleeping pod, a futuristic looking piece of furniture with a recliner and an enormous plastic bubble over the head. He slid into position and he was soon snoring away in his power-nap.

Precisely twenty minutes later, Gregoris woke up, splashed some water on his face and sat back at his workstation.

He went through the notifications of his voice mails. He had asked people to send their questions in that way, so he could speed them up and listen to them while he typed the responses.

He deleted the four messages from the CFO of Hermes without opening them. The man was a buffoon who liked the sound of his own voice. He objected to everything and never read any report people gave him. He was a total time-sink. A black hole of back-and-forth correspondence, and there was nothing anybody could do because of the powerful position he held in the company.

Gregoris replied without listening to his messages, with generalities. ‘Your concerns are understandable. Data shows, etc, etc. The company has been secretly working up to a big reveal for months etc, etc.’

Gregoris sighed and send the email away.

He sped up the rest of the messages. His own department head could be listened to at 4.2x speed, the man spoke like a stroke victim. You could boil an egg in the gaps of the conversation with the guy. He replied to him in email.

Irma, the stock division’s head was quick. She could be listened to at 2.3x speed. He replied to her as well. ‘No ma’am, it’s unlikely that the Shijie CEO’s expressions were due to him being constipated. The man has had perfect health treatments and organ replacements for a decade now.’ He attached the documents that supported his counterargument. They were illegally obtained documents procured by the non-existent corporate espionage division of Hermes, but he could share them freely with Irma. It was all encoded anyway, and she had the required clearance, plus her hands were already dirtier than a plumber fixing a backed up toilet.

He hesitated. The response from the Hermes’ CEO himself, was half a second long.

Half a second.

It could easily be a ‘go ahead.’

It could also be a ‘no.’

And no meant no, when coming from the corporation’s head.

He tapped his finger on the desk, an old habit that he thought he had conditioned himself out of years ago. But he couldn’t contain his anxiety.

So much time wasted, if this just got c**k-blocked from above! It was a perfect storm of international events, and he had managed to pluck out a sliver of information from the aether and deliver a winning move to his company, if the cowards in power would actually go for it. No algorithm could do that, despite what the nerds at floor 51 thought. Sure, algorithms could make thousands of transactions per second, could dredge up decades of data for patterns and shifts in the market. But they were also stupid. Extremely stupid. Actually, they were stupid enough that the world market had nearly crashed seventeen times already in this millennium because one auto-trader glitched and sent the rest into a recursive loop of frenzy. People, actual humans, had to intervene and shut them down, freezing the market and reviewing the transactions manually over months of work.

But, even Gregoris, who hated the trading algorithms to his core, could begrudgingly agree that they worked. They offered incremental profits, tiny percentages. But tiny percentages every day and with millions of dollars or euros or yen, meant hundreds of thousands in profit. Money that the average employee could only dream of after twenty years of hard work, were being shifted electronically around the world a hundred times per second.

It didn’t matter, half the world’s stock markets nowadays were automated, anyway.

But the boss had faith in him, in his ability to see beyond the mechanical data mining, to intuit.

To predict.

He shivered. The office wasn’t cold, of course. It was at optimal temperature. It was psychological. He opened the voicemail from the CEO. From Hermes himself.

He played it at normal speed, the boss was always quick and to the point, anyway.

The voice was far too young-sounding for a position this important. If you didn’t actually know who he was, you’d dismiss him as a teenage prankster.

But the important thing was, that the words had been, “Do it.”

He played the message back three times before taking the next breath.

The Asian markets opened on time.

Hashtags in social media, Twitter, f*******:, Agora, blew up with the announcement of the tech giant Shijie. It was something about a game, of people catching knockoff Pokemons or something, but the device projected the game directly into the gamer’s field of view. There were no contact lenses needed.

People could see the monsters chomping down on the edge of their sofas and catch them, in blissful Shared Augmented Reality.

And Hermes had bought all available stock just in time, right before the announcement.

He had made his company a profit of 98 million euros.

Beat that, stupid algorithm.