“There she is,” Cat stated ruefully, staring at her computer’s screen. She sighed and magnified the image. “And I doubt that’s soda in her flute.”
Following the TV station fiasco, Cat sent her small army of private investigators after her mother. She was basking in the spotlight, back in the glamorous circuit of charity fundraisers and parties, only this time she wasn’t the one giving money away. Maybe that was an improvement, but not on a personal level. All the work they’ve done vanished like an illusion. Maybe it was that from the beginning.
But the real illusion was there, in those photos. Every other picture had to be scrolled away because it contained a certain black-eyed man. Or demon, as Catherine saw him even through a computer screen. That was some magical shitfuckery if Cat ever saw one. She even ran some image analysis software and to the unfeeling computer, it was a picture of a human figure. Catherine, however, saw it for what it was even after the image was heavily modified by several filters, including being converted into a wireframe, cartoonized, or heavily distorted. No matter what happened to the picture, as long as it was recognizable as the man called Roger Marthan, Catherine saw the demon that climbed from hell with the sole purpose of dragging her back.
Or maybe “sole purpose” was too much hubris on their part. The demon surely was taking his time corrupting people. His “Church of the Theoretical Satanist”, as ridiculous as the name sounded, grew in followers with each day. Stories already circulated on the web of how people’s lives changed for the best after they joined. From winning the lottery to getting promoted to even finding “true” love. With a whiff of hellish magic, everything was possible. But at what cost?
An eternity in a barbecue grill, Cat believed. Not by, or on, or at. In. Learning how to get cozy with the embers.
Any attempts at contacting their mother were blocked. The foundation staff was under orders to ignore her calls, and the other ways of contact were blocked by her personal assistants or the church people. She felt as if the demon had erected a bubble around her mother, and put her in a knockoff version of the Truman Show. She went to ask Jack about his opinion.
“There’s almost nothing we can do, within the law. And trust me, that church is under enough scrutiny to make a catholic bishop cower in fear they’d find his choir boys. Your mother is an adult and we must trust her to make her own decisions. I know you were working hard to help her with her alcohol problem but trust me I’ve seen it enough. It needs to come from within. Forcing someone to fight their dependency backfires ridiculously badly most often.”
After a few more attempts that ended in nothing, including sending physical mail, she gave up and kept on with her life. Jack’s advice was true but hard to swallow.
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“Push it down as hard as you can,” her ballet instructor told her. “You’re warmed up and the doctor cleared you to increase your load. Even if it hurts a little, push it. We need to stretch those ligaments.”
Cat was sure the old dancer just wanted to see if she could do a proper pretzel. Which she could. She had no trouble to, from a standing position, bend her torso down and put her head between her knees. She could even see her lycra-covered butt. Making a bridge? Piece of cake. Sit down with her legs straight and bend forward until she could kiss both shins at the same time. Splits were just as easy. Yet the instructor demanded she pushed her body to the limit. From what she saw on Youtube videos, she was already as flexible as world-class professional ballerinas.
But seeing a girl’s body (even if her own) bend that much tickled a small part of Cat that still identified as male.
[I’m doing it naked later,] Cat replied without parting her lips. Her subvocalization skills were improving. Now she only moved her tongue to form the phonemes along with softly grunting through her nose to coordinate the vocal cords with the tongue movements. Catherine was getting better at interpreting what she meant as well.
[I’m not doing that.]
She improved in both piano and ballet lessons at a breakneck pace, using the ghost’s help identifying mistakes and integrating with the body’s muscle memory. Imagining it using computer terms, it felt as if William’s “software” was installed in Catherine’s “hardware” without formatting the HDD. All he had to do was to find the proper files and reintegrate them into the operational system. Maybe everything about Catherine was just hidden inside her head, waiting to be unlocked. She thought she’d be frightened of the process but the fear wasn’t there. She literally felt and breathed in Catherine’s body and after almost a year, it felt normal. The way people looked at her, talked to her, reacted to her actions was different than what William experienced.
After ballet, she had some time to decompress, relax and let her body restore her muscles to perfect order before the physical therapist arrived.
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She went to her room to read things online and check her messages. She read the financial news and adjusted her standing orders to buy and sell stock. The windfall from shorting the TV network was a one-time deal, the kind you need to be in the perfect place at the perfect time, and came with a lot of risk. But the market reacted and went along with her bet as thousands of speculators tried to make a good profit riding the rollercoaster as it went down, even if they joined the fun halfway from the top. But even a one-percent profit in a single day was a good profit. Once the stock price reached rock-bottom, another horde of speculators started to buy it so they could profit from the recovery of the stock prices. All that echoed on other stocks as algorithms attempted to hedge and take advantage of the fluctuations. That made for a really fun day at the trading floor.
But the machine was taking over the place of the investment banker, the broker, the floor trader. Now it was a game of putting bank A’s computer to talk to bank B’s machine and trade between them. Soon the very building on Wall Street would be just a data center with a legacy exterior. Cat remembered a competitor investment bank that did an aggressive bid to move to a new building closer to the NYSE so they could save a few microseconds on network lag and get better deals. Maybe they’d keep the trading floor only for those IPO ceremonies when some massive company went public.
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She received an email from an investment firm. It was an invitation to become an underwriter in a SPAC that was going to allow exposure to the clean energy sector. The SPAC management team seemed competent and the leader had a good track record to pull those reverse mergers. The digital pamphlet detailed how recent regulations in the EU and tax incentives to develop clean energy technologies made the sector especially profitable, yadda yadda. 80% of the pamphlet was financial jargon and buzzwords aimed at generating hype.
Cat smiled as she loved to talk about finance. Catherine might be a sheltered damsel for most of her life, but she was focusing her time on learning to take the family business.
“The SPAC management team needs to raise funds from the underwriters to prepare to buy a company, right? They also need to set their company so it's publicly traded before the acquisition process starts. The underwriters buy shares at the SPAC’s IPO but this money does not go to fund the company’s operations, it goes to an escrow account where it accrues a small amount of interest with high liquidity but often pays below market.”
“So, they are required by the regulator to state the purpose of their venture. Once they do that, they need to focus on the sector they targeted, in this case, clean energy. Most of the time they already start talking to the target company or companies to see if they are open to being acquired.”
“And money laundering too. Once they enter the acquisition stage, they need to buy a majority of shares in the target company, to gain control of it for the underwriters. But they need a majority vote from the original shareholders to approve the acquisition, and this is where lies the problem.
“The company being acquired usually is a private company. One that the current shareholders worked hard to develop. Sometimes, they have emotional attachments to the company and may see the SPAC as a bunch of capitalist sharks hungering for their tender corporate meat.”
“Touché. However, different from some acquisitions that aim at dismantling the company, the SPAC team and the underwriters they represent want the target company to prosper. After all, the main idea is to expose a good, profitable, and stable company to the public market to profit from its stock appreciation. Trashing the company and jeopardizing its productivity is to burn money. And yet the shareholders can’t see this because they are blinded by their emotions. Then the vote fails and more than a year of work goes to waste.”
“Not exactly. The company targeted by a SPAC is usually a healthy one, so they can keep on with their business as usual. But they miss an opportunity. Like Yahoo when they got an opportunity to buy Google for less than a billion. One of the hardest abilities on the market is to keep a clear and open mind. I believe that’s why they call the best traders ‘sharks’. It’s because they seem uncaring and unfeeling.”
“They have to be. Look, most of these capitalists donate a lot of money to charity. It’s not that they don’t have a heart, but to put one’s heart in the wrong place may be detrimental to making a profit.”
“There’s no such thing as the TV money. Money is money, once it is yours it doesn’t matter where it came from. You are thinking like a gambler, easy money comes easy but goes easy. Money has no such qualms. A dollar from your grandpa is exactly like a dollar from the Caymans.”
“I don’t know. It feels odd to me. As if it is not the right time. Let me check the market cycle. Just like you keep tight control over your menstrual cycle, the market has major ups and downs at somewhat less regular intervals. This body worked like clockwork.”
“Not your fault. While your previous selection of company may be questionable, you didn’t ask to be the victim of a crime.”
Cat browsed a few sites and cross-referenced a few indicators. It was a bother but there was no app to display the current market cycle anywhere online as if a mysterious group of rich people didn’t want this information to be publicly available.
She finished her research with an exasperated sigh. “No. The last low was last year, as I remembered. This SPAC will try to buy a company at the worst moment.”
“No, you’re right. They aren’t,” Cat’s eyes sparkled. “They must know something we don’t. Let me read the invitation letter again.”
She did but there was nothing there to betray any of their intentions. It was common for the SPAC team to keep their cards close to their chests, that’s why the initial investors had an out once the purchase was announced. They had to do that to avoid competitors from getting a jump on them.
“No. Oh, Catherine, I love you!” Cat grinned as she browsed some news sites.
“Yes. A German company announced a few months ago plans to lay a new underwater cable array crossing the Mediterranean. They want to create an internet link with the African continent starting from Sicily to Tunisia. Here. It will also include power cables. This article mentions the challenge of shielding data from the high voltage pulses.”
“The Sahara. It’s the place with the biggest potential for solar energy. Power can run through the cable either way. Now, check this,” She opened an article about a new startup.
“It doesn’t have to be that big. Startups are notorious for exaggerating the scope. They might make a few smaller farms but they’re making solar farms in the desert. That’s what the SPAC is going to dump the cash on.”
“I’m not but that’s something worth betting on. And it allows me to do something I wanted to do for a while. We’re branching out to Europe. As you suggested, we’re getting the TV money that cleared in the Caymans, and instead of bringing it back to the US, we’re expatriating it to Switzerland. And we’re becoming an underwriter for this SPAC from there. I’m moving all the seven and a half million. We can pay the loan here in the states, it will allow us to lower our earnings for the next tax period because we’ll have to repay the loan.”
“Yes, but it will allow us to wait for the best moment to convert from US Dollars to Euros in the next months before we need to put the cash in escrow. It will lessen our exposure to FOREX risk. And trust me, FOREX sucks. It is one of the easiest ways for investment banks to literally steal from their clients.”
Cat sent the orders and sent the seven and a half million dollars on a vacation to Switzerland. As far away from the US government as possible. Then she went to the physical therapy session.
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After the physical therapy, she was measured and weighed. The therapist did some calculations and cheered. “Congratulations, Catherine! Eighty-eight and a half pounds! You’re officially a healthy person now! Have you grown too? You’re half an inch taller too.”
She smiled coyly, “That’s probably all the stretching I did in the ballet lesson.”
“It’s fine. What matters is that you are getting stronger. I bet you can lift now. We’ll change your diet, less protein and a bit more fruit. More flexibility. It’s your reward for beating the dreaded sixteen.”
Esmeralda had controlled what Cat could eat as Cerberus kept watch over the gates of Tartarus. The therapist typed her most recent measurements in the computer and plotted the dreaded graph. The latest data point ticked up and changed colors, from orange to yellow.
“Now, this is a national average that doesn’t account for body type. You are naturally lean and elegant and it’s enviable that you won’t get fat. We’ll enter the maintenance phase now. I’ll come only once a week and our routine will focus on keeping your body from discarding what you got. I’ll allow you to use the swimming pool and go on bike rides at the Hudson Park,” she said with a smile. “I saw your picnic photos. What a lovely place!”
Catherine was cheering as if her team had won the Superbowl.