Grim realized how badly he'd fucked up. He'd been going for a stroll in New York, admiring the massive arcology/conservatory that had replaced the old Central Park after the post-war cleanup, haughtily ignoring the holograms ordering everyone to keep off some of the grass. The old park was still above, artfully designed to disguise the enormous subterranean structure, more of a memorial to the dead than a park anyone was supposed to play in.

He reckoned it was a poor choice, what better way to show America had moved on than to have children running through the fields once again? At any rate, he'd been enjoying himself, after every spree of unavoidable shoplifting, he'd been tipping hundreds of thousands of USDE in recompense, stopping at several stores he'd felt guilty about lifting from in the past. It was immensely gratifying to see the value in his account not even budge. Just the nominal interest rate in the millions of investments he'd set an autonomous agent to perform had accrued interest faster than he could spend it. Shame nobody took bills any more, he'd been thinking about just walking about and tossing clouds of money around.

While not in a real rush, he hadn't been lounging about either. His first act had been to transfer all his USDC to USDE, while the former would leave trails in the transaction, the latter would swallow it all up, at least if the old Mossad laundering tricks still worked.

From his rough understanding, USDC was the Digital Dollar, a very stable coin that was minted only by the three fragmented nations that had once been the Continental United States, with limited licenses carefully doled out to a few trusted organizations like the IMF, maybe a few other UN bodies. It was built for audit, there wasn't any reliable degree of anonymity.

On the other hand, USDE was the extended family of nominally interchangeable currencies, but more importantly, it allowed for incredibly fast transactions as well as the execution of smart contracts, with that speed being essential for them to be worth anything. Despite many entities wishing otherwise, it did have robust provisions for anonymity, the main method by which nation-states regulated it was to blacklist nodes and wallets that were suspect, but they couldn't touch the funds. Individual currencies could be mined by anyone who cared to front the compute/storage/good vibes necessary, but they'd be implicitly interconverted by the network, with certain branches at risk of being devalued. The conversion rate with the atavistic physical dollar or even USDC was allowed to float, instead of the strict 1:1 of the latter. Of course, now that people used crypto as money instead of as a speculative asset, it was quite reliable.

He'd never been a crypto fiend, not even when that had been a fad in his teenage years, but he'd asked an AI whether his understanding of USDC being analogous to the old dollar while USDE was akin to all currencies that could be exchanged for a dollar was accurate, and received a reply that could be summed up by saying it's true enough if you squint.

And he was squinting, trying to read the holographic advert just peeking out from the edge of Times Square visible from the southern edge of the park, when shit went sideways.

Or more precisely, it went down, a rain of businesspeople jumping out windows. A performative gesture, the civic drones caught almost all of them immediately, the ones who didn't have jetpacks and parachutes.

He chuckled, that tradition had been revived by certain quant firms specializing in the use of precogs to help AI in predicting market movements (the net result was them all canceling each other out and the ensuing scramble for a scrap of alpha). Something about putting their money where their lives were, stake in the game, yada yada.

Everyone around paused to take note. The USDE network could operate asynchronously, with individual nodes updating as fast as they could and reconciling later, but it was standard for all of them to sync up every week, unless a quorum demanded it happen more frequently. The next one was in a minute or so, which was about as far ahead as the competing precogs could predict, and everyone wanted to see what had them making a fuss about potential losses.

The largest hologram, that he could see, at the least, displayed a rough estimate of the total amount of USDE in existence. Suitably impressive, a lot of zeroes in it.

At precisely the point where the market sync occurred, the number jumped. There was an explosion, the projector overloading. Before it went, the number of digits ballooned, fading out before he could count them.

At the same time, practically every device configured to play alert notifications buzzed or beeped, from the old-fashioned who had phones or glasses, to the puzzled expressions of those who had laces or contacts.

At first there was massive cheering, and why wouldn't there be? Billions of people, at least hundreds of thousands in NY, donated their spare compute for the purposes of the background computation needed for the network to operate. In return, they received a cut of the gas fees, but those were usually so tiny that they barely amounted to a tiny bonus to their salary or UBI, if they were lucky enough to have either.

This time, anyone who had anything larger than a microwave hooked into the network received tens of thousands of USDE in compensation, many receiving millions or billions.

People ran out into the streets crying tears of joy, someone began firing very illegal fireworks that scared off drones. Grim was touched, a smile on his face as he recalled the exorbitant fees he'd been charged when he'd converted all his USDC over, which surely had to be the reason everyone just got a massive, irreversible dollop of cash in their accounts. He'd been annoyed at the time, but less so when he saw how little it changed the total, which was safely ensconced in a primary account and then laundered a thousand different ways. What's the harm in spreading the joy, he was still the richest man in the world right?

Their cheer vanished as fast as his did, when the city lost power, and a few minutes later the gunfire and explosions began.

It had been a day, and Grim walked through the frozen streets like a ghost. The fires had been put out, most of the bodies and blood cleaned off the streets. A flotilla of armed drones floated by overhead, one of them momentarily halting to carefully assess the potential anomaly its LIDAR had just detected, but then dismissing it when other instrumentation told it there wasn't anything there.

For almost an hour, terrestrial comms had gone down. The financial system had collapsed, the riots and panic starting in earnest when people came to the conclusion it wasn't a localized error, but rather that what they'd thought was the resumption of ever backed up UBI or an attempt to oil the gears of commerce had been closer to dousing the whole thing in an vat of gasoline and setting it on fire.

He wasn't entirely sure what went wrong, but his access to Mossad back channels gave him more insight than most (they'd forgotten they'd ever given him access, let alone to revoke or update it). Much of the damage had been from the panicked response of governments and financial institutions, be it from yanking back payments, freezing accounts, or other acts of stupidity that had only made people more panicked. New York had been worst hit, having resumed its position as the tick feeding on the heart of the world's finances.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Rumors had spread it was a prelude to an alien invasion, especially since people had begun to notice the information blackout from Mars. Eventually, anyone with slightly above average vision or at least a telescope could see the nuclear fire around that dim red globe, and the explanations from governments were entirely inadequate.

He kicked aside a rat grown fat, shuddering as he imagined it dining on one of the corpses just hauled off the sidewalk.

I didn't know.

I couldn't know.

This wasn't like when he was young, when people had been entrained to handle short or even prolonged issues with payment processors and the like. Not even like 2028, which almost everyone had forgotten.

But people rioting was hardly the biggest problem, once again he felt sorely out of his depth, but as far as he could glean, the operation of the smart contracts hooked into USDE had been important. DAOs, records, even background AI systems and commerce platforms, all relied on predictable processes going on in there, at least for input regarding financial decisions, and they'd gone nuts. An analyst suggested that many autonomous agents had considered the sheer magnitude of the discrepancy to be a sign of the network being utterly compromised, or themselves coming under adversarial attack. They enacted their own contingency plans, often executing emergency sales of assets before they could be devalued, or doing god knows what else.

The hyper-inflation was obvious, the meter on the autonomous taxi he passed demanded $E 82,586 per mile.

More hilarity had ensued. NYPD police bots were authorized to use lethal force on anyone caught in the process of stealing goods or services worth more than $E 67,000, a figure regularly updated to account for inflation, at least on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of people who had, say, just bought lunch, often not bothering to pay right then (even if they legally should, but nobody cared), knowing the sum would be autodeducted shortly, but who then found that they literally couldn't pay after the network went down were assessed by the ambling bots as being akin to bank robbers. God forbid you were behind on your rent, or utilities. The only reason his apartment hadn't been raided by a robot SWAT team had been because they were too busy raiding all the others.

Have an unpaid parking fine? Well that's a drone strike for you and your car.

Someone had found the emergency override in a few minutes, but Grim shook as he felt his old PTSD resurface, hiding from drones, hearing the screams of innocent men and women, even children, either being gunned down, tazed, subjected to sub-lethal microwaves and who knows what else.

He shook as he recalled close calls with death. The bots hadn't been shooting at him, but he could easily have been in the line of fire.

A crying, drunken man stumbled after walking into him, Grim watched him slip into a dilapidated building. A bot stopped to watch him enter, while breaking curfew was a crime, the police were understandably trying to be less trigger happy.

Essential services had come online sometime past midnight. At least power was back on, so was water, occasionally a version of the Internet censored harder than ever.

Grim popped a pill, that was more than he was supposed to take, but you can probably understand why his headache was worse than usual.

At any rate, the damage was done, it simply wasn't possible to roll back the enormous chain that was USDE, maybe C, but the former was too deeply embedded in everything, and no single agency had the ability or even the authority to do so. Sure, people were no longer at risk of starving to death, but global supply chains had combusted, just beginning to be coaxed back into action.

An army mech stomped past, crushing the same taxi. Bright red stripes, must be a psychic in there. Thankfully even metahuman powers usually missed Grim.

That evening, as the city burned, he'd braved the streets filled with panicked crowds, desperate to get to the preschool his daughter attended. Finding it closed, he'd rushed to apartment where his wife and daughter lived, and yes, the man who had replaced him. To his relief, they weren't there, from tapping into footage from the cameras, he figured they'd been evacuated.

The new husband was military. Grim figured she had a type.

If it was any consolation, he was still the richest man in the world. The clawbacks and freezes at the disposal of most nations meant less than nothing to his privileged credentials and hidden accounts, even slightly out of date as they were.

After breaking into the physical premises of a bank, paradoxically less secure these days since all they held were banks of computers and not cash or gold, he'd found a terminal that could still work more or less normally.

Yes. His money was there. He didn't want to access it quite yet, someone might check logs. So he left, once again hopping cordon and confusing patrolling officers and robots, finding himself at the standoff by UNHQ.

It was a miracle the Army hadn't opened fire, tensions had been high to begin with before everything started collapsing.

Thankfully it wasn't too hard to get in, his credentials worked, and the dumb machines meant to catch invisible intruders were unperturbed.

There. That was a secure client with access to satellite internet.

Grim's plan, at least a few days back when he'd first thought of using Midas, had been to just buy an Anchor, but to his immense dismay, he'd found the quote of "a billion dollars" remarked off the cuff by that Chinese official had been out of date for years, even before his recent actions.

That conversation (or interrogation) had been back when they could actually make more of the damn things, he wasn't sure what had gone wrong, his BLUE clearance was insufficient, but China had initially hiked prices to eye-watering levels, then outright stopped selling them. The forms a CCP website asked him to fill to express interest clearly assumed he was an agent of a different nation, there didn't seem to be any route for a humble quadrillionaire to order it by mail.

No, he'd prepared for this. Buying it with UN creds was off the table, they didn't even sell or loan to them. But there were Anchors out there, ones previously sold, even if most had been quickly bought back by the Chinese before people realized what was up. The average owner these days wouldn't part with them for love or money, but while the infinite love he felt for his daughter wasn't hard currency, he figured he still had plenty of the latter. And people who wouldn't just take the money could be compelled by other means.

Making sure the system wasn't being logged, he downloaded a particularly advanced intrusion toolkit from Mossad. The installer told him it was already present in the network, and he sighed and just booted it up.

Rainwater was a good crew, or at least they paid their operators well. He'd considered joining them, after his discharge, but ended up opting for UNSEEN since he could ensure more time close to his family. But they, believe it or not, had scruples, or at least standards expected of would be customers.

No, there was a different PMC, one that asked fewer questions, that only cared if your money was good and not who they might have to kill. Sure the number of billionaires and trillionaires on the planet had gone up by an order of magnitude or two, but to Grim, that was pocket change.

You wanted someone who did as you asked, even if that risked pissing off the CCP or the kind of people in their good graces? Took anonymous payment from the Dark Web and wouldn't rat you out even if a Clairvoyant grilled them?

You wanted the MDF.

Grim sent them a few billion. Just as a token of interest, yesterday a few million might have sufficed. There, they bit. He went on to outline his particular requirements to the agent, both of them behind a veil of anonymity, only USDE and not particularly pointed questions crossing it.

This was going to be expensive, but by now, Grim's horizons had begun to expand, an inkling of just how much power he held. What was metahumanity next to fuck-everyone money?

Fuck. He had to find out what happened to Midas, and potentially bail the kid out. That was beneath the line that he considered the least he could do. Another wince at what that might cost him. Maybe he'd have to do so for Adat too.

A digital handshake, then a transaction. Sergeant Grim now had an army.

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