The Atlantis Variation

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The Atlantis Variation is a finance fiction novella by alpha-crazed beat poet Hunter Barkley.

Set in a fluctuating spacetime that waivers crazily between the present, future and one queasy weekend in September 2008, it concerns the machinations of a malign secret society working in the shadows to produce the 2008 ISDA Master Agreement, known under its working title as the Atlantis Variation — hence the title of Barkley’s novel.

The Atlantis Variation was to be an apocalyptic edition of the ISDA Master Agreement that was almost completed in 2008, only prevented by the intervening near total financial destruction of the planet. It never saw the light of day, instead collapsing into a form of dark tedium that continues to upset those who would seek to harness the power of the universe.

According to Barkley’s dystopian vision, the 2008 ISDA was to be short, plainly worded, future-proofed and agile. It would allow counterparties to agree robust trading terms with little fuss and only the cursory clerical management delivered through unskilled personnel in low-cost jurisdictions and, eventually, chatbots.

It promised to be the long-lost missing use-case for distributed ledger technology, natively negotiated “on-chain” between arrays of dematerialised large language models housed, for the sense of theatre, in a single giant data centre in the outskirts of Bucharest.

Had it been implemented, this template would have addressed the financial, infrastructural and regulatory challenges which would dog the financial derivatives market in the early 21st century, eventually bringing to the brink of an abyss the rolling countryside of Aïessdiyé a verdant land where peaceable swapsfolk had for generations made comfortable nests in the folded hills, nooks and crannies of that pleasant land.

While these hobbity little creatures romped wealthily about their sun-drenched meadows, the ’08 would silently, effectively consolidate all documentation across a wide range of products and asset classes (including but not limited to repo, stock lending, prime brokerage, exchange traded derivatives, commodities and emissions), finally moving the financial world into a stable utopian state in which all risks are known, all eventualities experienced and contingencies accounted for. Risk would finally be banished for ever.

As it was, the challenge was just too big. The project expanded — at first gradually; in the closing stages at breakneck pace — and in the final days exceeded the Schwarzschild radius of document comprehension altogether. There was a sudden, catastrophic implosion, and everything associated with the project — all drafts, riders, boilerplate, annexes, schedules — and everyone — the firm ISDA engaged to hold the pen (a mysterious cyber law firm that spontaneously winked into existence when a document management system became self-aware) and several thousand members of ISDA’s document working group, seconded by their employers to contributing their “clarifications” and doubt-avoidances for the greater good of the standard form, simply vanished into thin air.

All — the document, the personnel, the drafting miscellanea and terabytes of tedia — are now lost to history. We now do not know what the agreement said, how it said it, or indeed whether the agreement really existed at all. And the chatbots —

Well, speaking of chatbots, Barkley claims that Roy Batty’s extraordinary speech from the original Blade Runner (1982) originated when a page of his novel fell backwards in time through a rent in the fabric of the space-tedium continuum created by the 2008 financial markets implosion, landing in Rutger Hauer’s lap as he was waiting in makeup for that final scene. Hauer, not realising this was a unique document from the apocalyptic future, took it for a script redraft. He adapted it, but only slightly, from the original record, which was exchange between an ETD negotiator and a mortally injured CDO lawyer as he dragged his mutilated psyche away from the smoking ruins of his employer:

“You thought you knew everything, didn’t you,” sneered the hapless futures specialist. “And now look at us. You did this. You have no idea.”

The CDO man turned, a replicant glimmer in his eye, and said:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack-ships on fire off the red-herring of Orion 2006-1 hybrid CDO.

I watched mezzanine-tranches glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like payments in kind.

Time to retrain —

As a primary-school teacher.

See also

• 2011 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions
• Finance Fiction