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 past — Barkley went so far as to invent a whole new tense, the “plumperfect present”, to deal with events which, he said, could only be located probabilistically in spacetime — but orbiting around one queasy weekend in September 2008, The Atlantis Variation concerns the machinations of a malign secret society of stuffy old men working in the bowels of the great institutions of their day, to produce the 2008 ISDA Master Agreement, known under its working title as the “Project Atlantis”.
The Atlantis Variation was to be a definitive, final, flawlessCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag 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.