The ISDA Protocol
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The Adventures of Opco Boone, Legal Ace™
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Background
When they signed the armistice the remaining banking superpowers resolved that never again would they engage in such futile destructive behaviour.
By BCB accord, use of FWMDs was forever banned, the superpowers agreeing, by conference at Bretton Woods, to create a multi-partite peacekeeping force with wide-ranging powers of inspection. Peacetime use of controlled derivative devices to power and heat for the world’s financial markets was, of course, permitted, but a pan-global regulatory force could inspect at any time.
Meanwhile, the BCBH established five-sigma exclusion zones around the still-smouldering ruins left over from the great financial war, while massive IOSCO transport helicopters flew continuous missions over the “Lehman sarcophagus,” dumping gigatons of flame-retardant liquidity upon it and similar sites for years after the armistice.
Gradually, the financial world returned to stability and progress. The were, of course, flare-ups: no one expected a hiccup during routine testing at the massive BBA-LIBOR facilities in E14 in 2010 to cause a reactor meltdown, but the chain-reaction was swift and before it could be brought under control the gigantic IRS generators that powered much of London were knocked out for months. By the time the situation finally normalised, there had been significant casualties: not least when a transporter carrying upper management team ran out of plausibility and crash-landed on the very building housing the BOE’s crisis headquarters. The crash site was swiftly isolated and neutralised with credibility derivatives.
The education of Private Melvin, part 1: The crooked E.
The Early interaction with Graeber, whom Melvin bullies.
The Baker Street shakedown
Graeber is sitting in a squad-car waiting for his partner to return with coffee. An APB comes across the wireless about a cache of FWMDs in a grey car in the Baker Street area. At that moment a grey GMRA sedan runs a red light and Graeber knows he’s got his man. He pulls it over, demands to see in the trunk, and finds ... nothing. He shakes down the driver and his VIP passenger, with a 92 LFC in the solar plexus and demands to strip search the whole car. He rousts the trunk, throwing stuff into the street, then opens the back door and — there is this androgynous, youthful, dolphin-like being — Graeber is smitten, and is stammering an apology when his partner, Officer Melvin R Melvin, arrives with the coffees and donuts, horrified and recognises that the VIP is none other than Julian Wickliffe, chairman of the WHAMDAQ and politically connected guy. He quickly lets the car go, apologising profusely. Wickliffe is complementary about him as he goes, to his great relief.
If course the dolphin is/is concealing the weapons cache
They return to base, Melvin warning Graeber he had better prepare himself for a bollocking.
An encounter at the vega den
Across the squad room, Boone hears the group commander’s booming voice.
“GRAEBERRRRRR!”
Opco leaves for an investigation.
Boone follows lead [NEEDS EVENT] that takes him undercover and into a “Vega Dens”, where supposedly legal synthetic alpha generators operate. underground clubs in London’s West End.
Opco tracks down old fellow vet Felix, who is now doing super well as the owner of a chain of Vega Dens. A vega dealer or “prime”, skims cash “commission” from clients but never partakes in its own product. “It’s just business.”
Unwisely, Boone accepts Felix’s offer of an alpha tray, assuring Boone that is is a legal, harmless high. It is served by a beautiful, otherworldly child. The child seems curiously unengaged. Dissociated. Boone goes to ask the child for more information but as it does the alpha takes hold and Boone falls deep into the well.
As Boone sleeps, The Romanian enters his chamber and arranges compromising pictures with the youth, then says.
“All right, Signa, get this schmuck out of here.”
Improbably strong, the slight youth lifts boone over one shoulder and takes him out.
Boone wakes up in a strange room, realises he is late for an all hands meeting back at the office and makes haste back.
Netting detail
Reverie
Meanwhile things slowly turned to normal for commando Opco Boone of the I.S.D.A.’s crack drafting squad. He can’t stop thinking about the kid with the vacant eyes.
Thoughts snap back to coalface. A colossal wall of tedious shit.
Though still shell-shocked, he has a desk job now as a once promising career ran stale and drifted into dead end — netting compliance — but he quietly bridles at the timidity of his role, the department, and the uneasy peace of the post-crisis world. His hand still shakes and he has PTSD whenever anyone says “margin”.
New crew
His CO asks for his report. He follows him into the office and lays it down: unkempt, stuffed with scraps of paper, scrawled notes, faxed sheets.
Opco is following a series of odd coincidences which are turning him to a view that mysterious forces are gathering in the shadows, and is privately collecting evidence to assemble a theory and back his theory up. The Vega Dens of Soho are building up odd concentrations of correlation. That is what you would expect, in Vega addicts, but Boone believes the dealers are getting correlated.
CO stops him, irritated and disinterested with his ludicrous theories, and urges Boone to get on with the netting analysis, which needs to be done by Friday, or there will be serious (internal, formalistic, consequences).
Boone complains that there is so much to do, and it is all so boring, and CO says, the good news is you have a new team member to help you.
It is Graeber, who has been demoted out of Eagle Squad. He has been put out of harm’s way on the netting detail for the duration of the joint association working group business day convention that is being held in town.
Anxious to avoid further disruption or embarrassment from loose cannons while the Joint Association Working Group’s Business Day Convention is in town, and the precinct is overflowing with the luminaries of Military Financial Complex, Palmer assigns them Graeber to Boone’s to netting detail. “The guy’s a liability. See if you can’t keep him out of trouble for a week would you?”
Learning the ropes
Boone is unhappy but has no choice. He starts to train Graeber on netting and assigns him Luxembourg as his first jurisdiction. Very important to get clear, succinct summary.
Netting epiphany postponed
Graeber works at the Luxembourg opinion, until late in the night. He cannot make head or tail of it. The schedules, the assumptions, the reference to obscure provisions of Germanic law and the Napoleonic code. The defs, the anti defs, the assumptions and the qualifications.
Dawn is coming up and, delirious, Graeber resolves to pay the Luxembourg lawyer a visit.
Graeber has made a beeline for an avocat’s office in Av. John F Kennedy in the Belgian Quarter. As Palmer’s bad luck would have it, L’Hôtel des Grandes Moules Frites, the venue for the Business Day Convention, also happens to be in the Belgian quarter, in avenue J F Kennedy.
Man overboard
Boone’s arrives, looking for Graeber but he is gone. On his desk, an address scratched in the blotter. Leclerc leclerc, avenue J F Kennedy.
Realising the scope for disaster, Boone makes a beeline for the quarter, where eventually following powers of deduction, he finds Graeber, shaking down a poor Belgian netting attorney, bruised and bloody, babbling mindlessly about aleatory contracts (Graeber shouts “YES OR NO, GODDAMMIT”) and the avocat has just launched into a lengthy, sobbing description of what a Belgian corporation is not when Boone arrives, hauls Graeber out and remonstrates with him on the street by the Manneken Pis.
At just that moment Wickliffe’s silver sedan rolls by, catching Graeber’s attention. Wickliffe tells him to forget it and focus on the netting, but then sees the the child from the alpha den, dressed immaculately and bejeweled, emerge from the sedan in the company of — Julian Wickliffe himself. Both Boone and Graeber say, “there is that kid!”
In his pocket the walkie-talkie screeches Graeber! Boone! If you don’t get back here! [The point of no return to normality]
Boone thinks, fuck it, were committed now.
The business day convention
Boone and Graeber follow the pair into the L’Hôtel, where they lose them in the hubbub — there follows a surreal sequence of hallucinogenic images, like a ghost train of different sessions, plenary sessions, break out sessions, tea breaks and so on until Boone suddenly finds the child, propped up against a bar, looking anxious. [multiple identical clone children]
Boone accosts the child but she — or he? it is oddly hard to tell — does not recognise him. Boone says “for a young person you find yourself in some grown up places. Do your parents know you’re here?”
“If I had parents I guess they would tell me not to talk to strange men in seedy bars.” She regarded him confidently: big, brown eyes. “I guess it’s your lucky day.”
“Oh yeah, how come?”
“I don’t.” She sucked on a drink. Comič & Tonic.
Boone reminds her of their meeting at the Vega Den, but she feigns ignorance, claiming not to recognise him.
“Vega den? what kind of child do you think I am?”
Barman pops a drink on the bar. Boone snatches it.
“Sir, wait —”
She says, “well someone is in for a fun ride”.
“Huh?” Boone starts to feel good.
Suddenly she turns frosty, like that first breath of winter.
Says she has to leave.
They are watching you, Mr Boone.
She presses a card into Boone’s hand. She sees something over Boone’s shoulder. She looks nervous, is scanning the room. “I can’t be seen here. Nor can you. It wouldn’t be —good for you.”
Boone sways around trying to see what she is looking at. He is feeling woozy “What do you mean good?” He turns back to her but she is not there.
Barman gives him a knowing look. “What?”
Murkily bone seeds her sequinned dress sparkling as she melted into the crowd. It looked like a man was manhandling her out. Boone drooped.
“id be, ah, Careful with that one, sir. She is an agent.” He taps his nose and skies an eyebrow. “Strictly professional, if you know what I mean.”
Boone feels the uneasy sensation of Vega and passes out. Boone face-plants the carpet.
meanwhile Graeber tries unsuccessfully to liberate the Barman and gets thrown out.
Hacienda
The second time do Boone wakes from a Vega-induced Stupor. He is in a GFS suite at the Hacienda, a luxury hotel room next to is sleeping form of the kid. He does not know how he got there but reaches out to touch the child’s form to find that she is quite cold. At the same time he notices a small hole in the window and a trickle of blood between the kids shoulder-blades. and there is a knock on the door.
A window cleaning unit abseils past the window. Did he see someone in a suit? Boone gives chase but he is still woozy from the Vega. By the time he gets to the ground the man has gone. He races back up to the room, but to his horror find the cleaning staff are in the room and there is no sign of the body.
The child is dead. Liquidated. The regulator is already there, standing over the body. Very weird. There are no creditors. No parents. No records. No police file. No-one recognises her. Only record ties her back to a boarding house for orphans. In the Cayman Islands. Boone picks up her wallet. There is a card saying only “Ugland House, 121 South Church Street, George Town.”
CB radio interlude. It is Palmer. “Boone: where the hell are you?
Boone dissembles and mumbles. Well truth be told, I don’t care where you are. Just get yourself here, and fast. We’ve got a live ongoing situation. Suspected FWMD. You might be right...
Melvin’s short squeeze
Boone and Graeber hasten to a strip mall on the outskirts of the city where Melvin is holed up, barricaded in the GameStop premises. It’s in the old Blockbuster building. Melvin’s flagship fund vehicle — a twin-class 2/20 clipper out of Georgetown — is badly holed and leaking liquidity. He’s shipping fire from all sides but — weird — the conventional combatants’ artillery depots are all silent. Third Point, Icahn and Pershing Missile have actually sent down a peace-keeping detachment. Ackman is crying.
The GameStop situation isn't over. Melvin squeaks “my shorts! My shorts! As the promontory on which he is marooned is thrust higher. The rate of ascent is slower but it is clear there is no way down
Opco is scarred from his experience at the battle for Cayman brac when, as a young communications officer in the famous Eagle Squad, led by the celebrated derivatives commander David Bundie, was all but wiped out
Deltaview Force
Eagle Squad goes undercover into demilitarised zone to clear out derelict building [WHY/WHERE] with its device for searching for material differences. They detect movement with the deltaview, thinking they have found a Biggs particle. Behind them, they find a live squidboy in the rubble. He is booby-trapped with red herrings and unapproved pitchbooks. Squad radios back to base to get a Chinese wall thrown up. There is a CBT countdown alert. EVentually he gives up the pitchbook: Lexrifyly IPO. AJ picks it up to browse. He gets sucked in by the mesmerising text. Squidboy burbles about how clever the technology is, A.J. gets sucked into the vortex. Opco grabs the squidboy and goes in after him.
Enigma Variations
For years GCHQ has protected sensitive communications with a syntactic scrambler code language. Arrayed with sophisticated defensive systems such as prolixity dumps and syntactical contortion arrays — GCHQ has forged an impregnable iron dome of textual impenetrability that has permitted vital communications to take place uninterrupted, un intercepted, in real-time.
But in recent weeks it is as if the enemy can anticipate our every move. Legal Squad agents are getting intercepted during what should have been routine courier drops.
And at the same time the double-oh command has changed up its own encryption. Central interpretation units — the Eagle Squad “Enigma Machine” has been struggling to decipher COO communications. Whatever they run through it turns up banal, random words, or cancels down to nothing at all — like there is no content in the message at all.
For months engineers work on the codebreaker but cannot improve the results. Just utter, face-slapping, moronic gibberish, however we render it. The double Ohs are communicating freely though this impenetrable channel, and we can’t do a thing to stop them.
Boone suddenly sees it: the overwhelming scale of the challenge that faced the team. “Lines and lines of utter gibberish...That’s... it. That’s exactly it. It’s .... GENIUS”.
Boone barked into his wristcomm. “Algy! Janice! Let’s go!”
NAV Trigger Point
Boone floats above a planet, a legal eagle unchained and at the peak of his powers, surveilling the flickering taxo-grid below. Delirious, and egged on to do it by his Digital Voice Assistant Denning, he unshackles himself from his flight harness and floats free of all constraints, before feeling himself falling to earth, as the tranquil operations of the Risk management matrix collapse into reds and burst into flames. Denning won’t — can’t — override the control settings, and placidly watches as Boone falls and the planet is engulfed in disaster. Boone snaps out of a delirious dream with J-Rod and A.J frantically trying to wake him. There is an emergency scramble. Legal Squad is mobilising.
SIV Endgame
MCA drops remaining irregulars unit on the beach at Cayman brac. The mission is to liberate is a detachment of SICAVs help captive by enemy stock lending counterparts who are using it as a cheap source of sales credits. Tucker shows off his new “Liquidator” weapon. Chippy sets it off and Bundie shouts at them to be quiet. A huge mechanical SIV bursts through the trees and advances on them. The unit engages with the SICAV using several FWMDs such as self-referencing CLNs, CSAs and a sawn-off repo The SICAV doesn’t seem to be weakening under fire. They begin to realise this is no ordinary SICAV. Bundie bids young Obadiah take cover behind a tree stump and he bravely goes in to fight for his men. But it is a losing battle. Slowly the boys in the unit succumb: Tucker, Chipper, Swart and then Frenchie is blown apart from close range.
The Armourer
Young AJ is learning from [Palmer] how to strip a Calc Agent Appointment Side Letter. He graduates to an Engagement Letter with an NDA “Silencer”. The Kid catches a number of defects Hare hadn’t noticed. Irritated, Hare sends him out to the Armoury for a long weight. Burke meets him [Annabel Lecteur/E/Cassie Lieberman]. Burke sends him to the stacks for a long weight, where A.J. finds all the classics of the FWMD Canon including a Biggs hoson. The Biggs is missing, “removed for security purposes”.
The Gathering Storm
Sweeney is stuck in a dead-end clerical job at Barringtons. Getting rings runaround him by Roly Punchface. AJ accosts him with the challenge of the call of adventure.
The Last SPV
Espievies are dying out. Global regulatory warming is making their usual habitats hostile. Traditional breeding grounds are becoming increasingly polluted by a parasite which feeds on them: the red tapeworm. There are some mature specimens with legacy Tax rulings, known as “the grand-fathers” — but these are a finite commodity, are protected against hunting, in designated wildlife sanctuaries and in any case trade at massive premia on the black market. Some poachers break into the sanctuaries of northern Europe where there experimental breeding programmes designed to reintroduce them for benign taxation planning. Suddenly there is talk of a new supply of synthetic SPVs flooding in from eastern Europe somewhere.
Onboarding in the Meadows outside Moor Gate. Young Roly arrives with a tote-bag of espievies he says he has caught in Bretton Wood. The onboarders are unimpressed, assigning them a three priority, being Portuguese SGPS. Throw out a non-netting Qatari vehicle, the dogs wolf it down. The last is a Panamanian tax vehicle. The onboarders freak and shout at Roly to take it away.
The Taxonomy of Doom
The children file into the Defence Against Indemnities classroom to find the professor is not there, and Imelda Skagghead taking the class instead. Professor Cavalier has been reassigned. Her teaching style has been found to be out-dated. It no longer accords with industry best practice. Skagghead presents the very latest in modern risk management! It calculates and monitors all risks, tabulates them, and provides an overall risk rating. Risk is assessed as ambient, but legal operating cost is too high. Roly asks how the machine can tell risk is ambient and legal cost too high: The answer: key performance indicators. This, says Imelda Skaghead, is why Professor was let go. He was just too expensive.
Where Legal Eagles Dare
Algy, Boone and J-Rod watch the COO battle truck roar across the dessert. After a wristcom argument with Chip, GC, Boone sends the dirt bikes off to intercept, and leaps off the cliff in his wingsuit. The Battletruck wipes out a couple of stray doc-jocks but otherwise can’t understand the imminent attack signal. Boone lands on the roof of the cab and fights Kurzweil. He prevails but there is a detonation counter ticking down on the dash. Kurzweil recovers and resumes the fight. Boone is knocked out. Kurzweil regains control of the battletruck and doubles down. Boone is in a semi-conscious stupor recalling his school days with Algy and J-Rod. Algy and Janice arrive on their bikes. Algy jumps the truck and lands on its roof. Kurzweil ties insensate Boone to the wheel and prepares to decamp as they approach the settlement. Kurzweil hears Algy in the back of the truck and goes to investigate. Algy cold cocks him and hoofs him out the door. He resets the counter, turns the truck back towards the COO compound and exits, walking back to the settlement.
Raptor Patrol
Enron Trooper MT Emsworth lands her Raptor outside an abandoned strip mall, not far from the gushing torrent of the nascent information superhighway. After an argument with her droid, she goes in on a routine patrol. She finds tied up Blockbuster execs, and one dead body on a pile of rubble. It seems the CEO has gone rogue, killed his head of digital ventures and tied up the board. Emsworth lays out a plan for them to escape across the digital footbridge. It involves a forty-year broadband capacity swap, which Emsworth will mark to market.
Retail Wars
Melvin’s [ROLY?] tragic character arc from not terribly good soldier to preying on innocent retail victims, and eventually the retail victims ganging up on him in his personal apotheosis. Increasingly sordid episodes where Melvin’s lack of moral fibre and corruption become increasingly evident as he spirals into depravity. Starts with a routine patrol to clear out a brinks and mortar emplacement across the old information superhighway. Melvin reminisces about his brass barrelled OSLAS and falls into a reverie about his old commander Bundie, warning the class of the likely slip in standards in future weaponry by the I.S.D.A. And he was dead right. Melvin snaps back to patrolling the greyfield strip mall, with E in his comlink. He takes on a videodrome. Expecting it to be dead and deserted, Melvin is surprised to see the radiation is unusually high. Melvin goes on closer and finds a hopped out long-head retail partisan. Melvin shorts him, killing the stock, and closes out his short with the partisan’s open position. He makes a small turn and gets a feel for blood.
Days later Enron blows.
Meanwhile E tries to act as whistle-blower and is pooed by higher-ups who are enjoying the easy revenue. Far from being suspended, Palmer reassigns him and funds him. Palmer quote “it seems this short selling business is not terribly difficult.”
Make it look that he was lured into a trap in.
Melvin moves on - his next mission he stumbles into the GameStop arcade.