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 et Cie, Ave. 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 bejewelled, 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. In his swoon, Boone sees —or thinks he sees — multiple identical clone children, each being chaperoned by adults in dark glasses.
Boone accosts the child but she — or he? it is oddly hard to tell — does not recognise him. They have a conversation, Boone again mistakenly quaffs vega, she presses a card into his hand and as Boone slurs and stumbles, is whisked away.
Hacienda
The second time do Boone wakes from a Vega-induced Stupor. He is in a luxury GFS suite at the Hacienda. Satin is rumpled and next to him a still, sleeping, alien form. It is the kid. He does not know how he got there but reaches out to touch its form to find it is quite cold. At the same time he notices a small hole in the window, billowing the sheer curtains, and a trickle of blood between the youth’s shoulder-blades.
The cables from an exterior window cleaning unit run outside 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.”
Melvin’s short squeeze
Boone and Graeber hasten to a strip mall on the outskirts of the city where a police cordon is formed, and a press scrum assembled. 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 flak seems to be coming from the demilitarised civilian quarters.
“But that is impossible. The proles don’t have anything like the firepower. Melvin is big - he’s got strong supply lines running back... this can’t be happening!”
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.
Graeber flees into the retail maelstrom
Clear-out of the retail ghettos
IOSCO tanks roll into the demilitarised zone, bombing civilian facilities in the search for concealed FWMD. Wickliffe lends munitions and vehicles to the effort, pulling out day traders in a cynical show trials that suggest some malign retail force, and that Wickliffe and the professional industry is the victim.