Talk:The ISDA Protocol

Opco Backstory

Opco Boone is born in Switzerland to a pair easy going, peace-loving NDA specialists at a small, family owned legal consultancy in Interlaken. When Opco was nine, they were killed by a hijacked truck that crashed into their car.

Opco survives the crash and is rescued by a man he comes to know as Uncle George, a wealthy Caribbean philanthropist who happens to be visiting Interlaken. He adopts Opco and takes him home to the Cayman Islands where Opco grows up, despite the loving environment, a troubled child, often waking from nightmares in the middle of the night screaming for his parents and having visions of about harmless furry little animals with sharp teeth who suddenly turn on their owners overthrow the world. He channels his energy into stamping out dangerous legal weapons that can cause havoc in the financial markets and harm innocent people.

He earns a scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Crustard’s Academy for the Perpetually Confused, where he specializes in the international law preventing the promulgation of financial weapons of mass destruction, are complex and dangerous financial instruments that can cause global economic collapse and social chaos if misused. Here he meets also his classmates Algernon Farquhar and Janice Henderson, who are martial arts magicians, dirt bike supremos, ace fighter pilots and counsel when Opco needs them.

He meets his mentor, Professor Havid Dilbert, an eccentric expert on semiotics who is trying to formulate a set of axiomatic legal definitions from a small corrugated iron shed in the grounds of Broadmoor prison. He fears that The Romanian is developing a new type of financial weapon that is a network of interconnected micro bombs buried in the investment portfolios of ordinary, unsuspecting and innocent people, including the elderly which could be detonated remotely causing catastrophic loss and panic.

He also encounters his nemesis, J.T. Palmer, an agent of the F.I.A., a regulatory enforcement agency that is supposed to monitor and prevent financial crimes. However, Opco suspects that Palmer has been corrupted by The Romanian and is secretly working for his father’s company, which is behind the micro bomb scheme. Palmer is arrogant, ruthless and manipulative, and he tries to sabotage Opco’s career at every turn.

He also learns more about his parents’ past and their connection to the Eagle Squad. They were not the pointless confidentiality experts he had been brought up to believe, but were undercover agents working for the Eagle Squad, a renegade group of vigilante derivative lawyers who are sworn to protect the world from the evils of synthetic vega, a measure of the sensitivity of the price of a derivative to changes in volatility.

They had been on a mission to infiltrate the software-as-a-service legaltech company owned by The Romanian, a shadowy androgynous figure who legend has it is immortal and descended from the great trickster of the First Men, Oleg Paripasu. Their death in the truck accident was no accident.

He finds this out when he confronts Palmer at his office and sees a photo of his parents on Palmer’s desk. Palmer reveals that he was a former colleague in the Eagle Squad, but he betrayed them to The Romanian for money and power.

He decides to continue his parents’ legacy and join the Eagle Squad in their quest to stop The Romanian from taking over the world. He faces many dangers and challenges along the way, but he also finds love and friendship in unexpected places. He ultimately confronts Palmer and The Romanian in a climactic showdown that will determine the fate of humanity.

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.