The education of Private Melvin: Difference between revisions

We were five years into this raging war and we were bogged down by pointless, unwinnable conflicts with German regional savings banks. It was mad. Our CDO howitzers were running gangbusters, laying waste to credulous ECPs up and down the industrial heartland but the local authorities were getting wise. They were picking off our Locust Class attack funds. They had their own start-up challenger bank charlatans running behind our lines with BaFin cover. We didn’t know it but they were setting fused recession-sensitive timebombs. Just when things were turning down they would go off and throw the combat field into chaos.

I don’t deny it was fun. You feel like a hero, togged up in Kevlar annexures, camo-moly anonymising ALD codes, and those gleaming brass barrels on those old sweet bastard OSLAs. They don’t make stock lenders like that anymore. This modern dreck: it’s so anodyne, so commoditised, so dreadfully rectangular.  

It took me back, as so much seemed to do nowadays, to Bundie. The old dog barked up a ton of wrong-headed trees, but boy was he on the money barking up that one. David goddamn Bundie.

I can still hear him saying it, in that put-on baritone of his, all faux swagger and stuffy authority:  

“Now, mark my words, soldiers” — he was always calling us that — “treasure your weapon. Respect it. Treat it like a child, and it will treat you like it’s a fire-eyed mastiff and you are master of the hounds of hell.”

At that moment, Bundie’s face darkened. A light went out. Something closed down in there. A door that had briefly shown a delicate perimeter of golden rays slammed shut. The youthful, vigorous warrior was gone and the kind old defence against indemnities master returned. “I — I don’t know what you mean, Punchface.”

Well, the old bastard had been right. Totally right. ISDA rolled out a plastic twin network SL/Repo mod designed to work with their 02, but it was never popular, and there were documented examples of them falling apart during live margining exercises. The failure rate was off the charts. Reports of entire battalions throwing them down in the field and just running for their lives. As the enemy SIVs rumbled up the salient they didn’t even stop to collect them. They didn’t even take the unspent margin ammo for their rehypothecation tanks.  They just rolled over them, atomising these weapons and grinding them into the mud.

The old guy’s intonation rang in my ears.  

“Maintaining a ’95 OSLA takes skill, soldiers. Dedication. Deep insight. Handling them takes real skill. But, oh — the rewards. That perma-balancing portfolio margining. The native netting stability. That dependable 5 point bias. But ongoing service and maintenance takes time, effort and craft. Mark my words: they’ll ditch these babies. They'll outlaw them. We won’t see their like again.”

“I.S.D.A.”

They were bad derelicts. They were mainly deserted. It was target practice: guilt-free workout on the downside levers.