The sky over the city was a bruised, heavy gray. She checked her watch. The Federal Reserve had announced the quarter-point rate hike 20 minutes ago. She walked back to her desk and tapped her monitor to wake it. She expected a slight dip in the market, a brief period of volatility.
The screen was a wall of red. Victoria blinked. She tapped the screen again, assuming it was a visual glitch. The numbers didn't change. They were accelerating.
The downward arrows next to Cross Capital's primary holdings were moving so fast the text blurred. Her desk phone rang. It was an internal line, the trading floor. "Cross," she answered crisply. "Victoria, you need to get down here. " The voice of her head trader, Marcus, was tight, borderline hysterical.
The algorithm is going rogue. Clarify, Victoria snapped, walking briskly out of her office toward the private elevator. Commodities in Asia are tanking due to the port strikes. The rate hike just hit. The system is interpreting the drop as a localized discount.
It's executing buy orders. So, cancel them, Victoria said, stepping into the elevator. I can't, Marcus shouted. The volume is too high. The system is using our cash reserves to buy the dip, but there is no dip.
It's a free fall. We're catching falling knives. We've lost 400 million in the last 10 minutes. The elevator doors opened onto the trading floor. It was chaos.
Men and women in expensive suits were standing at their desks, screaming into headsets, staring at monitors with horror. The usual hum of aggressive confidence had been replaced by the raw animal sound of panic. Victoria sprinted to the main console. Shut it down. Shut the core server off.
If we shut it down, we lock in the losses, the lead quant said, his hand shaking over the keyboard. We're heavily leveraged on margin. If we halt trading, the clearing houses will issue margin calls immediately. We don't have the liquidity to cover them. How much are we down?
Victoria demanded, her voice cutting through the noise. The quant swallowed hard. A point two billion and dropping. Victoria felt a cold sweat break out on her neck. Override the buy parameters.
Tell the system to dump the toxic assets. I'm trying. It's not accepting the new parameters. The core architecture is overriding my inputs based on a master condition set. I don't know how to bypass it.
The code is ancient. I built the board you're playing on. Aiden Caldwell's quiet voice echoed in Victoria's head. A sudden sickening wave of nausea washed over her. She gripped the edge of the console.