Jack is alone in his studio apartment, on his phone, watching the odds creep low and lower.
“Don’t overthink it,” he tells himself. “And don’t get greedy.” He understands that the market operates not on real probabilities, but on privileged information, and his information is as solid as it gets. The time to act is now, so why does he hesitate?
Watching the ticker bob up and down is agonizing, so Jack looks instead at the vintage flip-clock alarm that Mindy gave him for his birthday years ago when they were still dating. He watches the clock as the bygone hour rolls over, and the fateful one begins. He looks at his phone, and YES position is now below 2%. It’s too risky to wait any longer. He presses Buy YES, and it’s done.
Jack drops his phone on the bed and lifts his eyes to the ceiling.
“Please, God,” he prays. “Let that bomb blow by midnight. Please let me win, just one time.”
The irony of his prayer isn’t lost on Jack. If he wins, people will die, but that’s an inevitability that has nothing to do with him or the last $200,000 left from his 401k. He’s certainly not rooting for death. After all, the senator assured him this bomb would save more lives than it ends, and besides, what difference does it make if it happens tonight or some other night? No, Jack understands that he’s not funding an outcome, he’s merely backing a winning proposition.
And when his proposition wins, he’ll be rich, rich enough to buy his old life back and more. Mindy took their girls and left after Jack lost their short-term savings on a bad bet, even though no one could have predicted that the young billionaire would die in a traffic accident on the way back from the lawyer’s office where she had just updated her will to say that upon her death, her fortune would go to the non-profit that would then use the timely windfall to prevent a famine in Haiti just in time to spoil Jack’s surefire bet.
But soon, Mindy will have no choice but to admit that Jack was right, that he’s not gambling, he’s investing in their family’s future. Soon, Jack will have his daughters back, and he’ll be their hero again. He’ll replenish their college funds, and then he’ll take them to Disney for a month, then buy them a big house with a swimming pool and a slide, then they can go to basketball camp or sailing camp or whatever camp they want, and Mindy will be happy because the girls are happy, and Jack will be happiest of all. When that bomb blows, Jack will be the good guy, as long as it happens by midnight.
The clock flips to half-past eleven. There’s only thirty minutes left, so why are the YES odds down to 1.5%? He curses himself for not waiting a little longer to place his bet. Now it’s 1.2%. A moment later, 0.9%. Has something gone wrong?
Jack lifts his mattress and reaches into the almost-invisible incision where he keeps his secret phone. He powers it on and opens the encrypted messaging app. He knows he’s not supposed to use the phone at home, but he needs to make sure the senator knows that his bet went through.
“What’s going on?” Jack types. “Shouldn’t the odds be changing by now?”
Jack waits for a reply. Twenty minutes left. Fifteen. Jack’s armpits are drenched and he can’t take a full breath. He looks out his window and wonders if four stories to the ground is far enough away to lose track of his debts.
The phone lights up with a message. “We’re ready to go,” the senator says. “Just waiting for one more.”
Jack punches a hole in the drywall. If the senator were here now, Jack would strangle him. That bastard said the $200k would be enough. Now his future depends on “one more”. But even as angry as Jack is, he’s twice as desperate.
“I need this,” Jack responds. “Please, I’ll give you fifty percent.”
No answer.
It’s ten till midnight, and Jack begins to cry. Why does this happen every time? Jack is a devoted husband and a loving father. He volunteers at church. He recycles his plastics. What did he ever do to deserve a life of only loss?
Then, the ticker ticks up a hair, back to 1%. Then it jumps. 15%, 40%. Jack can’t believe it.
“You’ve got a deal,” says a message from the senator.
YES is up to 98%.
“YES!” Jack shouts. “YES!”
Jack gets a notification from the market. “Congratulations! You predicted correctly. Your account balance is now $9.8M.”
A great red cloud blooms on the other side of the world, the bad guys are dealt with, and Jack, the hero, prevails. Even as his new reality settles and his problems are put to rest, he’s far too excited to sleep now. Besides, he knows that the market moves on, with or without him.
He goes back to the market’s home page where other tickers tick, odds are negotiated, outcomes are brokered, money is bought, sold, won, and lost. With the purchasing power he has now, Jack thinks that it would be wrong of him if he doesn’t use some of it to make the world a better place.
The market is a force for good, he realizes, because it brings movement to the backwaters of the world where before there was only stagnation; those places which had been without access or opportunity or even a reason to exist are now bursting with the phenomenal possibility of incalculable value.
“Yes! Yes!” Jack repeats his mantra again and again. “Buy yes!”
The market moves on, and Jack’s bomb drops and blows and wins and wins and wins, and a fiery plume rises from an explosion over a library in Khartoum, a bridge in Odessa, a warehouse in Mogadishu, its center nowhere, its circumference everywhere.