Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 100

a dust storm; the computers rebooted and sent themselves home. Supposedly.
Obviously, they’d been hacked shitless. We never
did catch the bastards, although a few fishy financial
transactions surfaced, it turned out that they’d all been
executed by trading algorithms and it was impossible
for any human being to have programmed them with
advance knowledge of what was going to happen and nobody benefited from them anyway, apart from
a very obscure, almost microscopic hedge fund that
turned out to be owned and operated by, and out of the
bedroom of, one extremely embarrassed and utterly
innocent child prodigy day trader.
We were going to take him for everything he had, but
then it turned out that his algorithm-driven hedge fund
had sunk all the cash into yet another weird backstreet
operator, and so on, and on, and on, and on down the
line until the money had been lost track of as completely as the molecules constituting the last breath of
Julius Caesar.
Who benefited, then? Cui Bono? as the conspiracy
theorists say. Everybody and nobody. The system benefited. The money propped up the financial sector for
another few years, kept our gimcrack global economy
from utterly disintegrating just that little bit longer, till
we came up with some more permanent answers. The
shock and horror of the deaths caused by the Attacks
galvanized the international community into a sort of
solidarity, who knows, maybe even averted World War
III. And of course everyone’s favourite douchebag
politicians got themselves elected and re-elected, but
that’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering some of
the alternatives on offer.
It’s on nights like this, when I can’t sleep and I don’t
want to think about my personal life, that I find myself wondering: Just who the fuck are these dickholes
we’re fighting, anyway?
Not the brainwashed zombies driving bombtrucks into
embassies and shooting up newspapers. Those mothers are so gone they couldn’t organize a Christmas
party, let alone a Jihad. Mohammed Atta was so out
of it that he wouldn’t shake the hand of a woman, and

Timothy McVeigh actually thought there was a microchip in his head. This isn’t self-directed - someone’s
strategising for these fuckers.
So who’s giving the orders? Their leaders? They don’t
really have any - but the closest thing they have to a
leadership are the self-appointed sheikhs and caliphs
immortalized in thousands of hours of grainy videotape - but those old geezers are living in the tenth
century; they probably think the TV’s got a little guy
in it that makes it work.
So it’s not the leaders and it’s certainly not the followers - funny-farm candidates to a man - who’s running
the show? Who’s minding the shop? The standard conspiracy theory has it that they’re secretly controlled
by sinister politicians with elections to win, high on
arms deals, geostrategic dominance and general war
fever, but that doesn’t make any sense either, because
the result of the terrorists activities is that America is
now in “partnership” with some of its worst enemies.
First it was Iran, then it was Russia, now even North
Korea’s talking about ‘joining forces in a spirit of
forward-loo