The second spot, called “One People, One Market,” was being assembled simultaneously in the editing suite upstairs. It was based on DD&D’s other main consumer insight: that online traders were suffering from an emotional schism. On the one hand, they were being bombarded with so much investment information that they felt overwhelmed and afraid to make decisions for themselves. On the other, they held an even deeper conviction that their own gut instincts were the best indicators of a security’s chances for success. If they could only disentangle themselves from the “tyranny of conflicting information,” as Martha called it, they felt they would be set free.

  The creative execution involved no new footage; instead, it culled scenes from famous televised revolts: the demonstration in Tiananmen Square, the felling of the Berlin Wall, the candlelight street vigils in Czechoslovakia, the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, and the Broadband Revolt in Omaha. Over these images flowed the NASDAQ ticker tape in bright green characters. As the scenes intensified, the ticker tape began to undulate to the rhythm of a heartbeat that slowly increased in volume. The voice of a famous actress who played the ship’s captain on a canceled Star Trek 103 series narrated over the imagery: “America is a tree, with roots in ethics and branches in liberty. We are one people, with one great goal. As we reach for the sky, no one can stand in our way. Let my people go.”

  “Genius!” Tobias Morehouse declared at six o’clock the next morning as we played the finished reel in his conference room. “When do they air?”

  “The first one will be running on CNN’s Financial Channel starting this morning,” Alec beamed. “The other hits the major networks during the news tonight.”

  “Fantastic!” Morehouse said, rewinding the tape to watch the commercials again. “But where does it say Morehouse & Linney? Do you add that on at the end?”

  “That’s the brilliance of it, Dad. We don’t say it anywhere.”

  “What kind of advertising is that?” Morehouse asked, confused.

  “Just think of it.” Alec got up and slowly circled around the table. “There’s no brand being pushed at all. The ad positions itself as a public service announcement. A noble communications effort by an anonymous firm, simply and righteously amplifying the voice of the people.”

  “But how will they know it’s us?” Morehouse was breathing heavily now. Creativity was one thing. Paying good money for anonymous ads was just plain bad business.

  “Don’t you get it?!” Alec was speaking a good two octaves higher than normal. “Secondary media! That’s what makes this such a breakthrough campaign! Everyone will want to know who it is making the ads. There’ll be investigative reports, a feature on 20/20, 104 until some reporter—one that we choose, of course—‘figures it out!’ ” Alec made little quote marks with his hands. “Then everyone and his sister will be doing stories on how Morehouse & Linney felt so strongly about this issue—about freeing the American public from the shackles of paralyzing regulation—that we made ads with no intention of being rewarded ourselves!”

  “What do you think, Jamie?” Tobias said, quieter now. “Could that really work?”

  Alec didn’t even turn around to throw me one of his you-better-agree-with-me glances. Just the back of his head spoke volumes.

  “I think it’s brilliant,” I said. “We could very well be seen as the heroes of our age.”

  “Or the cowards.” Tobias scratched his hairy knuckles. “I hate taking potshots from behind a wall. It’s very . . . unsportsmanlike.”

  “This is a different world, Dad,” Alec said, sitting down across from his father. I thought he was going to hold his father’s hand. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one. This is my business.” 105

  Just then, I saw a flash of orange through the plate-glass window. It was Carla, in her trading vest, marching past the conference room and holding up her middle finger at the three of us. Her hair was flying behind her.

  “What’s gotten into her?” Alec asked.

  “I better see,” I said, getting up and running out after her. Maybe she had reviewed my comments from the day before, about fucking her for her job.

  “Wait up!” I called to her. “Carla!”

  She stopped without turning around.

  “You guys do that just to piss me off, don’t you?” She was almost in tears.

  “What, Carla? What did we do?”

  “The executive washroom. You know . . .”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.” She looked so vulnerable.

  “Leaving the seat up like that?” she said. “It’s your little message, isn’t it? That it’s boy-turf, right?”

  “I hardly go in there, Carla.” And even when I did, I had no idea we were supposed to put the seat down.

  “Yeah, right. I know about your games. I’ve sent memos, you know. Human resources is totally on my side. I can sue his fat ass over this, you know.”

  “Over a toilet seat, Carla? This isn’t like you, Ms Toughguy.”

  “Just you watch me. I’ll win, too.”

  We stood there together a moment. I smiled at her.

  “It’s not funny,” she insisted, trying not to lose her rage.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, calm now. “I better get down to the pits before they open.”

  “Hey, look.” I felt myself taking her arm as I walked her to the elevators. “That was really weird, yesterday. I’m sorry if I—”

  “You were honest, Jamie. That’s all I could ask for.”

  “Yeah, but it got me thinking. We really started out on the wrong foot, you know? Mixing business with pleasure and all. I really got the wrong idea about you.”

  “No you didn’t.” She pushed the down button. “I’m a mess. You’re right to stay away. The cops should wrap some of that yellow warning tape around me.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re a beautiful woman. And you’re smart.”

  “And still very single at thirty-three.”

  The elevator opened. The urgency of the moment provoked an impulse.

  “Look, Carla, I’ve got the company’s seats tomorrow night. Why don’t we go to the game together?”

  “Because they’re for clients, stupid.”

  “Fuck the clients,” I said. She was turned on by my rebellious tone.

  “You mean it?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s just try to have some fun and see where it goes, eh? Can’t ask for anything more than that.” Where had I heard those lines before?

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Why don’t we meet for dinner at Gotham, say six?”

  “Fuck Gotham,” she said as the doors began to close. “I want Garden foot-longs. 106 Just pick me up at seven.”

  Maybe she was my kind of woman, after all.

  10

  MSG to USB

  A lec’s commercials did their job—and then some.

  Just three days after the first one was broadcast, busloads of market activists began showing up in Washington DC under the banner of Consumer Rights America for what amounted to a continuous vigil on the Mall. The CRA were demanding the resignation of Ezra Birnbaum and the lifting of all remaining regulations on Internet trading. A few pods of counterdemonstrators, mostly teen anarchists and old ladies representing what remained of the Civil Liberties Union, 107 were easily shouted down by the massive crowd, and didn’t even make the evening news.

  Morehouse had me launch the new Synapticom interface right away in order to capitalize on the swell of popular support. No one would dare start an investigation into the program’s legality in the face of such a public outcry, and once the program was up and running, it would be a lot harder to challenge. In the two days since the online reactive architecture was implemented, trading on the site was up over 300 percent. Tobias promoted me to Chief of Technology Investments (a new position, so no one needed to be fired this time) which earned me a write-up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, albeit below the fold.

  “Weird seeing your face like that,” Carla said. We were in the backseat of a stretch limo together, on the way from her house to the Garden.

  “Like what?”

  “In an etching like this. With all those little lines and dots. It makes you look, I don’t know, historical.”

  “I guess. I just wonder what it is I’ll be remembered for.”

  “Don’t be silly, Jamie. You should be proud. You’ve empowered the little guy. Or at least made the little guy feel that way for a while.” Ever the cheerful cynic.

  “You want I should turn the radio up?” the driver called back to us in a foreign accent. “It’s the business wrap-up.”

  I looked at the driver’s image in the rearview mirror. He was a bull.

  “That’s okay.” I ignored the hallucination. “I’m off duty.”

  “Hah!” said the driver. “That’s a good one.” He turned up the volume in the rear speakers.

  “The Fed has reiterated its intransigence in spite of new pressure from the CRA,” said the voice on the radio. “In a press conference this afternoon, reporters had difficulty hearing Ezra Birnbaum over the noise of protestors outside the Central Bank.” The broadcast cut to a sound bite of Birnbaum. “A set of regulatory boundaries provides the discipline for free markets to grow at a sustainable rate. The economy does not need to be as unpredictable nor as potentially cruel as untamed nature.”

  “That’s gotta be weird,” Carla said. “The stuff in the news is the stuff that you and Alec are doing. You feel Machiavellian, or what?”

  “More like Albert Speer, 108 actually.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” I leaned over toward the bull behind the wheel. “Can you turn it to something else?”

  “Sure thing, boss,” he snorted. “I hate that man. That Birnbaum. If he was standing in the street I would run him down.”

  “Wow,” I said, marveling at the power of the campaign I’d helped to architect.

  “Even if he was on the sidewalk,” the foreign bull continued. “I would go off the road to run him down. Even if it would damage the car. That is what I would do. Very much so. I told my wife.”

  I pushed a button, closing the divider between us and the driver.

  “That was kind of rude, don’t you think?” Carla said.

  “Can we not talk for a minute?” I snapped. I would have apologized, but I wanted to let it sit for a while.

  What had I unleashed? I’d merely intended to work as an analyst for a couple of years, get vested, and get out. Maybe get a few good technologies out there—with my name on them. This was all supposed to be for laughs and a few bucks. But the better I got at playing the game, the more it felt like everything was getting out of control.

  “Hey, you’ve gotta lighten up just a little, Jamie. Shit happens, you know?” She had either read my mind or my face.

  “That’s the point, Carla. Shit happens. Real shit. Sometimes it seems like people forget that.”

  “Just keep your head down and plow ahead. It’s all you can do.”

  “I like to know that I’m not smashing anything on the way, Carla.”

  “The more you worry, the worse it gets,” Carla said, putting a hand on my knee. “Believe me, I know. You should meet my mom sometime. She’s practically an obsessive. When my dad died, she got his car. It was almost brand new, and she was so scared about getting it dented that she left it in the garage all the time.”

  “I’m not saying people should deny themselves stuff, or run around worried.”

  “I didn’t finish, Jamie,” she said, putting her index finger on my lips in a move I figured she must have picked up from a Marilyn Monroe 109 movie—a deconstruction I hated myself for making. “So, last week she had to take it out for its regular service. And she crawls along to the dealer at ten miles an hour. Insanely careful. Well, these kids were up on an overpass. And they see her inching along like that, like a timid old lady, and they decide to chuck a water balloon down on her. She’s going so slow that they’ve got plenty of time to aim, and they get her right on the windshield.”

  “So what? A water balloon doesn’t do any damage.”

  “Yeah, but she’s already so paranoid that she freaks out, assumes her windshield’s cracked and swerves over onto the shoulder. Only there isn’t any shoulder. She goes over the curb and hits a railing instead. It hadn’t been there a week ago, but the Transit Authority is in the midst of a big highway safety campaign and they’re putting railings all along the road. The only thing on the other side would have been a field of grass. She’s only going ten miles an hour, but the railing peels off one whole side of the car like it’s the top of a can. She totaled it.”

  “So what are you saying? That the Transit Authority’s vigilance cost your mom her car?”

  “If she had driven the car like a normal person, she would never have been picked out by those kids. She brought it on herself.”

  “Come on.”

  “All I’m saying, Jamie, is you have to learn to recognize when you’re on a roll, and go with it. Stop questioning everything. Things are going well for you.”

  “At other people’s expense, Carla. Even yours. Or have you forgotten about that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.” She put her hand on the back of my neck. “Can you?”

  We made our way into the Garden. Carla leaned into the crowd like a linebacker, gritting her teeth and clearing a path for us with her shoulder. I held her hand and hung on. All around us, the wealthy and their even wealthier clients rushed about like dazed tourists, checking the numbers on their tickets and looking for the correct gates. No one wanted to be late and risk missing out on whatever free promotion—T-shirts, caps, cigars—might be handed out at the escalators. Each of these people probably had enough cash in their wallets to buy a car, and enough available in their credit cards to buy ten more. They earned hundreds if not thousands of dollars a minute, but a single sixty-nine-cent Somali-manufactured Knicks cap with an insurance company logo disgracing the back strap was enough to get them out of the office half an hour earlier than necessary. In a sense this meant they still had souls.

  Anyone who doesn’t know the exact criteria for breast appraisal in twenty-first-century New York need only to descend the steps at Madison Square Garden, where each concentric ring of seats holds women whose busts—either naturally or via cash investment—represent an incremental improvement in shape, size, direction, wobble, and tautness over the ring outside them. This allows the spectator to infer an idealized set of breast characteristics by imagining how the progression would continue past the front row and all the way to center court.

  As we took that physical and cognitive journey toward our box seats, I finally realized why the girls at expensive private high schools like Dalton and Spence were so much prettier than the ones at Stuy. These were their mothers. Rich men could select the most beautiful mates; evolution at work.

  It was as if market forces and arena architecture had arrived at a perfectly accurate distribution of New York’s society page, using a matrix of wealth, stature, longevity, and genetics. Every inch closer to the court corresponded to a measurable increase in total human worth.

  Our seats were good. Really good. Fourth row, just left of the center line. Six seats away from Kevin Bacon. 110 Eight from Spike Lee. Ticket-holders cared more about their own progress toward higher status seats than the Knicks’ progress toward a championship. The jockeying between white millionaires for better positions rivaled anything going on between the black millionaires on the court. Most of the spectators spent a good part of the first half simply registering who was sitting where.

  Just getting inside the Garden was a feat. Even the cheapest seats required purchasing an entire season plan, and the waiting list had reached an estimated twenty-six years long. The only way into the arena was to have connections, and the only way to get connections was with money (or breasts). Once inside, the object of the game was to move down, closer to the action, and closer to the rich, powerful, and famous. The upgrading process involved an even more convoluted set of applications and waiting lists, all designed to keep the meritocracy from functioning. And why should it? This was business. 111

  Firms like Morehouse & Linney offered their tickets to clients or analysts they wished to give a boost. Now that my deal with Synapticom was the focus of the firm’s public relations efforts, it made sense for me to be placed in the coveted fourth row chairs. Still, I was there by proxy more than personal power. These were not my seats, they were Morehouse’s. It meant only as much as flying in his G-2. I had achieved the male equivalent of fake breasts. My tickets had been bestowed upon me.

  It was years since I’d been to a Knicks game, and I was bringing Carla to a Garden disappointingly different from the one my Uncle Morris took me to as a kid. I’d wanted to bond with her on a level more wholesome than the hi-tech financial markets where we spent our days. But this place was more commodity-driven than the pits.

  From the way she squeezed my hand as we edged into our row, I could tell she was thinking the same thing. She was wearing a tight black skirt and an old Sprewell jersey over a sports bra. Her hair draped over her bare shoulders with an elegant, casual grace. The perfect mix of Manhattan class and Bronx cheer. But among the landed gentry of the floor seats, she stuck out like an outer borough bumpkin, and she knew it.

  The renovated Garden now had three tiers of what were called Club seats, all served by waiters. M&L’s row was in the Nothing But Net section, the most exclusive of the three. The dinner fare included entrees like filet mignon and lobster, which were brought on metal trays that clamped to the armrests—making the wealthiest diners look like they were helpless babies in high chairs. Most of them spent so much time eating off trays in the first-class sections of airplanes that this posture probably made them feel safe.

  “Jesus Christ,” Carla said, perusing the blue and orange tasseled menu. “Can’t a person get a friggin’ frank here, anymore?”