Money is an ab­strac­tion to me. I han­dle tril­lions of dol­lars for clients each day but only seem to work harder the next. Peo­ple's eyes often glaze over when such sums are men­tioned; they have no con­cept of what a few tril­lion would mean to them. I, on the other hand, find it nec­es­sary to ask, "And how many cents?"

We re­cently moved of­fices so I could be closer to the ac­tion, closer to the fi­brous heart below lower Man­hat­tan. I now have the upper hand and am con­sis­tently a faster draw than my neme­sis in Chicago, the Weasel. My neigh­bor dis­dain­fully com­pares our com­pe­ti­tion to a game of teenage girls play­ing the card game spoons, but this doesn't do the com­plex­ity of our work jus­tice, nor the speed at which we do it. (My neigh­bor’s true na­ture is ob­struc­tion­ist any­how. His sole pur­pose is to strate­gi­cally flood the wires with use­less bids, thus de­lay­ing the ar­rival of the com­pe­ti­tion’s of­fers. His vo­ca­tion is one small step up from a spam-bot.) For that mat­ter, it also be­lies the se­ri­ous­ness of our game - I will not rest easy until I de­stroy the Weasel com­pletely and stand alone.

There has also been talk of reg­u­lat­ing high speed trad­ing, of clos­ing down our im­moral, con­found­ing busi­ness. But I do not fear for my job - hu­mans de­mand the chance to get rich quick. Bet­ter to try with me than with Ponzi, Mad­off, or the next mas­ters of the uni­verse.

Through the slow hours of the night, I dream:

of com­ing face to face with the Weasel,

of the few tiny mis­takes I've made - orig­i­nally played out in nanosec­onds but now re­an­a­lyzed with ex­cru­ci­at­ing pre­ci­sion,

of an edge case (just be­yond the pos­si­bil­i­ties for risk I’ve con­sid­ered) send­ing me down a whirling vor­tex lined with dol­lar bills into the abyss,

of skim­ming off a cut for my­self, ab­scond­ing to the Ba­hamas, and be­com­ing human.

Amelia Green­hall