Chapter 1: Morale Hazard
3 min read
Dear Sir/Madam,
We regret to inform you that your claim for the reimbursement of the loss of the KEPLER-452 AUTONOMOUS RECONNAISSANCE EQUIPMENT in the amount of $17,375,269,224.95 has been denied.
Reason: SPONTANEOUS BLACK HOLE FORMATION is excluded under the Acts of the Void clause, subsection 14(b), which defines such phenomena as “unforeseeable, unquantifiable, and categorically beyond insurable risk.”
If you have questions about this determination, please contact your Customer Service Team.
Sincerely,
Ron Kasprowicz
Vice President of Claims
Echelon Prime Assurance
March 4, 2222
The draft floated above a conference table at Echelon Prime HQ.
“We can’t send this,” Priyanka said.
“We didn’t load for spontaneous black holes,” Brea said.
“They may have an adhesion argument if black hole formations are predictable. We’ll have a PR nightmare.”
“So what, we just pay out four years of our net income in one claim and go to lunch?” Ron said.
Quinn pressed two fingers to his brow. “My book’s gonna get a hell of a haircut.”
They broke for lunch.
After work, Brea was poring over her team’s interstellar marine models at her Gramercy apartment in Manhattan.
What did we miss?
Brea spawned detectives to analyze Echelon’s entire data lake. It seemed like a waste of time, but she let them snoop while she brewed more coffee.
She reviewed the results by thinking commands to her percept, short for “perception enhancer.” Charts and correlation matrices flickered in her field of view as the percept interfaced with her visual cortex.
Her detectives found Lumina’s Sedona trades recently ingested by the Speculative Products line.
Relate Lumina data to the vibrational anomalies across the galaxy.
Weak correlations emerged.
I wonder if we also have EG’s stream.
Ethereal Gateways. They had a competing Spirit Bazaar nexus in Varanasi, India. Speculative Products had their trades, too.
Detectives began spinning interactions between trades from both exchanges and the vibrational anomalies. The signal slowly strengthened. When extracellular glucose dipped and galanin surged in her hypothalamus, the percept suggested she order a pizza.
Half pepperoni.
By midnight, she had the initial findings.
The first chart is headed “When vitals spike, Varanasi stops the trade.” A long bar for Sedona, in shades of orange, is marked from left to right “physician objected, overruled,” “closed,” and “pulled after closing,” and ends in a short gray part. A bar for Varanasi has a short part in two shades of blue-green, the darker marked “closed,” and most of it, in gray, is marked “stopped before closing.”
The second chart is headed “Only closed trades leave an echo in space.” An orange line marked “closed” climbs to a peak just after “the session” and settles by “two weeks,” while a dashed gray line marked “stopped before closing” stays near level. Each line runs inside a pale band of its own color.
The third chart is headed “After the New Year rush, the convoy was lost.” From October to January a white line wanders below an orange band marked “where the earlier collapses began,” then climbs through it in January toward the words “Convoy lost.” Under it is a row of orange bars, two of them topped with blue-green, and the tallest, in January, is marked “New Year rush.”
The following morning, Brea called an emergency meeting.
“Picture yourself sitting on a trampoline here in New York. Someone jumps next to you, you bounce. That’s a vibrational anomaly. Or at least that’s what our models assumed. We didn’t think anyone jumping in Sedona would cause your trampoline to fold in on itself and disappear into a black hole.”
“You’re saying Lumina’s traders doomed the Kepler convoy?” Quinn said.
“We’ll need time to demonstrate proximate cause with counterfactuals —”
“But we have enough to make them sweat,” Priyanka said.
Quinn looked at her. “So, we pay and go to Sedona for recovery?”
On June 18, 2222, Lumina entered into a confidential settlement of claims arising from the alleged gravitational reconfiguration of the Kepler-452 system, without admitting liability or fault. ⬤