Crunched

Numbers and procedures were Janus's milieu and machines his family, as was shown by his early divorce and his tendency to be polite to computers and cash machines. He had grown gray working as data specialist for a well known and now notorious company. Twenty years in the back office keeping the electronic plumbing going. A middle-aged Saint Peter, he held the gates for those golden forsaken children, so they could grab their bonuses and, their toxic work complete, run. This left the company sucked dry, the bosses heading for early retirement on small Caribbean islands or the Riviera.

The human resources man made an unsympathetic mumble about the credit crunch and gave Janus his notice, his severance pay check, a professional goodbye smile, then showed him out of the office.
A security officer accompanied him to the building's entrance and passed on his possessions in a cardboard box.

Taking stock was the hardest part of losing his job, he knew that he was not at fault. Others had made the bad decisions, others had blindly bought and sold products that they hardly understood. If they had asked, he could have shown them. He saw the data in the system and it made a pattern of chaos, heartache and pain. They had to pay. The company may no longer need a Saint Peter, but he still had the keys, the passwords, the credentials and a plan.

It is easy to connect to banking systems from the Internet, easy for Janus, who knows, after years of guarding the company from hackers and criminals. Money passes through a tangled web, from bank to bank, skipping, millions of dollars in microseconds, from account to account. These are the nerves of the system, where money is made and lost, and where butterfly effect storms can really happen.

Janus injects the virus into the banking system's synapses. It spreads fast and in silence, and tomorrow will begin shuffling and redistributing the deck. A new deal: any bank account worth more than a million will be emptied. The money divided among twenty random accounts, on and on, leveling. Its work done, the virus is to delete itself and the records of the transactions. In a few hours it will have covered the globe. Check your bank statements. . . .