Fiction — Bank on It

As usual, I’ll explain elements of the story at the end.

Right now, I can say that this story came together shockingly quickly, after days of trying to find a place to start. And it finally pays off a promise that I made years ago.

Bank on It

Ugh. This jerk again. The Monkey-Wrench, he calls himself, and the press inexplicably obliges, despite everyone in the tech press having no trouble identifying him as Spalding Flint, the prodigal son of Flint Consolidated Services Corporation. The Flints have always pushed for redistribution of wealth into their hands, but have carefully kept even their most murderous schemes technically legal for more than a hundred years, before any of my predecessors showed up.

Spalding considers all those legal details beneath him, though. To him, his intellect entitles him to anything he likes. And ever since the family disowned him, his criminal activity has become…let’s call it flamboyant.

“Back off, Luminary,” he shouts from his—I kid you not—giant mech suit. “This money comes home with me.”

I don’t love that he has already ripped the roof off. And…yeah, of course he throws it at me. I specifically approached from the park and cleared it out, to minimize the chance of someone else getting hurt from exactly that, as it turns out, because as much as he talks about his genius, a motivated child could predict his moves. I take a large beam to the shoulder, but that should heal by morning.

Honestly, I wouldn’t normally waste time on this creep stealing the money. Bank branches don’t exactly hold piles of cash on hand. The authorities will have plenty of time to figure out how to find him while he scrambles to launder what he gets out of this deal. And insurance exists for exactly this sort of nonsense.

My mother sweeps the floors, there, though—ironic, given that she can’t get an account at the place—and I don’t remember if she works today, so I want to limit the odds of her getting caught in the damage. Plus, as mentioned, I have a genuine dislike of this jerk. He and his family routinely lobby for punitive immigration laws while exploiting undocumented labor.

“Pull your foot out of the bank, Flint,” I yell, figuring that I might as well play it up for the reporters, now that they’ve set up. Over the last few years at this, I’ve noticed that using my powers to catch people responsible for wage theft, toxic dumping, and hate movements, the media ignores what they can’t outright spin as villainous. And stopping a domestic abuser can go either way, depending on their preconceived notions about the perpetrator. As a result, when I do something that looks like a defense of the status quo, I try to make the story easy for even them to follow. “Give it up, man. You have no way out of this. You’ve stepped in more than the bank.”

I rush away from the fight to reposition some reporters and other bystanders across the street, before some debris strikes them. My mother stands among them, on the fringes. Good, I don’t need to worry about her inside. I borrow a notepad from one of the reporters to leave my mother a note suggesting that we catch up over lunch in a few days, then rush back to pretty much where Flint still looks at me.

He cackles, one of the reasons that I don’t like him. “Oh, I have everyone right where I want them.” I feel, more than hear, a subsonic vibration coming from inside the bank, near that foot. Only in Four Freedoms City.

“Whatever, kid.” I mentally scan in different directions, reposition myself to keep anything out of the path of my damage, and let loose an atomic blast through the mech suit. I hear Flint’s cackle turn into a scream as he ejects from the giant suit, now sloppily bisected through its midsection.

“I’ll get you next time, Luminary,” I hear amplified from a distance. I told you: Jerk.

Meanwhile, I tell the bystanders that they no longer need to worry about Flint, but warn them against re-entering the bank until the fire department can check out the structure. I wish I could say that the smoldering giant robot leg would serve as a better warning than me, but no, people already seem to want to go inside. As the reporters approach with questions, I wave and leap away, looking for a quiet place where I can change back into normal clothes and get back to my day.

---

“Really? A giant robot leg sticking out of the roof of Down Town Savings? Cuartio, I’ll have to ride by before they haul it away.” Song Chen got me my first job, and knows my secret after covering for me for so long. She retired a couple of years ago, but we still get breakfast every couple of weeks.

“Yep. It looks surprisingly nice. Maybe they can keep it there, change the bank branding to something leg-related, like…”

“Deep Pockets Savings Bank, definitely.” It took me months to realize that she keeps her thick accent specifically so that her command of English surprises people. I have a bunch of weird powers because of whatever my father did to me while our world died, but Song code-switches on a supernatural level.

“Good one,” I laugh. “At least the change would make this heist make some sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the news says that he breached the vault, probably that weird sound that I heard, not that it makes a difference. But Flint—”

“Monkey-Wrench,” she questions with an exaggerated grin on her face.

“Nope. I will not give him that satisfaction. Flint invented a variety of technologies, which seem worth a fortune, if he sold them. He built that suit, which must have cost a fortune on its own. And figure that, even if he emptied the vault, maybe he could’ve gotten away with two hundred thou? How many heists would he need to pull, like this, to break even and make more than patents?”

“Fair. Two hundred sixty, bare minimum. One every weekday for a year?” What doesn’t this tiny woman study?

She opens her mouth to say something else, almost certainly about to top herself, when I hold a finger up to catch a conversation over my shoulder.

“…without that loan, will need to close the business.”

“I hear that Parsley & Frame has a similar problem, not even enough to lay people off.”

“Did they do business with Down Town Savings?”

“No, they have money with Crown Bank, but the attack sparked a bank run in the area, in case Monkey-Wrench comes back. And the Hotel Attraction has had to stall their improvements, because Down Town’s investors have pulled in every contractor to get their branch back into shape and put this incident behind them.”

More concerned, now, I turn back. “Song, did you catch any of that?”

“I sure did. If I pick up the check and head home to follow the money, do you want to check in with some bank managers?” She slips her credit card to the server, so that she can expedite our exit.

“That sounds like a plan. Same time tomorrow?” I gesture around the Four Freedoms Café as she smiles in agreement.

---

“Thank you for meeting with me, Ms. Kuusk.”

“Indeed, Mr. Donati. Who did you say that you worked with?”

“FMWUB, ma’am. We handle the auditing for Parsley & Frame.” Thank goodness this identity and cover story doesn’t need to withstand much scrutiny. “We can’t say who, understand, but someone in their camp asked us to look into the possibility of someone siphoning money into competitors.”

She taps at her computer. FMWUB has apparently acted far more forcefully than my requests, here, with far less of a story, given how quickly she conforms. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

“Well, we wouldn’t expect it to look blatant. Could you, perhaps, get me a list of Parsley & Frame’s local competitors?” Like I said, it doesn’t need to withstand scrutiny. The cover only needs to…

“I apologize, Mr. Donati, but you know that I couldn’t break confidentiality on our customers. Especially since…I never did see your identification.”

There we go. I only needed that defensiveness at the right time. She knows her customers, so having provoked her into protecting them, I can pick them out of her mind without her violating any confidentiality agreements…at least, not in a way that can get her in trouble. As to the other part, my cue has arrived.

“Not to worry, Ms. Kuusk. I’ll have my office send everything that you need, when I get back. I’ll also have them send an official apology, in case anybody believes that you have overstepped.” A lie, but now I only need it to withstand enough scrutiny to get to the door. “Thank you for your time, ma’am.”

On the way out of Crown Bank, I duck into an alley. It gives me a beat to drop the disguise for “Mr. Donati” and replace him with “Mr. Dharmawan,” and continue on to Traders National, rinsing and repeating for the other major banks in the neighborhood. By “close of business,” a phrase that I have now heard far too often for my health, I return home with a decent map in my head of which local companies bank where, and their danger as people keep pulling their savings out.

At the Four Freedoms Café early the next morning, Song shuffles to the table, looking a bit off her game.

As if reading my mind, she blurts out an answer. “Tea. Now. I stayed up all night chasing leads on the Internet. I chased the news of Monkey-Wrench’s spree,” her voice lowers to a conspiratorial tone, “around the country through every major population center, and a few that I’ve never heard of.”

She drops a hilariously dramatic pile of printouts onto the table, while reading from her tablet, and continues. “You had it right. Every attack involves some new invention. He mostly fails to walk away with anything useful. And when he does take any money, it can’t possibly pay for his new toys.”

I stifle a chuckle as I flip through the articles that she printed out and realize that they all talk about planning a garden, presumably in case somebody happens to investigate our discussion. Meanwhile, I outline the stakes. “OK, that might fit into what I found. Bank policies look to put about thirty companies out of business and cause a similar number to cut back severely, putting maybe a thousand people out of work. Maybe he wants chaos, bringing the neighborhood and city down?”

“For starters, maybe,” she answers, with her tablet out, showing a series of charts. “But look at these numbers. The same thing happened in almost all the cities, but—”

I cut Song off. “The new unemployed decrease wages in the area, at which point Flint Consolidated Services Corporation buys the patents and brands of the failed businesses, picks up a lot of cheap real estate, and takes on the best prospective employees at cut rates.”

“Exactly. And I don’t know about you, but that tells me how he spends so much money to get so little, too.”

“FCSC and his family still cover his bills,” I realize. “They use him to cross the line, while keeping their hands clean…until the world’s greatest detective catches them.”

Silence. I realize that Song hasn’t said anything, so I look directly at her.

“Oh, please continue, Mr. Torres. I have much more tea to drink to function for the rest of the day.”

“Maybe…try a nap before ingesting all the caffeine that you can find. You did good. You deserve a rest, world’s greatest detective.” She nods and relents, as I realize the enormity of the problem in front of us.

---

“Don’t you have enough to eat, Cuartio,” my mother teases at lunch. “You almost look invisible. You can’t turn invisible, can you?”

“Yes, mami, I have enough. No, I can’t turn invisible, as far as I know.”

“Well, good. How is your other mother?”

“The Jacksons feel fine, and they ask about you whenever they call. You should talk to them without going through me. They miss you.”

“No, they want to take pity on a poor undocumented worker and send me money. Too proud,” she thumps her chest. And undocumented only works as a euphemism, here. Delcine Torres trekked through the deserts on our dying Earth, nine months and change pregnant, to reach a portal anywhere. She made it through and gave birth in the cave that the portal brought us to. I have citizenship, but she has worked in the shadow economy.

“They don’t pity you, mami. They respect what you managed to do, especially for me.” The Jacksons found us collapsed outside the cave, after only a few days in this world. They took us in and got me documentation, and raised me while my mother tried to work out what this new world looked like. I moved out here mostly to get to know her, especially the way the Jacksons talked about her strength. And if anything, they had a talent for understatement.

“They have guilt, then, for nearly hitting a new mother and baby with their car on the side of the road.”

“Stop exaggerating. And you shouldn’t need to work in the shadows. I’ve worked with the Woosters on…projects that you don’t want me to talk about, but they have people who could get you papers—”

“No, absolutely not. We do not lie about what makes us us, Cuartio. And even if they find me, they can’t deport me. Where can they send me? I come from the other side of a tiny rip in space in a magic cave in the desert that someone has probably bulldozed and replaced with another Shopway.”

“At least think about it, mami. I would feel better if you didn’t need to hide.”

“Says the boy,” I should have seen this coming, “who sneaks out of his office to fight giant robots.” And I can’t really call her wrong, there. The last few years have left me wondering if anonymity protects me from retribution or shields me from accountability. But I don’t really have time for that ethical debate right now.

“Fine, but think about it. I’ll think about your point, too. But first,” I realize that we might have a few problems that overlap, here, “with a couple of days’ notice and permission taken care of, do you think that you can organize some of your colleagues to put together a…secret block party, something like that, down Main Street?”

“I think so. Why?”

She hates hearing about my “extracurricular activities,” so I try to spend as little time as I can on the fight at the bank, especially since she saw it, and I outline the overall plot.

She whistles through her teeth. “We had people like that on our world, poisoning everything, until nobody survived except us. I’ll make it work.”

With that, she rushes out the door, sandwich in hand.

Meanwhile, I make a phone call.

“Long time, no hear, right? Listen,” I explain,”in talking to my mother, I realized that I have a case that might interest you…”

---

I decide to attend the block party as the Luminary, figuring that will save me a few steps, throughout the day. And as always, it never hurts for people to see that version of me in public, acting like a normal person. It feels like this might go smoothly, until some teenager drags me to the main stage. I suppose that situations don’t praise themselves.

On stage, I clear my throat and hope that my speed lets me get through this without making a complete fool of myself.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank everyone for coming out. We’ve had a rough few days, in this neighborhood, but we have survived.”

They cheer.

“We survived, because we stood together and helped our neighbors.”

They cheer again, happy to have someone see them as the heroes.

“We also survived, thanks to help from Wooster Amalgamated, helping us keep money moving through our community, when circumstances made that difficult. Mr. Wooster assures me that I have his permission to bring any and all of you to his office, if he so much as requests anything more of you than scheduled repayments.”

Another cheer. Once Eebee heard that the Flints had their fingers in this scam, he originally offered to give the companies grants to replace their loans, no strings attached, but eventually concluded that it would help his image as a sleazy CEO more if I “threatened” him into making fair loans.

“And we survived,” I conclude with fingers crossed that this doesn’t backfire, “because our entire community got involved. Those of you in the business community may not recognize the folks in our undocumented community, but they put this entire party together. It has come time for the different communities in this neighborhood—in this city—take care of each other. And when I say that, rich folks, understand that I mean that you do most of the work of taking care of everyone else.”

I see polite, grudging golf claps from the CEOs—they see that my help comes with strings attached, after all, and that I don’t mind bullying the occasional corporation—while everyone else cheers. All things considered, it could have gone far worse, since I definitely don’t love public speaking.

And that leaves one stakeholder remaining at this meeting.

“Luminary,” Spalding Flint bellows loud enough that we can hear his natural voice over his loudspeaker. “I told you that I’d settle the score.” He rides atop a giant robot made in his own image.

I told you. For a self-styled genius, anybody can predict what he’ll do. This speech, I have prepared.

“Spalding, we didn’t invite you to this party, but we welcome you, anyway, at least for the moment. Members of the press, Ms. Chen and Ms. Torres have distributed all the information that you need to connect Mr. Flint’s technological tantrums to Flint Consolidated’s buying spree across the country. They bankroll him to destroy, so that they can march in.”

I walk casually down Main Street to Flint’s robot, as he makes incoherent sputtering noises from his loudspeakers. I can see in his mind that he has no backup plan, here. In the best case, the family will really disown him, this time.

I give the robot’s foot a kick, sending shock-waves through the entire mass. With the number of people around, I need to take some care in disabling this thing, so I start by leaping up to tear the cables out of the knee-joints to paralyze it.

Furious, Flint arms some sort of launcher on the wrists, but running up the body to give the steel wrists a solid slap ensures that whatever he planned to launch detonates in the chamber, detaching the arms. I clear away any bystanders, but let the metal arms fall to the ground.

My target sits further up. As I crack open the head, Flint fires an energy rifle at my chest. It hurts, but it doesn’t even damage my costume. I crush the rifle in my hand, as I pull Spalding out and bring him down to street-level, where the police await.

“If none of the journalists will share,” I tell the highest-ranking officer while pointing at the assembled reporters, “I assume that at least one paper will feel the obligation to run the story.” And with that, I vault away.

I quickly change and double back, so that I can spend some time anonymously in the crowd.

“You’re late,” my mother admonishes.

“Yes,” I respond, assuming that she aimed for a joke, there. “I had a couple of errands to run, and some people to talk to.”

“Not the party, Cuartio. Check your calendar.”

Oh, no. I forgot. “Robert,” I say as she nods pointedly at me. I kiss my mother goodbye and rush off, mentally kicking myself for forgetting my dinner date in all the theatrics. I might make it before he gets annoyed, again…

Credits, Disclaimers, and Other Notes

Overall, I’ve some variation of this story on my mind for at least fifteen years. When working on a role-playing game campaign, I wanted a world that looked like comic books on most levels, but also made some sense. To explain my issue, I started with the classic 1960s idea of a super-scientist villain building a giant robot to rob a bank. I spun that out into a massive conspiracy to undermine the United States, tying into stories from the early twentieth century with various kinds of revolutions.

While that project collapsed—a story for another time, maybe—I’ve always thought that the idea might have some merit, if it had a decent excuse. And this month, along came the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. I don’t want to start any conspiracy theories, but it struck me that, when you line up the timeline, you see a possible narrative that probably has some coincidental aspects to it, but also fits nicely with the story that I already wanted to tell.

• On March 8th, we started seeing “previews” of the February 2023 Employment Situation Survey, which would turn out to have added hundreds of thousands of jobs, despite constant fears from the elites that employees have it “too good.”
• At the same time, SVB announced its vulnerability and risk.
• The following day, big investors—including a name that comes up frequently in discussions of destroying companies for petty reasons—sparked a run on the bank.
• In the days following, people started worrying about companies shutting their doors, with some unable to lay off employees, because they couldn’t pay severance packages.

Again, I most emphatically do not want to accuse someone of causing a bank run in order to increase unemployment around Silicon Valley, in the wake of the February jobs report. Silicon Valley Bank had clear issues, due to deregulation of the banking industry, that would have caused its collapse sooner or later. But I also wouldn’t at all feel any surprise, if someone found evidence to the effect that someone orchestrated it or a whistleblower came forward.

Flint Consolidated Services Corporation adapts ideas in The Air Trust by George Allan England, as initially adapted in my own Seeking Refuge. In that novel, Isaac Flint attempts to create a monopoly on oxygen, so a modern equivalent of that trust seems appropriate to having investments in industries that work against what consumers would prefer.

The Luminary got an offhand mention in Seeking Refuge, where I promised that he “has not appeared yet, but will someday soon.” Welcome to soon. I have a lot of notes about his history and predecessors, which I may eventually use for something. Wooster Amalgamated and “Eebee” Wooster also come from my novel, based loosely on the public-domain-in-the-United-States books in the Wooster & Jeeves series and other sources described in that book’s credits.

I created Four Freedoms City partly around the Luminary, though I may try to pull together a more thorough description some day for people who need a fictional metropolis in their setting, with some level of detail. If you think of it as looking like New York City, then you probably won’t feel too far out of place.

Down Town Savings Bank comes from Philip Wylie’s Gladiator, which lapsed into the public domain after not renewing its copyright. Crown Bank comes from Tom Warin and Nora McGunnigle’s 100 Heroines, which I can’t find available online at the moment and don’t even remember where I got it, but released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Traders National Bank comes from James Branch Cabell’s The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, in the public domain due to a long-expired copyright. Shopway comes from Bulletproof Blues Hotel Attraction originally would have stood in Lower Manhattan on or near the site of the World Trade Center, as proposed by infamous architect Antoni Gaudi. I threw in Parsley & Frame and FMWUB largely as placeholders.

For anybody looking to try out their editing or rewriting with this story, I would strongly recommend starting with how much exposition this tries to pack in. I tried referring to things in passing or making the conversations interesting in some respect, but the fact remains that a lot of this research and analysis doesn’t have a clear “hook,” where we could see our characters engaged with anything. As a result, the story has two sections where the characters explain parts of the story, and I don’t care for it. In a more visual medium, we could at least do some of this with maps and charts, but we don’t get that in prose.

The characters also don’t really have strong voices, probably accounted for by how quickly I put the story together to get it out (later than I’d like) on a timely Sunday post.

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Credits: The header image adapts Cafe by Andrew Garton, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic license.