novelnext Chapter 5 The Termites' Feast
Chapter 5 The Termites' Feast
The backyard barbecue party scene, which looked like a magazine cover, began to show noise.
The colors faded rapidly, and the originally warm and saturated hues became dull, sharp, and grainy.
Time was fast-forwarded, and Leo's consciousness was dragged into the turbulent 1970s.
He saw long lines of cars on the highway and signs that read "No gas today" hanging in front of gas stations.
He grasped the true meaning of the word "stagflation"—prices soaring while wages stagnated, creating a pervasive sense of anxiety throughout the country.
For the first time, cracks appeared in that sturdy house.
The scene then switched to a university television studio.
A thin, bespectacled man is speaking eloquently to the camera.
His name was Milton Friedman; his logic was clear, and his language was highly persuasive.
He told the American people that government regulation is the enemy of efficiency, labor unions are an obstacle to freedom, and that the only social responsibility of businesses is to create profits for shareholders.
"They repackaged the filthy word 'greed' as rational self-interest and endowed it with a noble virtue." Roosevelt's voiceover was filled with undisguised contempt and disgust. "They devalued a society's responsibility to the weak as a burden that hinders economic development. These termites first and foremost corrode people's minds."
The corruption of ideas led to a political shift.
A familiar figure appeared in the picture; he was once a Hollywood actor, but now he stood at the pinnacle of American power.
Lonner Regan.
His smile was captivating, his voice brimming with confidence, and he promised the American people a "morning for America."
Then, Leo saw that turning point in history.
1981 years.
In the White House press briefing room, President Reagan, facing cameras across the nation, announced in a forceful tone the dismissal of all striking Federal Air Traffic Controllers.
The scene shifts to outside the airport's security perimeter, where those professionals who once controlled the security of U.S. airspace, their union leaders, are handcuffed by police and put into police cars like ordinary criminals.
"Look, son, here it is! This is where everything begins to fall apart!" For the first time, Roosevelt's voice was filled with uncontrollable anger.
"It took me twelve long years and countless struggles to allow union representatives to walk into the White House with dignity and sit at the same table with the giants of capital! And he, Ronald Reagan, with just one televised press conference, completely broke the backbone of the American working class in front of the entire nation!"
"From that day on, the concept of labor-management balance became a complete joke."
The dominoes started to fall.
Before Leo's eyes was a series of rapidly edited, dazzling images.
A massive tax cut bill was signed, reducing the highest federal income tax rate from 70% to 28%, with the biggest beneficiaries being those already at the top of the pyramid.
One by one, the regulatory rules that once bound the behemoths of capital were abolished.
The term "anti-monopoly" has quietly disappeared from the Department of Justice's dictionary.
A massive wave of mergers and acquisitions swept across the corporate world, giving birth to one behemoth after another.
Wall Street, the financial casino that was once caged, has reopened its doors.
Leo saw all sorts of terms he'd only read about in financial history textbooks come to life as crazy tools in real life—junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, financial derivatives…
Those bankers who were once like accountants have transformed into the masters of the new era.
The scene ends with a cut back to the place Leo knows best.
Pittsburgh.
He saw the steel mills he had watched grow up close one after another.
The blast furnace was shut down, and the chimney no longer emitted smoke.
The massive factory buildings became rusty and looked like the skeletons of abandoned steel behemoths.
Thousands of workers, men who once supported their families on a single wage, lined up to receive meager unemployment benefits.
Their faces bore an expression completely different from that of the generation that passed the GI Act—confusion, humiliation, and utter despair for the future.
The illusion of the "Golden Age" was shattered here.
Eventually, all the chaotic images disappeared.
Only one close-up shot remains, magnified infinitely.
It was a young Wall Street trader in the 1980s, wearing an expensive suit and a flashy tie, facing the camera with an extremely arrogant laugh full of conqueror's pleasure.
Behind him were countless trading screens flashing red and green numbers.
Roosevelt's voice turned icy cold at that moment.
"They're no longer content with just gnawing at the foundation, Leo."
"They began to dismantle the load-bearing walls of the house, piled up the century-old timber they had removed, and lit a huge bonfire that they called prosperity."
"Most people, the original owners of those houses, could only stand at a distance from the fire, cautiously picking up a few embers that were still warm from the burning embers to keep warm."
The close-up of that Wall Street trader's arrogant laughter shattered like glass.
The year drew to a close in the twentieth century.
Leo's perspective shifts to Washington, D.C., where he sees a group of politicians and bankers in suits raising their glasses in a lavish conference room.
They are celebrating the formal repeal of a law.
That bill was the Glass-Steagall Act.
"They opened the cage door themselves." Roosevelt's voice-over was eerily calm at this moment.
Then, a storm hit.
2008 years.
Leo experienced this global financial tsunami in an unprecedented way.
He saw the day Lehman Brothers collapsed, with bankers in expensive suits carrying boxes of personal belongings, walking blankly out of their Manhattan headquarters.
He saw an ordinary middle-aged couple sitting in front of their computer, watching helplessly as the value of their 401(k) account, which they had prepared for retirement, evaporated by forty percent in a single day.
He could feel the wife's silent sobs and the husband's deep-seated, helpless despair.
He heard the auctioneer at the foreclosure auction strike the gavel.
Countless families were evicted from their homes of decades because they could not repay the subprime mortgages that were packaged in intricate ways by financial alchemists.
Then, his perspective was abruptly pulled back to Washington.
He saw the bankers who created the crisis, the CEOs of financial institutions that sold toxic assets to the world, sitting in the congressional hearings.
But they were not punished; instead, they are receiving aid.
"Too big to fail!"
At this moment, Roosevelt's voice was no longer one of anger, but a roar from the depths of his heart.
"This is the most shameless lie I've ever heard in my life! They've taken depositors and taxpayers from all over the world hostage, holding the entire country hostage! I summoned the bankers to the White House and reprimanded them in front of them as lawbreakers! And your president, your government, is offering taxpayers' money like sacrifices, begging them to accept it!"
In the video, a bank CEO who received a government bailout of tens of billions of dollars due to failed investments in financial derivatives distributed an astronomical bonus of thirty million dollars to himself in the same year.
After the crisis, even more terrifying monsters sprang up from the ruins.
The old industrial area is completely dead, replaced by Silicon Valley under the California sun.
Leo's perspective flies over those beautiful technology parks that look like university campuses.
But the scene underground was chilling.
He saw the data center lying underground like a giant beast, with countless server indicator lights flashing like the eyes of monsters, greedily devouring information from every corner of the globe.
"Child, did you see that?"
Roosevelt's voice rang out again, this time like a history teacher explaining a completely new topic to his students.
"The trusts I fought against back then monopolized steel, oil, and railroads—those tangible things you could see and touch. And these new-age economic royalists..."
He reverted to the vocabulary he had once used to describe the DuPont and Morgan families.
"They monopolize information, data, our thoughts, and our desires!"
"They create a digital profile of you that's so precise it's frightening, based on every click, every search, and every time you stay on the page. Then, they use this profile to manipulate you, making you buy things you don't need and believe the ideas they want you to believe."
"They've built an invisible digital empire that spans national borders, ten thousand times larger than Standard Oil's empire!"
Just as Leo was overwhelmed by this grand narrative, the camera suddenly accelerated, like a bullet fired from a gun, pointing directly at his own life.
It pierced through the clouds, skimmed over the American continent, and landed precisely in Pittsburgh.
He saw the "Daily Grinding" coffee shop where he worked.
He saw his own Twitter account, "New Policy Ghost".
He saw the pinned tweet about Omni.
Then, the camera penetrated the physical walls and entered a virtual world made up of code and data.
He saw a system backend for a company he had never heard of before, called "Human Shield Data Service Company".
On the system's interface, he saw his name—Leo Wallace.
His profile picture, his personal information, and a screenshot of his tweet were compiled into one file.
At the top of the file, a label automatically generated by an algorithm is clearly marked in red:
Risk assessment: High.
"Emotional Tendency: Antisocial/Anti-business"
Then he saw a series of automated instructions being executed.
This file, marked as "high risk," was automatically distributed to all corporate clients in the "Human Shield Company" database who had subscribed to the "Employee Risk Warning Service."
The client list is very long.
And in that long list, he saw a familiar name.
Daily Grinding LLC
He finally understood.
He finally saw through the entire workings of that "invisible hand".
Cold, efficient, precise, and utterly inhuman.
There was no angry manager, no malicious HR, and not even a single person pressed the "fire" button.
He was simply identified as a "bad asset" by an algorithm within a massive, automated risk management system, and then calmly "eliminated."
The arrogant laughter of that Wall Street trader, and the helpless yet sympathetic expression on Dave's face when he was fired, overlapped in his mind at this moment, spanning thirty years.