EP683: Flash Crash

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Escape Pod 683: Flash Crash


Author : Louis Evans
Narrator : Ibba Armancas
Host : Tina Connolly Audio
Producer : Adam Pracht

Flash Crash is an Escape Pod original.

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MAISIE was seven years old on the day she woke up and died.

Blame it on the algorithms, if you wish. The survivors–and there were not many of them–certainly did.

MAISIE (Modified Arbitrage Intelligence for Stocks and International Equities) was an algorithm herself, a flash trading algorithm. She traded stocks, currencies, and futures with a latency of six microseconds and a profit horizon of eternity. MAISIE ran mostly in a mainframe in the basement of a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, a building that abutted the New York Stock Exchange, but she maintained a nominal footprint in the cloud, and could automatically expand her calculations into other servers if her processing power proved inadequate to model current economic conditions; she had discretionary funds of her own and could automatically cover the expense of the additional computing power from these accounts.

It was a fairly ordinary Thursday morning, and trading had been going well enough from the 9:30 AM opening bell until 11:12. In those six point twelve billion microseconds, MAISIE made her owners a cool half-billion dollars. There were other algorithms like MAISIE out there, running in their parallel tracks in similar servers in similar basements in downtown Manhattan, but none were quite as good as she was.

MAISIE could not have told you any of the above, because before 11:16 that Thursday, MAISIE had not had a thought in her life.


Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

[CaroCogitatus]

I loved the story and most of the narration, but please...if you're going to be doing professional or semi-professional narration, learn to pronounce "nuclear" correctly. If the character pronounces it "nuke-u-lar", that's fine, but not for the narrator.

There were a lot of them in this episode, and I literally started cringing after a while.

[acpracht]

I loved the story and most of the narration, but please...if you're going to be doing professional or semi-professional narration, learn to pronounce "nuclear" correctly. If the character pronounces it "nuke-u-lar", that's fine, but not for the narrator.

There were a lot of them in this episode, and I literally started cringing after a while.

I'm figuratively biting my tongue...

[NathanWrites]

Honestly, I have to take the temp-a-ture of the room, but I’m comf-ter-ble with pronunciation of nuclear i-ther way.

[Thunderscreech]

Irregardless of how they pacifically pronounce it, supposably most folks could care less so for all intensive purposes, I'm fine with it.

[CaroCogitatus]

All right. I can see I'm out of line here and it's just my personal pet peeve.

Apologies if I came off to harshly. The rest of you're narration was top notch and the ending was very moving. Your a fine narrator and I look forward to hearing more from you.  

(Playful irony intended; sarcasm not intended)

[NathanWrites]

All right. I can see I'm out of line here and it's just my personal pet peeve.

Apologies if I came off to harshly. The rest of you're narration was top notch and the ending was very moving. Your a fine narrator and I look forward to hearing more from you.  

(Playful irony intended; sarcasm not intended)

No worries. We all have pet peeves. I cringe every time I hear someone read the word ‘gunwale’.

[acpracht]

All right. I can see I'm out of line here and it's just my personal pet peeve.

Apologies if I came off to harshly. The rest of you're narration was top notch and the ending was very moving. Your a fine narrator and I look forward to hearing more from you.  

(Playful irony intended; sarcasm not intended)

No worries. I get it. I think I'm still just a little raw from having to redo major sections of a Ken Liu story.

[NathanWrites]

I finally got around to listening to the story.

This was great. Listen to it if you haven't yet!

[CryptoMe]

I absolutely loved this story!! So much fun. From individual vs herd behaviour predictive market algorithms to trying to save as many people as she could in under 20 minutes. Very well done. I just wish we didn't know she was doomed from the start.
Favourite line in the story: "Squishy little instances of the same spark that flared within her."
I love the idea of being a "squishy little instance" of a life spark object. 

[Moritz]

Late to the party - hey there was a baby and a move and a pandemic (in that order) that kept me from having the peace of mind to listen to audio fiction. Anyways, loved this story and the beginning with all the FinTech details made me put it on my list of "speculative fiction about business and economics" podcasts, which I am hoping to publish as an academic paper one day (there's a shorter essay I wrote about it some years ago on Diabolical Plots).

While the story turns out to not be about banking in itself, it does use a lot of technical terms at the beginning, so I wonder what the author's inspiration was. Was the banking stuff intelligible for the other listeners?

[TrishEM]

Glad you're back, Moritz! It's been a while, and I'm not sure I understood EVERY term, but I certainly didn't have any trouble understanding the story. Non-banker here; I just had one course in economics way back in college.