“Come on!” Samuel shouted at the same man, now feeling charged with adrenaline from the crowd. “Your money's in there too, isn’t it? Don’t you want to know what’s happened to it?”
“We deserve to know the truth!”
“We deserve our money!”
“Let us in,” Samuel shouted again, keeping eye contact with the guard in front of him. “You can’t keep us out forever!”
Watching the security man, Samuel could almost see the moment his perspective changed and he succumbed to the will of the crowd. He stopped fighting against them and stepped to one side, allowing the surge of people to push forward, the link in the chain of resistance broken. Other members of the security team tried to fill his gap, but it was hopeless. The dam had broken and the crowd had won.
Within seconds, Samuel was inside the building. A place he had been coming to for over twenty years, a place he thought he knew inside and out; a place he thought he could trust. But Trident was different now. The bank floor was deserted, no tellers behind their booths or welcome staff standing beside the door. The smiling new receptionist nowhere to be seen.
As the mob from outside streamed in, Samuel knew he had to break away if he was going to find anything out for himself. He dove toward the staff staircase and out of the sea of people, keeping his head down as he keyed in his code and dashed up the stairs on the way to the fourteenth floor where he felt safe. Only then could he catch his breath. Only then could he try to figure out what had happened to his bank. To his money. To his life. To the world.
Introduction
The modern banking system is increasingly reliant upon technology to function. Electronic records are the standard for transferring, storing and accessing money, turning what we used to think of as a “hard” form of currency into a digital one, where the sum total of your wealth is expressed as a series of 0’s and 1’s in a computer database. We save our money – in some form or another – to buy homes, start families, go on vacations, protect ourselves against the worst possibilities in life and, ultimately, to have a future.
In 1929, well before digital records were even conceived of, the great Wall Street crash preceding the Great Depression ruined millions of lives. Billions of dollars were lost in an instant thanks to plummeting stock values, soup kitchens became the go-to places to get a few bites of food, businesses ceased to exist overnight and an entire generation’s way of living was upturned in the blink of an eye. Looking back, the one positive we can draw upon from the crash is that it’s well understood what actually happened and, even more importantly, how it could be avoided again.
Imagine, though, a scenario where such a crash was caused not by extensive loans, fraudulent banking or another similar situation, but instead by a rogue group whose only goal would be the complete destruction of the US – and by extension, much of the world’s – banking systems. As our monetary records become increasingly digitized and large banking corporations continue to control more and more of the banking sectors across the globe, if such a group were to find a way to destroy the records of even a single banking giant, the results would be unfathomably disastrous.
Already, terrorism in the world today is more than just individuals or groups dressed in masks waving guns and setting off bombs. The value of computer hackers on the black market has risen over a hundred percent in the last ten years, and nations who don’t field their own array of computer geniuses have easy access to them through groups that hire themselves out. This has led to the startling fact that there is a new cyber-attack taking place roughly twice a minute, costing the United States alone over fifteen billion dollars a year in damage mitigation, damage response and increased cybersecurity bills.
As terrorism goes digital, so comes the possibility that organized groups could find loopholes within the digital economic landscape, exploit them and wreak horrifying consequences upon millions – or billions – of innocent lives.
Imagine, then, if you will, a possible near-future world in which every single dollar in the United States banking system is stored electronically and someone finds a way to wipe all of those 0’s and 1’s clean. If even one of the major banking institutions in the world were to suffer such an attack, it would make the Great Depression look like a tiny blip on the world economy.
Stock markets would crash overnight. Without a way to process paychecks, businesses would shut down within days. Individuals who hadn’t spent time preparing a stockpile of necessities would find themselves fighting with millions of others for scraps of food, water and medical supplies. Governments would be thrown into chaos as the value of the dollar was thrown into doubt, and even massive government interventions would have no guarantee of fixing the situation.
Money is, quite literally, the thing that keeps the world turning. If it’s taken away, though, how long would it take before society would crumble and fall apart? Without a stable economic system, how will the unprepared have a hope of surviving?
Chapter 1
In a dark room in a quiet and unsuspecting neighborhood, KW spun around from her computer and smiled. The screens all around the room showed the same image. Trident had collapsed.
