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Chapter 5: The Feast of Termites
The idyllic backyard barbecue scene, once as polished as a magazine cover, began to distort. Colors faded rapidly, their warm saturation replaced by cold, sharp tones riddled with grainy static. Time accelerated, and Leo’s consciousness was hurled into the turbulent 1970s.
He saw endless lines of cars snaking along highways, gas stations displaying signs reading “No Fuel Today.” He felt the visceral meaning of “stagflation”—prices soaring while wages stagnated—an anxiety that seeped into every corner of the nation’s psyche. For the first time, cracks appeared in the sturdy house Roosevelt had built.
The scene shifted to a university television studio. A small, bespectacled man spoke passionately into the camera. This was Milton Friedman—his logic razor-sharp, his rhetoric electrifying. He told Americans that government regulation stifled efficiency, unions obstructed freedom, and corporations existed solely to maximize shareholder profits.
“They repackaged greed—a dirty word—as rational self-interest and dressed it up as virtue,” Roosevelt’s voice growled with undisguised contempt. “They dismissed society’s responsibility to the vulnerable as an obstacle to economic progress. These termites first corroded people’s minds.”
The corrosion of ideas led to political shifts. A familiar figure appeared on screen—a former Hollywood actor now standing at the pinnacle of American power. Ronald Reagan. His smile radiated charm; his voice exuded confidence as he promised America a new “morning in America.”
Then came the pivotal moment.
1981.
In the White House press briefing room, President Reagan addressed the nation’s cameras with steely resolve, announcing the firing of all striking air traffic controllers employed by the federal government. The next scene showed airport picket lines where professional controllers—guardians of America’s airspace—were arrested like common criminals, handcuffed by police, and shoved into squad cars.
“Look, child! Here it is! The beginning of the collapse!” Roosevelt’s voice erupted with uncontainable fury for the first time.
“I spent twelve years, fought countless battles, to ensure union representatives could sit at the same table as corporate titans with dignity! And he, Ronald Reagan, dismantled the backbone of America’s working class in one televised press conference!”
“From that day forward, ‘labor-capital balance’ became nothing more than a cruel joke.”
The dominoes began to fall.
Leo witnessed a rapid montage of dizzying images. A massive tax cut bill was signed, slashing the top federal income tax rate from 70% to 28%. The primary beneficiaries? Those already perched atop the pyramid. Regulatory chains binding the beast of capital were dismantled one by one. Words like “antitrust” vanished silently from the Department of Justice’s lexicon. Mergers exploded across industries, birthing colossal conglomerates. Wall Street—the financial casino Roosevelt had caged—was flung wide open again.
Leo recognized terms he’d only read about in finance textbooks: junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, financial derivatives. Bankers who once resembled meticulous accountants transformed into masters of this new era.
Finally, the focus returned to Pittsburgh—a place deeply familiar to Leo. He watched steel mills close one after another, the furnaces extinguished, chimneys silent. Once-mighty factories rusted over, their skeletal remains resembling abandoned steel beasts. Thousands of workers—men who once supported entire families on single incomes—lined up for meager unemployment checks. Their faces carried expressions starkly opposite those of the GI Bill generation: confusion, humiliation, and utter despair for the future.
The mirage of the “golden age” shattered here completely.
All chaotic images dissolved until only one close-up remained, infinitely magnified. It was a young Wall Street trader from the 1980s, clad in an expensive suit, sporting a garish tie, laughing triumphantly into the camera. Behind him, trading screens flashed red and green numbers.
Roosevelt’s voice turned icy.
“They no longer content themselves with gnawing at the foundation, Leo.”
“They’ve begun tearing down the load-bearing walls of this house, piling century-old timber together to ignite a bonfire they call prosperity.”
“And most people—the original owners of this house—can only huddle far from the flames, trembling as they scavenge for still-warm ashes to keep themselves alive.”
The arrogant laugh of the Wall Street trader shattered like glass. Time leapt forward to the end of the 20th century. Leo’s perspective landed in Washington, D.C., where politicians and bankers celebrated in a lavish boardroom. They toasted the repeal of a landmark piece of legislation: the Glass-Steagall Act.
“The cage door has been flung wide open,” Roosevelt’s voice intoned, eerily calm.
Then came the storm.
2008.
Leo experienced the global financial tsunami in unprecedented detail. He saw Lehman Brothers collapse, bankers clutching cardboard boxes filled with personal belongings walking aimlessly out of their Manhattan headquarters. He observed an ordinary middle-aged couple watching helplessly as their retirement savings evaporated overnight via their 401(k) accounts. He sensed the wife’s silent sobs and the husband’s bone-deep despair. He heard auctioneers pounding gavels, foreclosing homes whose owners couldn’t repay complex subprime mortgages peddled by financial alchemists.
His view snapped back to Washington. There, CEOs of institutions responsible for the crisis sat before Congress—not punished but bailed out.
“Too big to fail!”
Roosevelt’s voice roared, raw and guttural.
“It’s the most shameless lie I’ve ever heard! They held the world’s depositors and taxpayers hostage, blackmailing entire nations! I summoned bankers to the White House and berated them as outlaws! But your presidents, your governments, groveled before them, offering taxpayer money as tribute!”
Onscreen, a bank CEO who received billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts awarded himself a $30 million bonus that same year.
After the crisis, even more monstrous entities emerged from the ruins. Old industrial zones lay dead, supplanted by Silicon Valley under California sunshine. Leo’s gaze soared over tech campuses designed to resemble university grounds. But beneath the surface lurked horrors. He saw sprawling underground data centers, server lights blinking like monstrous eyes, voraciously consuming information from every corner of the globe.
“Do you see, child?”
Roosevelt’s voice returned, now that of a history teacher explaining a new subject.
“The trusts I fought monopolized steel, oil, railroads—things you could see and touch. But these modern economic royalists…”
He used the term he once applied to DuPont and Morgan dynasties.
“They monopolize information, data, our thoughts, our desires!”
“They track every click, every search, every pause, building digital profiles so precise they terrify even their subjects. Then they manipulate you—selling things you don’t need, feeding you beliefs they want you to hold.”
“They’ve constructed an invisible digital empire spanning borders, ten thousand times larger than Standard Oil’s!”
As Leo absorbed this grand narrative, the mental film’s lens suddenly accelerated like a bullet fired straight into his own life. It pierced through clouds, raced across the American continent, and landed precisely in Pittsburgh. He saw the coffee shop where he worked—Daily Grind—and his Twitter account, @NewDealGhost. He saw his pinned tweet about Omni Corporation.
Then the camera breached physical walls, entering a virtual world of code and data. He discovered a system backend he’d never heard of: Shield Data Services. On its interface, he saw his name—Leo Wallace. His profile picture, personal information, and screenshot of the tweet were compiled into a dossier. At the top, an algorithm-generated label marked in bold red letters:
"Risk Assessment: High."
"Emotional Tendency: Anti-Social / Anti-Business."
Instantly, automated commands executed. The flagged dossier was distributed to all corporate clients subscribed to Shield’s "Employee Risk Alert Service." The list of recipients was long. Among them, Leo spotted a familiar name.
Daily Grind LLC
It all made sense now. He finally understood the full operation of the “invisible hand.” Cold, efficient, precise—and utterly devoid of humanity. No angry manager, no vindictive HR department, not even a single person pressed the “terminate” button. He was simply judged by an algorithm within a vast automated risk management system as a “toxic asset” and quietly purged.
The arrogant laugh of the 1980s Wall Street trader overlapped with Dave’s sympathetic yet helpless expression during Leo’s termination. Across three decades, the two moments converged in his mind—a chilling echo of history repeating itself.
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