The image of the backyard barbecue party, like something from a magazine cover, began to develop noise.
The colors rapidly drained away. The originally warm, saturated tones turned dim, sharp, and grainy.
Time was put on fast-forward, and Leo’s consciousness was dragged into the turbulent seventies.
He saw cars lined up in long queues on the highways, and signs hanging in front of gas stations that read “No Gas Today.”
He felt the true meaning of the word “stagflation”—prices soaring while wages stood still, an anxiety that permeated the very air of the entire nation.
For the first time, cracks appeared in that sturdy house.
Immediately after, the scene switched to a university television studio.
A thin, bespectacled man was speaking eloquently into the camera.
His name was Milton Friedman. His logic was clear, and his language was intensely inflammatory.
He told the American people that government regulation was the enemy of efficiency, that labor unions were obstacles to freedom, and that the sole social responsibility of a corporation was to create profits for its shareholders.
“They took that filthy word, greed, repackaged it as rational self-interest, and endowed it with a noble virtue.” Roosevelt’s voice-over was filled with undisguised contempt and disgust. “They reduced a society’s responsibility toward the weak to a burden obstructing economic development. These termites first corroded people’s minds.”
The corrosion of thought brought about a political turn.
A familiar figure appeared in the scene. He had once been a Hollywood actor, but now he stood at the pinnacle of American power.
Ronald Reagan.
His smile was full of charm, his voice full of confidence, and he promised the American people the coming of a “Morning in America.”
Then Leo saw that turning point in history.
1981.
In the White House press room, President Reagan faced the cameras of the entire nation and, in a hard-line tone, announced the dismissal of all striking federal air traffic controllers.
The scene changed. Outside the security line at an airport, those professionals who had once controlled the safety of America’s airspace—along with their union leaders—were put in handcuffs by the police and escorted into patrol cars like ordinary criminals.
“Look, child, right here! This was where everything began to collapse!” For the first time, uncontrollable fury appeared in Roosevelt’s voice.
“I spent an entire twelve years, through countless struggles, just to allow representatives of labor unions to walk into the White House with dignity and sit at the same table as the giants of capital! And he, Ronald Reagan, used only a single televised press conference to snap the backbone of America’s working class in front of the entire nation!”
“From that day on, the phrase ‘balance between labor and capital’ became a complete joke.”
The dominoes began to fall.
Before Leo’s eyes was a dizzying series of rapidly edited images.
A massive tax-cut bill was signed. The top federal income tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%, and the greatest beneficiaries were those who already stood at the top of the pyramid.
One regulatory law after another, laws that had once bound the monstrous beast of capital, was abolished.
The word “antitrust” quietly withdrew from the dictionary of the Department of Justice.
A towering wave of corporate mergers surged upward, and one corporate behemoth after another was born.
Wall Street, that financial casino once locked inside a cage, had its doors opened again.
Leo saw all kinds of terms he had only ever read in financial history textbooks become mad tools in reality—junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, financial derivatives…
Those bankers who had once been like bookkeepers transformed in an instant into the rulers of a new era.
At the end of the scene, it cut back to the place most familiar to Leo.
Pittsburgh.
He saw the steel mills he had grown up seeing, shutting down one after another.
The blast furnaces went dark. The smokestacks no longer emitted smoke.
The enormous factory buildings became rusted and mottled, like the abandoned remains of giant steel beasts.
Tens of thousands of workers, men who had once been able to support an entire family on a single wage, lined up in long queues to receive meager unemployment benefits.
On their faces were expressions completely different from those of the GI Bill generation—confusion, humiliation, and utter despair for the future.
The illusion of the “Golden Age” was shattered completely here.
In the end, all the chaotic images disappeared.
Only one close-up remained, magnified without limit.
It was a young Wall Street trader from the eighties. He wore an expensive suit and a flamboyant tie, and he faced the camera with an extremely arrogant laugh, full of a conqueror’s delight.
Behind him were countless trading screens flashing with red and green numbers.
At that moment, Roosevelt’s voice became bone-chillingly cold.
“They were no longer content with merely gnawing at the foundation, Leo.”
“They began tearing down the load-bearing walls of this house, piling up the century-old timber they dismantled, and lighting a gigantic bonfire they called prosperity.”
“And most people, the original owners of that house, could only huddle far away from the fire, trembling as they picked up a little of the still-warm ash left after the burning to keep themselves warm.”
The close-up of the Wall Street trader’s arrogant laughter shattered like glass.
Time arrived at the end of the twentieth century.
Leo’s perspective was pulled to Washington, D.C., where he saw a group of politicians and bankers in suits raising glasses in celebration inside a magnificent conference room.
They were celebrating the formal repeal of a law.
That law was the Glass-Steagall Act.
“The door of the cage was completely opened by their own hands.” Roosevelt’s voice-over was terrifyingly calm at this moment.
Immediately after, the storm descended.
2008.
In an unprecedented way, Leo experienced the financial tsunami that swept across the globe.
He saw the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. Bankers in expensive suits carried cardboard boxes filled with personal belongings and walked out of their headquarters building in Manhattan in a daze.
He saw an ordinary middle-aged couple sitting in front of a computer, watching helplessly as the 401(k) account they had prepared for retirement evaporated by forty percent in market value within a single day.
He could feel the wife’s soundless sobs, and the husband’s despair, helplessness sunk deep into his bones.
He heard the sound of a foreclosure auctioneer bringing down the gavel.
Countless families, unable to repay subprime mortgages that had been packaged by financial alchemists into something impossibly complex, were driven by banks out of homes they had lived in for decades.
Then his perspective was yanked violently back to Washington.
He saw the bankers who had created this crisis, the CEOs of the financial institutions that had sold toxic assets to the entire world, sitting in the hearing seats of Congress.
But they were not punished. On the contrary, they were receiving bailouts.
“Too big to fail!”
At this moment, Roosevelt’s voice was no longer anger, but a roar from the depths of his lungs.
“That is the most shameless lie I have ever heard in my life! They used the savers and taxpayers of the entire world as hostages and kidnapped the whole country! Back then, I summoned the bankers to the White House and scolded them to their faces as lawbreakers! But your president, your government, held the taxpayers’ money before them like an offering and begged them to accept it!”
In the scene, the CEO of a bank that had accepted tens of billions of dollars in government aid after failed investments in financial derivatives awarded himself an astronomical bonus of thirty million dollars that same year.
After the crisis, upon the ruins, even more terrifying monsters grew.
The old industrial districts had died completely, replaced by Silicon Valley beneath the California sun.
Leo’s perspective flew over those technology parks that looked as beautiful as university campuses.
But the scene underground made one shudder.
He saw data centers crouching beneath the earth like giant beasts. Countless server indicator lights flickered like the eyes of monsters, greedily devouring information from every corner of the globe.
“Child, do you see it?”
Roosevelt’s voice sounded again. This time, he was like a history teacher explaining a brand-new subject to his student.
“The trusts I fought against back then monopolized steel, oil, railroads—things you could see and touch. But these economic royalists of the new age…”
He used again the phrase he had once used to describe the DuPont and Morgan families.
“What they monopolize is information, data, your thoughts and mine, your desires and mine!”
“Through every click you make, every search you conduct, every moment you pause, they build a digital file on you so precise that even you yourself would be afraid of it. Then they use this file to manipulate you, to make you buy things you do not need, to make you believe the views they want you to believe.”
“They have built an invisible digital empire that transcends national borders, ten thousand times larger than the empire of Standard Oil!”
Just as Leo was shaken by this grand narrative, the lens of the mental film suddenly accelerated, like a bullet leaving the barrel, aimed straight at his own life.
It pierced through the clouds, swept across the American continent, and landed precisely in Pittsburgh.
He saw the “Daily Grind” café where he worked.
He saw his Twitter account, “New Deal Ghost.”
He saw the pinned tweet about Omni Corporation.
Then the lens penetrated the physical walls and entered a virtual world composed of code and data.
He saw the system backend of a company he had never heard of, called “Human Shield Data Services.”
On the interface of this system, he saw his own name—Leo Wallace.
His profile picture, his personal information, and a screenshot of that tweet had been integrated into a single file.
And at the top of the file, a tag automatically generated by an algorithm was clearly marked in red:
“Risk Assessment: High.”
“Emotional Tendency: Anti-social/Anti-business.”
Immediately after, he saw a series of automated commands being executed.
This file, marked “High Risk,” was automatically distributed to every corporate client in Human Shield’s database that subscribed to its “Employee Risk Alert Service.”
The client list was very long.
And in that long list, he saw a familiar name.
Daily Grind Limited Liability Company
He finally understood.
He finally saw clearly the entire operating process of that “invisible hand.”
Cold, efficient, precise, and utterly inhuman.
There was no angry manager, no malicious HR representative, not even any specific person who had pressed the “fire” button.
He had simply been judged by an algorithm within a vast automated risk-management system to be a “bad asset,” and then calmly “cleared” away.
The arrogant laughter of that Wall Street trader and the helpless, sympathetic expression on Dave’s face when he was fired, at this moment, crossed thirty years of time and overlapped in his mind.