Palindrome: Traversing Fields for Planting.

Magnification

William looked at the symbols as he typed. He added another line. He added the symbol to terminate the line. He hit the enter key. And the lines scrolled past him. Programming for him was like planting. He created rows of symbols; some which when grouped together functioned like tiny machines. They accepted an input, a value, which changed their output. Ana said this output was a voice, a time when these tiny constructions spoke.

The programs he had been working on for the bank were intended to remove moments in time as the algorithms from other banks carried out each low-latency trade. There was an increase in trading activity in a commodity as any given bank attempted to increase profit from the vast number of trades occurring each millisecond. The desire to increase profit had a momentum and a force. Each bank stood back, like an unlikely avatar in a game, poised to release their trades into the market which were then released like an enormous cloud of pollen, executed at the speed of light, on machines whose materials were slowly evolving to increase the speed of each trade. And as William noticed before, as each bank released their trades into the exchange, the price curves flattened as this activity created a weight on the waveform of the price curve.

William viewed the price curves that cycled through the exchanges as living entities. And they were. They were comprised of millions of human investors making an exchange, to buy from another or sell to another. They were based on decisions each person made about their understanding of the value of the commodity or equity over a specific timeframe, the non-abstract information. And then there were the banks, and their change of scale, whose teams of algorithmic traders distorted this coarsely constructed human generated price curve. As the cloud of trades were released into the market, coming and going at the speed of light, momentary scars appeared on the price curve; forming a grey-amorphous body that attached to the curve, quivering as a million trades were executed in milliseconds and then disappeared.

William was to write programs that could interfere with these bodies of trades. His bank hoped to cause interruptions, creating a tiny stumbling block that allowed their trades to execute ahead of the other banks. But as he worked on this his mind began to understand something else. As the scars of algorithmic trades increased on the price curve, and the curve flattened, there was also a shortening of the cycle. Over the course of the day, as the price curve flattened, entire cycles within one day increased in number and so in frequency. He described this to Ana, saying that if you could hear them with a listening device that could perceive the fluttering of the nearly-flat waveforms, it would sound like a tiny rapid beating of a heart.

And it was at this point, after this discussion that William and Ana decided to listen to the execution of these trades by magnifying the cycles where the scars had formed.

But as they listened to the rush of trades occurring and watched the price cycle decay, they noticed something. There was always a point, where the amplitude of a cycle became almost imperceptible. There the waveform was no longer a writing over linear time, but instead became a point of silence that attracted everything to it. And as this occurred, there was a concurrent change in the price cycles of other commodities and equities across the exchange. These were momentary bumps on the cycles, a sharp move up or down. Not enough to change the direction of the price, but enough to be observed. It was a lateral move, a cross-talk from one commodity or symbol to another.

William wrote down this description in order to hold it close—the price curve was attacked by algorithmic trades creating a scar; this density on the curve weighed down the curve, flattening it. This caused a quickening; an increase in frequency, resulting in the price curve becoming a point, which then somehow impacted all other price curves on the exchange.

William thought to himself, "There's no explanation for this."

He then gave Ana a set of waveforms of over one-hundred commodities, showing this lateral move and she began to measure the aberration.

She then looked over at William, "I think they are getting larger".

William looked, and she was right. There was the point on the original price curve, the place of silence that drew the peak of the waveform to it that became the point of departure away from the 2-dimensional writing. And at first, the aberrations on adjacent charts across the exchange appeared as sharp blips on the intraday price curves. But over time, over the course of the day, these distortions began to extend for longer and longer periods of time. And if you looked at the waveforms during this period of one hundred commodities, it looked like a ripple expanding, from tossing a pebble into a pond. It was having a profound effect and changing the price of all the commodities, but it was doing so in a way that at first was unseen because you only perceived part of the ripple; a point along the perimeter of an expanding circle of influence.