Have you had that dream? You know, the falling one; you’re on a cliff edge or the roof of a high building or a bridge or something ….and then you’re not. You’re falling, tumbling and falling, falling, falling. Faster and faster, stomach lurching and too terrified even to scream; rushing through the air and just so horribly afraid. You’re about to die and there’s nothing you can do about it; it’s too late and was the moment you stepped off the edge. Then, just before impact and death, you wake up, heart pounding and so very relieved that it had just been a dream. You lie in bed, heart throbbing, sweating and still frightened; a part of you knows that the nightmare meant something and that in some way you are still falling.
She had had the dream often as a child, less often as a young adult, but lately it had returned to her in the night, like an affectionate but uncontrollable dog or a long-discarded lover. Increasingly she thought it wasn’t just a dream; it seemed to her it might be a presentment or an unconscious recognition that she had, unknowing and reckless, stepped off that ledge a long, long time ago; it was too late to do anything about what was happening and all she could do was fall. ‘Maybe’, she thought, ‘the act of being born was the stepping off firm ground and everything after was tumbling and falling, full of fear, towards the inevitable collision of soft tissue with hard inevitability’. But sometimes, just sometimes, she thought the stepping off happened later in her life, when her young and ‘successful’ self had made choices without realising the consequences for her older iteration. By the time she understood what she had done and not done it was too late: she had stepped off and was approaching the bottom of her fall with ever-increasing speed.
In many ways she had had a successful life. She had had sporting and academic success. Sometimes she told herself or others that, if she had wanted it enough, she could have made it as a tennis pro. and competed and succeeded at the highest level. And, quite often, she believed it. If it had not been for injuries – an achilles and knee ligaments – she would have played in the juniors and then who knows. Quitting, or rather being dropped, had really hurt. It was a hard world; the coach who had been there for her, suddenly wasn’t. There were so many young kids and pushy parents that, if you stumbled, you got trampled on in the rush. She had resolved then that no-one ever again would drop her; if and when it came to it, she would do the dropping.
She’d gone to the university of her choice to study the degree she wanted. She’d said goodbye to her family, such as it was, and her boyfriend without a backward glance. Her mother had cried as she left but not as much as she had when she had quit tennis; those dreams of being the mum of a tennis champion broken with the knee and ankle joints.
Her boyfriend had been a year older than herself. His father ran a sizable plumbing business and he drove a car, which had been a major part of his attraction. He had taken her out for a meal the week before she left and made a pitch for her to give up the notion of university; they could marry, have kids and ‘settle down’. One day he would inherit the business and she wouldn’t have to work ever again. ‘Down’ was active word to her in his proposal. As nicely as she felt able, she told him she was definitely leaving and definitely not coming back. There were any number of girls who would bite his hand off for marriage, children and an idle life, but she wasn’t one of them. He was devastated and then angry as he realised she wasn’t just rejecting him but pretty well everything he aspired to. So, he quite quickly got over his loss and chose one of the ‘any number of girls’.
University had been fine. A first had been followed by a masters with a placement in a prestigious city finance company where she’d slept with her boss and secured the offer of a middle management job. She’d decided then that she would never hook up with someone in her workplace again; it was too messy. He had been infatuated with her. He was ten years older with a wife and two, or was it three? kids. She’d moved on to another finance house leaving him to move on to a small apartment and a custody battle he would never win.
After that work had gone well. She was good at her job, worked harder and more visibly than her colleagues and made a lot of money for the firm, clients and herself. She made plenty of friends, mainly in the same line of work and mainly, but not exclusively, men. Colleagues saw her as driven and pretty hard but fair. They liked her and thought she liked them. She entertained; mainly work colleagues or acquaintances with similar values and ambitions as her own. She had a great apartment and had become a good cook, though she preferred to use outside caterers and could afford to.
By the time she was appointed corporate efficiency executive with a brief to cut costs and maximise profits, answering only to the CEO and the Board, a good many of the relatively few women who worked there had quit or gone part-time as marriage and often, kids, came along. She never really wanted either.
She had a small team under her, one for each trading team. They were young, smart and, on the whole, lacking in conscience but not ambition – just like her. In her first year they and she found a number of ways to cut costs, generally by increasing work-loads and decreasing the establishment. It wasn’t popular but it cut overheads, or appeared to. It was, everyone knew, a highly competitive sector and, even though the firm was making a great deal of money in commission and some smart acquisitions, efficiency was the name of the game.
The ’improvements’ the team came up with had some unintended consequences. Staff turnover increased, partly because some people of a certain age could no longer put their work ahead of their new wife or kids – ‘work-life balance’ they would say, looking faintly embarrassed, at their exit interview. Staff absence increased too, either because of physical ill-health or ‘emotional/mental health’ issues.
After a year she sat down with her boss for a progress review and they reluctantly agreed that the marginal productivity gains had come at a cost and discussed how to present the team’s first year efficiency gains to the Board. The general message would be ‘work in progress’ but some positive signs. She didn’t have much time for her boss but she knew he was protecting her back as well as his own. “What we need”, he said, “is a big idea. Something no-on else is doing that would somehow transform the business.”
She fed the message back to the team. They needed to come up with a step-change….something transformative. “Come on people” she said, smiling, “give me something.”
‘People’ looked at their feet, tried to appear thoughtful and inspired and hoped someone would speak up, preferably with a crap idea that they could all rubbish. At last the newest member of the team, Tim, coughed hesitantly and said, “There is one thing.” He had done some weird degree like physics with astronomy and computer science and looked more like a dreamer than a commodity trader. He was slight, floppy-haired and wore glasses. She liked to think of him as her contribution to diversity in the workplace. The team looked from her to him and back. “Tell us”, she said.
“Well, it probably wouldn’t be what you’re…what we’re looking for but…”
“Tell us”, she said again, smiling.
He looked around the room and then at her. “AI”, he said.
She told her boss. He told the Board, emphasising it was early days and that there was a need to proceed with caution but that the potential for savings and better trading were astronomical. After all, tracker dealing had been as exciting an innovation in its day, minimising risk and maximising profit just through the use of IT to follow market trends.
They started small and monitored closely. They set up a discrete unit, headed by Tim. Initially it simply did some shadow trading, paralleling one of the teams. Results exceeded expectations. She shared them with her boss and he shared them with the Board and was given the go-ahead for phase two implementation. There was a genuine sense of excitement and anticipation which she and others could feel at the firm. She was a winner and everyone wanted to get close to her. When she walked from her office through the trading floor during the day people looked up and smiled or gave her the thumbs up as she passed. If she went to a water cooler or the coffee machine, she was soon joined by one or more people anxious to chat. Morale was high; people liked being part of a cutting-edge firm and anticipated higher than usual bonuses at the year end. No-one took sick-leave any more.
But nothing lasts does it? just ask Ozymandias. The penny dropped when the second stage of Phase Two was given the go ahead. The logic was beyond dispute. If AI outperformed human traders……?
Initially just the weakest performing team was let go. They were given good pay-offs as long as they signed NDAs and cleared their desks within half an hour. It looked and felt like Lehman Brothers in 2008. Losing one team was shock; a price worth paying to her, her boss and the Board, but, strangely not to the team ‘let go’. She and her boss had known from the start that, if things went well, they could dispense with most of the workforce and the firm would thrive and, after all, if they hadn’t thought of what they called their ‘virtual traders’ some other city firm would have.
As other teams understood the fantastic transformation they were involved in, something changed yet again. She suddenly, like flicking a switch, found she could get her water or coffee in peace; no-on would disturb her. No-one looked up and no-one smiled. Odder than that, friends and acquaintances also seemed to pull back. It was a small world after all. When the second and third teams went, pretty well everyone in the business knew something radical was happening and knew someone who had lost their job, together with part of their self-esteem and identity, in the shake-up. She was disconcerted at first; in time people she knew would even cross the street to avoid her. But she didn’t care, not really. Her bonus and her boss’s bonus were incredible and the Board loved her. She could always make new friends. The first suicide of an ex-team member gave her a jolt though. She took two weeks leave and spent them in the Bahamas getting her head straight. Her boss was a huge support. He was adamant that all change was disruptive and the suicide victim had always been a tad flaky. It was a tough world, survival of the fittest and so on.
Eventually AI was doing 80% of the trading and still exceeding expectations.
After about a year something came up. Tim, looking anything but his best, was waiting for her when she arrived in the office. He looked strained and she made a mental note to make sure he took a break soon. Her old team had survived the cull and were mostly managed by Tim under her notional supervision. Their job had changed from finding efficiency savings to monitoring transactions; instead of looking at people working, they looked at AI working. It was boring and surprisingly tiring but they too had been rewarded for their contribution to the reimagining of the firm’s work. Even with them though, she sensed a distancing. She put it down to the fact that she interacted with them less frequently and they no longer socialised as a team at all, at least not with her.
Once they were in her office and seated with a coffee she said, “You’re looking tired Tim. Time you took a break. I can recommend a great villa in the Bahamas.”
He smiled back weakly and the said, “We’ve got a bit of a problem I’m afraid.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t sort though, ………… is it?”
He looked at her with no smile at all.
It transpired that AI was smarter than even they suspected. If the firm wanted transactions and profits, that’s what it would give them; only, they didn’t have to be actual transactions, they just had to be like actual transactions. After all, the money involved often didn’t exist even for real trading and it was much more efficient not to bother going through the whole trading rigmarole which seemed just to be some sort of weird game humans played. So about a third (Tim’s best guess) of the recorded trades were in fact just virtual trades, which satisfied AI and the book-keepers.
She told her boss but he didn’t tell the Board. She signed a non-disclosure, got a huge pay-off and was gone, along with Tim. Her boss explained that she was such a hot property that it had been impossible to keep her and that Tim had wanted to travel once he’d finished his Doctorate.
They had contributed so much on the firm’s journey to becoming a stellar performer that they had both earned the enormous gratitude and good wishes of the company. Having lost such key people though, irreplaceable really, it would be prudent to shift back to a little more human trading activity.
And the Board bought it.
The title of Tim’s thesis, which he didn’t share with his boss, was ‘Technological innovation and its potential for cultural and operational dislocation in complex organisations’.
And where did that leave her?
She had money, her apartment and a kind of splendid isolation. She had a cleaner who also shopped for her and generally bought her meals in. From her twenties on she had been at various times:
- attached, with a partner and sometimes a live-in partner;
- semi-detached, with casual relationships with one or more men;
- unattached, single, independent and free to make her own choices without reference to anyone.
She found having a partner somewhat tiresome. She was irritated at the need to consider someone else. And whatever else they were, they were often needy. Not at first or she wouldn’t have gone near them but, over time they became almost dependant on her. Two had become quite pathetic and hinted, then been open about wanting to marry and maybe start a family. ‘I might as well have married the plumber’ she thought and, once, even said, during the breakup. Once or twice in an unattached phase she had felt the need for someone she could talk to or sleep with who was interested or even concerned so she hired an escort but she couldn’t stand the synthetic contractual attention and charm; it felt cheap and she was not cheap whatever else she was.
She didn’t work again; didn’t need to and then, before she knew it, she was In her sixties. She would sometimes look down from her apartment balcony and see people stop and talk in the street; she didn’t do that. If she was out and an old work colleague came along, one or other would cross the road or she would feign seeing something in a shop window that interested her. She wasn’t ashamed of what had happened (what she had made happen) at work but she really didn’t need to examine and rehearse it all with someone who had been part of it. Neither did they it seemed.
She was alone and aging. She realised then that her situation had come about because of experiences and decisions she had made long, long ago in her youth. The one certainty in life is, after all, decline and death or death pre-empting decline if it comes early. She had not thought in her twenties and thirties that she should plan for her sixties. She had planned to compete and succeed. Life was there for the taking and she had taken. Giving, she had not considered and now, when it was too late, she understood that she would have liked a friend, perhaps even a partner or just someone who liked her even when she wasn’t paying. The only person she spoke to regularly was an old lady who lived on the same floor. They would exchange a greeting when they met in the corridor of the lift. Generally, she managed to be out when the cleaner came and, if not, it was a pretty transactional relationship. She didn’t know much about the woman’s life and circumstances; it had never occurred to her to find out.
And now she was alone – in the quiet of the night and at breakfast and in front of the TV. When she put the key in the lock and opened her door no-one called out. She had always thought she didn’t need people, not special people anyway. There were plenty of people and she had picked and chosen as she wanted, with no obligation on either side. She had assumed she was climbing, getting on and moving up. In fact, there was no beating gravity; life had been like trying to climb a down escalator – stepping up but getting lower. She had been falling not climbing.
Why had no-one told her that what she did and thought as she stepped off the edge would determine her landing?
