On television, reports occasionally run about amazing shelters where the children now play ball, study, and wear clean clothing. Only if you look closely do you realize it is always the same happy children. The homeless, too, live happily and well-groomed in shelters in front of which they’re filmed playing chess.

Another missing subset of the population is the

BANKER

FORMER HOBBIES: vintage motorcars, wingtip shoes, neckties, naked dancing women

FAMILY: a so-called child

OCCUPATION: basic income

MOOD: fine

This one here is in a bad mood.

He’s no longer a banker, as he was let go. Fairly recently. When it all started. With the so-called inflation. The constant electricity outages. And the algorithms, is there really anything more to know? If you leave every decision about financial markets to machines, you have to reckon with some minor hiccups. The algorithms in the so-called financial market have the capacity always to invest in rising shares. You have to reckon with minor downsides there. In any event it is in the meantime no longer possible to save the banks, as you’d first have to save the state, which can no longer be saved. And this guy. The banker, no longer understands how he is to make something of the incoherent stream of his fragmented, botched ideas.

So—

He’d been let go together with eighteen thousand others in the preceding weeks. He’d been a good investment banker. Known for his fearlessness. He had begun at the time when it was already clear that the system of global financial markets had failed. That global financial markets meant nothing more than dispersing the risks of the US financial market. At a time when one already knew the shit wasn’t going to work out and that the central banks were lowering interest rates to below zero in order to hinder a second 2008. That’s what was said, a 2008, and every banker cringed and pictured himself jumping out the window of an office tower.

The banker had kept at it, subject to Ritalin and dimethyltryptamine, that let him fly, and speed, that made him courageous. The pharma firm that manufactured methylphenidate produced 2.5 million doses daily, with the effect that its users lost their creativity and became depressed, but to combat that there is: speed.

And then, a few weeks ago, the banker’s physique had begun to change. Together with throbbing headaches. He became cautious. His audacity disappeared. Had dissipated. He’d become fearful and his transactions had been questioned. He’d had an existential crisis, because all of a sudden he was no longer sure what he was doing. Adding more imaginary zeros to zeros. Forcing countries into default. And how did it all fit together, and what did the algorithms do, anyway?

The banker has gotten soft of late. Occasionally he stands there shocked, looking at what he has produced. What—utterly unnoticed by him—has grown.

It is

THE CHILD

INTELLIGENCE: unmeasurable

HOBBIES: hospitalism