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I wake up from my whiskey stupor to the scent of burning motherboards, and I know that something is wrong. Out the window in New York’s Financial District, two men in torn bespoke suits roast a body over an oil drum. It looks like Thomas Friedman’s, but I can’t be sure.

“Brother can you spare a bitcoin?” one screams.

In the distance, I see fire.

I haul myself up, wipe the cigarette ash from my hair, and put on a flak jacket made solely from Golden Parachutes. “War. Horror. Hatred. Death.” I say, to no one in particular. “Looks like I’m gonna get a fucking Peabody.”

“Reporting live from the frontlines of #NYSEDown!” I tell my phone cam. Then I run out the door.

Outside, I take in the scene: street preachers denouncing Gnosticism, a lone banker trying to garrote himself with ticket tape, and the Bull – that gold, beautiful bull – running through the streets like Zeus. I chase after it for a quote, but, like the dubious financial transactions powered by super-compressors, it is too quick.

At Freedom Tower, lost German tourists ask “Where is 9/11?”, but the commemorative booklet sellers who cater to them have disappeared. FiDi’s new currency in the wake the stock market shutdown is glossy pics of The Twin Towers exploding, and the commemorative booksellers already made their killing and moved uptown.

Smoke. Weeping. Screams.

My face attractively smeared from the ash of burning cocaine, I pause for a selfie. Then, I see it.



All the tourists are dead. And missing their spleens.

I hire now-former JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon as my local fixer. “Tell me the ways of your people, caught as they are between the present and the ancient past”, I demand, offering him half a hotdog as payment. Instead, he weeps. He tried to seek shelter at the dungeon of his favorite pro domme, he tells me, but when his black card bounced she slammed the door in his face.

“She was the only human I ever loved,” he splutters. I pat his head in a sensitive but professional way, wiping excess hair gel on his shirt from Pink.

“War is hell” I tell the camera, while manfully clenching my neck.

In Zuccotti Park, once the home of Occupy, the ex-Goldman Sachs boys have built a squatters city out of Hermès gift boxes that were meant for their mistresses. They communicate only by wiggling their fingers. No cops try to roust them. Behind us, Tiffany’s burns.

Then we hear the chanting. Dear god. The chanting. Dimon and I run towards it.

“ALL HAIL THE GREAT GOD HSDSDAOOOF!”

That’s when we see those pile of spleens – some glistening fresh, others roasted black – presented as an eldritch offering before the Google Data Center. “HSDSDAOOOF! HSDSDAOOOF!” the traders shout, beating their CrossFit-sculpted chests. One climbs to the top of the data center’s ledge and throws himself into the pit. “I am the god of light and math”, he chants. The tubes rise up to consume him.

“Dimon! Ask them how much a spleen is going for?” I demand, and he translates. Though this is my beat, I never learned to speak Suit.

He asks, but does not translate the answer. Instead, he jumps at me, clawing at my left rib. I think I make out his local dialect: he wants my spleen, to sell it, and get money, and then give it to his Pro Domme. Perhaps she might love him again.

I see the Bull, leaping and golden, and jump onto its back. “My savior”, I whisper into its metallic ear. “Take me away from all this.”

But he has his own secrets to tell: the bull’s testicles contain the power of capitalism, which is why the police barricaded him during OWS. But his blue-clad servants became lax and, one night, a former occupier gave his balls an irreverent slap.

When Occupy uploaded the footage to Instagram, the crash was born.

The Bull sheds a single brass tear. “If you survive this hell, tell future microsecond traders of my fate”, he gasps, before dying like Aslan.

I sell his spleen. War is no time for sentiment, and I have my own deals to make with the old gods. I want a Polk Award.

I run past the looted Fed and past Ciprianis, where Jamie Dimon’s corpse now hangs from the balcony from its intestines, wearing the rumba panties given to him by his one true love.

The stock market looms in front of me, adorned with the severed heads of unpaid interns. Anderson Cooper poses before it, wearing his tight black t-shirt of war. He rips it off, to reveal another, tighter t-shirt.

“Shit’s gonna get real,” I say into my phone cam, as I turn my face to the more photogenic side. But I know that if I keep taking selfies, my phone will run out of juice.

Meanwhile, atop the barricades of The Autonomous Republic of Fie Die, Jamie Dimon’s rumba panties are flown as a flag. His dominatrix has declared herself the Emira of Goldman Sachs Caliphate. I kidnap Anderson Cooper, and sell the story to CNN using the last of my iPhone’s power.

Above me, I hear the whirring of drones.

Then, they release the bees.