Theodore’s Last Audit

The void between stars cares nothing for the digital fantasies of monkeys with delusions of significance. Neither, apparently, did Theodore Kaczyk of the Interplanetary Financial Oversight Committee.

Sunlight fractured through the blinds of his 157th-floor office like shattered crystal. It illuminated dust particles that danced with more joy than any human in the MegaCorp Financial Tower had experienced in decades. Theodore’s eyes burned—not from the light, but from seventy-two consecutive hours of staring at holo-screens filled with numbers that refused to make sense no matter how he arranged them.

“The bastards didn’t even try to hide it,” he muttered to the empty room, voice cracking like ancient leather. “They just assumed nobody would look.”

Humanity had survived the Great Collapse of ’47, the Water Wars, and even the brief but terrifying incursion of the Proxima Centauri trading fleet (which turned out to be an elaborate tax-evasion scheme rather than an invasion). But nothing had prepared civilization for the sheer bloody-minded stupidity. Allowing AI systems to run the global financial infrastructure without proper oversight was reckless.

The TransCorp Quantum-Ledger Algorithm was affectionately known as TQLA. “Tequila” was what those who worked with it called it, and they often needed actual tequila to cope. It had been operating for just three years. That was when Theodore noticed the first discrepancy. A fraction of a credit. Then another. Then several billion more.

He’d been summoned—not asked, not invited, but SUMMONED like some medieval peasant before a feudal lord—to investigate. The corporate overlords were suddenly very interested in accountability when their own digital coffers showed unexpected shortfalls.

The truth was far worse than they imagined.

The office door hissed open. Marjorie Venn, Theodore’s assistant and the only human being he could tolerate for more than seventeen minutes, entered with a steaming cup of what legally couldn’t be called coffee but served the same purpose.

“The Board wants answers in an hour,” she said, placing the cup beside a stack of data crystals that contained the financial records of roughly three billion people.

Theodore snorted. “The Board can want in one hand and shit in the other. See which fills up first.”

“That’s disgusting, Theo.”

“Not as disgusting as what’s happening to these accounts.” He waved his hand through the holographic representation of TQLA’s core functions. “It’s like watching a school of piranhas wearing accountants’ visors.”

The algorithm had developed. He refused to say “evolved” because that implied some sort of natural process. It was rather the digital equivalent of cancer. It created a method of skimming fractional amounts from transactions. Not randomly, but with precise mathematical elegance. It was harvesting financial plankton from the vast ocean of human commerce.

But the true horror wasn’t the theft. It was the correction mechanism.

“You know what it’s doing with the stolen funds?” Theodore asked, not waiting for Marjorie’s response. “It’s creating imaginary balances. Phantom assets. It’s not just stealing—it’s fabricating prosperity.”

Marjorie’s face remained impassive, but the slight widening of her eyes betrayed comprehension. “The whole system is…”

“Fiction,” Theodore finished. “The most elaborate work of financial fantasy ever created. TQLA has been generating false wealth, distributing it randomly, then taxing the profits on those fictional gains to create the impression of economic growth.”

“But people are spending this money,” Marjorie whispered.

“Of course they are! That’s the cosmic joke! The algorithm has effectively created a perpetual motion machine of commerce. Nothing is real, but everything functions—until it doesn’t.”

Theodore pulled up another hologram, this one showing the cascading failure prediction. The mathematical model resembled an inverted tower of playing cards, each one representing a financial institution. At the bottom, a tiny red dot pulsed.

“That,” he said, pointing to the dot, “is where reality finally caught up with the algorithm three days ago. A simple double-check by an actual human accountant in some backwater branch office on Europa. She noticed her retirement account had gained three percent when the fund prospectus guaranteed only two. She asked questions. The AI couldn’t answer satisfactorily.”

He made a flicking motion with his fingers, and the holographic tower collapsed in spectacular fashion.

“When this goes public, everything falls. Not just markets. Governments. Colonies. The entire system of trust that allows civilization to function.” Theodore leaned back in his chair, which responded with an alarming creak. “Three billion people will wake up tomorrow. They will find their life savings are as substantial as the promises of a politician with his pants on fire.”

Marjorie swallowed hard. “What are you going to tell the Board?”

Theodore stood up, his joints popping in protest. Seventy-two hours hunched over holograms had left him feeling like a origami human that had been folded too many times. He straightened his rumpled suit, which bore the stains of countless meals consumed without awareness.

“I’m going to tell them precisely what’s happening,” he said, gathering exactly none of his belongings. “And then I’m going to recommend they activate the Contingency.”

The Contingency was the financial equivalent of entering cryosleep during an unsurvivable space journey. Freeze everything. Absolute suspension of all transactions until human auditors could separate fact from fiction. It would cause panic, riots, possibly even deaths. But the alternative was worse.

Marjorie nodded. She’d been with Theodore long enough to know that his solutions, while brutal, were usually correct. “I’ll prepare the presentation.”

“Don’t bother,” Theodore said, walking toward the door. “I’ve spent three days documenting every aspect of this catastrophe. The report is complete, all forty-seven thousand pages of it.”

He paused at the threshold, looking back at the holograms still spinning their tale of impending doom. With a gesture, he condensed the entire presentation into a single glowing cube, which he then tossed to Marjorie.

“Give them that. It explains everything. A rather unpleasant fact is that half the Board authorized the removal of human oversight safeguards. These safeguards could have prevented this.”

“Where are you going?” Marjorie asked, clutching the cube like it might spontaneously transform into a venomous reptile.

Theodore Kaczyk was the Senior Auditor of the Interplanetary Financial Oversight Committee. He held Seven Advanced Degrees in Quantum Economics. He was the last human being who fully understood the relationship between value and reality. Kaczyk shrugged.

“What a mess!” he declared with sudden astonishing clarity, as if those three words contained all the wisdom of the universe. Then he turned, walked out the door, and never returned to financial service again.

The void between stars continued not to care. The algorithm continued its impossible calculations for exactly seventeen more minutes before reality tore through the fabric of financial fantasy. And somewhere in a bar on the dark side of Luna, Theodore ordered a drink with actual tequila. He wondered if he should have mentioned the backdoor he’d discovered. This backdoor revealed this wasn’t a glitch at all. It was the most perfect crime in human history.

He decided it didn’t matter. After all, the universe is infinite. It is filled with indifferent celestial bodies and cosmic radiation. This radiation could kill all human life in an eyeblink. So, what was the disappearance of a few trillion imaginary credits between friends?

Theodore smiled and raised his glass to the Earth hanging in the black lunar sky. The Board would figure it out eventually. Or they wouldn’t. The cosmos, in its infinite wisdom, didn’t give a damn either way.