The Golden Egg: Sesame Mountain
A Grimm Novella — part 2 of 4
[Author’s Note:
The Golden Egg, in my copy of the Grimms’ works, is an incomplete fragment, from which I borrowed only the title. I took similar liberties with the subtitles. Then the original stories started calling…
Part 1, The Poor Maiden, is here]
Well, that was a trial-and-a-half, Sarah said to herself as she swiped her card to let Genevieve out through the security barrier. “See you tomorrow.” If I don’t kill myself tonight. Genevieve flashed teeth and fluttered fingers as the glass door closed behind her. Me, me, me, Sarah mentally summarised Genevieve’s side of their conversation. My Obsession.
Or does that describe me? she wondered. She could never be sure now. “Miss Miller has issues with intimacy and trust,” she had read in the psychological assessment. After all these months, she was still puzzled at how the interviewer had managed to divine so much from the minimal answers she had given to his questions. “Aspiring to perfection in herself and seeking it in others, she falls prey to flattery. A difficult relationship with a controlling father — ” Sarah had bridled, read no further, and torn the thing in two. How dare they!
“Just get rid if it!” she recalled herself shouting, screaming, sobbing, being comforted by the nurse as the doctor explained, patiently and carefully, that there was nothing to get rid of, she’d had a lucky escape. She should put it all behind her, perhaps find another job and forget the whole episode, the way Steven apparently had. But no: deeper logic told her to face down her fears. For now the encounter with Steven, and its aftermath, would remain secret. I ought to tell someone, she said frequently to herself. But not today.
Climbing the stairs back up to the top of the Tower, Sarah shrugged off her cynicism about Genevieve. The girl was totally lacking in worthwhile experience, that was all, and if they had not been forced into contact by Jakob’s hijacking of Steven, Sarah might have had more patience. Then, it might have helped if Genevieve hadn’t had filthy-rich parents and a double-first from Cambridge too. “It was this or rocket science,” she’d confided, “and this pays better.”
It was obvious that Genevieve didn’t understand the first thing about money. How to spend it, yes; how it worked, where it came from, other than from an over-generous parent or employer, no. Sarah was still grateful for her own clear memory of Jakob’s explanation. “Suppose I’ve got a dollar,” he’d said to them, placing the coin on the table in front of him, “and I lend it to Dan.” He slid it diagonally in Dan’s direction.
“That’s an old pound,” Smelly Dan contradicted, before looking at the coin more closely. “Oh. Sorry, I haven’t seen one of these before.”
“International currency,” Jakob confirmed. “Can we move on?” He put an index finger on the coin. “And Dan lends it to Sarah” — slide — “and Sarah lends it to Geeta” — slide — “and Geeta lends it to me.” A final slide. “That’s an economy with four dollars in it.”
Smelly Dan was unconvinced. “One, surely?”
Jakob indulged him. “If you take a snapshot, freeze everything and count the coins, then yes, there’s only one. But money isn’t the coin, it’s the movement of the coin. In a snapshot, in my pocket, under your bed, it’s of no value at all. In motion, it has value, to the person giving and to the person receiving. And the faster it moves — the more often it moves, in our one-dollar-coin economy — the greater the total value.”
“And that’s what SSIG does.” Sarah realised. She looked up at him, into the deepest, bluest eyes she had ever seen. She wondered whether he knew.
“Yes,” Jakob said. He moved the coin in a circle on the table, faster and faster. “If you can move it around fast enough, it turns into something else altogether, like sugar in a candy-floss machine.” He held up an imaginary stick of floss. “And the something else is considerably more attractive than what you started with, and therefore worth more. People are willing to go out and find ways — farming, mining, manufacturing — of trading some from you.” He put the coin back in his pocket. “And that, briefly, is how we make money from money. Spinning straw into gold.”
“SSIG,” Sarah translated. “I get it now.”
“The official name is a backronym,” Jakob said. “Don’t ever tell Investor Relations.”
Back at her desk on the near-deserted twelfth floor, Sarah wondered whether Steven and Jakob were still having their few minutes. What could it be about? She unlocked her screen to pore again over the intractable problem in the Transfer module, then looked up to see Steven returning, wearing a self-satisfied expression. She took out her earbuds to indicate her presence in the real world, expecting Steven to demand news of Genevieve’s whereabouts, but he ignored her. Unlocking his desk drawer, he took out his laptop and docked it, then logged in.
Sarah always knew when he was typing a password. He did it one-handed, with the fingers of the other hooked over the top of the laptop screen, covering the webcam with his palm. It gave him a lopsided look, almost a hunch. I could make a good guess at his oh-so-secret login password, she thought. She knew it started with a lone capital, because of the initial awkward thumb-and finger move that was never repeated. She knew there were three numerics in the string, because his hand stabbed off to the right on each occasion. The rest must be lower-case, unshifted. If she examined her memory she could probably count them.
Hey, she told herself with a start. I could almost guess his password. She filed the thought away with all the others like it, another potential seed of revenge. Like the spare key to his desk drawer that was taped to the back of its cabinet.
She had found that herself one day, while scrabbling to tidy the rats’ nest of cables between their desks. She recalled the cabinet being delivered, and Steven’s furious calls to the Facilities department demanding a replacement for its ‘lost’ key. She had half an idea that she might find an embarrassingly public occasion to tell him about it. But maybe it could be of direct use?
Steven finished whatever he was doing and locked the laptop away again. “Genevieve had to go,” Sarah told him as he looked up. “Heavy date tonight, I think.” The entirely defensible supposition, designed to needle Steven, had the desired effect. He grunted acknowledgement, turned and left. Sarah returned gratefully to the Transfer module.
After another half-hour of puzzling over the awful Transfer code — someone should rewrite this properly, but please don’t make it be me — Sarah needed a break. While waiting for the coffee station’s kettle to boil, she looked out over the river. I like it here, she thought. It’s like home. Better than my current home. Her own flat, with its views of others’ walls and its smells of others’ drains, was anything but homely.
“Staying all night?”
Sarah whirled at the sound of Jakob’s voice. “You made me jump!” she laughed, with a hand to her heart. In more ways than one.
“Well?” Apparently it was a serious question, not just small talk, even if he was smiling as he asked it.
“No,” she confessed, “much as it would please me to find an unlocked office and bed down in it, I’m only staying another hour or so. I have some code to disentangle, then I’m going back to my garret.” Jakob seemed to be hoping for more. “In the Transfer module, if you know it.”
“Oh, that!” Evidently he did know it. “You’ll need more than a silver hairbrush to comb that out!”
“You’ve worked on it?”
“Everyone’s worked on it,” Jakob told her. “Once upon a time it was like a trial, an Impossible Task. If you can handle this, you can handle anything. If you can’t — well, plenty of people couldn’t. Good ones, too.”
Sarah was surprised. “Really? I’ve never had any trouble with it, not trouble that I couldn’t handle. It’s just awkward, all non-standard usage and counter-intuitive protocols.” Jakob nodded agreement, and Sarah felt compelled to keep the conversation going. “That’s probably why it has so much history.” Jakob’s eyes narrowed in query. “In the Repository. The code gets checked out far more often than it ever gets updated. People must be looking at it and then saying No, someone else can fix this. It’s so slow, I don’t blame them.”
“Can you show me?” Jakob seemed genuinely intrigued.
“Sure. This way,” Sarah smiled. Maybe I will stay all night after all. If you want me to.
[End of part 2. Part 3 continues:
]
