Daemon

organization and to every client. Every account and every dollar in every branch office passed through Lindhurst’s networks and data systems. Every e-mail passed through his servers. He had thirty regional VPs as direct reports and oversaw an empire of some five hundred IT employees worldwide.
    And yet, Leland Equity Group was one of those multibillion-dollar companies that existed on the periphery of public awareness. Their unremarkable logo could be found in the skyline of any major city in North America, Europe, or Asia, and even if most people had no idea what the company did, they assumed it must be doing something important.
    The reality was that, with eighty billion dollars in assets under management, the decisions made by Leland MBAs ruled the daily lives of two hundred million Third World people.
    Following a (more or less) Darwinian economic model, Leland identified and quantified promising resource development opportunities in the far corners of the world. They had since formed private equity partnerships with local leaders for strip mining in Papua New Guinea, water privatization in Ecuador, marble quarrying in China, oil drilling in Nigeria,and pipeline construction in Myanmar. Anywhere local public and/or private leaders existed with abundant resources, a surfeit of rivals, and a deficit in capital, Leland could be found. And while these projects were theoretically beneficial, the benefits were best perceived at a distance of several thousand miles.
    Leland’s equity offerings used tedious statistical analysis to mask the fact that their business centered on enslaving foreign people and ravaging their lands. They didn’t do this directly, of course, but they hired the people who hired the people who did.
    Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was
regional development
. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too – but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.
    To view Leland fund managers as immoral was a gross simplification of the world. And what was there to replace capitalism, anyway? Communism? Theocracy? Most of the Third World had already suffered nearly terminal bouts of idealism. It was the Communists, after all, who had littered the world with cheap AK-47s in order to ‘liberate’ the masses. But the only lasting effect was that every wall between Cairo and the Philippines had at least one bullet hole in it. But nothing changed. Nothing changed because these alternate belief systems flew in the face of human nature. Of even common sense. Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.
    Leland bankers told clients that they didn’t design the world – they were just trying to live in it. And incidentally, the wonders of the developed world rose from the ashes of conflict andcompetition, so they were helping people in the long run. For godsakes, just look at Japan.
    And while the debate mumbled on, asterisked by legal disclaimers, Leland booked another highly profitable year.
    But profitability was not what was bothering Garrett Lindhurst as he approached the CEO’s office suite.
    Among Leland’s C-level executives, only Lindhurst was without decades-old family ties to the organization – but then again, the rapid expansion of computer systems in the corporate world in recent years had outpaced the ability of old-money families to produce senior technology talent. While Lindhurst hadn’t written any actual code since working with Fortran and Pascal back in his Princeton days, he had learned over the years how much systems should cost and what they needed to do.
    In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money. Everything else was just details. Scut work. These tasks Lindhurst delegated to the executive senior veeps, who, in turn, delegated them to someone else … and so on. It was only during times of complete disaster that Lindhurst involved himself with the actual computer systems themselves.
    Today was such a time.
    Lindhurst pointed at the CEO’s temple-like office doors as he passed the executive