The private Gulfstream G550 cut through the night sky at forty-one thousand feet, its cabin configured more like a mobile office than a traditional aircraft interior. The man who knew sat in one of the leather executive chairs, gazing out at the endless expanse of ocean below. The emergency restructuring documents for the Castle Wealth Incubator sat in a manila folder on his lap, unsigned but ready, contingency plans that he hoped wouldn't be necessary.
His assistant occupied the facing seat, a BlackBerry in one hand and a thick stack of printed briefing documents spread across the polished wood table between them. This assistant had been with him for years—long enough to recognize when silence was more valuable than updates, but also when conversation was necessary to keep the man who knew from disappearing entirely into whatever calculations consumed him during these flights.
The BlackBerry buzzed with an incoming email. The assistant glanced at the screen, his expression shifting to something more urgent.
"I just got the final agenda from Margaret," he said, scrolling through the message. "The emergency board meeting tomorrow—they're not just asking for solutions anymore. They're saying the Incubator's exposure to 'experimental ventures' was reckless and uncalled for, given the protected state of the market right now." He looked up from the device. "Margaret also mentioned that the board wants to discuss your... extended absence. Two years of delegating primary operations to David while you focused on 'strategic initiatives'—that's how they're characterizing it in the minutes. But they’re questioning whether David's leadership contributed to the current exposure levels. They're expecting you to resume active control, not just provide guidance from the sidelines."
The man who knew's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Two years of carefully maintained distance, two years of allowing David to serve as the visible face while he worked behind the scenes, and now the board wanted him front and center just as everything was about to unravel.
The assistant put his phone away and leaned back. “Armand came back with the numbers and at last count we have almost 3 billion that can’t get liquid and can’t be divested evenly enough. If the market takes a downturn…” The assitatns eyes trailed, fearfully to the newspaper on the table, the news echoing fears and speculations which had been building for months. “If the bubble bursts…” The assistant looked back to the man who knew, trying to conceptualize 3 billion dollars vanishing like smoke in the wind. “The board will expect you to have solutions." Was all he could manage to say.
The man who knew continued staring out the window, watching distant city lights flicker like stars against the darkness. "Solutions assume problems can be solved."
"Sir?"
"Tell me something," the man who knew said, finally turning from the window. "Do you believe in fate?"
It wasn't the first time his employer had asked seemingly random philosophical questions during flights, but the timing always seemed deliberate—especially now, with the financial world teetering on the brink.
"Fate as in... predetermination?"
"Fate as in inevitability. The idea that certain events must happen, regardless of human intervention. That the universe has momentum, and individual choices are just... ripples on the surface of much deeper currents."
The assistant considered this, glancing at the briefing documents scattered on the table—printouts of portfolio analyses, market projections, and newspaper clippings about the risky state of both mortgages backed loans and large investment banks. "I suppose I've always believed in free will. That people make choices, and those choices have consequences. Otherwise, what's the point of any of this?" He gestured at the financial reports between them.
"What's the point indeed." The man who knew leaned back in his chair, though his posture carried a tension that spoke of someone walking a very careful line. "But consider this: you're flying to New York to help me save the largest multi-phase investment company on earth, that's teetering because of decisions made by hundreds of people—bankers who created toxic securities, regulators who looked the other way, rating agencies who blessed the unblessable. Each person making what they believe are free choices. But when you step back and look at the pattern..."
"You see larger forces at work?"
"I see inertia. Economic momentum that carries individuals along like debris in a current. People have free will—they can choose which way to swim. But the current itself?" His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "That's something else entirely. Something that can be... nudged, but never fully controlled."
The assistant was genuinely curious now despite the urgency of their situation. "You're saying individual choice is real, but limited?"
"I'm saying individual choice exists within constraints that most people never recognize. Think about housing bubbles, market panics, mass financial delusions. Millions of people all making 'individual' choices that somehow align into predictable patterns. As if they're all responding to the same invisible signal."
"Herd mentality. Market psychology. There are rational explanations—"
"Are there?" The man who knew's voice carried an edge of something between exhaustion and barely contained tension—like someone who had been holding his breath for months. "Or are those just the names we give to forces we don't understand? Forces so delicate that even acknowledging them too directly can alter their trajectory?" He paused for a moment, wishing he could tell his assistant the truth. “Tell me, when you decided to take this job three years ago, was that really your free choice?"
The assistant frowned, thinking back to 2005. "Of course it was. I weighed the options, considered the salary, the growth potential, the work environment—"
"And what made you aware of the job opening in the first place?"
"A headhunter called me. But that's normal in our industry—"
"Who recommended you to the headhunter?"
"My former colleague at McKinsey. But—"
"Who you met how?"
The assistant paused, seeing where this was leading. "Business school. We were randomly assigned as study partners."
"Random assignment. Interesting term." The man who knew turned back toward the window, his reflection showing someone who seemed to be choosing his words with extraordinary care. "So your 'free choice' to work for me was the result of a chain of events stretching back years. Random assignments, chance meetings, economic conditions that created the position, regulatory changes that allowed the Incubator to exist in the first place. And what if someone or something had weighed that random choice in favor of a specific outcome?"
"But I still chose to say yes when offered the position."
"Yes, you did” The man who knew nodded. “You did make that choice, but why that choice specifically? Was it because it was simply the most rational? You are a rational actor, intelligent, conscious, but if you truly are a rational actor, then there was only one choice for you. The one that created the most flourishing to yourself. Does that make it a free choice? Reality pushed you toward a decision that felt free, but in the end it was simply the increase of entropy?"
The assistant was quiet for a long moment, considering. Outside, they were passing over California, city lights sprawling like neural networks across the dark landscape far below.
"You're talking about determinism," he said finally. "The idea that everything is predetermined by prior causes."
"Not predetermined. Channeling." The man who knew's voice grew quieter, more careful, as he steepled his fingers and frowned. Even this conversation could somehow ripple outward in unintended ways. "Canyon walls prevent travel down a river. You can try to stop, or sail faster, but you can’t get over those walls from the riverbed. All genuine choices. But the river itself—its direction, its destination, the fact that it exists at all—that was determined by erosion, geological features, energy building and building for centuries. The river always finds the sea."
"So we have freedom within constraints."
"We have freedom within momentum." The man who knew paused, not from fear, but from the weight of enforced inaction. "The spinning of the earth determines our day length. The cycle of water currents and gravitational effects from the moon determine our tides. That momentum has its own agenda. Its own preferences for how things should unfold. And that agenda is to waste time and energy as quickly as possible. And sometimes, if you can understand that, you realize that the most powerful thing you can do is... nothing. Let events find their natural timing."
The assistant studied his employer's profile, noting something he hadn't seen before—where he'd expected to see the usual focused intensity, there was instead a kind of forced stillness, like a man holding something volatile that could explode if jostled. "Sir, is this about the CWI? The crisis you were talking about back at MAL?"
"It's about patterns. About the way complex systems seem to organize themselves toward certain outcomes, regardless of individual intentions." The man who knew opened the manila folder, glancing at the restructuring papers with something approaching reverence for forces beyond his control. "I've spent fifteen years preventing disasters and making money off doing it, and I've learned something dangerous. Sometimes your very attempts to prevent a crisis can trigger it prematurely. The financial system right now is like a house of cards on a wobbling table—even the breath you use to warn someone can bring it all down."
"What are you using to make that judgment, sir? Models? Intuition?"
The man who knew looked as if he hadn’t even heard him. "The inertia that carries civilization forward” He hummed, more to himself than to his assistant. “Some crises serve a purpose—they clear away inefficient structures, force innovation, redirect capital allocation. But timing is everything. Trigger the collapse in June instead of September, and you get chaos instead of controlled demolition. The difference between a necessary correction and the end of the world can be measured in months, sometimes weeks."
The assistant looked at the briefing documents spread before them—projections showing the Incubator's exposure to toxic assets, strategies for emergency liquidation, contingency plans for institutional survival. "So what can a single man do? If these forces are so much larger than individual choice?"
The man who knew turned from the window, and for a moment his expression carried something almost like relief—as if he'd been waiting for exactly this question.
"You know what a hero really is? A real hero is a plumber." He paused, noting his assistant's confused expression. "A plumber doesn't prevent water from flowing—he makes sure it flows where it's supposed to go. He maintains the system so the natural forces work properly instead of catastrophically. When an emergency happens, there’s nothing you can do but triage. No matter how good of a plumber you are, you still can’t plug up a rushing torrent of water with gravity and momentum bearing down on you. When a pipe bursts, it happens in seconds and by the time you hear the first crack, it's over. No individual can stop that moment of failure, they can adapt, try to make the situation better, respond instead of react, but they can’t fix it. Can’t make it right” He scoffed and shook his head. “A good plumber can make sure the burst happens in the basement instead of the penthouse. A great plumber can make sure it never happened at all. But…I don’t know if we have any great plumbers…at least not this time around” He rubbed his chin as he considered the papers within the folder, running hand across the page.
The assistant glanced at the restructuring documents, grateful that his boss was getting back on the topic of his own worry. There was something odd about the conversation, something slightly painful about it, like the essence of pain, the activation of threat response in his mind, but no actual pain he could associate it to. It made his head hurt to question it, and so he didn’t, preferring the blissful ignorance of trusting that his boss has a solution. "What exactly are we proposing to the board? I know we've been restructuring projects, but to what end?"
"All the money they could ever want” The man who knew sighed. “I’ve been selling it all” He said with small smirk “MAL was just the first," the man who knew said, his voice carrying the finality of decisions set in stone. He judged his assistant's face, debating whether it was terror at what he had just heard, or nervousness at the implications. He decided to continue. "I liquidated the bottom twenty percent of our Asian startup portfolio. I dismantled all of our Asian startups, redistributed their funding back into the CWI network, and got everyone their severance packages they needed. I have far more than 3 billion coming down the pipe. I managed to get the finalization papers in last Tuesday, but pretty much all of our asian companies have been sold off and distributed to the higest bidder.”
“Sir…you can’t mean everything”
“Yes…everything” The man who knew sighed. “The accident modeling software companies, the corrective systems analysis firms, all of our tech investments and experimental projects." He tapped the manila folder. "David signed the termination orders under my insistence and direction."
“You liquidated them? Sir, that's—without board approval?"
"The board gave me discretionary authority over 'strategic repositioning in volatile markets,'" the man who knew said matter-of-factly. "Asian markets can move a little quicker, which allows disolution a little quicker. I didn’t tell anyone because it would take too long to get approval. I made CWI and I made those companies what they were. I have every right to sell them without the board getting in the way."
“But you told me-”
“They are CWI properties, and they where at my discretion to do with as I pleased” The man who knew said, simplifying it for his assistants slightly panicked posture.
“But some of those companies were showing promise."
"But not as much promise as they should." The man who knew opened the folder, revealing documents stamped with completion dates from just days ago. "It doesn’t matter anyway. The liquidation was completed Wednesday afternoon. 3 billion means nothing now. We're sitting on so much cash the FEC’s eyes will water if they ever got to see it all. Every other fund in town is leveraged in housing speculation that's about to crater and we’ll be the only ones left standing."
The assistant felt that familiar painful sensation at the edge of his thoughts as he tried to process the implications. "Sir, those were some of our most promising investments. The safety modeling alone—"
"Was burning cash on experimental technology that wouldn't be market ready for years." The man who knew's expression showed no regret, only cold calculation. “If you want, you can send them a message stating that the great Johnathan Castle, finally failed and made a bad investment” The man who knew sighed. “It doesn’t matter. The SEC filings went through yesterday. It's public record now and I’m sure they can read about it in the wall street journal if they want to know the truth.” He looked up and considered the words on his tongue. “CWI divested from high-risk asian experimental technology on Tuesday. Why? How?" He looked back to his assistant with aplomb. “I suppose they’ll be the only ones lucky enough to know that”
The assistant froze, unsettled; he had never heard him speak with such a razor’s edge of irony. “That amount of money, shifted so suddenly… it will draw eyes. People will start asking questions.”
He didn’t smile. Not really. His voice was calm, but it carried the inexorability of gravity. “By the time anyone asks, the market will already be in a slump. They’ll be more worried about the real estate investments we have and if they’ll get their returns than about how much cash is being moved out of one of our sectors. No regulator, no auditor, not even history itself will leave a mark. They’ll call it prudence—never foresight.” He closed the folder with deliberate, almost ritualistic care, like a man locking the future in a vault.
He could have done it another way. He wished he could, but his best plans had fallen through to the forever tightening grip of entropy. He looked at his assistant's concern and nodded, graciously, already knowing what the assistant was going to say. “The board will resist—they always do. And when the storm hits, their doubt will read as cowardice. Our certainty will shine as brilliance.” His eyes lingered on nothing, seeing every consequence, every failure, every survival—as if he alone were both architect and arbiter. He bore the cold, stony eyes of inevitability, and his assistant knew not to question them.
The assistant stared at his employer, finally understanding the weight behind the carefully controlled tension in his posture. "They're going to be furious. Margaret, the trustees—they're going to say you exceeded your authority, violated fiduciary duty—"
"They're going to say I preserved capital when everyone else is about to lose theirs." The man who knew turned back to the window, city lights streaming past below. "And then they're going to have to decide whether they want to fire the CEO who protected them from catastrophe, or ratify decisions that kept us liquid when everyone else goes under."
The assistant resumed typing, but more slowly now. "What should I tell them you're planning to propose at tomorrow's meeting?"
"Tell them I'm not proposing anything." The man who knew's voice carried a hint of dark satisfaction. "Tell them I'm going to explain the difference between asking for permission and asking for forgiveness. And that we're sitting on more cash than any comparable private capital firm in new york"
"They'll say you should have consulted them first."
"They'll thank me when the market collapses and we're still breathing." The man who knew's smile was cold. "If they’re still unsatisfied, I’ll tell them that I’ll buy them out”
The assistant was unsure if the man who knew was joking or not, and part of hi