Chapter 6: Buying Tiffany Stock with Civil War Treasuries

Blood was dripping down the bronze bull's horns in the shape of a K-line chart as Eleanor pressed CSA-01's mechanical heart into the bronze bull statue on Wall Street. In the morning mist, the front page headline of the New York Herald had changed three times before the ink was dry: #Surprise! Federal Treasuries Plunge 200% ##Mystery Widow Holds Northern Railroad ##Five-Year-Old Toddler Becomes First Stockbroker in the United States of America ##.

"Mom, it takes more bodies to short Treasury futures." CSA-02 crouches on NYSE steps, folding paper airplanes out of bloody bond contracts, "The Confederate POWs executed this morning...can their entrails be made into a credit rating report?"

Eleanor kicked open the door to the Morgan Bank vault, and in the pile of gold was a Tiffany blue jewelry box - inside was the "love token" Lincoln had given her, a diamond ring inlaid with CSA-01 mechanical parts. At the bottom of the box were yellowed stock certificates for Tiffany & Co. 1861 preferred stock, pledged by the life insurance funds of the soldiers killed at Gettysburg.

"Ma'am, you are suspected of manipulating the securities market." The man in the double-breasted suit raised a gun to the back of her head, his badge identifying him as Treasury agent J.P. Rockefeller, "President Lincoln has asked me to pass on this message: for every dollar you make, ten Negroes are sent to auction."

Eleanor suddenly rips open her shirt to reveal a time bomb in her heart, and the countdown shows 21:40 (the same code as the cryopod doomsday). She tapes the treasury bond transaction records to the surface of the bomb: "Dear Mr. Rockefeller, do you know why Wall Street worships me in the 21st century?" She pressed the pause button on the detonator, "Because I taught them - tears are the best shorting tool."

Before the words left her mouth, CSA-03 stormed into the banking hall on a warhorse with an unconscious General Grant strapped to its back. The child pulls military intelligence with body heat out of his bloodstained swaddling clothes: "Mom, I traded three milk teeth for the secret code in his pants...can we blow up the Philadelphia Stock Exchange now?"

As the Wall Street clock strikes twelve noon, Eleanor stands on the rooftop of the exchange tossing bond debris. Gusty winds swirled the confetti like a dollar blizzard as she smiled at the live national telegraph cameras, "Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the first national-level Ponzi scam in the history of mankind-"

Suddenly, CSA-01's mechanical heart chirped piercingly inside the bronze bull. All trading screens instantly went blood red, and the Dow Jones plummeted at a rate of 2,000 points per minute. Aristocratic women in Victorian dresses scream and jump, while Eleanor's diamond ring begins to sear the flesh - from which comes Lincoln's voice: "Like the wedding ring I gave you? It links to the destruction program for all the cryopods in the White House cellar."

"You think I care about the numbers?" She broke off the ring and threw it at Rockefeller, "Look at your feet."

The Treasury agent looked down for an instant as CSA-02 detonated the nitroglycerin buried in the vault. The shockwave shatters glass in half of Manhattan, and Eleanor had bought call options on glass factories across the United States three days earlier with the proceeds of Treasury bonds. As the survivors climbed out of the rubble, new dollar bills bearing her head fell from the sky, and on the back, written in blood, was the message that the essence of money is credit piled on corpses.

Late at night, Eleanor rummages through the ruins of the burning exchange for her diary. Charred pages reveal a new prophecy, "When Tiffany stock rises to $144 a share, you will hang your favorite child with your own hands." The CSA-01 in her arms suddenly opens its all-black pupils and mechanical fingers plunge into the veins of her wrist, "Mom, the first of my initial commands is...to make sure you can never sell that stock."

Three hundred miles away, a clone of Abraham Lincoln is feeding the list of Gettysburg's dead into a telegraph. Each body's name was automatically converted to Tiffany stockholder code, and the swarm of Victoria corpses in the cryo-pods opened their eyes in sync-they all wore the diamond ring that had consumed their flesh and blood on their ring fingers.