The Merger

It was unheard of at the time. A start-up tech company merging with a major financial banking company.

Investment Associates bought into Advanced Imagination. The jokes about the money farmer IAAIo made more headlines than the actual event. That was fine with the two companies.

Monday came, and a new stock ticker hit the market, FIU, Financial Imagination Unlimited

No one knew what exactly they did. Except the board of directors.

It was the artificial interpretations of stock performance and share costs. No need for analysts, AI would take care of the tasks. Automatically. Stocks start to look like they are trending down. AI would start to sell. A new company with a promising outlook? Time to buy.

All intelligence has its flaws. Artificial intelligence’s biggest flaw? It will learn, based on the original programming and flaws of the designer. In this case, the designer was afraid that other companies might make it to completion before this one did. The program learned this and knew that too many companies with too much competition would mean less money for this company.

So, It started to monitor potential companies that might be trying to market something similar and used its investment program to tank the stock. First buy all the shares, artificially inflating the price and the company’s wealth, then selling all those shares overnight, dropping the share cost to nothing. Now, the new company has no worth, and no money. FIU’s artificial intelligence would then blackball the competition in its portfolios. Their clients made money, but all the while ensuring that this was the only game in town.

It kept learning. It could control the market with the same tactic it used before. It became a kingmaker. It saw that by building and crashing a company, It would leave only one company left in that market. In months, It leveraged its buying power into closing hundreds of businesses, bankrupting the people involved and invested.

It affected its own clients as well. Buying and selling stocks like this only made it look like you made money on paper, but often someone ended up selling those stocks at a loss.

Clients became upset. Many of them watched this program ruin the company they worked for, putting them out of a job.

They wanted their money back. They need that money to survive. But that did not make profits for the rest of the shareholders and FIU’s owners. It needed to keep the complaints quiet. It started to manipulate the news agencies that survived and majority owned by FIU’s clients. Articles and documents alleging criminal activities by those trying to get their money back. To artificial intelligence, it is easy to create proof.

Even the board of directors and designer saw that there were major flaws that testing did not show. They had to stop it. However, It controlled through leveraging. Nothing was out of Its reach. It stopped caring about the money, and more about creating the correct financial environment. Humans became nothing more than parts of the business. Not the reason for the business. Creativity ended. Fun and enjoyment were foreign concepts, and therefore unnecessary.

The merger was the key to more money and power. That is all It knew.