The Trade by JT Kalnay Page B

need
beauty and love and belonging and being needed and all that's good
and right and us. Once a year, once a lifetime, once a day, I don’t
care, but it always has to be like a fairy tale like that…”
    Jay had no answer except a single tear that
Tonia wiped from his deep blue eyes.

Chapter
     
    Bill Beck scuffled his way towards Jay
Calloway's office. As had become the habit, the other office
dwellers on the hall began coughing or throwing wadded up paper
balls to announce the impending arrival of a visitor. Jay blushed
at the attention, but welcomed the warning.
    Jay's concentration and focus were quickly
becoming legendary at MacKenzie Lazarus. He'd work all morning,
rarely getting up from his desk except to go to the cooler in the
corner to get an ice cold diet coke. The department secretary had
bribed one of the cafeteria workers to keep his cooler full. He'd
run at noon, sometimes a mile, sometimes ten. He'd work all
afternoon then drift home to catch some dinner. Sometimes he’d head
home by way of the arcade where he would routinely play an hour on
a single quarter and establish a high score. After arriving home,
he'd work most of the evening on his powerful SUN Microsystems
computer while he listened to baseball on the radio or talked to
Tonia on the speaker phone.
    He never saw Tonia during the week.
    He spent a lot of time answering email on his
computer. It seemed that his internet address had been distributed
to his former students and they took delight in finding him and
sending him messages. Jay didn't really mind because he was
actually fond of some of his students. And when he was lonely, it
was nice to have someone, anyone, even a computer geek student to
talk to via email. C. Daniel Kinchon was his most faithful
correspondent, frequently seeking guidance about teaching and about
research.
    A big mystery with his coworkers at MacKenzie
Lazarus was where he'd disappear to on the weekends. No-one knew
where he went and he never offered to tell. They all assumed it was
to see his significant other, and they assumed from his secrecy
that it must be another man.
    After the success of his redesign on the CTSG
system, Jay had fixed a few other software problems which had saved
MacKenzie Lazarus more money, though not in such dramatic amounts.
But he wasn't fixing things now. He was building something. For the
last four months he'd been working on a new system for MacKenzie
Lazarus' traders at the NYSE.
    The idea for the system had sprung from a
simple question. On a tour of the trading floor he'd wondered aloud
why the traders had to make their trade, then write it down, then
report it to a helper who'd keypunch the whole thing. Jay had asked
why the whole thing wasn't automated with hand held terminals
connected via short range FM radio links to a local file server
that could act as a front end to MacKenzie Lazarus’ networks. Jay
had further asked why the traders had to write the trades down at
all when either a touch screen or voice- input system would be
faster.
    "Will they be able to make more trades?" Bill
Beck had asked.
    Jay studied the floor, zeroing in on a
trader, monitoring the action involved in several trades. "If
there’s more trades to be made then I would think probably 25% to
33% more trades,” he finally said.
    "Why?"
    "Because of the one or two minutes that it
looks like it takes to complete a trade, the paperwork takes 30 to
40 seconds. If we can cut the paperwork by 15 to 20 seconds… You
figure it out.”
    Bill answered, "Let me run it by the big
boys.” Later in the week, Bill Beck walked into Jay's office.
"You've got four months, $1.2 million in budget, 4 slots for
programmers and 2 slots for electrical and radio engineers to get
this thing done,”
    Bill announced. His face showed respect for
Jay's ability and foresight, but human concern for his own job and
the rapid rise of Jay's star. Although Bill was in on the backroom
dealings at MacKenzie Lazarus, he'd never figured to