Psych Co.

For two days Kensington Bank had kept his hand on his PDA, waiting for a call from his operatives. Finally, late in the evening, Kensington had answered a call from his chief disruption agent, telling him they had been magically reconstituted once the plane had entered Alaskan airspace. The corporations had not even felt the elapse of time between the Canadian border and the Alaskan frontier. For the time their bodies had spent over the foreign soil, they had simply ceased to exist. Dizzy at the terrifying thought of any corp being so easily extinguished, and exhilarated that his agents had made it through, Kensington ordered them immediately to the zinc mines to halt production. The scheme was beautifully orchestrated. Within three days of each other, all the major zinc-producing mines in the United States suffered catastrophic tunnel collapses, mechanical failures, terrorist attacks and even a small earthquake in Tennessee which snapped a mine shaft closed, trapping dozens of miners. Kensington’s agent there claimed credit for the earthquake but the banking Lieutenant knew that it had to have been a happy coincidence. Predictably, the commodities market reacted to the sudden shortage of supply. The price of zinc more than doubled over the course of those three days. Knowing that the mining corps would be bolting to re-establish their operations, especially the colossal Teck and Rio in Alaska, Kensington initiated the second phase of his plan. Even before he had dispatched his disruption agents, Kensington had been quietly collecting pennies. Every bank could request physical cash transfers from other banks, exchanging digital dollars for hard currency. Using his privilege as a top-tier bank, Kensington had transferred nearly all of his remaining wealth, including the deposits of his clients, into pennies. Truckload upon truckload had rolled into Chicago before the mining failures, arriving at warehouses Kensington rented in an industrial park near O’Hare International Airport. Kensington had struck a special bargain with Chicago Metal Inc., a strong smelting Corporal who worked in that same park. As quickly as the pennies came in, they were taken to the smelter’s plant where they were melted down into liquid. U.S. pennies, contrary to what most believed, contained almost no copper at all. They were one part copper and thirty-nine parts pure zinc. Before Kensington’s campaign against the zinc mines, the metal traded at around one dollar per pound. This meant that a hundred pennies contained around forty-eight cents worth of metal. Now, with the price of zinc hovering around two-and-a-half dollars per pound, a hundred pennies contained over a hundred and thirty-eight cents worth of metal. Kensington had Chicago Metal cast the zinc from the pennies into saleable ingots and then the banking Lieutenant sold the melted pennies at a profit. Pennies were technically government property and the destruction of government property was a federal offence. Kensington’s banking operations, however, were extensive enough that he was able to forge fictitious transfers of the coins to his outlying branches to explain why they were disappearing. For the despised Government to prove he had been melting them, they would need to check every single branch’s vault. Meanwhile, Kensington had a near-endless supply of zinc which he could buy at a price that never changed. In the week leading up to the sabotage, Chicago Metal’s smelting ovens were never cold and Kensington was able to melt billions and billions of pennies. As soon as the zinc price went up, he sold the zinc back into the market, using the profits to request more coin transfers from other banks. He had already realized a huge gain from the scheme when his plan hit a snag. As Kensington was able to buy larger and larger volumes of pennies, Chicago Metal’s ovens could not keep up with the supply. The backlogs in the coin warehouses became more and more pronounced, with shipments of pennies having to wait hours and hours before an oven became available. At the same time that Kensington started to notice the backlog, the Herculean Teck Corporation had restarted ore refinement at the Red Dog Mine in Alaska, loading ships bound for the western coast with thousands of tonnes of zinc. The cursed Major had done it more quickly than Kensington had ever thought possible. As soon as the ships were away, the price of zinc in the American markets began to drop back towards its original level. Kensington panicked and stopped Chicago Metal’s ovens, afraid that the price would drop below his breakeven point before he could sell the zinc ingots he had already cast. The price spike had lasted for a week, and he knew it would drop even more quickly than it had risen. Then, in the midst of his panic and mad scramble to find a buyer still willing to pay the premium for the metal, Kensington became aware of an unintended side effect of his scheme. As a result of all his coin transfers, a shortage of pennies had developed in Illinois and the surrounding states. Gas stations, convenience stores, supermarkets, restaurants and all other corps who dealt in cash were losing money because they could not give proper change. To keep their customers, they erred to the generous side, and most lost a few cents on every transaction they made. Some larger chain store corps had resorted to paying a premium for pennies. One supermarket corp was paying her customers a dime for nine pennies at her checkout counters. Kensington thrilled at his good luck, forgetting about the zinc ingots he had left and focusing his attention on selling his vast reserves of intact pennies, which had been waiting to be smelted, back to eager mercantile corps. He knew it was only a matter of time before the omnipresent and hated Government ruined the play. Kensington made money hand over fist until the fateful day a week later when five giant mining corps marched angrily into Chicago.