Dana Blankenhorn

The Killer

In honor of the coronavirus quarantine, and because April 1 is coming, here's another fiction story for you. 

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“It was a joke. A JOKE!”

I screamed it as I was strapped to the gurney.

A doctor approached, holding the first of the syringes that would soon end my life. Across a window, a small group of witnesses looked on with anger. All except one man, of indeterminate middle age, thin, with a salt and pepper beard and glasses, who just shook his head mournfully. The man I’d spent my life hoping to meet.

It was the first execution in California for many years. It was real. It was happening to me. And it really was just a joke. This was the punch line I’d been waiting for.

I was born after my father joined the witness protection program, in Massapequa, on Long Island. I learned much later he had been born Giacomo Moroni, but the feds made him change his name after his career as a contract killer ended in Arizona. He got out by ratting on his capo, Don Julio Pasquale, the boss of Phoenix.

My dad’s mind didn’t work well back in the 1980s. I think it was coke. He didn’t remember things all the time. He said he couldn’t just make up a new name for himself, so he’d just take the vowel off the end. But that made his name moron, and that didn’t make any damned sense. So, he tweaked it just a little. He became Mike Maron.

I’m his son, Matt.

Assets vs. Investment

The recent fall in the stock market makes now a good time to talk about the difference between assets and investment.

Assets, as you’ve seen, are worth only what someone will pay for one of them.

If you bought Apple at $300 and now have a share worth only $240, it’s because the last guy to buy Apple bought it at that price. One sells for that, they’re all worth that. Collectively, they’re all worth that. So it was that nearly $300 billion got wiped away.

Spending, investment, is something else. Buying something, building something, improving something creates value that lasts. Facebook began investing in cloud data centers, at $1 billion/quarter, before it had $1 billion/quarter in sales. Amazon.Com invests nearly everything it brings in. It leads its financial records with the cash flow statement, which includes the amount of money it spent on data centers, on delivery vans, and on warehouses.

Getting Through Today’s Crisis

For the last few years, I’ve made a living talking about stocks. Let me start with that.

Don’t look at your retirement account. It won’t do you any good to sell right now. Unless you must. If you must, and you’re in a taxable account, sell your worst losers first. If you’re in a tax-free account, sell your strongest stocks first.

I have been expecting something like this for a long time. About 25% of my retirement account consists of cash, or equivalents like a three-month government note. I’m going to need to do some bargain hunting to get back to even.

That said, I’m not grabbing a falling knife. So long as the panic is ongoing, don’t get in front of it. The best time to buy, it turns out, is near the end of a down day. The best time to sell, meanwhile, is at the end of an up day.

There are three types of stocks to look at once we hit bottom. Some stocks involved in virus research, like Moderna, Inovio and Regeneron, are up on the virus. That’s stupid. Once the panic subsides, sell them and wait for them to return to normal values.

Some stocks should bounce back quickly. The Internet stocks are going to do great business, yet they’re falling with everything else. Grab them once the storm subsides. I’m talking about companies like Amazon.Com, Microsoft, Nvidia. I’m talking about Salesforce.com, Workday, and ServiceNOW. If anything, the move toward these companies will accelerate, as companies find telecommuting works.

Operation Trump

While we're all in quarantine I'm entertaining myself, and hopefully some others, with some short fiction. You can find my entire collection of short fiction here.

Enjoy!

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Jack Wong was not just an expert on alternate history.

In the year 2080, he was the world’s leading expert on altering history.

Wong’s invention of the Turtledove Drive a decade before, his Ph.D thesis project at the University of Minnesota, stunned the world.

Since then he had succeeded in altering history twice.

First, he traveled from his lab to the 2075 Coronavirus outbreak, reached its Patient Zero, and brought him to a hospital before he could infect others. Three years later, from the front of his Minneapolis classroom, his team prevented the 2001 World Trade Center bombing by shooting the terrorists before they reached Logan Airport.

When New Yorkers woke up, on a fine spring day in 2079, to find two 120-year old buildings instead of one 65-year old one, it was a shock at first. Then the mass psychosis took hold. The attacks had never happened. The Twin Towers had always been there.

It was magic.

Now Professor Wong was Time’s Man of the Year, which meant even more was expected of him.