Forging America: My Campaign Manager is Roosevelt

Chapter 458: Chapter 212: Saints

"Why did you have to destroy all of this?"

Barney’s voice was filled with confusion.

"Why would you become a murderer for a bunch of poor bastards like us? Why live like this, hiding in the sewers like a rat?"

The two young workers beside him also stared at Luigi.

They couldn’t understand either.

In this country, class was an iron wall.

You only ever saw people scrambling to get over it. You never saw someone who’d made it over willingly jump back into the muck.

Luigi looked at them and gave a bitter smile.

"Yes, Barney."

Luigi spoke, his voice hoarse.

"I could have been one of them."

"I sat in the front row of my classes at the Wharton School of Business. The professors taught us how to read financial statements, build models, and quantify everything into numbers."

Luigi paused, his gaze growing vacant.

"Back then, I thought that was the truth: maximize efficiency, minimize risk."

"We used formulas to calculate future returns and curves to predict market trends."

"I did very well. Exceptionally well. I was the top student in my graduating class, and even the biggest fund managers on Wall Street were trying to recruit me."

"But they never taught me that some things can’t be quantified."

Luigi stretched out his hand, tracing the shape of a spreadsheet in the air.

"Do you know what a quality-adjusted life year is?"

Barney shook his head.

"It’s an algorithm," Luigi explained. "Insurance companies use it to calculate how much a human life is worth."

"They feed a person’s age, health status, and expected contributions into a computer, and the system spits out a number. If the cost of treating that person is higher than this number, then the payout is deemed uneconomical."

"If it costs two hundred thousand dollars to treat Rosa’s husband, but the value he’s projected to create in the future is only one hundred thousand dollars, then on the spreadsheet, that’s a losing proposition."

"And losing propositions must be cut."

"I learned about this at the Wharton School of Business," Luigi said, his voice growing hoarse. "The professors told us this was rationality, this was efficiency, this was the optimal allocation of resources."

"After graduating, I joined a hedge fund. My job was to design trading algorithms. I sat in an office chair, staring at three huge monitors."

"I made a lot of money. Every day, I researched how to squeeze more profit out of the market. I thought that was my purpose."

Luigi’s voice began to tremble, and he instinctively reached to rub his back.

There was an old injury there, from his time on the university rowing team, that would ache faintly on damp, rainy days.

"Then, two years ago, my mother was diagnosed with a neurological disorder."

Luigi let out a bitter laugh.

"I thought I had money, I had the best insurance, I could get her the best treatment. I even thought that if the insurance company wouldn’t cover it, I’d just pay for it myself."

"When I applied for her to receive the latest targeted drug therapy, the insurance company denied it."

"The reason was ridiculous. Because she had a record of being treated for mild anxiety ten years ago, the algorithm determined she was a potential high-risk, long-term care patient and didn’t meet the coverage criteria for the drug."

"Of course, I could buy the drug out of pocket. I didn’t care about the few hundred thousand dollars; I just wanted my mother to live."

"But things were more complicated than I imagined."

"My hedge fund had invested in the pharmaceutical company that produced the targeted drug, and also in the insurance company that denied the claim. Part of my bonus came from that drug’s exorbitant price, and also from the money the insurance company saved on denied claims."

"I was using money stained with other people’s blood to buy my mother’s life."

"I even discovered that the reason the drug was so expensive was precisely because funds like mine were behind the scenes, hyping up its scarcity and turning it into a financial product."

"It was at that moment I understood. I wasn’t just a part of this system; I was its accomplice."

"Maybe my mother’s illness could ultimately be cured with money. But what about the people who don’t have money? People like Rosa’s husband?"

"They’re just left to die quietly, sentenced by an algorithm."

"It’s systemic murder."

"I went back to the office and looked at the flickering numbers on the screen."

"I saw how the machine worked."

Luigi abruptly raised his head, his gaze burning as he stared at Barney.

"It eats people."

"And it doesn’t spit out the bones."

"It chews up flesh and blood, turns it into gold coins, and spits them into our pockets."

"I couldn’t sleep soundly in a world like that."

"If I kept sitting in that chair, kept making that kind of money, I’d just be a cog in that murderous machine."

"I had to do something."

Luigi clenched his fists.

"Because if I didn’t betray my class, I’d be betraying my very humanity."

"I’m not noble, Barney. I don’t want to be a hero."

"I was just fed up."

"I was fed up with watching that machine kill people while the law applauded from the sidelines."

"I was fed up with that polished, legal, respectable brand of evil."

"So I bought a plane ticket and a 3D printer."

"And I went to find that CEO."

"I wanted to tell him, and the world, that human lives can’t be calculated by an algorithm—that some things are more important than profit."

When Luigi finished speaking, he lowered his head again.

The room fell silent.

Barney looked at the young man before him.

He had seen many kinds of people in his life.

He’d seen greedy bosses, slick politicians, and fellow workers who had resigned themselves to their fate.

But he had never seen anyone like this.

A man who had everything, yet smashed it all to pieces for the sake of his conscience.

In the value system of these blue-collar workers, there was a specific name for such a person.

Saints.

Barney slowly took off his baseball cap and placed it over his heart.

"Son."

Barney’s voice grew choked with emotion.

"You didn’t betray anyone."

"You just came home."

"Back to where people belong."

Barney reached out his calloused hand and clasped Luigi’s.

"As long as we’re here, no cop is taking you from this place."

The two young workers beside him had red-rimmed eyes as they nodded in silence.

In this crowded, damp apartment.

A bond stronger than blood connected two completely different classes.

They were no longer a rich heir and poor workers.

They were comrades-in-arms.