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******
Now it was Linda's turn to grimace. She playfully slapped his shoulder and stood up. "Are you out of your mind? Absolutely not! Do you know how hard I worked to get my career on track? My career is finally just getting started again!"
Linda had sacrificed her own ambitions, remaining a devoted stay-at-home mother for years after having Marvin. She had only recently resumed her creative work when the boy turned six and proved to be entirely self-sufficient. With her new connections in Los Angeles, she was fielding lucrative design contracts. She was not eager to put her hard-won professional identity on hold for another round of midnight feedings and diaper changes.
Grant chuckled warmly, holding his hands up in surrender. "Scared you, didn't I? Relax, honey, I was just kidding. The empire is safe."
He stood up, stretching his legs, his mind wandering back to the anomaly that was their only child. He swiftly changed the topic, though the awe remained in his voice.
"Seriously though, Linda," Grant mused, rubbing his chin. "With the way his brain processes complex macroeconomic theory and musical composition simultaneously... maybe we should look into having Marvin's IQ formally tested. Just to see what we are actually dealing with."
---
Miles away from the luxury of San Marino, a sleek, black Porsche 911 Carrera sliced through the glowing, neon-lit arteries of the Los Angeles freeway.
Inside the cabin, the vibrating bass of the engine was a low hum beneath the smooth jazz playing on the stereo. Jeff was behind the wheel, the streetlights rhythmically washing over his tailored suit. Sitting in the passenger seat, completely relaxed and staring out at the passing city skyline, was Marvin.
The negotiation at Mr. Zhou's had been an triumph. Miramax had been brought to heel.
"You know, Marvin," Jeff said, glancing over at the boy as he merged into the fast lane. "I was talking to a PR executive at the agency today. Considering the volume of output you are generating—the literature, the music, the screenplays—have you ever actually thought about getting your IQ officially tested?"
Marvin slowly turned his head away from the window. His eyes caught the reflection of the dashboard instruments.
"An intelligence quotient test?" Marvin asked, though an amusement flickered in his gaze. "Why on earth would we bring that up now, Jeff?"
"Because it is marketing gold," Jeff explained enthusiastically, gripping the leather steering wheel. "The press already calls you a prodigy. But if we had documented, certified proof from Mensa or a top-tier university psychologist? It would permanently solidify your 'genius' reputation. We could leverage it to secure prestige interviews, elevate your brand beyond just entertainment, and shut down any lingering ghostwriter conspiracy theories for good. It's a flawless angle."
Marvin leaned his head back against the plush leather headrest. He closed his eyes, considering the proposition for a fraction of a second, before a slow smirk spread across his lips.
He slowly shook his head. "No, Jeff. We will not be doing that."
Jeff blinked in surprise. "Why not? It's a half-day evaluation. You might completely shatter the charts."
'That is precisely the problem,' Marvin thought, opening his eyes to watch the blur of the city lights.
Marvin wasn't just a smart twelve-year-old. He was the impossible, supernatural convergence of three entirely distinct souls. He possessed the raw, developing neural plasticity of a human child, layered over the sprawling, future-knowing memories of an adult transmigrator, all anchored and powered by the vast soul of an Incubus.
If he were to sit down and take a standardized, clinical intelligence test, the results would not merely be "high." They would be terrifyingly anomalous. His processing speed, his pattern recognition, his spatial reasoning, and his memory recall would shatter the grading curve so violently that it would put the documented minds of Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Stephen Hawking to shame.
It would not look like human genius. It would look like an alien infiltration.
And in the current, geopolitical climate, being recognized as a literal, unparalleled superhuman entity was the last thing he wanted.
The Asian Financial Crisis was currently ripping through the global economy like a wildfire. Millions of people were losing their livelihoods, governments were panicking, and international regulatory bodies were frantically hunting for the invisible specters and predatory hedge funds who had profiteered off the collapse.
If Marvin were to publicly announce to the entire world—with certified proof—that he possessed the most advanced, calculating brain on the face of the earth, he would instantly paint a massive target on his own back. The SEC, Interpol, and foreign intelligence agencies would inevitably start looking closely at his offshore Zenith Trust accounts. They would connect the dots between the "world's smartest boy" and the phantom trades that had devastated the Eastern hemisphere.
Furthermore, his Incubus nature was a deeply guarded secret. His race was brutally pragmatic, cunning, and protective of its own survival. Lust Demons operated best in the shadows, pulling the strings of human desire while remaining unseen. To step into the blinding light of scientific evaluation would invite scrutiny that could lead to questions he could never safely answer.
Why expose his throat to the wolves when he was already quietly leading the pack?
"It is an unnecessary risk, Jeff," Marvin replied smoothly, wrapping his internal logic in a perfectly reasonable, PR-friendly excuse.
"The mystery of genius is more compelling to the public than a number on a piece of paper. If I score a 180, people will simply expect me to cure diseases, and they will criticize me when I choose to write pop songs and movies instead. A number creates a ceiling of expectation. I prefer to operate without ceilings."
Jeff considered the boy's words, slowly nodding his head. "You know what? You're right. You lose the 'artist' mystique the second you turn yourself into a lab rat. We keep them guessing."
"Exactly," Marvin purred, his Incubus charm radiating a subtle, soothing wave that completely erased any lingering doubts from his agent's mind.
'Best to play it completely safe,' Marvin reasoned in the silence of his own mind.
Perhaps one day, decades in the future, when he practically owned a part of the planet and fully understood the limits of human psychology, he would sit down for a test just to amuse himself with the resulting hysteria.
But for now, the Demon was perfectly content to let the world believe he was merely a very lucky, very talented, very smart child, while he quietly continued to purchase the earth beneath their feet.
—
Time flew by in a blur of negotiations, and before long, the crisp autumn winds of October 1997 swept through Los Angeles. Miramax was already entangled in the logistical undertaking of their newly inked contract with Marvin's parents in the presence of a judge.
Meanwhile, operating as Marvin's exclusive agent, Jeff executed a masterful, high-stakes power play right on the Weinsteins' desks: a complete film packaging deal.
In the ecosystem of Hollywood, a packaging deal was the ultimate flex of agency muscle.
Instead of merely submitting a naked script and begging a studio to finance it, an agency bundled the core creative elements—bringing together the screenwriter, the director, and the marquee lead actor—and sold the entire pre-assembled package to the studio as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. This strategy shifted the balance of power, forcing studios to pay massive packaging fees directly to the agency, completely bypassing standard client commissions.
It was a brilliant tactic popularized and perfected by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and its legendary co-founder, Michael Ovitz. Ovitz had wielded packaging like a weapon throughout the 1990s, transforming CAA into an unstoppable juggernaut that dictated the terms of the entire entertainment industry. His mastery over the town's top talent and his iron-fisted control over these bundle deals had famously earned him the #1 spot as the most powerful person in Hollywood by *Premiere* magazine in 1996. Even now, in late 1997—despite Ovitz having famously departed CAA for a brief, turbulent stint as president of The Walt Disney Company—his legacy as the ultimate Hollywood power broker still cast a shadow over every major deal struck in the town.
Taking a page directly out of the Ovitz playbook, Jeff presented Miramax with an irresistible bundle. Following Marvin's exact suggestions, the package attached an up-and-coming storyteller named M. Night Shyamalan to direct, anchored by the undeniable box-office gravity of A-lister Bruce Willis.
Faced with a pre-assembled, guaranteed blockbuster, Harvey and Bob Weinstein couldn't say no. Serious talks commenced immediately, and while the executives hammered out the final financial terms, the Miramax studio machine roared to life.
They shifted into pre-production, immediately beginning the sweeping location scouts for principal photography, drafting preliminary shooting schedules, and laying the groundwork for a cinematic undertaking.
The first week of October 1997 brought a development that Marvin had noted as a possibility in his July analysis but had assigned moderate probability to: the Hong Kong dollar came under significant speculative attack.
The attackers were following a logic that was, in isolation, financially coherent. The Hong Kong dollar's currency board arrangement — the mechanism by which the HKD was pegged to the USD at 7.8 — required the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to hold US dollar assets equal to or exceeding the monetary base at all times. If speculators could engineer a sufficiently large capital outflow from Hong Kong, forcing the HKMA to defend the peg by raising interest rates — the currency board mechanism's automatic stabiliser — the resulting interest rate spike would damage Hong Kong equity markets and potentially create the conditions for a feedback loop that challenged the peg's sustainability.
The Hong Kong dollar attack, which Marvin had rated at approximately twenty-five percent probability, materialised on October 7th. The HKMA's overnight interest rate spiked from approximately five percent to over two hundred percent as the authority defended the peg by drastically tightening liquidity — the standard currency board response to speculative pressure.
The Hang Seng Index fell four point four percent on October 7th. The attack continued through October 8th and 9th, with the Hang Seng falling a further twelve point six percent over those two days in what became the worst three-day period for Hong Kong equities since the October 1987 global crash.
The HKMA held the peg. It had the reserves to hold the peg, and Beijing's implicit commitment backstopped its credibility in a way that the Bank of Thailand's and Bank Indonesia's commitments had not been backstopped. But the cost of holding it — the interest rate spike, the equity market collapse, the liquidity withdrawal — produced collateral damage that spread through the region's financial markets with the speed and indiscrimination of a system that had, by October, exhausted its shock-absorption capacity.
In Korea, the Hang Seng collapse was the visible event that made the invisible domestic stress suddenly legible to the international institutional investors who had been maintaining residual Korea long positions on the basis of the exceptionalism argument. If Hong Kong, with its impeccable currency board and its Chinese sovereign backstop, could experience a twelve percent equity market collapse in three days, then the argument that Korea was categorically different from the rest of the crisis zone was not self-evidently correct.
The KOSPI fell four point eight percent on October 8th. The won moved to 947 per dollar — an accelerating pace of depreciation from the September trajectory. The Bank of Korea's daily intervention in the currency market increased visibly: the daily reserve changes, which the Seoul team was now tracking with the specific granularity that the October situation required, showed reserve consumption of approximately three to four hundred million dollars per day.
Billions of dollars weren't just evaporating into thin air; they were being erased from the global ledger, leaving behind a trail of devastation.
The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis had mutated from a sudden market correction into an economic plague. Decades of explosive, hard-fought prosperity turned to ash overnight, and as national currencies went into freefall, a blanket of despair smothered the populace.
The daily news broadcasts devolved into grim, relentless tallies of human tragedy. Faced with the sudden loss of everything they had spent their lives building, desperate people resorted to unthinkable measures. Driven by the weight of debt and the terror of ruin, formerly successful executives began stepping off the ledges of towering corporate skyscrapers.
Others wandered blindly into oncoming traffic or took their own lives in quiet desperation, clinging to the bleak hope that a life insurance payout might be the only way to keep their families from starving after declaring bankruptcy.
The reality of the collapse was that those missing billions didn't simply vanish into the ether—they were systematically extracted. The massive deficits hemorrhaged by reckless conglomerates and panicked foreign investors were drained directly from the life savings, pensions, and meager pockets of ordinary, hardworking citizens. The celebrated 'Asian Miracle' was dead, and it was the working class who was forced to pay the butcher's bill.
David Kim called at six-thirty Pacific time — ten-thirty in the evening in Seoul — with a report that was the most urgent in tone of any he had filed.
"The October rollover cycle has begun," he said. "We're seeing rollover failure rates that exceed thirty percent on some of the three-month commercial bank facilities. The foreign banks are not rolling. Korea First Bank has issued a statement indicating it is 'reviewing its funding structure.' That is —"
"That is the language a bank uses when it cannot roll its liabilities," Marvin said.
"Yes. Korea First Bank is insolvent on a mark-to-market basis if you apply conservative loan loss provisions to its real estate and manufacturing sector loan book. This is not a secret among people who have read the quarterly reports carefully."
*****
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