I.

The party was in full swing when Halcyon found me. I was standing by the pool, holding a champagne flute I had no intention of drinking, watching the light from the chandeliers refract through the water and dance across the white stone patio. Long Island in the summer of 1925 was a spectacle of excess that would have shocked a saint and bored a sinner. Daisy was somewhere inside, laughing with a group of stockbrokers whose names I had already forgotten.

"You look like a man waiting for a execution," Halcyon said, appearing at my side as though he had materialized from the shadows. He was a small man, impeccably dressed in a charcoal three-piece suit, his silver hair combed back with mathematical precision. He reminded me of a watchmaker—meticulous, precise, with no patience for anything that couldn't be measured.

"I look like a man who doesn't belong here," I said.

"That's because you don't. Not really. But you will."

He handed me a card. It was blank except for a time and an address: Tomorrow. Nine AM. 432 Park Avenue. Fifth floor.

"I have an opportunity for you, Mr. Thorne. Not an investment. Something more fundamental. I can show you how to extract value from the future itself."

"How much?" I asked before I could stop myself.

Halcyon smiled. It was a thin, precise smile, like a scalpel opening skin. "That depends on how much you want."

II.

The office on the fifth floor of 432 Park Avenue was spare and cold, all marble and chrome and glass. Halcyon sat behind a desk that seemed to float above the floor, its supports invisible, and explained the mechanism.

"The future is a resource," he said. "Just like oil, or gold, or wheat. It exists in potential form—prospects, projections, expectations—and it can be extracted, refined, and brought into the present. The market already does this indirectly, through futures contracts and options. But what I offer is more direct. More efficient."

He pressed a button on his desk, and a panel slid open, revealing a small device that looked like a brass compass crossed with a tuning fork. "This instrument measures the future value of any asset—any person, any company, any idea. Once we know the future value, we can extract a portion of it and realize it in the present. The excess future value remains, untouched. We are not destroying the future, Mr. Thorne. We are merely... harvesting it."

I should have been skeptical. I was, in other circumstances, deeply skeptical. But I was twenty-six years old, born to parents who had died owing money, and I had spent my entire life watching men born with silver spoons eat meals that I could only dream of. When Halcyon showed me the first extraction—pulling two million dollars from the future value of a small steel company whose stock was trading at eight dollars a share—I didn't see a mechanism. I saw a ladder.

Daisy noticed the change in me before I did. She always did. We had met at a party in May, she had been wearing a dress the color of champagne and laughing at something Tom Van Alen had said, and I had known in that instant that I would do anything to have her. Now, three months later, I was buying her anything she wanted—furs from Paris, jewels from Cartier, a apartment on Central Park South with a view that made her cry.

But she was fading. Not dramatically. Not in a way that a doctor could diagnose. Just... less. Her laughter was quieter. Her eyes were darker, shadowed. Her skin, once luminous, had taken on a translucent quality, as though the light were passing through her rather than reflecting off it.

"You look tired, darling," I said one evening, watching her sit before her vanity, removing her makeup with a cotton pad that came away pristine. She had nothing on her face but her natural color, and even that was fading.

"I am tired," she said. "But not in the way you think."

III.

I found out what she meant in October, when the second extraction went wrong.

The target was a real estate development in Queens—unbuilt, unpermitted, purely potential. Halcyon's instrument measured its future value at twelve million dollars. We extracted four, leaving eight in the future. Or so we thought.

The extraction process took three days. On the third night, Daisy collapsed. Not dramatically—she simply stopped, mid-sentence in the middle of a conversation with Tom, and folded to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

The doctor called it exhaustion. Chronic fatigue. I called it a lie.

I went to Halcyon the next morning. "Something's wrong with Daisy. She's being drained."

Halcyon didn't look up from his desk. "Everyone is drained, Mr. Thorne. The question is by what."

"I didn't know it would—like this."

"You didn't ask. That was your mistake." He finally looked at me, and his eyes were flat and depthless, like two coins dropped into a well. "The future is a finite resource. Someone has to consume it so that you can enjoy the present. Do you think prosperity comes for free? Do you think wealth appears by magic? It is extracted. It is taken from tomorrow and brought to today. The only question is who pays the price."

I left his office and went to Daisy. She was lying in bed, her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Her breathing was shallow. When I took her hand, it was cool and light, as though most of its substance had already gone.

"I'm afraid, Julian," she whispered. "I'm afraid that everything is so beautiful and nothing will last."

"I'll stop," I said. "I'll stop the extractions."

She closed her eyes. "It's too late for that. The future is already spent. The question is whether there's any left for me to grow old in."

IV.

I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk, watching the traffic crawl toward Manhattan, the skyscrapers behind me glowing gold in the setting sun. My phone rang. Halcyon.

"One more extraction, Mr. Thorne. Just one more, and you'll have enough for a lifetime of pleasure. The target is a telephone company—future value is astronomical. We extract, we diversify, we retire to the Riviera."

I looked at the river. It moved slowly, brown and indifferent, carrying the runoff of a city that consumed itself by the ton every day. I thought of Daisy's cool hand, of her whispered fear, of the way the golden light on the skyscrapers looked less like prosperity and more like the glow of a furnace.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about this, I realized. Not exactly this, but the thing beneath this. The hollowness beneath the glitter. The way a generation had won the war and discovered that victory tasted like ash. We had built a civilization on the principle of consumption—consuming goods, consuming time, consuming the future—and we had called it progress.

I hung up the phone. I walked to the nearest telephone booth and called a travel agent. I booked a flight to Maine, a cabin by a lake, a place where the only future anyone cared about was whether it would rain and whether the trout would bite.

When I got home, Daisy was sitting on the couch, wrapped in a shawl, watching the sunset paint the park green and gold. She looked up at me, and for a moment, the shadows under her eyes seemed a little less deep.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Somewhere the future hasn't been spent yet," I said.

And I meant it.

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