You’ve no doubt heard what banks say about debts: when your customer owes you $1,000 it’s their problem if they can’t pay it back. But when the debt is $100 million then it’s yours. If you come clean and report it then you’re admitting you miss-read the customer risk, you’re just not good at your business.
When the truth is embarrassing or even threatening to survival, who wouldn’t consider lying? After all, if it’s done to protect innocent parties, isn’t it justified? Just a white lie?
Image that you work at the heart of the global financial system and through the course of your work you discover that a computer error has caused serious misreporting of debt, not of individuals but whole countries.
To correct the mistake would first mean announcing to the world that systems at the heart of global trade and commerce were unsound. Correcting the problem might be painful for the countries involved and the loss of confidence would lead to thousands, perhaps millions of lost jobs.
So just cover it up, yes? After all, it’s just numbers on a database or a row in a spreadsheet?
The trouble is, others might then discover the lie and the cover-up, the size of the lie grows until it becomes impossible to hide.
The damage done by disclosure, voluntary or otherwise is huge.
In Infinite Dream, part 2 of The Infinity Trilogy, just such a dilemma lies at the heart of a conspiracy which spirals into a collapse of confidence and the race to find a solution.
As world leaders squabble over who to blame, resolving the crisis becomes a broader search for the truth in a world that has forgotten what it looks like.
Infinite Dream is available now on Amazon.
Photo by Micah Williams on Unsplash