The scene, like a backyard barbecue party straight from a magazine cover, began to fill with static.
The colors rapidly faded. The once warm, saturated tones became gray and sharp, full of grain.
Time was fast-forwarded, and Leo's consciousness was dragged into the turbulent seventies.
He saw long lines of cars snaking down the highways and gas stations with signs that read, "NO GAS TODAY."
He felt the true meaning of the word "stagflation"—prices soared while wages stagnated, an anxiety that permeated the very air of the nation.
For the first time, a crack appeared in that sturdy house.
Then, the scene shifted to a university television studio.
A small, bespectacled man was speaking eloquently to the camera.
His name was Milton Friedman. His logic was clear, his language highly inflammatory.
He told the American people that government regulation was the enemy of efficiency, that unions were an obstacle to freedom, and that a corporation's only social responsibility was to create profit for its shareholders.
"They took the dirty word 'greed' and repackaged it as 'rational self-interest,' bestowing upon it a noble virtue," Roosevelt's voiceover was filled with undisguised contempt and disgust. "They denigrated a society's responsibility to the weak, dismissing it as a burden hindering economic development. These termites, they first corroded people's minds."
The corrosion of thought brought about a political shift.
A familiar figure appeared on screen. He was once a Hollywood actor, but now he stood at the pinnacle of American power.
Ronald Reagan.
His smile was full of charm, his voice full of confidence. He promised the American people the dawn of a "Morning in America."
And then, Leo saw the turning point in history.
1981.
In the White House press briefing room, President Reagan faced the nation's cameras and, in a hardline tone, announced he was firing all striking federal air traffic controllers.
The scene cut to the picket line outside an airport. The professionals who had once controlled the safety of America's skies, their union leaders, were being handcuffed by police and shoved into squad cars like common criminals.
"Look, child, right there! That's where it all began to collapse!" For the first time, Roosevelt's voice was filled with uncontrollable rage.
"I spent twelve long years, fought countless battles, just to get union representatives to walk into the White House with dignity and sit at the same table as the titans of capital! And him, Ronald Reagan, with just one televised press conference, he broke the backbone of the American working class right in front of the entire nation!"
"From that day on, the words 'labor balance' became a complete joke."
The dominoes began to fall.
Before Leo's eyes, a series of rapid-fire, dizzying images flashed.
A massive tax cut bill was signed, slashing the top federal income tax rate from 70% to 28%. The biggest beneficiaries were those already at the top of the pyramid.
One by one, the regulations that had once shackled the behemoth of capital were repealed.
The word "antitrust" quietly faded from the Department of Justice's vocabulary.
A tidal wave of corporate mergers surged, giving birth to one mega-corporation after another.
Wall Street, the financial casino that had once been caged, had its gates thrown open once more.
Leo saw all sorts of terms he had only ever read about in financial history textbooks become real-world instruments of madness—junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, financial derivatives...
The bankers, who had once been like mere accountants, transformed themselves into the masters of a new era.
Finally, the scene cut back to the place Leo knew best.
Pittsburgh.
He saw the steel mills he had grown up with shutting down, one after another.
The blast furnaces went cold, and the smokestacks no longer billowed smoke.
The massive factory buildings grew rusty and decrepit, like the skeletons of abandoned iron beasts.
Tens of thousands of workers, men who had once been able to support their entire families on a single salary, stood in long lines to collect meager unemployment benefits.
Their faces held the exact opposite expression of the G.I. Bill generation—confusion, humiliation, and utter despair for the future.
The illusion of the "Golden Age" was utterly shattered here.
In the end, all the chaotic images vanished.
Only a single close-up shot remained, zooming in infinitely.
It was a young Wall Street trader from the eighties. He wore an expensive suit and a flashy tie, and he was laughing at the camera—a laugh of pure arrogance, filled with the glee of a conqueror.
Behind him were countless trading screens, flickering with red and green numbers.
Roosevelt's voice, at this moment, turned bone-chillingly cold.
"They were no longer content with just gnawing at the foundation, Leo."
"They started tearing down the house's load-bearing walls, piling up the century-old timber, and lighting a great bonfire they called 'prosperity.'"
"And most people, the original owners of the house, could only huddle far from the fire, timidly gathering the last of the warm ashes to keep themselves from freezing."
The close-up of the trader's arrogant laugh shattered like glass.
Time jumped to the end of the twentieth century.
Leo's perspective was pulled to Washington D.C. He saw a group of politicians and bankers in suits, celebrating with a toast in a lavish conference room.
They were celebrating the official repeal of a law.
That law was the Glass-Steagall Act.
"The cage door… they opened it themselves, completely." Roosevelt's voiceover was now terrifyingly calm.
Immediately after, the storm hit.
2008.
In a way he never had before, Leo experienced the financial tsunami that swept the globe.
He saw the day the Lehman Brothers Company collapsed. Bankers in expensive suits walked dazedly out of their Manhattan headquarters, clutching cardboard boxes filled with their personal belongings.
He saw an ordinary middle-aged couple watching helplessly as their 401(k) account, their retirement savings, lost forty percent of its value in a single day.
He could feel the wife's silent sobs and the husband's bone-deep, helpless despair.
He heard the sound of the auctioneer's gavel at a foreclosure auction.
Countless families, unable to repay the incredibly complex subprime mortgages packaged by financial alchemists, were evicted by banks from the homes they had lived in for decades.
Then, his perspective was yanked back to Washington.
He saw the bankers who had manufactured the crisis, the CEOs of the financial institutions that had sold toxic assets to the entire world, sitting at a hearing before Congress.
But they weren't being punished. On the contrary, they were being bailed out.
"Too big to fail!"
Roosevelt's voice, at that moment, was no longer just angry. It was a roar from the very depths of his soul.
"That is the most shameless lie I have ever heard in my entire life! They held the world's savers and taxpayers hostage, kidnapping the entire country! Back in my day, I summoned the bankers to the White House and called them malefactors to their faces! But your President, your government, they offered the taxpayers' money to them like a sacrificial offering, begging them to take it!"
On screen, a bank CEO, whose company had received tens of billions of US Dollars in government bailouts after failed investments in financial derivatives, awarded himself a bonus of thirty million US Dollars that same year.
After the crisis, an even more terrifying monster grew from the ruins.
The old industrial districts were completely dead, replaced by Silicon Valley under the California sun.
Leo's perspective flew over the beautiful tech campuses that looked like university grounds.
But the scene underground was chilling.
He saw data centers sprawling underground like great beasts. Countless server lights blinked like monstrous eyes, greedily devouring information from every corner of the globe.
"Child, do you see?"
Roosevelt's voice sounded again, this time like a history teacher explaining a new subject to his student.
"The Trusts I fought in my day, they monopolized steel, oil, and railroads—things you can see and touch. But these new-era Economic Royalists…"
He used the term he had once used to describe the Dupont and the Morgan families.
"They monopolize information, data, your thoughts and mine, your desires and mine!"
"With every click, every search, every pause you make, they build a digital profile on you so accurate it would frighten you. Then, they use that profile to manipulate you, making you buy things you don't need, making you believe the views they want you to believe."
"They have built an invisible, borderless digital empire, ten thousand times larger than the empire of the Standard Oil Company!"
Just as Leo was stunned by this grand narrative, the camera of the mental movie suddenly accelerated, like a bullet fired from a gun, aimed directly at his own life.
It shot through the clouds, swept across the American Continent, and landed precisely in Pittsburgh.
He saw the Daily Grinding coffee shop where he worked.
He saw his Twitter account: "New Policy Ghost."
He saw the pinned tweet about the Omni Company.
Then, the camera penetrated physical walls and entered a virtual world made of code and data.
He saw the system backend of a company he had never heard of: the Human Shield Data Service Company.
On the system's interface, he saw his own name—Leo Wallace.
His profile picture, his personal information, and a screenshot of his tweet were all compiled into a file.
And at the top of the file, a tag automatically generated by an algorithm was clearly marked in red:
"Risk Assessment: High."
"Emotional Disposition: Anti-social/Anti-business."
Immediately, he saw a series of automated commands being executed.
This file, marked as "High Risk," was automatically distributed to all corporate clients in the Human Shield Company database who subscribed to the "Employee Risk Warning Service."
The client list was long.
And on that long list, he saw a familiar name.
Daily Grinding, LLC
He finally understood.
He finally saw the entire process of the "invisible hand" at work.
Cold, efficient, precise, and utterly inhuman.
There was no angry manager, no malicious HR representative, not even a single specific person who had pushed the "fire" button.
He had simply been judged a "non-performing asset" by an algorithm within a vast, automated risk management system, and then calmly "purged."
At that moment, the arrogant laughter of the Wall Street trader and the helpless, sympathetic expression on Dave's face when he was fired overlapped in his mind, bridging a gap of thirty years.