A jagged red snake curls down an unwatched plane one tick at a time. Cold monitor glow dissipates before it can illuminate the face of a person no longer a boy but not yet a man. He will awaken in his chair to a disaster in the world of numbers but first he exits a dream, of a woman-colossus, reclined, staring askance at him, a bug at her feet.
He creaks awake. His knee, pressed into the edge of his desk, tingles with needles and his jaw resets after a night aslack. An instinctual flick of his right wrist resuscitates the monitor. The bad news glows.
It’s all gone.
A chemical lightning bolt courses through his spine, shocking it erect. In a single reflexive action, he opens a new tab and presses the ‘R’ key, lets autocomplete guess the website he wants, then hits ‘Enter.’ Comment after cascading comment screams out the same message.
im gonna kms
it’s literally so over
this is because i bought guys
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
He tabs back over. The screen spells out his demise as an absolute number, as a relative percentage, and as a graph. The red snake plummets, racing for Hell. It dynamically resizes in proportion to the stretching window that contains it, making room for the cascade of threads.
somebody tell me WHYYYYY?
bruh I was leveraged to the tits
does ANYONE know what is happening rn
A snarky genius attempts to ease the pain with an explanation:
more people are selling than buying.
Others cannot contain their pain:
bro I put EVERYTHING into this fucking coin. it had ALL the signs, we were going to the moon, if I had got in two fucking weeks earlier I’d be drowning in champagne, FML
literally my last shot. this has literally never happened before, not this bad.
The snake shoots down so fast that it triggers an automatic alert, a venomous hiss.
[…down 75% in the last 24 hours] [Trade] [Hide]
A moment later, the same alert vibrates his phone, uncaring and redundant.
A tangled chain of impulses pulls his mind in every direction at once. He stares at a receding future where he is wealthy, where he had reached escape velocity, where he moves out and sets himself up for good. He pictures his dad’s grimace and the impossibility of explaining to him what any of it means. For the first time, he recasts his mother’s loss against cancer as an expression of mercy. She would never see him like this. He gets to spare her the burden of loathing and disappointment. She smiles at him from another realm; he does not detect it.
Every comment is the same. Tens of thousands of traders scramble in vain, glued as one into a burbling mass, doomed to the permanent underclass. The “dead cat bounce” proves to be a myth. He wonders, does this mean someone is making money? Or is everyone fucked? Someone has to be making money. My money went somewhere, right? It isn’t his money anymore. It was never his money. It was never anything but numbers stored redundantly in a million places on a million computers. Those numbers represent his fate, a die cast before he was even born. At any moment he could have opposed his fate; he could have sold before bed, or the night before, and been set for a month, just not a lifetime. No — otherwise it would not have been fate. Fate paralyzed him before he intervened, every time.
Fate releases its paralyzing grasp and leaves behind the stench of free will. He hardens closer to manhood but longs for boyhood. At least back then he could not read fate’s numbers. They were hidden away, defanged. Now is the time to act! Toughen up, sonny! There is only one thing left to do.
[Buy/Sell]
[Sell]
[Maximum Amount]
[Are you sure?]
[You’re saving $0.13 on this trade!]
One hundred twenty four dollars.
That’s literally nothing.
A vapor of hope sublimates off him as he leans back into his chair. Half a dozen calculations begin only to be aborted a heartbeat later. A final flash of his dream’s memory leaves him: the woman-colossus’ foot, a breaching whale, slipping past him, too big to climb but too gentle to crush him, a downward slope, the shape of his life. Cold shame tightens his pores, imprisoning him within himself.
The terrible snake, exhausted, flicks its red tongue one last time then turns green as it begins to climb.