Marta and the Demons
Page 8
about them, and more about yourself too – to get to the next person.
Oh, everybody mocked Tendr. At first. At first, when it was mostly just women on it. Everybody roundly took the thought-piece.
Why I Will Never Use Tendr.
Is Tendr Really Just Uber But For Sex Work?
Why Are So Many Lesbian Millennials Purchasing In-App Anti-Rebuff Buffs?
Tendr Just Fucked Up Fucking, Forever.
As Tendr went more and more mainstream, the conversation changed tone. And sex went up and up. Not no-strings-attached sex, exactly. Just . . . figuring out which strings are right for you?
I mean, so I hear.
Everywhere you looked there were corporate events with “Dispossession” in the titles. Academic conferences too. I went and saw one panel, “Monetising Monetisation with Ludic Tradeables.”
I figured a conference couldn’t be that different from a fandom convention, and it wasn’t: everyone was cosplaying their favourite philosopher. One dude, this Žiž-neck-beard smirker, coined the term “irritainment bonds” as an umbrella term for Dispossession’s gameplay cryptocurrency financial instruments. Nobody knew who I was. I asked him a totally fire ‘question’ which ran, in full, as follows.
“Criticz gonna critique.”
Also, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin wanted to talk. Which kind of creeped us out. But turns out arms suppliers deliver a heck of a lot of incredibly boring and arduous training days, and they figured Dispossession could revolutionize the way they delivered those.
We figured talking was better than awkward silence? As I explained to one of the disconcertingly nice and not-what-you’d-expect BAE Systems women:
“Training people who work with people who kill people isn’t exactly the same as killing people, right? It could even be the opposite of killing people. You see, because –”
She agreed.
And Rockstar Games got in touch about this epic, super-secret and semi procedurally generated sandboxy MMORPG game they were developing – working title Us – where the game world was built by magically augmenting the entire Google Street View data-set. I.e. the game world was the real world. They wanted us to provide the currency.
Okay, we said.
§
I still hadn’t figured out what Jubil33t was. Maybe it would save the world!
In my sober moments, I did think: I’m swimming in money. But a lot of it is the money I owe.
And something else niggled me. Something Marta had said about Monetrize.
The deposit limit nowadays is one hundred pounds per user. But when I signed up, there was no limit.
How did deposits get limited to a hundred pounds?
Regulators.
§
Anyway. As well as negotiating the unicorns and angels and demons, plus preparing to do the initial public offering – from Dispossession Ltd to Dispossession PLC OMG! – we were all buying and selling our own “irritainment bonds” (we reclaimed the term) like there was no tomorrow. Which there wasn’t.
It was utterly addictive. Trading on the financial exchanges is like a really good game. The kind you know you’ll have to delete one day.
It will feel really good when we finally do.
‘Eff-pee-ess-unit-tee-ess-tee-Asian-income-tower-defensive-zed-at-nought-spot-six-four-down-a-quarter,’ said the woman on the phone, in about zero-spot-five seconds. ‘Do-you-confirm-that-you’d-like-to-go-ahead-with-this-trade?’
‘Totes. Yes please. I wish I could talk like you.’
A polite laugh, with an edge of cute. ‘That’s done for you, Myeong.’
‘You’re like a human high frequency trader. I would just say “yes” to anything you ask me.’
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘. . . no.’
V. Bonds
The catastrophe took a week to unfold.
The story started on Reddit. It spread fast.
Financial instruments are liquid, tradeable. It’s not like people who buy and sell in the rice futures market actually have to worry about growing the rice, right? Nobody’s going to show up at your desk and be like, Hey, we’re starving, where’s that rice?
You shouldn’t have to worry about playing out your pledge personally. Unless . . . unless you deliberately designed your security to be illiquid.
A kid in Paris, Texas, wrangled $15,000 out of a loan-shark to create a new Dispossession security. The APR on those loans goes to like 1000%. To keep up with her payments she pledged to play at least 20,000 hours of Keel of Command – or any other games of comparable budget, produced either by the same studio or using the same engine – over the next five years.
She was either an idiot or a genius.
‘My mom and dad are always like, get a f**king job. Okay, now this is my job. I could have gone to college, and got a stupid degree, and got all those debts, and spent the next five years working a job I hate just to pay off my debts. I’m still going to pay them off. But I’m going to pay them off doing something that’s actually worthwhile.’
I mean, she was definitely an idiot. But for like one second I thought she might be some sort of twisted genius.
Basically, she did what gamers always do, and used Dispossession in a way it was never meant to be used. Unless the market totally crashed, there was no way she could offload that Keel of Command security on anyone.
Except us. We bought it immediately – compulsory sale – and Legal disintegrated it as soon as they could manage to figure out how.
But the damage was done. Loopholes were blooming everywhere and copycats were leaping right through them. We’d blown up on social media. All my favourite blogs were about me, in a bad way. Iconic journalists wanted to interview me, in a bad way.
Amid the appalling publicity, several big partners pulled out. Some were like, ‘Wink, wink. We’ll be back, if you’re still around.’
As they moved out, the regulators moved in.
§
The regulators were all over us.
It wasn’t just “Police Liaison Officer / Bad Cop” stuff. It was like: give it here. This wasn’t our thing any more, it was their thing.
Plus every lawyer in the universe awoke one morning and thought, Hmm, I bet Myeong would like some mail today.
You know what? In spite of it all, I think we could have got through it in the end. What killed us was the rating agencies. S&P, Moody’s, Fitch: I never really knew what they did till they killed us.
We were like a fallen gladiator, with a trident pricking his throat. He’s wounded, there’s nothing more he can do. He stares up the tiered seating. It’s the rating agencies who have the right to turn their thumbs, and decide it one way or another. Should he beg?
Revised IPO Grade: 0
One star.
Thumbs down.
§
There was this big fancy firm – no shout-out – that was on the verge of underwriting Dispossession’s share offering. They were so nice. They said they were excellently placed to manage our insolvency instead.
Give it here.
It’s ours.
§
I guess Narnia maybe regretted quitting her job, giving away all her stuff, and moving to Berlin to follow her dream of becoming a ballet dancer and/or actor.
§
And those Investor Visas for Marta and Li Shu?
Yeah, those weren’t going to happen anymore.
§
Ironically, the market in ludic tradeables did crash!
Revised credit rating for all ludic tradeables: CCC−
Thumbs down.
One star.
Everybody lost ever
ything. The market crashed so badly that the kid from Paris, Texas probably could probably have offloaded her catastrophic Keel of Command exposure after all.
Not that she even wanted to. I don’t know if that kid will ever get her dream of getting up every afternoon for five years and knuckling down for another hard twelve-hour shift of digital sun, surf, and slaughtering cyborg ikuchi and Kamohoalii drone-swarms.
I truly hope so.
I mean that – I don’t bear her any grudge. If it hadn’t been her, maybe it would have been somebody else. Some speed-runner, glitch-hunter, arbitrager, avant-garde gamer.
The regulators even said the kid did us a favour. If Dispossession had gone further, said the regulators, if we had caused a real bubble, we could have faced jail time.
Thanks, speculative, over-sharing regulators.
Thanks, kid.
§
It was about ten in the evening. Conquering Animal Sound was playing from Carly’s old laptop. We’d eaten take-out and stacked up the tupperwares, and we were curled up on either end of the sofa with the cushions piled up between us.
I was fuming. ‘How is this the government’s thing? This is our thing.’
‘Google “Robert Heinlein fandom,”’ suggested Carly. ‘Those guys’ll teach you anew the value of government, tax, and well-regulated markets.’
‘How can you be so calm?’ I peered more closely. ‘Are you calm? I can’t tell.’
Actually. She looked almost ghostly.
‘I got out,’ said Carly.
I picked up a cushion and put it down again. ‘What are you even talking about?’
‘I got out when the market was high. Our company’s bust. So what? We’re not liable. But I have about a hundred and thirty thousand pounds in my current account.’
Limited liability.
Our finances are separate from Dispossession’s. That money was ours.
I was just staring at Carly. She laughed, but really sadly. ‘Stupid place for it.’
‘You’re amazing,’ I whispered.
‘No,’ she said, very angrily. ‘Half of it is for you.