Page 99 of Tangled

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Colleen nudged Tristan with her elbow. “See? I told you they wouldn’t take the servers off-line to run the antivirus.”

Tristan chuckled and shrugged. “I never cease to be amazed and disappointed by my fellow human beings, especially those with too much money.”

She pointed at a different monitor off to the side. “Oh, look! CNBC has a live shot of it.”

“Okay, we’re starting phase two. Get Anjali.”

Twenty minutes later, just before the opening bell, CNBC announced that the meme stock GameShack was dead and probably heading to zero.

The talking heads unleashed invective that GameShack was a cautionary tale about why investors shouldn’t invest in meme stocks or else they could lose everything. The anger from Suit-Wearing White Guy #3 at the desk suggested that he’d lost a lot of money and hadn’t managed to divest himself of his position yet. “The shorts are smelling blood in the water, and the contrarians won’t be enough to save it.”

GameShack’s stock price fell like an ice-coated dead leaf in a blizzard, with flutters in the howling wind but its weight driving it inexorably to earth.

The price of GameShack’s cryptocurrency, the CurieCoin, did not fall. It rose and kept drifting upward.

When an artist dies, the price of their paintings goes up because that artist will produce no more art to dilute the pool of art already made.

If GameShack went to zero and dissolved in bankruptcy, the CurieCoin blockchain mint would cease operations, which meant no new CurieCoins would be minted.

CurieCoins had taken on an identity of their own that was no longer tied to GameShack, as they were traded on the international crypto exchanges, not merely on the GameShack streaming platform.

Huh.

Tristan turned to Colleen and Anjali, working on their computers at the end of his desk. “Time to crush the stock.”

53

Sherwood Forest

Colleen

Colleen and Anjali fired up their laptops and went to work convincing the minnows and other small fishies of the Sherwood Forest stock market forum that it wasn’t time to buy GameShackyet.

Let the price fall all day, they told the minnows. Drops like this don’t stage recoveries during the middle trading hours.

The Killer Whales were gleeful, encouraging people to buy the dip even though they’d already divested themselves of their positions, just because it amused them to see little people who couldn’t afford it lose their money. Colleen had seen the celebrations in the Killer Whales’ Pequod chat room after one of the small investors wrote a tearful post admitting they’d lost their life savings gambling on day-trading.

A quick search showed that the user account TwistyTrader was conspicuously absent from those posts, except for the occasional, “Knock it off, assholes,” comment.

Okay. Good.

So QueenMod and PikachuMod fought the good fight on the boards for hours, telling people how risky it was to catch a falling knife to keep them from buying the stock until it was lower.

They told the minnows that they should wait and see what the stock price would do in a few hours because it might go to zero, and then no buying price was a good deal.

When GameShack’s stock price fell below a dollar per share, the stock exchange declared that it would be removed from the NYSE the following day, a death knell for the stock.

Perfect.

Finally, with an hour left to go of trading and GameShack’s stock price at less than twenty-five cents, Colleen admitted TwistyTrader to the Small Pond room, a special meeting place for the small fish of the forum and the diametrical opposite of the Pequod room, where he made his offer to the minnows and sea bass of Sherwood Forest.

Fellow Merry People:

I don’t want to be seen buying GameShack stock, but with the approval of and in conjunction with Sherwood Forest’s moderators, at the close of trading today, I will buy GameShack stock for thirty-five cents US per share from anyone on this forum, no matter what you bought it at.