If you were a user of the GameShack streaming videogame service on Wednesday morning, you were probably wary after what had seemed to be a malicious hack the previous night. That’s enough to scare anybody.
You probably assumed that GameShack had run antivirus and antimalware software to eliminate any residual malicious programs the hackers might’ve left behind.
After all, that’s the only responsible thing to do.
Nevertheless, you downloaded and backed up your character and all your videogame progress, just in case.
And then, because you’d already fired up the game, you probably played the game a little bit, but you’d keep saving and downloading your progress every fifteen minutes or so. It’s painful to lose progress.
If you were a creator and thus had a business where you expertly played videogames for other people’s education and amusement, and those people paid you to watch, you’d probably be downloading your videos and other intellectual property since the hack the night before. Because, holy shit, if GameShack really did burn down their streaming service, you would lose everything you’d built over the years. All those thousands of hours of videos you’d made that people were still paying you to rewatch. All those subscribers who were your bread and butter. There was no way to download a subscriber list, but you could copy and paste usernames and try to find them on other services. And dammit, why hadn’t you also streamed on Division and YouTube and all the other gamer streaming sites as mirrors and told your subscribers to follow you there, too? Because if GameShack did blow their streaming service all to Hell, it was going to destroy the business that you’d worked on eighteen hours a day, every damn day, for years, and you didn’t know how you were going to make rent next month.
So you’d download everything.
Everyone was also transferring their CurieCoin cryptocurrency out of their GameShack wallets and into the cryptocurrency exchanges. The creators were paid in CurieCoins, and gamers bought the CCs to pay the gamers.
Every transfer and download required GameShack’s servers to run hard.
And if you were a technician at GameShack’s server farm, which was all the computers that were running the company, you would be watching that monstrous load on the servers as every single user and creator downloaded their data and transferred their blockchained CurieCoins, and you’d see how all that simultaneous high-bandwidth activity was slowing the bit rate down to a crawl like forcing a firehose through a funnel. And you knew if you tried to run the antivirus software at that point, it would crash the entire server farm.
So you don’t.
You don’t run the antimalware program.
You appeal upstairs to GameShack’s corporate office, begging the bean counters to allow you to take the servers off-line so you could run the antivirus software without the enormous strain on the system from every user simultaneously downloading backups of their accounts.
But they say no.
If GameShack went off-line even for an hour, even for routine or extraordinary maintenance, the stock price would fall even further, and the bean counters were paid in stock options.
And all that is why at nine o’clock in the morning New York time, just a half hour before the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the second half of Tristan and Colleen’s computer virus extricated its code and aimed itself like a bullet at the heart of GameShack.
The same message as the day before rolled up on all the computer screens this time, not just the creator accounts, stating that GameShack had ceased all streaming operations as of the following Friday.
Colleen and Tristan stood in his darkened computer office on his yacht, the floor rocking gently under their feet, watching the GameShack site on their monitors as each one of them snapped to black, and then their words appeared.
The GameShack streaming service has ceased operation.
Due to mounting operational costs and recent financial losses, GameShack is discontinuing its streaming service as of today at this time.
No data downloads will be available.
Thank you for being a valuable contributor to the GameShack streaming service.
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.”