“You’re giving me your yacht?”
“Nope. Better.” Tristan opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a small, portable hard drive, which he placed in her palms. “Here. In a year or two, you can buy your own yacht.”
“What’s this? Your vacation pictures with other women so I won’t mourn you?”
“It’s my Superman program, the one that arbitrages stock market futures and squeezes pennies out of every stock market in the world. Just in case I survive, and just in case we go our separate ways at some point, I tweaked the code to keep our two serpents from fighting each other. That’s if I make it out of this. If I don’t, then you’ll have the only copy. If something happens to me and I don’t log into my beast for two weeks, the kill switch will activate, and it will wither and die. I didn’t want it running up the score if there’s no one to take the money. Oh, and I called yours Supergirl.”
“Please don’t talk like that,” she said, and her chest felt funny. Bad-funny, not good-funny.
“This one, though, I’ve already hand-coded your bank accounts into it. All you have to do is plug that USB into a computer and upload it into any website to set it free. I was going to do that for you, but it seemed like something we should do together or that you should do when you want to. It also has a kill switch and a rudimentary dashboard for the login, but I didn’t write it for casuals. If you want to change your bank accounts, you’ll have to go into the code.”
The shiny black box, the size of a pack of cigarettes, seemed to weigh like lead in her hands. “Is this illegal?”
“No. It’s completely legal, though a little devious. If anything, syncing the prices at the markets is a social good, and they’re essentially paying you to do it. It’s not illegal like what we’re doing with GameShack is.”
“Oh, yeah. I know. But you don’t have to give me this. This is, like, money for the rest of my life without working.”
“Exactly.”
“It seems excessive.”
Tristan kissed her forehead. “No matter what, I want to take care of you. If I can’t show you the world, at least I’ll know that you’ll get to see it. Just remember me when you do.”
“Always,” she said. “These last ten days have been the best of my life, except for the kidnapping of Anjali and Jian thing. But, you know. I’ve never been so happy.” Colleen took a deep breath, and a warm streak traced from her eye to her chin. “I don’t want this to end.”
Tristan rubbed his thumb over her cheekbone, wiping away the tear. “Neither do I. As soon as everything is stable, we can talk more.” He took both her hands. “I know we just met in person ten days ago, but we’ve packed a lifetime into those ten days. We’ve seen each other when we’re happy, when we’re stressed, when we had a moral decision to make, when we were in danger, and when our worlds were falling apart. It feels like it’s been longer because it was.”
“In the casino, you introduced me as your girlfriend.”
“I hope you didn’t mind.”
“I don’t. It seems like it should be too soon, way too soon, but it doesn’t feel like it is.”
Tristan paused, searching her eyes. “It feels too soon to say this, too, and I don’t want you to say anything back. Nothing. Don’t say anything at all. But I love you. My heart beats for you. I turn into a spotlight when you’re around, and I search for you to hold you in my light, and you’re the only person who exists for me in this dark world. Don’t say anything. I know it’s too soon. I know it’s too much. And I don’t want you to say anything back at all. It feels like coercion if you say something now, and I almost didn’t say anything because I don’t want you to mourn this, too. But I love you, and we’ll see what Wednesday brings before we say anything else.”
52
Wednesday
Tristan
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.