Marta and the Demons Page 6

different,’ Marta said.

  ‘I think what Myeong’s trying to say,’ Carly continued, ‘is that Dispossession could be more than an app. It could be the framework of a new financial asset class.’

  ‘Totally,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what I said?’

  Carly grabbed my hand and started stroking my thumb. ‘If people value something, it’s valuable. You just need something to kick-start the cycle. And if we forget about tax and liquidity, usually there’s this trade-off between risk and return, right? In our case it becomes a three-way thing. There’s a three-way trade-off between risk, return and whatever intrinsic attractions the game has – such as fun.’

  ‘Hmmmmmm.’ Marta cocked her head. ‘So some gamers are gonna accept low return and high risk because of the high fun?’

  ‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘There must be like a million gamers out there who think they have leet skillz. They’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll deposit a hundred bucks, make back a hundred and five no sweat.”’

  ‘Then a lot of them only make back ninety?’ said Marta.

  ‘But they know most of what they’ve lost has only gone to other gamers, plus they had hella fun, so they’re okay with that!’

  ‘Plus they think, “I’ll make it back next time.”’

  ‘It could work,’ said Marta, pouting and distressed, looking like she’d jump at the chance to start her life over from the very beginning.

  ‘I bet there are enough of us who would try it,’ I urged. ‘It’s such a powerful dream, to play games for a living. I mean I –’

  ‘So here’s the thing guys,’ interrupted Carly firmly. ‘How do we set up the exchange? How do we make them transferable?’

  Quiet, wavering breath.

  ‘Transferable?’ I said uncertainly. Carly hadn’t mentioned a lot of this stuff when I’d explained my amazing idea to her.

  ‘Transferable, babe,’ said Carly. ‘Say something unexpected happens to someone, and they realise they’ll never make their target. They want to reduce their losses by selling their gameplay on. Or say somebody wants to buy some gameplay, but not to play it themselves.’

  My head was spinning. ‘Not to . . . play themselves?’

  Carly had a very strange expression now. ‘Not to play themselves, yes, Myeong. To sell. To sell to other people and institutions. Like the financial markets.’

  ‘For other people to play? Other people . . . can make their targets for them?’

  Carly gave me a look like I was four years old. ‘No. I mean, yes, but not mainly. Mainly for other people to sell as well. Or if they want to short-sell – to hold negative gameplay, essentially. Or for algorithms to buy and sell very quickly.’

  Holding negative gameplay sounded kind of weird. ‘I don’t know, babe. You really think people will be interested in that kind of thing?’

  Carly looked like she was going to explode. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they might?’

   

   

   

  IV. Futures

   

  So we got rich.

  It was, I must confess, a blur to me.

  Nobody who gets rich really knows how it happened.

  Entrepreneurs think they know. They think there are only two possible explanations: (A) blind luck or (B) themselves. They can’t believe other forces may be at play.

  Well, there’s more than (A) and (B), okay entrepreneurs? Like when you go on a scrolling quest to the far eastern reaches of Excel: there’s (ZY) and (ZZ) and (AAA) . . .

  The thing is, it was a blur to me, but some blurs are real. They’re not part of perception, they’re part of the world itself. I never expected to get rich. So I forgot to make up a big clear story to tell myself.

  Still, it’s fun to squint at the blur. To make it go all sharp and scratchy and crystalline with your own eyelashes. Maybe Marta’s marketing was the key? It was Marta who figured out the importance of a re-launch with buy-in from the finance community (shout out Wells Fargo, Deloitte), the phantom marketplace (holla SwapMob, G2G), crowdfunding platforms (hold tight Indiegogo, Unbound, Drunkstarter, Kickstopper) and the professional e-sports community (there are too many names to mention).

  Also:

  ‘I think we make some assets cute,’ Marta brainwaved early on. ‘Like Tamagoutchi, like Pokemon. Chibi finance. You feed it, it is cute. You therefore don’t want it to die. Cute is the new sex.’

  I surfed Marta’s brainwave. ‘Like when Carly and me left our old flat! Carly said goodbye to every room individually. “Goodbye box-room. You saved me. Goodbye loo. Never did you judge me.” But the one that really made Carly burst into tears was the kitchen. “Goodbye kitchen. You were so small.”’

  ‘I think cute is an angle,’ Carly agreed. ‘Remember Dogecoin?’ But she sounded distracted.

  Then Marta went, ‘Oh my God!’ and laughed until she wheezed and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. Then she described to us – very seriously, almost angrily – about how in high school her geography teacher once showed her class a picture of (as the teacher described it) “a baby star,” and all the girls in her class sighed and cooed, even though it was just a ball of gas and dust.

  And the boys in the class laughed.

  ‘I bet all the girls didn’t coochie-coo,’ I said. ‘I bet there was one cool goth who rolled her eyes.’

  ‘There were no goths. This was after goths.’

  ‘Are you sure,’ I said cautiously, ‘that maybe there just weren’t any goths?’

  ‘We already were done with goths.’

  Later Carly seemed really mad at me again. What now? What did I do?

  We were so up and down. All of us. I can barely describe it. Like a bird had flown into my body, or I was holding negative gameplay, or something.

  Later still, we went live in Jönköping, London, Tokyo.

   

  §

   

  Marta and Li Shu got rich, and they got to stay. There are these things called Investor Visas and Entrepreneur Visas. They went with Investor in the end. I saw the figure £3,000,000 and was like, OK, that’s a hefty bribe.

  But the insane part was, they get to keep it?

  The application fee was steep, £1,000 or something. But the big dollar, the £3,000,000, just had to be invested in companies on the London Stock Exchange. You didn’t have to spend any money. You just had to have money, and have it in this one particular form.

  ‘That’s such a random rule,’ I told Marta.

  ‘All rules are random, baby doll. Or it’s no rule, huh?’

  ‘There’s probably a good reason for it.’

  We called it her ‘VIP-sa.’

  We got rich too.

  §

  The world started to simmer and glow.

  Soon a site called TaskRabbit spun off a thing called TaskKitten, which laced the Dispossession markets together with all these existing pervasive gaming experiences. You could bid on TaskKitten for stuff to happen – “anything, anywhere®” – and if your wishes could be woven by bots into the storyline of somebody’s Alternative Reality Game, then often your wishes actually came true.

  TaskKitten made our markets freak out, and made the ARGs freak out, but apparently everything was freaking in a very acceptable and advantageous fashion, and everybody was basically down with all the freaking out, and dearly desired for the freaking out to continue, and for even more freaking out to commence.

  And it did. This thing called Karmageddon burst on the scene, which interfaced with Dispossession and TaskKitten, but was like a platform for indie gameplay authors, so it was basically a front-end for a whole bunch of people’s realities.

  §

  Then there was this thing called Jubil33t. I never actually even worked out what that was.

  I got a little nervous that we were borrowing so much money. But it took investment to keep the world simmering and glowing. Jubil33t demanded capital.

  Jubil33t hangry! Jubil33t must 33t!

 
; We took the edge off our debt by issuing more equity. Mainly we sold shares to guys who were very pointedly not wearing fancy suits, and called themselves Angels, and called us a Unicorn. Keep it lit, you guys.

  §