Her sweet mouth set in a grim line, and her voice was low with disappointment in him. “I knew you were trying to burn GameShack to the ground,TwistyTrader,but I didn’t know why. Sothisis why, huh?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
“GameShack has twenty thousand full-time employees and then another forty thousand part-timers like myself. Its valuation issixty billion dollars.”
“And that’s why I can’t just liquidate everything I own and buy what I need.”
“Crashing the stock like this will destroy the company.Everybodyis going to get laid off.”
Tristan nodded. “I know.”
“Do you? Do you know whatsomething like thatwill do to ordinary people who work for a living? When Miller fired me because you were being an ass, it just about ruined my life. I mean, most of the possible outcomes ended up with me being homeless. That’s what sudden unemploymentdoesto people. Especially here in the US where the government has cut all the strings in the safety net, people are vulnerable when corporations want to screw us over. That’s why we’ll take any job for whatever pittance they decide to pay us and then have three side hustles going when we should be sleeping just to keep our heads above water. I didn’t think you were like this, Tristan. I didn’t think you do something likethisto people.”
Tristan shook his head. “I do know what this is going to do to people, which is why I’m having problems bringing myself to do it. I’m a farm kid. I know whatthe price of corndoes to people. I understand what a sudden lack of money does to a family. And I’m not going to let this affectyou.I’ll make sure you have enough money not to be impacted by GameShack’s implosion, and you’re already fired from there anyway. Heck, I’ll make sure you have enough money to finish college before I burn it down. You’ll be safe. That’s all I care about.”
Colleen lifted her eyebrows and shook her head. “I thought you might bemorally gray,but I didn’t think about what that would look like in the real world.”
He didn’t know what that was.
Tristan took a deep breath to explain. “I don’twantto do this, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m not burning it down just to sell the ashes and make money for myself. If I don’t destroy GameShack, they’ll take everything I own, including my IP, which is those two computer programs, and then Mary Varvara Bell will force one of my best friends to do the same damn thing anyway. If I refuse to do it, it won’t stop it from happening. Itmightdelay it for a month or two. Or if she goes to Micah Shine next, it might only be a week. He’s the one of us who I’ve always suspected has a black hat in the back of his closet. He’ll throw the match and grill a chicken over the flames while GameShack burns.”
She frowned. “If you liquidatedeverythingyou own that is real property—your boat, your car, and all that—would that be enough to buy all that stock at the current value?”
Tristan shook his head. “Not even close. If I sold absolutely everything, it wouldn’t be enough to buy even ten percent of the stock she’s demanding. I mean, half of it is worththirty billion dollars.Either you inherited that kind of money from your robber baron ancestors, or you were a computer science college drop-out with delusions of grandeur in the right decade. If I wanted to sell my two computer programs, the only people who would buy them would be organized crime syndicates, and then Imightbe able to get up to half of the stock that I need. Even if I borrowed myself into a deep,deephole, which I was trying to do with GrazBank, there’sno wayI could get all of it at the price it is now.”
“It’s like she closed all the loopholes,” Colleen said.
He nodded. “And the real problem is that the letter specifies that the stock has to be worthless than a dollar per sharewhen it’s turned over to them, which means Ihaveto crash the stock, either before or after I buy it.”
“Then why don’t you just let her take everything you own and start over instead of screwing up the lives ofsixty thousand people?Just wash your hands of the situation and walk away?”
“Yeah, I know what that reference is, and that’s exactly what it would be. It’s a gesture of helplessness in the face of great evil and injustice.” Tristan plucked the letter from Mary Varvara Bell off the computer desk and sighed, angry with himself for even being in this situation. “Even if I did refuse, it’s going to happen anyway. One of my friends will be forced to do it in my place if I don’t. Plus, Mary Varvara Bell will get those two computer programs I wrote. The first one will allow criminal organizations—like the Russian bratvas and the Central American drug cartels and the Mafia and the Yakuza and the Asian Triads and the Mumbai Underworld and the Black Axe and all the rest of them—to evade facial recognition software in airports and everywhere else. The other program would allow them to launder money as they’ve never been able to before. If they control those two programs, the fallout won’t be that merely sixty thousand people will lose their jobs.Instead, millionsof people willdiein wars and genocides and street violence due to weapons trafficking, or they’ll be kidnapped for human trafficking and slavery, or they’ll die from drug overdoses as illegal and addictive drugs flood the worldeven morethan now. Political corruption will increase as the few remaining honest politicians are coerced, bribed, or killed. Everything that is wrong with the world will getworseif they have my computer programs. So Ican’t.”
17
The Impossible Task
Tristan
Colleen leaned her hip against the computer desk and asked Tristan, “If those computer programs are so dangerous, why don’t you just delete them? I accidentally deleted a whole program I wrote in Python for homework one time. A month’s worth of work,pfffft.”Colleen mimed smoke with her fingers.
He dropped the letter on the table and pointed to the page. “My computer programs are listed in the next-to-last paragraph. A subtle threat runs through this whole letter that they’ll also kill me if I don’t do what they want. And that means that when they move on to Micah, Logan, or Blaze, they’ll try to force them to do this, and then they’ll killthemif they refuse, too.”
She shook her head. “We’re talking about sixty thousand people’s livelihoods. People who work full-time at GameShack have 401(k) plans heavily invested in GameShack’s stock. If you bankrupt the company, those retirement plans are going to be decimated, and their retirement savings will be wiped out.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“A lot of people have their health insurance through GameShack, too. There have to be people out there who have cancer or heart disease, or their spouses do, or their kids do, and their health insurance is the only thing that’s keeping that person they love alive.”
Tristan sighed. “I don’t want to do this, but I have to dosomething. Either I torch a corporation that hired a white supremacist who treated you like shit, or literallymillions of peoplewill die, and the world will get worse. Something has to go down. It has to be GameShack becausecorporations are not people.”
“Well, no—”
“I have to burn it down. The only way to get that much stock and deliver it at that low price is a long squeeze. So I have to crash the stock and scare investors enough to make them panic-sell at a loss before they lose any more money.”
She was still staring at the paper. “Did they give you an impossible task because they want your computer programs when you fail? Or your boat, maybe? Is this all just a ploy?”
Tristan had been leaning on his elbows on the desk, and he settled back in his chair. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about that, but I haven’t come up with an answer. But if that was their plan, why did they give methree monthsto do it at the outset? Why not give me a week and declare that I’d failed? I think they want the stock.”
