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. Itseemslike it should be too soon,waytoo soon, but it doesn’tfeellike 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’tsay anything. I know it’s too soon. I know it’s toomuch.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’spainfulto 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 peoplepaidyou 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 loseeverythingyou’d built over the years. All thosethousandsofhoursof videos you’d made that people were stillpaying youto 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 todestroythe business that you’d worked on eighteen hours a day, every damn day, foryears,and you didn’t know how you were going to make rent next month.
So you’d downloadeverything.
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 onallthe 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.
