The Angels of Maybe

The Hypothesis Market reacted to your initial idea offering in a hyper-frequency trading frenzy. Two minutes later you are either extremely rich or still indentured to whatever owns your student debt this week, depending on the feasibility of a superconducting metamaterial concept nobody knows if physics allows for. You have to shut down your phone to stop the barrage of offers to buy your option for absurd amounts; absurdly high in some ways, a rounding error if your idea works.

It's a strange feeling, not knowing. As if not only your net worth but your own self were spread through a probability distribution with no meaningful mean. Your future, and therefore your now, is made entirely of long tails.

Under the Hypothesis Market lies the Strategic Dark, slithering game-theoretical monsters even faster and vaster than those glittering labyrinths of thinking money hungering for more. They have verified your hypothesis while the civilian amateurs above them were still trying to understand the basic math. They have already dreamed a hundred thousand scenarios of downstream developments. They have not liked what they saw.

The Strategic Dark pokes with an invisible finger at the lights above, and the Hypothesis Market mistakes it for a thought.

Over the fabric of the cities flies the swarm of swarms, invisible in their ubiquity. The Strategic Dark sends an arcane whistle of network packets to one of them, who believes itself failing.

Falling.

Fast.

You don't see it. You aren't looking up.

Eternities of seconds after your possible tomorrows had already collapsed to a single terminal state, your present catches up with your future for the last time.