We're All Going To Make It — A Short Story (Patreon)

Standing under the awning outside a Subway Dan jogged in place, cursing a digital sheep.

“Sell, you asshole, sell!”

His fingers, red from the early November chill, gripped the phone tighter.

This blasted $SHEEP refused to sell.

After twelve weeks of grinding TokenFarm day and night, waking up every two hours to maximize timers, /Petting his sheep, /Feeding them $FLAX, /Grooming them, /Shearing them for their precious $WOOL tokens,  Dan had finally gotten lucky: his $SHEEP breeding pair had rewarded him with twins, a 1/765,000,000 outcome. Not only did it mean he could replace one of his aging breeders it also gave him a spare.

On this miserable, wet November day, in a miserable, wet suburban strip mall, jogging in place to trick his heartrate monitor into thinking he was delivering a pickup, Dan only wanted two things: lunch, and this goddamn sheep to sell.

If you were willing to wait on the market you could sell a $SHEEP for 10-12 million $WOOL, which you could usually flip into Wax within a few hours, then you either hit a shop that accepted Wax, or flipped the Wax at an exchange. A single $SHEEP token was worth a couple weeks rent, the only thing you had to watch was the age of your sheep. Tokens could only be redeemed to try and breed six times each, and every attempt cost at least a day’s rent. On a long enough timeline, taken against the playerbase as a whole, the population was net negative. There were only a couple more years of $SHEEP left to be minted, ever, and piles of $SHEEP crowded the wallets of people who had quit the game or died. In general at the player level, if you didn’t accrue too many absentee penalties for not /Feeding them on time, it was roughly replacement level for your $SHEEP and you made most of your earn off selling excess $WOOL (minus, of course, any $FLAX you needed to buy if you didn’t have a $FLAX farm or didn’t have the $MEAT to feed your $WORKERS to harvest the $FLAX), and the margins on $WOOL sucked. But if you really hit the grind, and with a little bit of luck, you could come out positive on $SHEEP.

Twins were a massive windfall, and Dan had thrown the extra lamb on to SheepMark almost instantly, undercutting the floor for a nice quick sale.

On a normal day a $SHEEP posted for 8,000,000 $WOOL would be snapped up by bots in an instant.

But today it would not sell.

Pumping his legs and decidedly avoiding all eye contact with the random suburbanites around him, he swiped from SheepMark to the Yield Union chatroom, a hangout for play-to-earn workers that postured as a union while trading governance tokens directly with the companies a union would ostensibly square off against.

- WTF is up with sheep? Why aren’t they selling?

The responses came quick and furiously

- LOL

- LMAO

- Didn’t u hear? Shep got fukt.

- Glitch last night.

- *sheep

- Daylight savings something something.

- Every sheep made twins.

- Market’s fucked

- Floor is rekt, lol

Dan didn’t have time to process the dread before a notification alerted him, GrubHustle delivery completed.

“Oh thank god,” he said out loud.

Fortunately his last drop off before lunch was sympathetic and agreed to use TimeOff, an app that spoofed delivery apps so that you could mark a drop off as received ten to twenty minutes after you actually got it. This was extremely against TOS, and Dan risked his GrubHustle token being invalidated by even implying it’d be nice if the guy did, but the alternative was revocation anyway.

His twenty minute lunch window was coming up, but odds are the next delivery to pop up would either take forty minutes all on its own, eating the entire window, or, best case scenario, leave him too far away from anywhere to get food in time. If he got his own food from wherever the pickup was, intending to eat it once his window opened, GrubHustle would see the token transaction and, at best, penalize him with some $SLACKER tokens that never came directly from GrubHustle but always, mysteriously, showed up like clockwork anyway, or at worst revoke his delivery token entirely.

Technically he was free to not take the next available delivery, after all strictly speaking he was his own boss, but if you weren’t packing gigs end-to-end then the algorithm would shunt you down the priority pole, notch by notch, until you only got jobs if it was crazy busy, or they were basically impossible to fulfill in the 40 minute guarantee window.

TimeOff was a dApp some enterprising gig workers cooked up that offsets the delivery time so that sympathetic customers could give the hustler a head start on their next delivery, maybe find a place to pee, or even just a moment of serenity, without penalizing the hustler for going over time. In return, to “align incentives”, the customer got $TOKINS that gave proportional voting rights within the TimeOff DAO or could be flipped for some quick Gil2, EthN, Wax, or Jam.

The one hitch was that the hustler still needed to make it look like they were doing the delivery, not going idle for longer than the duration of waiting for a traffic light. Hustlers had pieced together that GrubHustle was too cheap to spring for GPS data and was, instead, just scraping pedometer readings from the poorly secured Vitalx healthcare blockchain that ran every “vitality tracker” on the market. The devices were stupid, everyone knew the system was broken, but insurance agencies all held massive reserves of Vits, so it was impossible to get insurance without wearing one, and it was impossible to work for GrubHustle without insurance. But a loophole is a loophole, and if jogging in place in a parking lot is the price you pay for a lunch break then, well, you pay it.

In this case it looked like it was going to pay off: as the Wax from the delivery transferred to his wallet the clock ticked over. He’d been on the clock long enough he could flag himself as “at lunch” without incurring a hidden penalty. Finally he could stop jogging.

The physical relief washed through him, almost distracting him from the sheep that refused to sell. It would have to wait, anyway.

Pulling up his mask, he stepped into the Subway.

The door chimed as he entered, and he was greeted with both a chipper “welcome” from the girl behind the glass counter wearing a facemask with large blue daisies on it, and the ageless smell of stale bread.

The only other patrons were an elderly couple wearing matching jackets seated at one table, a middle-aged woman in a pencil skirt and navy coat, and a teen boy with a skateboard. Hopefully the chill and wet would keep the rush away.

Behind the counter an overhead digital screen scrolled through the menu, with one whole panel dedicated to the current value: Foot Long = $12, a decent price, and there were only the two people ahead in line. Maybe today wasn’t going to go quite as pear shaped as he feared.

He swiped through apps on his phone and found the SubClub portal, but then, as he was authenticating his wallet, it happened.

Foot Long = $14

Foot Long = $18

Foot Long = $26

Foot Long = $47

An alert popped up. 

Due to high traffic surge pricing is in effect.

The door opened behind him.

“Yeah, these fucking losers don’t even understand market cap, what makes you think they’re going to understand utility? Alright, I gassed the price, so no one should be ahead of us.”

A herd of seven guys, all in the business-casual non-uniform of the nearby tech park, technically unique yet each stamped out of some procedural machine, stepped into the small dining room, instantly crowding it with both their bodies and their voices.

The girl behind the counter froze for a beat, a half-completed sandwich on the bench in front of her, a fist full of iceberg lettuce hovering in air.

“Welcome” she squeaked. Her smartwatch, no doubt connected to the shop’s price board, buzzed audibly. “I’m sorry, I’ll finish this in a bit,” she told the boy in front of her.

“Oh, come on, can’t you just,”

“Hey, some service here?!” the leader of the pack barked

“Sorry, one”

“Now?!”

Subway, like most retail, had implemented surge pricing to “shape traffic”, a practice which they used to justify only ever having one employee at the store at a time.

“Sorry, yes, sorry, welcome to Subway, can I interest you in our toasted chicken parm, available for a limited time only?”

“Fuck no, uh,” he squinted at her name tag, “Meghan, we’ll get two cold cuts, two meatball,”

“Hey, I’ll try the parm,” on of the guys shouted from the back

“Fine, fuck, one parm, one tuna, two southwest steak, all on white.”

“What do you mean all on white, that’s racist bro.” again from the back.

The herd laughed.

“Haha, fuck you.”

Dan’s brain started to vibrate. His lunch break had only just begun and already it was evaporating before his eyes. This was going to take forever, and the only way he could possibly get his lunch in time would be to out-bid them for the slot. There was nowhere else to go. He only had twenty minutes and it would take most of that just to walk to the next nearest restaurant that took Wax. Exchanging the Wax would take too long, and the fees on the exchange would just eat even deeper into an already slim budget. If only that damn sheep had sold.

Meghan, the Subway girl, rushed to lay out all the new orders, splaying bread along the prep table, pushing the teen’s incomplete lunch all the way down the board. The room grew louder and louder as the men all continued to talk over each other and spread out through the dining area.

Suddenly the price jumped another five dollars, her smartwatch buzzed.

“What the fuck?” the leader shouted; a man laughed from near the washrooms. “Was that you, motherfucker?”

“Jerry texted me, told me to out bid you for his lunch.”

Meghan grew even more flustered, “I’m sorry, I need to,”

“No you don’t, he’s with us, just add it to the end.”

The guy from near the bathroom, a sandy blonde with a fade cut, sauntered to the counter and interrupted, “that’ll be a foot long steak on white, with extra meat.” he intoned, dropping lewd emphasis on the word meat. Meghan blushed with embarrassment at the innuendo.

“And I would like to pay with $CUM. Do you accept $CUM?”

The CFO of Subway had invested heavily in several porn-themed meme coins and if you have strings to pull at a major fast food chain apparently you pull them. Once the infrastructure was in place to pay with one meme coin it became trivial for the suits to just add infinitely more to the list.

“That was a southwest steak, do you want that toasted?”

“I’m asking if I can pay for my sandwich with my $CUM. I want to give you my $CUM”

Meghan gritted her teeth, the tension in her jaw visible at the edges of her mask, and swallowed, trying to find composure. All she found was defeat. “Yes. We take... that. Toasted?”

“Yes please”

Chaos escalated as seven men shouted orders across the room, talking over each other, interrupting, and changing one another’s orders. It became an immediate in-joke between them to ask why everything was taking so long.

"Wen sandwich!?" became the catchphrase of a portly dude with a voice that pitched up and cracked, who insisted on resting his full weight against the sanitation guard, laying his head against the glass and keening like a toddler.

Dan swiped to Twitter.

Well, eight guys just gassed the price at Subway, there goes my lunch.

Post.

RIP came the reply from a mutual hustler.

Swiping back to SheepMark his $SHEEP still hadn’t sold. He pulled the graphs. His heart sank. The price was annihilated. $SHEEP, trading at 10 million Wax just last night, were barely above zero.

He swiped back to Yield.

Chat was hell on earth, everyone freaking out in all caps, spamming emotes of graves, skulls, and puke, gifs of atom bombs, and movie clips of characters jumping out windows, while people begged for a moderator to initiate slow mode.

Through the noise he caught the gist of it.

The twinned $SHEEP had a bug in their smart contract that allowed them to be mated and sheared immediately, no need to wait for the breeding or for $WOOL to regrow, and any breedings would also always yield twins with the same glitch. The only cap on generating nearly infinite $SHEEP, and thus infinite $WOOL, was the price of Gas. Since the bug was endemic to the $SHEEP tokens themselves the tokens would need to be invalidated and reissued, but badly-coded bots rapidly generating, selling, and buying $WOOL and $SHEEP, constantly reacting to an ever-plummeting floor price, had locked up the entire chain; the devs couldn't compete to push a new control contract that would lock all $SHEEP until further notice.

A proposal at the chain level to manually ban $SHEEP hadn’t gone over well with one of the major cartels of validators, who refused to implement the patch since they were making a killing on Gas and didn't care if bots drove $WOOL to zero. Over the course of fifteen minutes the entire Wax chain had forked, and nearly everything trading on both forks had gone to zero as no one was sure what version of Wax they were even transacting with.

The forks might be resolved, or one of them might recover, but that could take months. The validator cartels were as likely to give up on the chain entirely as they were to sort it out. Everyone's meta wallets were already stuffed with a dozen or more dead coins, what was one more on the pile? It's not like Wax was meaningful, anyway, just a junk coin for gig workers and play-to-earners, the whole thing could be cloned in an afternoon.

Fixing things was expensive, abandoning them and starting over was cheap.

Suddenly the dining room exploded with laughter. In the chaos of trying to juggle all the sandwiches Meghan had knocked the teen’s onto the floor.

Barely gripping his own reality, slowly realizing that just about all his pay had just gone to zero, still the thought crossed Dan’s mind, I wonder how many $SLACKERs she’ll get for that.

The teen stormed out, cussing as he left, followed shortly by the elderly couple and the woman in the navy coat. As they pushed past him he became acutely aware that he was still planted by the door.

Dan considered leaving, too, he was almost out of time, but why bother? GrubHustle paid in Wax. All he had was some un-spendable United Dog Coin some asshole had tipped him with months back. He slipped into the high stool chair by the door, set his phone on the small, round table, and leaned against the window. Whatever happened to Wax and $SHEEP tomorrow seemed acutely irrelevant, he needed a sandwich today.

He didn’t think about much of anything as time ticked by. GrubHustle alerted him that pending deliveries were ready for pickup and he just ignored it. On one hand he felt a little free. On the other hand it was the freedom of accepting that you’re just meat. 

Rumour in Yield Union chat was that GrubHustle was going to switch to BWax, and the space was already starting to fill with competing instructions for how to whitelist for a coin drop happening in two hours. At least one of the links in the mix just drained your meta wallet.

Eventually Meghan finished all the orders and the men paid. A small argument broke out over payment, but the guy with the fade only shouted the word “cum” a few more times before everything was settled and they began to file back out the door.

Wen Sandwich guy stopped in the doorway and punched Dan lightly on the shoulder.

“Hey, don’t look so FUD, we’re all gonna make it, dude!”

He laughed, Dan did not.

And with that they left.

The room felt excessively quiet in their wake, the contrast leaving a phantom ring that harmonized with the hum of the extraction fans, barely covering muffled sobs.

Dan slid out of the chair and approached the counter.

“Hello, welcome to Subway,” Meghan said, suppressing her tears, ”can I interest you in our toasted chicken parm, available for a limited time only?”

“Do you still take Wax?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she said, choked up, “we can’t take Wax, trading has been suspended, I guess there was a glitch or something with the sheep game and it’s causing some havoc, but we do take dollars, Tezos Classic, Ethereum Neo, or, um, c-coin.”

She didn’t want to say $CUM.

Who would.