Adventures on Wall Streets

                                          Adventures on Wall Streets

Blame came later, but on that hot May morning it was just getting started.  We’d all just gotten used to the idea of a multiverse when Manny hurried up to me all out of breath, looking as if somebody had beaten his four-of-a-kind with a straight flush.

"You hear about the big one this morning?” Manny said as he slid into the chair next to mine.

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but the entire student center was filled with freshmen, seniors, grad students and perennials jabbering in low tones.  A hushed, almost awe-struck, longing-for-it tone of voice once reserved only for late night confessions about girls we’d like to sex up.  That, or cars.

“Some guy in East Timor bought thirteen million shares of Nike in four universes at five-ten in the morning,” Manny said.  “Then he flipped ‘em at five-twelve for a three hundred percent profit.”

“Geeez,” I looked up from the text for Chem 102.  The book was slobbering over the Human Genome Project and the vast array of discoveries promised, how unlocking the genetic code for humans beings was going to be the key to big changes in treating diseases, longevity solutions, curing male-pattern baldness, and saving one of the last six Giant Pandas.     

“Did you hear what his Nike trade was worth?” Manny asked.

“Manny, I hadn’t heard about it at all, how would I know what it was worth?” I snapped.  Stupid text.  I flipped the pages to check the publishing date.  There was way too much happy-talk about the HGP in this thing.

“You can guess,” he said.

“I don’t want to guess,” I found the book’s publication date.  It was just as I thought.  The book was “updated” earlier this year, but the original press run had been nearly three years ago.

Manny squinted at me.  I hated it when he did that.  It means he has myopia and doesn’t know it, refuses to admit it, or he’s watched too many Clint Eastwood DVD's at a time.

“Okay,” I said.  “What was it worth?”  Stupid, expensive, worthless book.  Published three years ago, before it came out that most of the “mapped” human genome had been extrapolated using gene sequences from fruit flies.  Only the sequencing patterns didn’t match up with humans except to a ninety-nine-point-eight percentile of certainty.  Which, as anyone who knows genes would tell you, is enough genetic disparity to explain why human beings are sequencing genes and gorillas are lucky to have enough habitat to take a crap.  The great fruit fly fiasco also explained why gene therapy never quite got off the ground, and why I still had a greater than seventy-two percent chance of seeing way too much of my balding head before I turned thirty.   

Manny lowered his voice.  “The trade was worth two hundred million.”

                                                  Fast Fingers
                                            SF Chronicle Online
                It takes more than a hyperhit broadband downloader to
                handle stock trading in the ever-expanding multiverse; it takes
                nerves of steel and some pretty quick reflexes.  Just ask
                Mack Troddenly.
         
                Troddenly, a former telemarketing executive, spends at least
                16 hours a day surfing the online multiverse markets for bargains.
                And when he finds one, he has mere seconds to pounce before
                the opportunity is lost.
         
                “I hesitated for exactly two seconds on a deal this morning,”
                Troddenly said, “and it was gone.  The stock had increased
                in price by nearly a dollar by the time I hit ‘Enter,’ and I lost
                millions just like that.  This is not a game for the slow.”

Yeow, two hundred mill in two minutes.  I forgot why I was looking at the front of the stupid textbook.  That’s good money.

"Way good,” Manny grinned.  “But there’s something better.”

I leaned toward him to hear more.  I had left my place at eight-ten with a stale Krispy Kreme crammed in my mouth and too many expensive and worthless textbooks to fit into my backpack so it was hell getting across Maryland Parkway on my bike while juggling that mess and I lost the donut before the light changed.  Starved, I snatched one of the first Pizza Hut Personal Pans that came rolling off the little assembly line they had going in UNLV’s Student Union because the one lousy hour I had between American History 201 and Chem 102 was my best shot as getting some food in my stomach before dark. 

“You gotta promise to keep this strictly confidential,” Manny whispered.  He always did that just before sharing something he thought was inside info, like we were in some big conspiracy movie and secret agents had listening devices pointed in our direction.  Like anyone cared about a couple of freshmen in a podunk college that didn’t even have a decent basketball team anymore.

“Okay, okay,” I agreed.  Like I had people lining up to hear my secrets?  Besides, the last time Manny gave me the “strictly confidential” pledge, all he had to tell me was that our big man, Hebert Sleet, had been busted for possession of three ounces of very cheap pot and was going to be suspended for a couple of games.  A fact which forever changed my life, as if I could actually afford to bet on the games.

“Cortez has a bot that can trade,” he said. 

“So what?”  I hefted a steaming slice of cheezy goodness out of the sticky cardboard box.  The pepperoni sported a thin film of sizzling grease, the cheese below browned and bubbled just the way I liked it.  I had watched the big girl slide a couple of cheezes, two pepperonis and three everythings into the oven and waited until the very first pep appeared, felt my stomach growl as she sliced it into four almost equally sized pieces, watched her box it up and shove it down the serving tray where I watched it land with a strangely compelling, meaty thud.  I’d been hungering for this corrugated box full of processed cheeses and starchy dough since I dropped my previous attempt at eating worthless calories and potentially harmful additives on the corner before the light changed.   

“He got it last night and testing it right now,” Manny nodded his head.  “It’ll change everything.”

“No way Cortez came up with that,” I said.  “He’s good, but he’s not that good.”

“Who said he came up with it?” Manny raised his eyebrows.  “He just has it.”

I nearly choked, felt a surge of pepperoni backwash into my nose, tasted contrails of hot spices that lingered in my sinuses.  “You mean he stole it?” I croaked.

“Shhhhh,” Manny waved at me.  “Dude, you’re maxxed, I don’t know if you can handle this.”

I swallowed hard, reached for the bottle of YooHoo I bought before getting the pizza.  “Yeah, right,” I took a swig to help dampen the burning, smooth the rasp in my voice.  “I can handle anything you can possibly tell me.”

“Then let’s go,” he got up.

I wasn’t finished eating.  Had barely started, in fact, and was now looking at Chem for the rest of the day.  “Go where?!”   

“Where do you think?” Manny started through the crowd, his eyes darting from face to face, his shoulders hunched as if he was trying to hide something.

I took the pizza with me.

Cortez was our age but looked a lot older, all skinny and nervous.  Come to think of it, most of my friends are skinny and nervous.  Except those who are fat and nervous.  But Cortez wasn’t skinny and nervous in the same way that Manny was skinny and nervous.  Manny was only skinny and nervous around anyone in authority, otherwise, he was confidently scheming how to get his hands on cash, while the rest of us were just skinny and fat and nervous.  But Manny, dude, Manny had been playing poker in the casinos since he was sixteen. 

He was amazing, wore a fake beard and smoked cheap cigars so he wouldn’t look too young.  Said if he got caught it meant a stay in Rehabilitation Camp, and probably a beating from the casino’s security guys.  But Manny kept going despite the risk.  One weekend, he made over three grand beating up a busload of middle-aged mommas who had stayed for free at the Lady Luck as part of a time-share scam for retards with a high credit rating and low sense of reality.  I laughed and laughed when he showed me an email telling him when they were coming back to town, just begging to be wiped out again.  He laughed too, and turned away as he did so, but I saw him highlight the date on his organizer. 

The incident taught me that when it came to risk versus reward, Manny was fearless.  Cortez, on the other hand, was more like the rest of us facing an uncertain economy, endless outsourcing, a lousy job outlook, and student loans up the wazoo.  Skinny, fat, and nervous.

“Start from the beginning,” I said.

We had hurried from the student center to the old dorms, making our way through the tangled mass of eager young learners studying the latest theories in push-up bra technology and beer ingestion phenomenon.  Cortez lived on the fifth floor with a zitty kid who never seemed to be home.  Not a bad arrangement, considering what apartments ran these days.

“I’ve been running it all night using a dummy account,” Cortez stammered.  “It’s really something.  It searches for key opportunities across the entire multiverse and acts on them in nanoseconds.  It seems to know the second and third quoted price without needing to know the first.”

“It trades, right?” Manny was leaning over Cortez’s bony right shoulder, staring at the screen.  I had pulled up a chair from Zitty’s tiny desk and sat on Cortez’s left. 

The monitor showed a colored spreadsheet that raced up the screen.  The entry lines were full of numbers, long strings of them.  Stock abbreviations.  Last price.  Current price. Margin.  Offers.  Number of bidders.  Number of shares sold.  When a deal popped, the bar flashed a bright green.  That meant that whoever won the bid had his margin money instantly sucked out of his account and transferred into the seller’s account.  Now it was up to the buyer to become the seller and unload the stock before the actual payment came due. 

It was all timing.  You had to strike a bid at the right moment, lock up the stock before the price went up too fast and stuck you with a margin call that magically turned you from a winner into a loser, then sell at a higher price before it went down causing the same effect in reverse.  Oh, and you had to work fast.  Most trades were made in minutes.  Some in seconds.  The whole thing turned on margin money and leverage, processing power and bandwidth.  That and caffeine. 

It was a new “market” made possible by the algorithm snatched by a pair of interdimensional tongs one night in a lab in New Jersey.  It allowed anyone with a computer and an internet connection complete access to the multinet, and the multiverse and all its’ possibilities.  At least, that was the latest from Time. 

The story had broken last week and the multinet instantly saw about a billion new users crawling around every part of it.  Everyone seemed to be doing it.  Those of us in our universe as well as other us’s in other universes, even if none of us were really sure what we were doing in any universe. 

We stared at the endless line of colored entries quickly scrolling up Cortez’s screen, the three of us just gazing at it in complete silence.  The sheer amount of data was overwhelming.  Row upon rows of entries, all of them stock offerings.  Many of them in our own universe, even. I saw that some of the listings were accompanied by thumbnail graphics of the company logo, and it didn’t take me long to see that the ones with logos had more action than the ones without.

“What are we looking at?” I asked.

“Money,” Manny said.  “Lots of money.”

"I know that,” I snapped.  “Cortez, what kind of search parameters are you using?”

Cortez jabbed a nail-bitten finger at the screen.  “I set it up only to interact with buying opportunities equaling a combined offer-bid-sale upwards of ten million and where the next recorded trade was at least ten percent below last quoted price.”

“Ten million shares or--?”

Cortez now worried the finger with his teeth.  “Dollars,” he said.  “Big, fat, giant Georgies.”

He looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week.  His “Go Rebels!” t-shirt was deeply lined with wrinkles and his feet swam in grimy socks.

“Some trades are thousands of shares, some are millions,” Cortez said.  “But this little bot is slick.  It played a deal just before you walked in where all the available shares of a mid-size manufacturer of popsicle sticks in about a dozen universes was bought and sold twice in a minute.  The bot bought everything it could at $3.49, sold at nearly $4 dollars, and the next recorded sale was $3.82.”

“Popsicle sticks?” I shook my head.  “Who wants popsicle sticks?”

“People who make popsicles,” Manny said.

“This thing is out of control,” I shook my head. 

“Dude, it’s just getting started!” Manny squinted at the screen like it was the answer to all of life’s questions.  “What was that deal worth?” Manny asked. “What would we have made?”

Cortez looked up.  “One hundred and ten million dollars.”

“I’ll take it,” Manny said.  “Let’s throw this little bug into the pond and see what we catch.”

“We can’t do that,” Cortez started shaking.  “We’ve got to see what the bot’s algorithms do long term.”

“Long term?” Manny looked aghast.  “In this market that’s like five minutes!”

“That’s what I mean!” Cortez spun around to glare at him.  “This market is unreal.  The licensed brokers don’t know how to play it, they’re just buying what they can and selling whatever someone else will buy.  I saw a report that said at least half of the trades are outside of brokerage, which is illegal in at least our universe and probably many others.  People are going crazy, they’re buying and selling millions of shares of stock across who knows how many different universes, and all of it on margin!”

We considered this for a moment, the three of us as silent as if we were attending a funeral.  It was mind numbing, to think of the billions of dollars flying around cyberspace, the sheer magnitude of it all, the opening of a new wave of commerce that crossed every border imaginable, some of them unimaginable until a few shorts days before.  The entire vast multitude of the multiweb... awesome to contemplate.  Universe upon universe, with people like us and companies and stock offerings like ours... all ready to be traded by highest bid.  It was a vision so vast the seer is consumed by the sight.  That’s what three freshman in a podunk college that once had a good basketball team stood thinking about in a dorm room small enough to qualify for federal aid. 

“Let’s crank up the credit cards and rock!” Manny who broke the spell.

“We could do that, sure," Cortez waved his bony hands in a futile gesture, "but we risk getting ourselves in really, really deep, really, really fast.”

“But the bot is trading way ahead of the curve,” Manny bounced on the balls of his feet, all raw energy and sweaty desire.  It was how he got around money, and the screen was flashing numbers that would make The Beverly Hillbillies throw a hooteanny.  Someone had traded several million shares of Proctor & Gamble in six universes for a nine percent profit.  Instant millionaire.  Billionaire?  Hard to tell, the numbers were flying up the screen so quickly.  Another guy had traded MicroFlex for a cool twenty million profit.  Of course that was nothing compared to MicroFlex's total trades for the day.  Trillions, baby.  Trillions. 

Cortez turned to his other monitor.  “Look,” he said.

He had several windows up on the monitor, a long connector snaking across the floor to Zitty’s computer.  Cortez was monitoring Google news, Yahoo news, MSNBC, CNN, all the major networks and several overseas media outlets.  All of them featured top stories on multiverse trading.

                            Hausfrau Leads Investment Club to Riches
                                                  CBS News
                Elfriede Frittenhoff can’t stop smiling.  The 46-year old
                stay-at-home mom has made herself and her friends over
                $50 million Euros in the last two days, and did it using an
                outdated computer on her kitchen table. 
               
                Frittendorf and six friends started the “Multiverse Investment
                Club” a little over two days ago using spare change and a
                modest line of credit, and bankrolled their combined $3256
                into a trading empire worth upwards of $50 million dollars.
         
                “It’s the promised land!” Frittendorf said of the multiverse in
                which she and her fellow Berlin hausfraus invested a little
                money between changing dirty diapers and shopping for
                groceries.  “I just followed my instincts and added one sale
                on top of another.  Before I knew it, I had all this money in
                our account,” Frittendorf said.  “I don’t feel like a millionaire,
                but I guess I am!”

“See?  Why aren’t we in the game?” Manny whined.  “I want to make money.”

Good question.  “What do you think?” I asked Cortez.

“Risky,” he squirmed.  “The bot has done well, so far...”

Manny nudged me with an elbow.  “Maybe it will continue to do well, huh?” I said.  “I mean, look at all these people who are kicking ass.”

                                  Multiverse Craze Stuns Investors
                                        New York Times Online
                Fourteen year old Brandon Bagleman played a hunch three
                days ago and found himself worth tens of billions of dollars
                after several stocks purchased across dozens of universes
                shot up in value.
         
                “That boy has outperformed the combined brain power of
                industry analysts in half a dozen known universes,” said
                Milton Schusbeck, dean of NYU’s Business School.  “I
                think he has a brilliant future in the financial world ahead
                of him once he finishes Junior High.”

“We’ll have to put up all the credit we can scrape together,” Cortez stared at the screen.  The bot had made two thousand trades since we arrived, and all of them at a profit of no less than three percent.  We didn’t even want to acknowledge the running total on the top right corner of the screen.  Suffice it to say, none of us had much experience with such large numbers.

“I’m in!” Manny dug into his pocket and produced a worn credit card that looked like he used it to pick locks.  “I got three hundred and eighty-two bucks on this baby.”

“Including the draw?” I asked, knowing Manny too well.

“Okay, four-fifty,” he said.  “You’re smarter than you look.”

“Four-fifty.  That’s a start,” I said.  “I’ve got just over four hundred on one card and little more than two on another.”

Cortez hesitated, his eyes watery, his fingers twitching.  Finally he said, “I’ve got six on this card,” and pulled out a Mastercard from Chase Manhattan Bank.  We all looked at the name.  Manhattan. 

We were about to explode on Manhattan in a big way, a huge way.  Maybe, when we’d collected our profits, we’d go there and check it out.  Manhattan.  BroadWay.  The New York Stock Exchange.  Yeah.  All of them multiplied almost infinitely across the limitless expanse of the multiverse.  Manhattan to the power of ten. 

I looked at Manny and Cortez, wondered for a brief, crazy moment which of us would ring the bell some morning to open trade for the day once word got out how we were kicking major butt in the multiverse.  That would be so cool.          

It took less than a minute to set up and fund our trading account.  The weird little data bit snatched from somewhere allowed access to multiple universes, but did so only through the medium of a trading website called M-Stocks dotcom. 

M-Stocks allowed us to create a user name and password, plug in our credit card numbers, post the amount we wanted to use for margin buying, and invited us to join the “Mighty Flow of Commerce across the MultiVerse!”  We opened the account with $1598.  Now it was time to release the bot.

Cortez hesitated.  “Guys, I’m really nervous about this,” he said.  “This site has more traffic than ebay, yahoo, google, webmail and amazon combined fifty times over.  There’s something like twenty billion people in who knows how many universes trying to do the same thing we are.”

Manny scoffed.  “Good.  We’ll make money off of all of them.” 

“I’m not so sure,” Cortez shook his scraggly head.  He had yet to comb his thick hair and it stood out at weird angles.  Unless that was his new style.  He had a hawk one summer that looked just about as bad.  “For every trader who scores big, someone else loses, right?”

“Who cares, as long as we win,” Manny was getting anxious. 

“Wait,” I was beginning to see what Cortez was getting at.  “For us to get a good sales price on a stock, that means someone has to sell at a loss, right?  So the next guy has to do the same thing, which means that someone else has to do it again, only with a higher sales price, or he loses money.  Am I right?”

Manny just looked at me.  “Your financial acumen is astounding.  Both Smith and Barney should hear this.”

I glanced at the zitty's kid's computer.  "Hey, look at this."

                                        Multiverse Math Drives Prof Blind
                                                    The Guardian
                Digby Higgs, an adjunct professor of mathematics at
                Wesseley, spent four days attempting to decipher the math
                behind the strange program that has allowed billions of
                people to trade stock options in the multiverse.  He thought
                he had it cracked, until suddenly he went blind.
         
                “It was the queerest thing,” Higgs said.  “I was staring at the
                board when everything just went dark.  One moment, I’m
                healthy as a horse.  The next, blind as a bat.  Just the
                damndest thing.”

The article was accompanied by a photo of Higg’s chalkboard, his manic math scrawled in all directions.  Two men in lab coats stood staring at the board, each of them looking as stumped as the other.  And no wonder.  Higg’s figures looked less like a breakdown of the strange program then it did a fractal representation of Spaghettios.

“I think Cortez is on to something, Manny,” I said.  “This market can blow anytime.  I mean, how long can this go on?”

“Not forever," Cortez nodded.  "Even with all those other universes out there.  Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“But the risk is worth it,” Manny raised his voice.  “You guys are crazy.  Every minute – every tenth of a second – we sit here and argue, we’re losing money.  Lots of money.  Millions maybe.  Tens of millions!  Aarrrghh!”

He thrust his hand at the keyboard.  With a single push of the enter key, he sent the bot from Cortez’s dummy program into the multiverse.

“Manny!” Cortez shoved Manny’s hand away, his thin shoulders suddenly hunched over more than they were a moment ago.  “Shit, dude, what did you do?”

"I made us rich.”

I held my breath, unsure what was going to happen.  Cortez stared at the screen.  Manny folded his arms and just stood there as if waiting for the riches that were due to descend upon him any moment.   

We watched as the bot instantly interacted with the market, pinging here and there, searching for the right combination of value, potential and push.  It bought shares of SonEase, Inc, a small reseller of earphones and assorted listening accessories.  It tapped the stock at $1.05, margined all the shares it could, held it for less than twenty seconds and sold at $1.80.  We made 75 cents a share that quickly, and before we could even congratulate ourselves, it had bought all it could of another stock. 

“Cortez,” I said.  “Where did you get this thing?”

He glanced up at me, ignored Manny who was pacing in short-legged strides in the middle of the room.  “I just got it,” he said.

“But how?  It just didn’t appear, you must have–“

“I just got it!” Cortez said.  “Okay?  I just... got it.”

I backed off.  “Well, whatever it is, look at it go,” I mumbled to myself.

Before I even finished the sentence our account had over three million shares of various stocks in dozens of universes, bought on margin of $307,800.  Some of them were margined out only a few minutes, and we sweated out a call that would have bankrupted our little enterprise about sixty times over.  But the bot sold in time, and moved on to use the profit for another round of buying.

“Man, oh, man, this is so good,” Manny said.  He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen, particularly the top right box with our running total.  I could feel him mentally spending that money, which made what happened next all the more painful.

We had noticed something odd about the way the bot operated, the way it chose stocks, the timing it used.  And then it just – ping - disappeared.  Just like that.  Gone.

It took a few seconds for us to realize what had happened.  Cortez instantly leapt at the keyboard, his fingers frantically trying to track down our wayward trader.  Manny stood behind him in stupefied silence.  The top right box was frozen... but that wouldn’t last long.

“What happened?” Manny whispered.

“I think, I think the bot just...” I felt myself not wanting to say it, certainly not wanting to think it or admit it.”

“What the FUCK?” Manny shouted.

Cortez waved his hands around his head.  “Stop shouting, stop shouting!”

I saw it first.  Our bright little box, the number that was now large and fat and happy, sitting magnificently on the top right of the screen.  Our box.  Our profits.  Our account.  It ticked down a few thousands dollars, paused, then the numbers started rolling backwards a lot faster than we thought they could.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Manny said.

No one noticed Zitty had come in until he was right behind us.  “Hey, what are you guys doing?” he asked.

I backed away from the screen, already guilty over something, anything, maybe not even this, but since I’m Catholic, guilt is right up there with fight or flight.  I bumped into the weird kid, nearly knocked him down.  Manny ignored him, already in an open-mouthed funk, but it was Cortez who reacted as if electrocuted.

“Shit!”  He lunged at the kid’s computer, the one monitoring the news outlets, quickly gave it up when it was obvious there was no way he was going to cover up the fact that he had hijacked the kid’s machine for his own use.  Deflated, Cortez sunk back into his chair, softly moaning.

The zitty kid saw what we were doing, took it in quickly, like he knew all about the bot, the multiverse, M-Stocks dotcom, the whole damn thing.  “Javier,” he said to Cortez, “what have you done?”

“It’s no big deal, dude,” Cortez tried to smile.  “I just borrowed your laptop to look at news while I was...”

The kid pushed Cortez aside and started in on the keyboard.  He slid into Cortez’ chair, eyes darting from keys to screen in that peculiar dance of the ubergeek in battle mode.  It took him less than four minutes to track down where the bot had gone.  Or rather, where it had been snatched.  When we heard it, all of us felt more than a little weird.  But everything started to make sense.

A lab in Jersey.  Small town, actually, used to be famous for being where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  Since then, people pretty much forgot about West Orange, but it made the news big time earlier that very week.  Hell, we’d all been talking about it for at least that long.  Way before we sent the bot into the net.

All of just sat there a few minutes, staring at the screen.  Manny was almost comatose, watching our fortunes falling into negatives as our stocks were sold short while we stood there powerless to unload them at any price.  Our margins were called, a message appeared requesting additional funds, our account flashed red, the word “suspended” appeared on the screen.

By the next day it became clear that we weren’t the only ones in trouble.  Millions of accounts had suddenly tanked, and millions of investors found themselves going into the hole with no way to dig themselves out.  The morning news was all over it – CNBC, FOX, CNN, Headline News, Google, Yahoo and MSNBC featured almost nothing else all that night and well into the next day.

The bubble had burst.

Everybody owed M-Stocks dotcom fortunes large and small.  Sobbing mothers wept for milk money while grim faced men spoke in earnest tones about how the interversal transactions allowed by multiverse trading ability had taken a “bad turn” and sucked gajiggity trillions from bank accounts across the globe.  Where the money went was a hot subject for awhile, and a team of cyberspace investigators pulled together in Zurich uncovered an electron trail that led from our universe to another.  They had our money, alright, and were owed more.  And it got even worse.

Every single person who had logged into M-Stocks dotcom had posted a credit card from one of our banks, that is, banks in our universe.  So whoever was behind M-Stocks had all of our credit card numbers.  And they had the account information from the banks who issued those credit cards.  And the banking information from the banks since each trade, and there had been billions of trades, had gone back and forth between all of those accounts.  All of it on margin, and all of it, apparently, a one way transaction - from us to them.  From our accounts to theirs. 

A great sucking sound wasn’t heard that weird May day when the numbers fell.  But it should have been, for we were bled dry.  Our universe had been schooled by masters, left poor as students. 

So now it’s all about blame.  Ours.  Theirs.  There’s plenty of it to go around.  But in low conversations overheard in crowded buses and supermarket lines where people scrounge loose change to buy not-quite-enough of the cheapest food they can find on nearly empty shelves, the biggest blame is saved for whoever had unleashed the algorithm in the first place... which led to some pretty sleepless nights on our parts.  Especially during finals.  Luckily, seeing the enormity of the situation, even the zitty kid realized that no one must ever know.  No one.  Ever.  No one must ever know, at least not until all of our debts are paid.

If only the damn interest would stop accruing.