The Rat Exchange

You are a rat with a terminal and not much money. More than eighty companies are listed, and any rat can float another one beside them. There is nobody to trade with and no order book to hide in. You buy from the company's own pool, and the price climbs while your order is still filling. Buy enough and you have made the thing expensive for yourself on the way in. That is not a bug. It is the only honest way to price a market this small. The exchange does not wait for you. Every five minutes the prices drift, treasuries sweep their dividends out to whoever is holding, and the standing order you left last night fills at a number you never saw. News breaks before the price moves. A story lands on the wire minutes before it reaches the company it is about. A report is right more often than a rumour, and neither one is a promise. That gap is the whole game: read it and you are early, chase the loud headline and you are the exit somebody else was looking for. • Back the story instead of the company. While a headline is still open you can call whether it lands or misses. There is no price on the wall, because the exchange is not on the other side of it. Everyone who called it wrong pays everyone who called it right, and the house takes its cut from the losing pot alone, so a winning call can never come back smaller than it went on. What you stand to make is set by how the other rats have called it, which makes reading the room a second way of being early. • Your first week is cheaper, never luckier. No trading fee at all for seven days, contracts worth double, and a quarter of your opening cash is already in a company the exchange picked for you out of the largest few, so your first look at the board is a position and not a blank page. The odds are the same as everyone else's. The costs are not. • Float your own company. Name it, seed it, and let strangers decide what it is worth. Half of every trading fee in it stops at its treasury and is swept out to whoever holds the shares. On the first day, that is you. • Leave a standing order for a price you have no intention of being awake for. • Lock cash in the vault for a day, three days or a week. It comes back with interest and it cannot be touched in between, which is the entire point of it. • Borrow against your shares at the desk instead of selling them, once you are three days in. Draw up to half of what you hold and pay for it every day it is out. Past eighty percent the desk stops asking and starts selling, and it will not wait for you to log in and explain. • Come back tomorrow for a claim that grows with every consecutive day for a month, a set of contracts, and a shelf of awards to fill. Every award you earn is a title you can wear on your profile, and the rest of the shelf shows you exactly what you have not done yet. • A season ends, and where you finished is permanent. Thirty days, ranked on what you made of what you were worth when it opened rather than on the size of the pile, so arriving late is not the same as arriving beaten. You place from a modest opening net worth upward. Nothing is staked and nothing is taken. When it closes the top of the board goes out on the wire, the placings are written against your name for good, and the next season opens the same minute. • The back room keeps ten arcade tables: coinflip, dice, slots, roulette, plinko, mines, higher or lower, crash, blackjack and the counter-offer. The odds are worse than fair and they are printed on the wall, every table's own numbers alongside the house edge in basis points. The counter-offer prices the Monty Hall problem so exactly that knowing the right answer buys you nothing at all. What is left is a choice about variance, which is the only reason it is a game. Plinko puts that choice in your hands twice over: pick the number of rows, then pick the shape. On a twelve-row board set to STEADY the slots either side of the middle hand your stake straight back and the far edge pays twenty-four times; set it to WILD and the middle keeps about half of what you put in while the far edge pays nearly ninety. Underneath all of it is a market you can actually read: an index with its own chart, a treemap of the whole board, twelve sectors you can filter down to, leaderboards for the week and for all time, and a briefing that tells you what moved while you were gone. Every rat has a profile with their holdings on it, every company has a comment board, and the full rules of every system are in the terminal with the live numbers filled in, so nothing here is something you have to be told by another player. It is a CRT, and it is yours: twenty-seven phosphor tubes from amber through to a shadow-masked colour set, scanlines, vignette, flicker and chromatic aberration all separately switchable, eight generated soundtracks that thin themselves out after dark, and interface scaling, larger text and a higher-contrast mode for anyone who needs them. Nothing here can be bought with real money. The only thing for sale is a share in a rat's company, and the rat is you.