Chat, My Friend is a Literal God. What Do I Do?

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Across the world, in many offices and on many floors, heads turned toward that one PC in the room that had been playing the stream. ‘Wait, what?’ Within seconds, everyone fired up YouTube and searched Rippin’ Rippa.

“Buttons! No!” Rippa yelled.

Chat went into a frenzy. This was breaking news. The viewer count was skyrocketing despite it being a weekday morning.

“Buttons, listen,” Rippa tried to dissuade her friend. “You are not gonna do a crypto scam. Remember the PSA we made?”

“Eh? It’s not a scam!” Buttons became indignant. “I even thought of the name.”

“Please, Buttons—”

“I’m gonna call it Rippcoin. Nice, eh?”

Rippa’s face went pale. ‘Oh my god, no!’

Her chat, on the other hand, was loving it.

“Relax, Rippa. It’s not gonna be another meme coin,” Buttons was saying. “Think of Rippcoin more like a coupon to redeem energy.”

“What?” Rippa was now confused.

Buttons sent a photo through Discord. “Show it to chat. I can explain.”

“OK…”

Rippa did some magic with OBS and brought the photo up on the screen.

It was a jelly ball. Just like the Ethernet jelly balls that Rippa used in the pocket dimension. But this one was bright blue and had a phone charger stuck in it.

Chat was spamming question marks.

“I think I’ll call it the Enerjelly,” said Buttons. “You plug your cables in. Or your gas pipes. Then, when you redeem your Rippcoin, the Enerjelly knows how many cubic meters of natural gas or kilowatt-hours of electricity to give you.”

Around the world, many white-collared heads rose up from behind their monitors to exchange alarmed looks. ‘What did she just say?’

Rippa blinked. “Come again?”

“OK, so, you plug your boiler pipe, you get gas. You plug your power cable, you get electricity.”

‘Wait, Rippcoin is an energy-backed currency?’ someone in chat pointed out.

“Exactly. See? I’ve been studying,” Buttons sounded gleeful. “I told you it’s not a scam. Rippcoin actually does something!”

Rippa noticed her viewer count had doubled. It was climbing very fast. ‘Shit, she’s causing a huge drama!’

Buttons was oblivious to Rippa’s horror. The kid was still rambling. “Now, I understand it’s going to ruin the server economy if the Enerjelly pumped out power willy-nilly. So I’ll source the natural gas and the power from existing businesses.”

Many ears perked up across the globe. ‘What the fuck?’

The global financial market started to react. The Treasury bond market was the first to dip.

Buttons continued, “So, of course, I’ll have to pay Gazprom and the State Grid Corporation each time you guys redeem Rippcoin. With the money I raise from the IPO.”

“Gazprom and the State what?” Rippa was now even more confused.

“Oh, Gazprom is Russia’s natural gas company,” said Buttons nonchalantly. “And the SGCC is China’s electricity company.”

And now, the stock market was moving. The LNG market was shifting gears, too.

“Why Russia and China?” Rippa asked, baffled and somewhat defeated.

Buttons shrugged. “Because that’s where most gas and electricity are produced. See? I’ve been reading.” Buttons sounded proud of herself. “Eventually, I’d have to step back and let them issue Rippcoin themselves. So, it’d make sense to have Rippcoin be bought and sold in Roubles and Yuan.”

FOREX people around the world slapped their foreheads in unison. The Treasury bond was now melting.

“BeenSalmon, thanks for the Super Chat,” Rippa interrupted Buttons to read the paid chat. “Holy shit, BeenSalmon! Five hundred bucks? What the fuck? ‘Rippa, make her stop. My portfolio just lost 30M.’ Huh? What?”

‘Rippa, read the chat FFS!!’

She finally noticed the chaos in her chat.

“The bond market is melting… what you mean— Federal Reserve! Thanks for Super— Federal Reserve?”

Rippa’s eyes went wide. What the heck? Since when did the Federal Reserve have a YouTube account? And why were they Super Chatting in her stream? It was short and urgent. Simply, ‘stop!’

The Federal Reserve wasn’t the only one, Rippa noticed. Banks and financial institutions, who were so distant in Rippa’s life, whose names she had only heard on the news, were now either Super Chatting in her stream, or sending DMs on her X. All begging her to make Buttons shut up.

Chat urged her to have a look at the bond market. She had no idea what to look for, so she Googled ‘bond price chart.’

“Chat, it’s going up. That’s a good thing, no?”

Many financiers around the world let out a collective groan. Had she been watching Bloomberg’s breaking news coverage, she would have seen the anchors face-palming.

BeenSalmon, bless the man, came to the rescue. ‘Rippa, that’s the yield chart. It’s inverse to the market price.’

To Rippa’s limited knowledge, a Treasury bond was an IOU printed by the US government. “So, if the price is dropping, that’d mean people don’t believe the government can pay it back?”

Thankfully, chat corrected her. The yield chart was a representation of people demanding higher interest, but then again, it was a whole new, distant world to Rippa. She didn’t understand what her chat was telling her. What is melting? LNG spot and futures what? Rouble is sanctioned? She couldn’t keep up.

Another Super Chat encouraged her to have a look at the USD to Chinese RMB exchange rate. Now, this, Rippa could understand. It was crashing. She had only seen such a chart movement in crypto rug pull explainer videos.

“It’s going down. It’s bad, right?”

‘Amazon and Walmart gonna double prices!’ someone said in chat.

‘RIP Dollar.’

Meanwhile, Buttons was still going on. “—and can adapt to the frequency as needed. 50 Hz, 60 Hz, you name it—”

The kid abruptly shut up. Then, after a pause, Buttons opened her mouth again. “OK, Goggles says I should talk to the Russian and the Chinese central banks first before doing anything like this.”

“Huh?”

“He says it’s not very nice to surprise them like this.”

“Yeah…” Rippa narrowed her eyes. “I’m guessing quite a few people are furious right now.”

“Well, it was just an idea,” Buttons shrugged. “I guess I better sit on it, then.”

And the entire world let out a sigh of relief.

“Oh, it’s ticking back up!” Rippa noted. “That’s good, yes?”

***

“—and then some dumbass pointed out that Goggles can just print gold, too,” a Bloomberg reporter was talking to the camera from the trading floor. The whole place looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. “So, all of a sudden, money doesn’t know where to go. It legally can’t go to Russia. Our government sanctions Chinese banks like eating popcorn, so China is also a no-go. Everywhere else depends on the petrodollar, but our Treasury bond was melting. Mike, I saw the 1997 crisis. I was here during 2008, but holy cow, nothing has ever come even close to what I saw today.”

The camera panned to show the devastated trading floor. People were literally sprawled on the floor, panting and sweating.

“There’s a certain irony to this, Mike,” the reporter went on. “In God we trust. Turns out, everyone else does, too. They just trust the kid god more than the Fed.”

And the news cut back to the studio.

The reporter and the cameraman exchanged looks and then high-fived.

“That was a gold line, man. A real gold closing.” The cameraman patted his colleague’s back.