Myths in the Headlines: When Legends Disrupt the Modern World

At three-fifteen this morning, Eastern Daylight Time, the entire global supply of copper was sold and then immediately repurchased in the span of a single nanosecond. The price for the transaction was one silver coin of ancient Athenian design. Last week, your correspondent reported on the emerging pattern of mythic figures disrupting modern affairs; it now appears one has taken an interest in global commerce. Only yesterday, market analysts were remarking on the unusual calm. Commentators from the firm Federated Hermes described a “puzzling disconnect” between rising geopolitical risk and exceptionally low market volatility.

It was, they noted, as if the markets were holding their breath. We now know for what they were waiting. The first sign of trouble, beyond the impossible copper trade, came from the high-frequency trading desks. Algorithmic systems, designed for cold, mathematical logic, began executing trades based on what can only be described as whimsy. One fund’s entire portfolio was liquidated and reinvested into companies whose names contained exactly seven letters. Another began buying and selling airline stocks based on the migratory patterns of swallows over the Mediterranean.

The transactions were nonsensical, ruinous, and yet, they were all successfully clearing. The chaos then spread to the cryptocurrency exchanges. A previously unknown digital token, whose symbol is a simple caduceus, began to fluctuate with breathtaking speed. Its value, traders soon discovered, was pegged not to supply or demand, but to the interpretation of ancient Greek proverbs posted on public forums. When one user wrote, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in,” the token’s value soared.

When another posted, “The Fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling,” it crashed to nearly zero. Regulatory bodies are, to put it mildly, paralyzed. An official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that his agency was facing, quote, “a liquidity event sourced from a mythological dimension.” Throughout the morning, technicians searched for the origin of the attack. They found no hacker, no rogue state, no faulty line of code. What they found, embedded in the metadata of every single aberrant transaction, was a digital signature.

An impossibly small, fleeting image of a sandal… with wings. The name, pieced together from fragmented data packets, was HERMES. As of this broadcast, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is no longer being measured in points, but in stadia. The price of gold is listed on the London exchange simply as “a fair offer to the messenger.” Financial experts have ceased offering predictions. What is there to predict, when the market is no longer a system of rules, but the playground of a GOD? This is no longer a bull or a bear market. It is something far older.

Your correspondent has learned that traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have stopped watching their terminals. They are now, instead, watching the sky.