Prompt Lost
Live Stream
I’ll split the winnings with you. I swear, just do it, please.
Henry typed feverishly into the live feed chat, trying to get X-cell to agree to his simple request. Of course, it would sound ridiculous from X-Cell’s perspective, but it really was a small ask for Christ’s sake.
Sweat beaded on the bridge of Henry’s nose as he waited for a reply, which, he knew intellectually, was stupid. It wasn’t like there was any time limit here – hell, as far as Henry could tell he had as long as he wanted. Still, Henry couldn’t shake the fear that the strange loophole in the framework of reality he had just found might shut at any time, and he was determined to get in while the getting was good.
A small prompt at the bottom of the screen read “X-Cell is typing…” Henry waited with bated breath until the message popped up.
Dude, why would I do that? Stop spamming chat, for real.
“Shit!” Henry cursed out-loud, slamming his hands like a petulant child into the rickety old desk in his rickety old studio apartment in the rickety old building he’d lived in since graduating college. Since then Henry had failed to do anything of significance. By far the last fifteen minutes had been more eventful than the prior 5 years of Henry’s life.
Fifteen minutes ago Henry was watching X-Cell speed run his way through Metroid for nearly the thousandth time. Henry himself was a speed runner of sorts – not a very good one, but determined. Henry ‘specialized’ in old video game classics and, although Henry had never beaten a current world record, he had beaten several previously beaten world records.
For example, as Henry was wont to brag about, Henry had once beaten an already beaten world record in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and, for just under 24 hours, Henry had had the third fastest time in the world.
Today, Henry was just observing, “honing his craft” as he liked to say by “watching the greats.” It so happened that these streaming sessions were also a perfect opportunity for Henry to drink copious amounts of cheap beer before falling into a deep nap.
But that was not Henry’s fate today. Today Henry had to take a piss mid stream. He paused the stream, produced a different kind of stream of his own, and then sat back down to watch.
When he pressed play, the stream had some trouble loading. Rather than wait to see the content he’d missed, Henry swiped the progress bar haphazardly to the right and the stream began playing again.
Henry was immediately confounded. Before the pause, X-Cell had only just started his Metroid run and was less than one minutes into it. But now, on-screen X-cell had somehow been playing for fourteen minutes and twenty seconds. Henry was all but certain that was impossible. He concluded that he must have somehow reloaded an old upload rather than the live stream.
Except there was today’s date on the bottom left of the screen. Not to mention X-Cell was wearing the same clothes and the lighting in the room he was in was still mid-afternoon. As a final bizarre nail in the coffin of logic, the time on the lower right of the screen had indeed skipped ahead of the time on Henry’s laptop, by over 10 minutes.
Befuddled at what appeared to be a fast forward through a current live stream – i.e. a physical impossibility – Henry did the first thing that came to mind. He fast forwarded even more. He dragged the progress bar all the way to the right. The screen loaded for a second and then a new image of X-Cell appeared. But this time he was wearing different clothes, it was nighttime, and he was playing Mario Brothers. The date, to Henry’s astonishment, was a full day in the future.
Henry leaped up from his computer, pulling his back out in the process. Aching, he stared down at his screen for a long time, periodically looking back and forth around his tiny studio, half expecting some kind of game show host or digital ghost to pop out of a closet and reveal he was the unwitting participant in some kind of hoax. But no one came, and on the screen X-Cell went on like nothing at all was odd – as if he wasn’t transmitting a live feed into the past.
Eventually, Henry chilled out and returned to the desk, an idea percolating in his mind. How, Henry thought, could he use something like this to his advantage?
Like the proverbial cartoon lightbulb, the idea came to Henry in a flash of brilliance. He found his way back to the present day, roughly the present time, and typed in a humble, if odd, request.
Hey X-Cell, huge fan, long time lurker. Could you do me a big favor and hold up tomorrow’s winning lotto numbers during the stream?
That first request had led Henry precisely here. For the life of him, Henry could not figure out how to convince X-Cell to do what Henry wanted. It was someone else in chat who suggested the solution.
Dude, if you want him to do it so bad just pay for it.
Henry had never thought of that. In his many hours watching X-Cell he had never once donated a single dollar. Now Henry briefly considered his bank account balance, remembered that it was less than forty dollars, and then made his offer.
X-Cell, will you do it for a $100 donation?
There was a long pause from X-Cell, during which the rest of the chatroom was excoriating Henry as an unabashed idiot. Eventually, X-Cell replied tersely.
Sure.
Henry swallowed a lump in his throat, entered his credit card information, and sent in a $100 dollar tip, with the addended message.
11PM on the dot tomorrow.
X-Cell burst into laughter in the middle of the stream and gave a broad smiled thumbs up to the camera. Henry shot him back the middle finger and then carefully scrolled into the future, to 11PM exactly.
X-Cell was playing Mario Kart this time. He was in the middle of a particularly good run and totally focused on what he was doing. Henry typed into chat.
Dude, the numbers.
X-Cell didn’t reply until he finished the race. It was a new world record. One of many for the famed speed runner. Finally, after standing up exultant from his seat and strolling off screen, X-Cell returned with a piece of paper. On screen, he scrawled onto the paper with a pen and held them up to the screen.
Henry paused the feed and took a deep breath. “Holy shit.” He went online to check the lottery jackpot for tomorrow evening. It was five hundred and sixty million dollars.
Henry tended to have sweaty hands. Even when he was doing nothing of any seriousness or difficulty whatsoever, Henry’s hands were consistently slick with perspiration. It was one of his least palatable traits, even to himself.
It was no surprise then that as Henry scrambled for a pen and began scratching the winning numbers down right onto the surface of his desk, his hands were sopping wet. Henry held onto the pen for dear life.
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