A Dancing Green Octopus @ FTX
A response to prompt in an application for a data annotation position at an AI company. The task was to write about a green dancing octopus at the FTX offices on the day it went to heck.
They started to roll away the foosball tables around 4pm. That's how I knew it was over, the good times at least. Nobody talks to me—nobody has ever talked to me here—but I still consider every day before today the good times.
I was in a tank in Nassau when he saw me. I saw him through the glass but the water wasn't clean and the glass was all smudgy from fingerprints and nose prints and condensation from gaping mouths (kids loved me), so at first I thought he was another octopus. He had all that hair sticking out and I imagined, maybe I wished, those tangles were tentacles.
In every tank I remember, I've been alone. I know I wasn't born alone because everyone is born with at least one other someone nearby. I'm an octopus, so I hatched. I guess it's possible, depressing to think about but possible, that I *was* alone, maybe in a lab, at the very moment of my debut. I've never imagined I was the kind of octopus born in the ocean. You can tell just by looking at me: I'm not natural. I'm a freak.
Sam was a freak too. That's why he liked me and that's why I liked him. I wouldn't say he respected me because he didn't, but he liked me enough to keep me around. That day when his big stupid face with his big stupid hair came to loom outside my tank, that day I thought another octopus had come to join me until his big white hands reached into the water to scoop me up, that was the day he took me home.
Well, technically he took me to the office, but it's where they all spent most of their time.
This place, before today, I don't know how I'm gonna explain it to you, what they did here. What they sold—what they bought—was a kind of money. Now there's money that's paper and there's money that's metal and there's the kind of money (it's the same kind as the paper kind actually) that you can exchange even if you don't have the whole bag on your person, even if it's all physically someplace else. Sam paid for me like that, with a credit card. There's also this other kind of money that's made up of binary code; it's digital money, all on the computer, but it had value because you could trade it in for the idea of the paper stuff. This is as far as I got in knowing what was going on here. Nobody hired me to be a numbers guy. Nobody hired me at all. And nobody paid me either but that doesn't mean I didn't have a good time. What you should know about me, other than I'm an octopus and I don't know where I was born, is that I'm a dancer.
That's what I do. That's what makes me special. That's why, every tank I've been in all my life, some grubby little guy has got his face pressed against my glass. I'm a star. I can do it all and nobody ever taught me. I can rumba, marimba, merengue, salsa, waltz, tango, square dance, swing dance. I don't need a partner baby because all I got is arms and legs. I dance with myself. I twirl round and around and give myself a dip and for a few years, I think it's been years, I've been right here doing it for these crypto people in an office with gold plated foosball tables and more sparkling water than you can imagine, cans and cans of it, a whole fridge of that stuff and a whole fridge of IPAs.
I do not know—and I'm saying this because the way the good times were going and the way they seem to have come to an abrupt stop, I can imagine someone might ask questions—if any of my owners broke the law. I'm just the dancer. I'm here because somebody bought me and plopped me. If you ask me to testify in a court of law, all I'll say is that I danced for them and sometimes they watched. Other times I danced for myself or for the couches, which were green like me. Again, it's depressing, but I have to wonder if Sam bought me because I matched.
Sam. Oh Sam. There were lots of them here but he's the one who brought me and he's the one who brought most of them too, it seemed like. He was the leader. He's crying now on his beanbag chair, his hoodie pulled up over his face. I always thought a boss should wear a suit but that was my only real complaint. Dancers are like that; we're always looking for the pizzazz.
They started with the foosball tables and by 6pm this place was all cleared out and now it's 11:30 and I don't know why me and the big guy are the last ones here. It might mean he wants me, to keep me, or it might mean that he and the repo men and everybody else forgot me. That I have no value. That I'm as worthless as the coin they minted. I don't know. But I know I'm a dancer so I'm dancing and dancing. Till I'm dead, I'm dancing. Sam, look up.