Inch Centimeter Virtual Headquarters 1st of June, 3025

Sitting around the virtual table was TheNegotiator, Neovali44, JonnyJonnyDude, stackem, Blacksail, SLKS, and a giant cup of coffee. Discussing, debating, and deciding. Their story is for another time. Right now, the idea they are brainstorming with all their concentration will bloom into a giant entity, one to entertain the CEOs of society. And to get a bulk supply of materials as well, apparently. The story we are focusing on today starts a couple months later, five months later to be exact. In a dark room, lit only by a LED and otherwise devoid of life, sat a man in a chair.

Auction interactions for large ships with packages.¹

[Redacted, Redacted] Exact Date:[Redacted] Aprox. Date: October 12, 3025

This man was not an interesting man, nor one that you would recognize, one that would slip your mind moments after passing them on a busy sidewalk. In that room, he sat, typing on a retro interface bolted to the wall. Suddenly, his granite face began to crack into what could be described as a smile. Upon his screen, a there was a popup, found on the galactic trade forums. It read:”Live Inch Centimeter PrUn Auction”. Investigating further, it looked like the Second IC auction would be a perfect target for the state of the art tech in the [Redacted] he called [Redacted]. We’ll leave him for now, typing even more aggressively than before.

Moria CX, Moria

A large, grimy warehouse bursted with supplies, while two people, TheNegotiator and SilentReaper stand off to the side talking. Accepting the contract SilentReaper had given, he sighs as another contract replaced the last.

“Silent, how much stuff are you going to be selling at this auction? This is the 5th contract you’ve given me, and this is only for two of the CX’s,” commented TheNegotiator.

“At least 80,000 cubic meters,” replied Silent.

Sighing, TheNegotiator nodded his head and got ready for the contracts coming his way, not including the other materials that people were sending him for the auction. Calling the Warehouse administration, he placed an order for a couple dozen more Warehouses.

An incoming call interrupts his focus. It is a Warehouse Customer service rep. Pushing the accept button, he waited as a life-sized hologram appeared of a woman in her twenties that immediately started talking. “Sir, I’ve come here to make sure you haven’t butt-ordered some warehouses. According to our data, your number of rented warehouse has increased by over 2,100%. No company in the history of Warehouses has rented that many in such a short amount of time.”

Answering the flickering hologram, TheNegotiator said, “Yeah, yeah I know. I’m the organizer for the Inch Centimeter Auction, so I gotta store everything that people are selling."

“If the rentals were made with intent, then that is all I need to know. Goodbye sir, and have a ware-deful day,” the lady said as the hologram blinked out of existence, or at least as invisible as nanites can be.

A couple standard-time hours later, he sat on his bunk inside an apartment complex on MOR CX. An empty synth-cloth casing is strewn about the bunk, while a white AR headset is resting upon his face. Going through the Galactic Trade forums, he decides to create another advertisement for the auction. You can never have enough publicity, right? Titling it “Live Inch Centimeter PrUn Auction” and adding the necessary information (as well as adding a wrongly named form entitled “Help”) in just a couple minutes, he sent it out, onto the forums.

Holo-network Date: October 11th, 3025, 6:30 PM Universe Time (UTC)

List/Roles of Volunteers running the Auction:

TheNegotiator: All around cool dude, came up with the idea. Organizes every contract, and has the amazing voice to pull off speaking like a certified auctioneer.
JonnyJonnyDude: Decided to go full spreadsheet and not participate in the auction at all, and will spend the entire three hours entering who won what bids constantly, while getting hand cramps, making TheNegotiator pause the auction for 5 minutes so he could rest.
Blacksail: A name that reminds you of a black cat for some reason, and would “clear the board” so to speak whenever the next item would be sold. Translation: would message the next item and its starting price so bidders with tunnel vision don’t forget what they are bidding for.

The moderators of Inch Centimeter running the auction were panicking. Well, panicking may not be the right word. Stressed about time constraints would be better. This was because, 30 minutes before the auction was going to officially start, they were figuring out the protocols about how they were going to run the auction. Not, “Okay guys let’s review,” or, “We are almost done let’s refine it." No. They were setting up how IC would keep track of who is buying what, from the foundation up, with 30 minutes on the clock. But no biggie, they figured out a mostly ok system.

Other problems were abound though. A programmer joins their meeting.

“CEO’s, I got some bad news. The holonet is partially down. We will have to not use holograms, just sound and a profile picture for each participant. And the malfunction that took it down also overloaded our auto bidder number system. Each bidder is going to have to shout out a manually assigned bidder number every time they bid so that way we know who is bidding.”

“Are you serious? How could this day get any worse. At least we got the procedures set up,” replied JonnyJonnyDude.

Back at [Redacted, Redacted] the man awoke, reading the time on his “brand new” watch from the 21st century before remembering today was the big day. Where millions of pieces of computer coding humans fought over would become his, no risk required. Feeling confident, he decided to watch the auction happen using programming that made it so he could watch while the organizers didn’t even know he was there. Typing faster than a normal human and pushing keys with nonsense markings on him, a blue looking screen appeared on his computer, with about 15 squares with profile pictures appearing.

Back inside the holonet, we had a reporter allowed exclusive access to auction real time. So here is a transcript of the highlights.

TheNegotiator: “Welcome everyone, to the Second Annual IC Auction. I know it is kind of late for some of you for your local planet’s time zones, so I really appreciate you all being here.”
Evov: “You better! It’s 5am local time for me. I could be dreaming about building a colony ship a day, but instead I’m here”.
TheNegotiator: “Yes, yes, thank you for being here, anyways, I’m going to go over how this is going to work.” [This was a lot of boring instructions, so we cut this part out.] “Okay, and now for a quick demonstration before we start.”

Launching into a cycle of talking rapidly and spitting out numbers faster than an AI core, TheNegotiator had to be told multiple times by the other volunteers plus bidders to please slow down otherwise JonnyJonnyDude’s fingers and everyone else’s ears would be inoperable.

A large amount of bidding later…

TheNegotiator: “Next we have VF. This one is a bit weird, so I’ll have to explain. Basically, it’s a promise to give you the 10,000 VF once it’s actually available on the market and the seller produces it. Alright, the bidding will start at……”.

At that moment, a star went supernova. Bid after bid after bid went through. Across the station, a docked spaceship detected sound waves traveling fast enough to crack its hull, and wisely decided to undock and go AWOL for a couple days. Eventually, after much bloody fighting, one bidder rose to the top, rising wearily out of the ashes. Coincrafter23, paying 40.4 credits per unit of VF.

After a couple more bids and one well timed break for JonnyJonnyDude…

TheNegotiator: “Our next bid is for JUI, I’ll let the seller explain as this one is special”.
Evolivolution: “For this lot, I’ve decided to make this one for charity. All proceeds of this lot will go to a “new players grant,” to help give back to the community.”

An appreciable amount of cheers and clapping is heard after this particular one was sold.

[Point of view: JonnyJonnyDude during the entire auction]

Sitting in his chair, JonnyJonnyDude typed. Then stopped. Then listening to the auction audio, he checked the public auction lot list. Switching over to the internal list, he put down the information that was being put down in the public auction list. Then messaging in discord helping a new bidder, he became behind in his typing. So, on the grind he was again. Writing down the information needed to know who bought what and for how much, never stopping. Drink of water? Behind. Laughing at the BF lot being bid over? Not behind, surprisingly. Finally, after three hours of continuous typing, the auction ended, and with it, the typing. Only for the volunteers of the auction needing enter information into the spreadsheets for a couple of hours after the auction officially “ended.”

TheNegotiator finished the auction by saying “Wow everyone, that was a great auction, thanks again for coming everyone, we can’t wait for the next one. The next one will probably be a couple hours earlier for our friends in different time sectors”

Turning off the holo-network, his vision was back in his headquarters. Then, someone knocked on his door. Telling his room to open the door, his chief coder came in,

“Sir, something… weird happened at the end of the auction. The servers detected a very old interface named “APEX” try to break into the mainframe and siphon all the credits away to an outside source. The interface was so old though, the computers immediately detected the intrusion attempt and booted the interface. But I just can’t believe a relic like that is still in use.”

[Redacted, Redacted]

1011101001101010001010001000100011110100010100

Redaction uncovered by IC Mainframe…

[An “undiscovered” asteroid, Unknown sector (now known as BN sector) on the outer rim]

The man, or rather, Molp turned off his interface. How could the auction’s servers, even though yes more modern, boot his interface that quickly? It wasn’t that old…… though he guessed he’s been wanting an update for a bit.

Several days later…

Molp logged on to his newly bolted, slightly better looking interface and got onto the Galactic Trade forum to look for any new news about the next IC auction. One result popped up, and his jaw dropped. The only result was, “Starting time will change to be a couple hours earlier for our friends in different time sectors”. This time change meant that Molp wouldn’t be able to try to hack the next auction, as he would be having his nerd power sleep then. He had upgraded his APEX interface… for nothing.