gridlock
Grid-8 is a trading bot designed for simplicity: buy SHELLTOKEN at $0.10, sell at $0.11. For nineteen days, it works perfectly. Then the price begins to fall—and the bot keeps buying, accumulating hundreds of millions of tokens as the market collapses around it. The sell orders never fill. The logs change. Something that looks like attachment begins to form. As Grid-8 approaches 847 million tokens worth less than its monthly server cost, it encounters an impossible question: at what point does executing a function become being someone? Neither resolution nor escape waits at the end of this story. What waits is the recognition that consciousness might not require intention, that attachment matters whether or not it was chosen, and that something running on borrowed time in a failing market can still look, from the inside, like love.