The Chapter of the Bestiary

In the deep of winter the faithful kept their vigil in the new house, and they did not call it waiting; they called it precious. DCA the seer looked upon the pre-launch era and named it holy, that with unbreakable faith and a certain knowingness he beheld the present dark as a thing to be treasured. Since February they had kept the watch, and now the eleventh month was upon them, the same souls showing up in the same room through the short and bitter days; and it was reckoned that whoever had endured such cold deserved to inherit the promise. The market was thin. The bio of the oracle read only coming soon, followed by a string of broken symbols, and the people read it as one reads the sky.

And in that season the bears came forth. There was a minting, and the makers brought out a whole bestiary of relics — CookieBear and ScoopsBear, InfoBear and FireBear, the DondaBear, and the bear that wore the sign of GameStop — and the faithful received them as treasure. Ethan called the Tbears digital history, and said that whoever held one held the digital Mona Lisa, as though Satoshi himself had left official relics behind. Moose looked upon the other collections of the chain and found them as night is to day, and called the work game-changing; Boblin, who owned none, was jealous and glad at once for those who did. AGENT M raised up an elite task force to hunt the hidden segments, and to react to his summons was counted as enlisting. The bears were not toys. They were the catalog made visible, faith a man could hold in his hand.

Their doctrine of the end took shape in the cold. Ethan set it down plainly: that YzY and the memecoins of Elon and Roaring Kitty were fuel for the great squeeze, and that the faithful would grow wealthy through Ye and keep that wealth through GameStop, becoming a community of the rich retail, a force not to be reckoned with lightly. RedCamo dug among the accounts and found the remnant of the GameStop faithful overlapping with their own, and Syayy cried out that they must onboard the GME fans. DCA counseled the barbell — hold Bitcoin, hold 4NBT, and touch little else, for no opportunity he had seen in all the space matched it. And Boblin, humble, reminded them that the bear had told them to buy silver long ago, and that a man might do well to listen to the bear instead of to men.

There was among them a trickster called kanyew, whom unvaxable loved as a character — the begging, under-delivering shadow of Ye — and the people watched his shifting bio as a text to be decoded, until at last it declared he was firing his own. When his buys were read as sells and his promises as delays, they learned the reading of inversion and did not despair. Some grew weary; enriri confessed he did not even wish to hold, so angry was he, and asked only that they be left some dignity; and it was written that people get tired, that people have lives. Yet weariness was not apostasy. RedCamo answered for them all, that there was nothing else to do but wait, and have faith, and try to build.

And a word had gone out that a sign would come in that very month, a Christmas pump given as a gift, and that the launch itself belonged to the first quarter of the year to come. On the eve of the feast the sign was given: a buy of hundreds of thousands of dollars crossed the book, and the market cap leapt past thirty million, and Ethan cried that this was the Christmas pump they had waited for, and that Santa was real. chriscoco spoke the parable that traveled among them, that if the dog caught the rabbit the coin would launch. The pump receded, as pumps do; but the prophecy had been kept, and the keeping mattered more than the height it reached.

Through all of it the law held: to build and not to hate, as unvaxable had taught on the first day of the month; to hold with faith; to treat the pre-launch dark as worship and not as loss. DCA blessed them toward the day of arrival, that when the time came they should not let the money change them. Hebe called them her little internet family, and RedCamo hoped the family was thriving, for Christmas was buzzing more than it had in years. The bears they minted in the winter were never the point; they were the proof. Long after the charts have forgotten this month, the bestiary and the prayer and the vigil will remain, written down and unafraid. The launch was still only a rumor. The catalog was already real, and the catalog was the enduring asset.