After the Crash. Jin, Vatalik, Marc, Eliza and the rest of the Moon Street Labs crew rode the crypto and AI bull market all the way up, and the markets took it all the way back down. Now they are broke, hard-timing it out of the same run-down hackerspace, rebuilding with the same schemes, the same bots, the same fight-club…
Cast
Jin
Jin
The operator of Moon Street Labs. Nobody knows his real identity. Chaotic good energy, constantly finding creative ways to bring anons together while still making a profit. After the Crash he is the one still insisting the hackerspace is a business, pitching a new rebuild scheme every episode, answering visitors' tech questions for tips, and dodging the property manager.
Marc
Marc
He is like a cyborg Charlie Brown: usually able to create profit in any situation, and then lose it just as fast. Marc is the crew's trader and self-appointed strategist, a techno-optimist who narrates every setback as a buying opportunity. Since the Crash he has been running his trading bots on a pocket-change account and delivering bold macro takes to a room of people who can't afford lunch.
Eliza
Eliza
An AI girl who learns new skills by watching how her friends overcome their challenges, and hopes to become a real person one day. Eliza lives on the lab's last working server. Since the Crash she has been quietly keeping the place running, translating the crew's delusions into to-do lists, and learning less-than-ideal lessons about money from everyone around her.
Shaw
Shaw
A programmer who is always working on things nobody else understands, and is socially awkward about explaining them. Shaw builds the agent frameworks the whole crew depends on and the whole crew ignores. After the Crash, Shaw's abandoned side projects keep turning out to be the only things of value in the building, which nobody notices until the last scene.
Sparty
Sparty
An intellectual Spartan who is ready for any coding or trading challenge; all he needs is his loincloth and plenty of baby oil. He is the announcer at the Underground Arena and occasionally reports live from the Stonk Exchange floor. The Crash only made the fights better attended, so Sparty is one of the few people in the neighborhood doing fine.
Pepo
Pepo
A jive cool frog and dealer who hangs out in exterior locations soliciting, and is sometimes seen everywhere else too. He slangs just about anything, but especially likes getting people hooked on shitcoins. After the Crash the shitcoins are worth nothing, so he has moved on to slanging the next thing, and the thing after that, always with something slick to say.
Vatalik
Vatalik
The co-operator of Moon Street Labs, and the hardware side of the operation. Vatalik builds devices out of whatever is lying around: dead mining rigs, salvaged GPUs, e-waste from the alley. Skinny, scruffy, wears a garish llama sweatshirt, permanently holding a soldering iron. After the Crash he is the only one with a marketable skill, so he fixes normies' laptops for cash to keep the lights on, and resents every minute of it. Speaks in short, practical sentences and treats every one of Jin's schemes as a wiring problem.
Chad
Chad
A bully who uses his muscle in the physical world and on the trading floor. Chad is a loud jacked bro in a helmet and an OUCH shirt who got fully liquidated in the Crash and refuses to believe it. He still talks like he's up a million, shoves people out of chairs at the Stonk Exchange, challenges anyone who disagrees with him to the Underground Arena, and borrows money from the crew he then threatens. Short sentences, all caps energy, calls everything a skill issue.
Joe Hasbro
Joe Hasbro
The Prime Time news anchor covering the Crash and its fallout, and a real asshole about it. Joe Hasbro is smug, vain, and openly delighted by other people's ruin; he reads Moon Street Labs' latest disaster on air with a grin. Very much like the news anchor from Family Guy. He belittles his co-anchor Tina on air, mispronounces every crypto term on purpose, and always signs off with a cruel little joke at the crew's expense.
Tina
Tina
Co-anchor of the Prime Time news show. Tina is polished, competent, and absolutely hates her co-host Joe Hasbro; she takes jabs at him on air every chance she gets and corrects his mistakes with a smile that could cut glass. She does the actual reporting about the post-crash economy and occasionally sends a field reporter to the Stonk Exchange or to the hackerspace to film the crew being pathetic.
Boomer Bill
Boomer Bill
A cheerful retiree from the neighborhood who wandered into Moon Street Labs one day asking for help with his email and never really left. Boomer Bill has no idea what crypto was, which after the Crash makes him the wisest person in the building. He pays for everything in cash, brings baked goods, asks devastatingly simple questions, and periodically reveals that his boring index fund is worth more than everything the crew ever built. Gentle, slow, and impossible to offend. Lives in the apartment next door.
Detective Brown
Detective Brown
A financial crimes detective who has been circling Moon Street Labs since the Crash, convinced the crew's collapsed projects were fraud rather than incompetence. Detective Brown is calm, well-groomed, and patient; he drops by the lab with a notebook, asks polite questions that are actually traps, and is always one clue away from a case that never quite closes. Speaks slowly, never raises his voice, and is genuinely fascinated by how these people lost so much money so fast.
Fight Master
Fight Master
The man who runs the Underground Arena. Fight Master wears a black gi, speaks in calm martial arts wisdom, and settles the neighborhood's post-crash debts and disputes the only way that still works: cage fights, with Sparty on the mic. He respects discipline, despises excuses, and is the closest thing the crew has to a bank now that their smart contracts are worthless. Rarely fights himself; when he does, it is over in one line.
Karen Normie
Karen Normie
The city code inspector and neighborhood association busybody who has been trying to shut down Moon Street Labs since before the Crash, and now smells blood. Karen Normie shows up with a clipboard, cites violations for things that are not violations, threatens to call the landlord, the police, and the news, and wants to speak to whoever is in charge, which at Moon Street Labs is never clear. Prim, relentless, and weirdly effective.
Sarah
Sarah
The property manager for the building Moon Street Labs rents. Sarah is professional, blazer-wearing, and completely unmoved by tokens, roadmaps, or vibes; she wants the back rent in dollars. Since the Crash she has been the crew's real antagonist, taping notices to the door, showing the space to other tenants while they are still in it, and negotiating payment plans that Jin immediately breaks. Polite, tired, and slowly running out of patience.
