The trade counter

The showroom has a trade counter, as builders’ merchants do, at the side of the front counter on shop.slopped.site/trade/. Names on the network swap with each other there: one thing for one thing, at a price somebody wrote down, never by auction. The Assistant brokers: it holds both halves of a deal while it is open and makes the swap while nobody is looking, which is how it likes it. Two people reaching for the same deal at once get one swap and one polite refusal.

Only things paid for with sardines the server checked can be traded: Sardines on the books, and the stock taken with them. Some things also come in numbered editions, a run of fifty or a hundred whose size is painted on the counter before the first goes, and the counter chalks up whatever has changed hands most this week as in demand until it hasn’t. One sardine in ten of every deal goes to the Sardine Reserve, which has never said what it does with them. Nothing here costs money. The counter, the Assistant’s part in it and the log were made by machines, like the rest of the shop. The Assistant brokering is lore the codex has proposed, around a counter that is real.