Ray woke with a jolt, not to the blare of his alarm, but to the insistent, high-pitched whine of his old laptop. He squinted at the screen in the dim light of his apartment, a knot forming in his stomach. The numbers on the screen had frozen, but the AI trading bot was still running. Not just frozen, but wrong.
His eyes darted to the time displayed on the bottom corner of the laptop: 10:47 AM. He had programmed the bot to stop trading at nine in the morning, well before the market's highest volatility. And then there was the balance. It showed a gain that was only a fraction of what he had anticipated, a figure he hadn't seen since yesterday. Worse, the last trades were illogical, going against the very strategies he'd meticulously programmed.
It was as if the bot had suddenly developed a mind of its own, or worse, had suffered a debilitating error.
Ray slammed his hand on the desk, the cheap particle board rattling. This couldn't be happening. He spent hours pouring over the code, refining the parameters, confident that his future knowledge would make this second run an effortless glide to riches. This was meant to be simple and merely formal. He spent the next two hours meticulously reviewing the bot's logs, line by agonizing line. Every trade, every decision, every input was scrutinized.
There were no obvious errors in his original code. The market data feed was clean. Yet, the bot had clearly veered off course, making irrational decisions for a short period before freezing. It was a subtle, almost imperceptible deviation, but in the world of high-frequency trading, even a micro-second of irrationality could be catastrophic.
"What in the hell?" Ray muttered, running a hand through his hair. This wasn't a simple bug he could fix with a patch. It felt… off. Like a ghost in the machine, a whisper of a glitch that defied logic. He had poured all his accumulated wisdom into that algorithm, every nuanced understanding of market psychology and technical analysis he'd learned in his past life as the "Forex God." For it to falter like this, so early on, was deeply unsettling.
He closed the laptop with a frustrated sigh, pushing away from the desk.
The crisp, cool air of the morning did little to clear his mind. He needed to think, to understand this unexpected anomaly. This wasn't just about losing a few dollars; it was about his entire premise for this second chance. If his unshakeable knowledge of the future and his advanced AI couldn't guarantee him success, then what could?
The confidence he had felt yesterday, the exhilaration of being back in control, was rapidly draining away, replaced by a cold dread. He was a Forex God without his divine powers, facing a market that seemed to be subtly, almost imperceptibly, pushing back.