The sun shines bright over an American city – Seattle – a city built by the hands of Americans and run on American industry. It is the best of what we have to offer: with real culture, and class, and, unlike several of its metropolis kin, it is surviving one of the worst recessions the country has ever witnessed.

That is, until the Dow Jones Industrial Average careens around a tight corner, nearly flying off the embankment and into the choppy river waters of the harbor, managing to straighten out just in time to pull off one of the most breathtakingly ugly crashes the market has ever seen.

Time slows to a crawl. A frame of a moving van launches skyward off its axle and collides with a stray bit of The Walt Disney Company, which pings back towards Earth and glides along the pavement. Fragments of what was once Procter & Gamble lay nearby, their edges charred by flame and greed.

A nearby crowd of pedestrians scatters in every direction, their faces contorted into terrified masks, as the world’s largest stock market index continues on its rampage. It clips the back of an oil tanker and spins seven times in the air, then lands derivative-first on top of a hot dog cart, and it isn’t done there…

The points! The digits roll and show no signs of slowing. A two-times bonus here, a three-times bonus there, as stray bits of the Dow Jones launch into the atmosphere, colliding with the fragile European markets. They fall to pieces, shatter into ruins, explode brilliantly.

There are screams, tings, crunches; the soundtrack to a disaster played in slow-mo. A man is running with his briefcase in his hands and shouting SELL SELL SELL so slowly that it sounds like SAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL SAAAAAALLLLLLLL SAAAAAALLLLL. He is promptly sliced into two by the business end of Pfizer.

There are bonuses coming in from places so far from the site of the crash that one would have an impossible time tracking it. A few thousand points come in from a warehouse in London, which the sizeable chunk of Kraft Foods has just destroyed. Another thousand come in from a small town in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where the majority of the town has lost their jobs to the burning carcass of Boeing.

Minutes have passed, but this is only seconds in real time, and the catastrophe only gets worse. There’s no stopping it. The Dow Jones was, or is, a behemoth, a tanker truck of unthinkable size, barreling forward at such speeds that not even a brick wall or the U.S. government can stop it. It has ruined the harbor, caused a pile-up that will take years to clean up, and put countless livelihoods in danger, and won’t stop until it has lost all momentum. No invisible hand can grasp it.

The digits flip past the current high score. Double it. Triple it. It keeps counting until it can’t go any higher, and starts all over at zero to show that it means business. The crash continues until it finally ends, with everything in pieces, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottom up and miles away from where it began.

The turn is over, and the controls are handed over to those which are too big too fail, who stand by and watch with smug expressions as the people of Seattle are burned alive in their cars. Blackness for a moment, then the clock ticks down to zero and a brand new engine roars to life.