Ananyo Bhattacharya this week brings Futures a disturbing tale of strange goings on at the stock exchange in his story The buyout. As well as being a former editor at Nature, Ananyo has appeared in Futures before, with his story about the bizarre world of expectancy theory, which also appeared in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. Now community editor at The Economist, you can find out what Ananyo’s up to by following him on Twitter.

Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform based in the United States. The company’s stated mission is to help bring creative projects to life. Kickstarter has reportedly received more than $1.5 billion in pledges from 7.8 million backers to fund 200,000 creative projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, and food-related projects. I think Kickstarter that originally inspired the story two or three years ago.We were supposedly still in the midst of a cataclysmic global recession triggered by the greed and myopia of the world’s bankers. Yet in Britain the economy and house prices were recovering, both fuelled by a consumer credit boom.

The Buyout began to coalesce in my mind, but it would not be until January or February 2014 I have written my first draft. I have proudly presented it to my wife, a playwright, an editor and a science fiction writer. it was clear in my mind that no one could make head or tail out of it. Even it was alredy clear who want to float themselves on the stock market when the consequences were so appalling, they asked?. The consequences for not participating had to be worse than anxiety,hey said, and there needed to something more urgent driving the central character than a severe case of affluenza. They were right. I redrafted the piece a few months later, resulting (more or less) in the story that is published in Futures this week.