How we read the market

Every Timeline B story is built on one real number: the market-implied probability of an improbable outcome. Here is exactly what that number is, where it comes from, and what is real versus invented.

Source. The market question, its probability, and its resolution date are pulled from public prediction markets on Polymarket. The “Source · Polymarket” link on each story goes to that exact market.

Probability. The percentage is the market’s own implied probability for that outcome at the moment we captured it — the current market price, expressed as 0 to 100%. A market pricing an outcome at 0.5% is putting it at roughly a 1-in-200 shot. Prices move constantly; ours is a snapshot, not a live quote.

Observed at. Each snapshot carries the UTC timestamp when we read the market. The market keeps trading after that, so the live price on Polymarket may differ from the figure shown on the story.

Volume. Where shown, volume is the total US-dollar amount matched on that market — a rough gauge of how much real money and attention the question has drawn. It is not a measure of our confidence in anything.

Everything else is fiction. The headline, the reporting, the quotes, the experts, the images — the whole dispatch from the universe where the long shot landed — is invented, AI-generated satire. Only the market snapshot is real. See About and Terms of Use for the full framing.

SATIRE · AI-GENERATED FICTION. No real person said or did any of this.