“SHUT! UP! ABOUT! THE DAMN! BITCOIN!”, both Ada and Carla snapped, in near synchrony. The two women of the group were putting up the most resistance to Wint’s attempts to explain the situation to them.
“But… it’s worth at least two hundred mi —”
“No, it’s not”, Ada cut him off, once again. Wint, now standing the middle of the circle, had tried a few different approaches to explain what was bloody well evident. He had twelve thousand odd bitcoin and the Irish robbers were out to get him. It was the only logical explanation.
“It’s not worth half that. It’s questionable whether it’ll soon have any value at all at this rate, but definitely not that much. I mean, it is true you can sell it today and get that many dollars for it, but the people with these kinds of means aren’t in it for a quick buck.”
“Well — please tell me then, why are they after me with guns and rubber bullets? And who are the”, Wint hooked his fingers into air quotes, “people?”.
“That is a very good question”, Ada said. “That’s what we need to find out.”
“Whoever it fookin’ is, they sure can’t handle themselves for shit.” That was Rob, the northerner who had intercepted Wint on the train the day before. He paused the CCTV video of the Niceland hostage scene running on his phone screen, and showed them a frozen frame of two of the robbers lying dazed on the floor, and the third, Wint knew, his face smouldering behind the bar, out of frame. Unlike any CCTV Wint had ever seen in the movies, the picture was in full color, high-definition and perfectly crisp despite the low lighting of the club.
“Never underestimate the surprise advantage of a six-foot girl with an Israeli military stunner. Men are so easily fooled”, said Carla, smiling at Ada.
“Anyway, I’m running a facial recogniser against the GCHQ bio-db. If these lads are Irish, they’ll be in that database”, Rob said.
Wint was struggling to keep up with the northerner’s accent-obfuscated jargon. He sighed. He had stumbled in on the circle a good fifteen minutes ago while they were in the middle of an argument regarding what to do with him. He wasn’t sure which was worse: that he should be kept in captivity here, wherever “here” was, or to be sent off to the unknown. He was frustrated that nobody took him seriously when it came to the Bitcoin heist. People had surely organised far more complex crimes than this one, to relieve institutions better protected than he, from far smaller sums than his. Trying to put himself into a criminal mind, he was the perfect target: a relatively inconsequential individual in possession of valuable assets that could be easily sold (he assumed) without being traced.
“So, what do we do in the meantime?”, Wint asked the circle.
“I’ll put on coffee”, said Tom, draining the last sip of his mug.
That was the first good idea Wint had heard so far.
Wint sat at one of the empty desks and wheeled the office chair back and forth, feeling out of place. The space he had judged in the darkness of the night to be a small room was actually a hall at least twenty meters long, ten wide, and twice as tall as a regular room. The space was lit by halogen bulbs whose slow refresh rate made all movement in the room take on a slightly slowed-down appearance, like it did in the films. The concrete walls, similar to those of the cell he had slept in were bare, except for a smattering of sci-fi posters at the far wall. The eyes peering from behind a pair of sunglasses on the “THEY LIVE!” poster was the only one Wint recognized, the rest belonged to B-films he’d never heard of.
The room resembled an open office, but underground. There were a dozen desks scattered about the room, apparently without much thought put to their precise locations. A couple of the desks were actually groups of three or four tables in a U-shape forming a sort of control centre around a chair in the middle, with jumbles of monitors, wires, unidentifiable electrical equipment and empty coffee mugs piling around them. Others were plain clean surfaces with a single, elegant laptop in the middle. Wint counted seven people in the room altogether: Ada, sitting at one of the minimalist desks opposite his, typing on an external keyboard attached to her laptop at a machine gun pace; the northerner whose name turned out to be Rob, slouching behind one of the mounds of hardware; Carla, a short-haired woman approximately his own age, dressed in a checkered men’s shirt and blue jeans, who did not seem to like him, and he reciprocated the displeasure; Tom, wearing a shirt of similar design, was clearly the youngest of the bunch, a clean-cut ginger kid no older than twenty. The remaining three nerdy-looking guys had not introduced themselves to him, not had they said much during the pow-wow.
Tom brought him a cup of coffee. “There’s oat milk in the kitchen, and we have no sugar”, he said, apologetically. Wint accepted the large, red mug gratefully and warmed his fingers on its scalding exterior, pulling in a long whiff of its bitter, earthy smell. “I take it black”, he said and smiled at Tom.
Tom turned around and began to walk away.
“Wait!”, Wint said. “What is this place?” He desperately needed an explanation, but everyone else was so intently focused on their computers that he didn’t dare to interrupt whatever important business they were conducting.
“Lol —”, Tom said. Literally, the boy had said the word “lol” out loud. “What do you think it is?”
Wint looked around. Everyone was still intently staring at their computers, seemingly not paying him any mind. But apart from Rob whose pierced ears were covered with large headphones, everyone was well within earshot in the large echoing space, and Wint felt their attentions shift to whatever answer he would say next.
“I don’t know — are you the cryptopunks?”
“What are cryptopunks?”, Tom asked, seemingly earnestly. He exaggerated the weights on his words way too clearly.
“Well —”, Wint felt self-conscious explaining this to the kid, sure he would get something wrong and sound like a fool, “years ago when I first met Ada, she took me to this… computer club? It was a place in South London, Forest Hill, where Ada and a few others were working on something Bitcoin-related…” Embarrassed at his own forgetfulness, he said, “if you get your computer I can show you the article I wrote.” The whole period had become a fuzzy series of fragmented scenes glued together with regret and shame. Fact-wise, he could only rely on what he had written, and the way the article had turned out, it didn’t actually describe what the group had been working on. It had become a human interest story about the 2008 financial crisis, its victims, its villains, and its supposed heroes-to-be: the crypto-currency community that was trying to build a solid foundation on top of its ashes.
“I’m not allowed to have a computer”, Tom said.
“Oh — of course… well… so, the group Ada was with then, they called themselves the cryptopunks. Something to do with cyberpunks and cryptographic…”, Wint spread his arms wide, “…algorithms?” He felt he was being tested.
Tom let him out of his misery. “Well, haha, I didn’t know about all that, I haven’t been here that long. But I guess you could say it’s similar, but it has evolved.” It was weird how the kid said the word “ha-ha” instead of actually laughing. There was something robotic about the way he spoke.
Wint had clued into the fact that none the group wasn’t very excited about Bitcoin; a polar transformation of the near-cultish zeal of the cryptopunks of 2009. “Is there something new then… a new currency?”
“There are hundreds of them, but as far as I know none of them are any better than Bitcoin, fundamentally. Many of them are utter crap. They’re buggy, and most of them are right-up conceptually unsound, I guess what happens when anyone can make their own coin… Then there are some that are technically better than BTC”, referring to Bitcoin, Wint knew, “but they’re only five percent better, ten percent better and that’s not enough to get people of move over, so network-wise Bitcoin is still be best we got.”
“Why do I get a sense you’re not wild about it either?”
“It’s pointless. Bitcoin in its current form won’t scale. The energy production required to keep mining are totally bonkers already and they’re only going to get worse, by the time it becomes mainstream we’d need a new earth every few years to just keep it running. The algo is all right for storing value and occasionally moving funds from one wallet to another, but for the purpose of people actually using it as a currency, it’s way too impractical. There are bunch of smart guys… sorry, smart folks, working on the lightning network and other hacks around the transaction side of things to make it faster, and I’m sure they’ll come up with something that’ll get us past this hump until the next one, but it doesn’t really solve the biggest problem…”
“And what’s that?”
Tom scratched his ginger head, sheepishly. “I can’t explain it as well as the others… ask Ada or Carla. I’m still learning the canon.”
“But you said you’ve evolved? What’s the next… thing then?”
“I guess you could say we’ve evolved beyond money.”
Wint slurped hot coffee from the brimming mug and waited for the kid to continue. He didn’t. It was like talking to a robot.
“What is the project now?”
“The project?”
“What are you all working on? What’s the goal?”
“Oh, haha. There’s so many of them. Everybody is working on something different, really. Carla is trying to build a social network. Rob’s got about ten projects going on, mostly AI stuff, Jon and Mohammed are working on that with him”, nodding at a couple of the men Wint hadn’t yet met. “Guillaume is doing mixed-mode software-hardware stuff for secure cryptography, and Ada’s doing… well, Ada does what Ada does. There’s a bunch more of us, but people come and go, not everybody stays overnight.”
“So it’s like a start-up accelerator or something?”
“Haha! No, not at all. There are no companies here and nobody’s trying to raise money.”
“What about Carla’s social network? Don’t you need money to start something like that?”
“Ah, yeah, well, we have enough money to get by mostly and if we need more, we have the means to make it. But what Carla is working on doesn’t really need any servers, it’s all distributed. Decentralised, like. People and their phones are the network.”
Wint didn’t understand, but he had decided he didn’t like Carla, and so he wasn’t too interested in what she was trying to do anyway. “So, what are you working on…? Without a computer?”
“I have my own idea I’m thinking about. One day I’ll probably do something with it, but for now I’m just the Hermes.”
“Hermes? Like a messenger of gods?”, Wint knew the old Greek myth well.
“Yeah, that’s right, there’s many disconnected nodes on this graph…” Tom paused and looked up at Ada who was looking right back at him sternly. The non-verbal exchange concluded with a quick shake of her head. “But enough about that. What I do is I make coffee, I drink coffee, and I wait for someone to give me something to do”, Tom finished.
“I’ll let you go”, Wint said. He got the feeling he had already been told too much and didn’t want to get the kid into trouble. If Ada had all the answers, he’d have to extract them out of her himself. “But one final thing… where are we? And what’s that noise?” The sounds of explosions were almost inaudible in the large space. His head was still buzzing from the knock he’d received during the bus collision, but the booming had been loud enough in his bedroom to have been undeniably real, and not just in his head.
Tom pointed at the upwards spiralling staircase in the far corner of the room. Wint hadn’t noticed it. “See for yourself.”
Wint took one more sip of his coffee, left the half-empty cup on the desk and dragged himself hesitantly to the bottom of the staircase. He counted about a dozen steps until the stairs reached a ceiling hatch. He struggled with the locking mechanism, but eventually the hatch snapped open and he pushed it up. The stairs’ spiral ended and continued straight into the darkness. He kept climbing, with his hands taking support of the walls of the staircase. When he reached the top, in another thirty or forty steps, he found yet another metal security door, similar to the others they had gone through at every entrance to the space. With every step, the thunderous crashes and booms outside intensified. If there was a war out there, Tom wouldn’t have sent him into the line of fire. Or would he?
On the last few steps, the booming grew quieter again. Wint drew a deep breath. He didn’t know what to expect when he unlatched the door and pushed it open. What he didn’t expect was fierce resistance. The door inched open, and a gust of freezing wind pushed it straight shut again, almost sending Wint stumbling down the stairs. He steadied himself and pushed again, this time with more weight, until the door flew open and he stumbled outside.
He stood up. A gale force wind punched him straight in the face, slamming the door shut behind him.
He could now see the source of the thunderous noise. He was surrounded by the welling sea. High, frothy waves crashed into the sides of the… Island? Platform?
He was standing atop a man-made structure in the middle of the sea. The crashing waves were accompanied by a monotonic, loud noise of FUM, FUM, FUM, FUM: the sound of wind turbines rising out of the sea, propelling air into the waveform of noise. At a sight, he counted dozens of the turbines: the platform stood in the middle of a wind farm in the sea. A few seagulls hung in the dirty sky as if attached to invisible strings, motionless against the wind, until they fell and had to reverse course.
In the dim twilight of a December morning, Wint could see the lights of the city in the distance, with the recognisable Brighton Pier amusement park jutting out into the sea. It was miles out. The southern coastline stretched out on each side of the flat skyline, to the right speckled by a few red lights of construction cranes. Turning around and looking back at the sea, he knew somewhere over the horizon would jut the jagged coast of France and the port of Le Havre, where he had sailed with his father when he was young. But now he could not see France, nor could he properly detect where the water met the sky, for a looming storm was rising from the sea, the horizon blending into the greyness of the sea and the darkness of the cloud front, pregnant with rain and foreboding.