$hitcoin: How to hype your shitcoin to the moon
The following extract appears in the novel $hitcoin., available now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin. [NOTE: these are Amazon affiliate links.]
ERR%20%:(‘location’;=UNDEFINED.)
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: In order to make the scenes that follow more interesting, the names of people & places which really exist have been used. However, none of what follows is true. None of what follows has ever — or likely will ever — actually happen(ed). This is a pure work of fiction. Parody. Satire. It is not real. The satirised characters & places that appear in the following chapter (& all previous & later chapters) are in no way a reflection of the real characters & places they share a name with. All that follows should be regarded as fiction/satire/parody & none of it should be taken seriously by anyone ever, least of all any court of law with jurisdiction over regions in which this book is published or sold. </LEGAL DISCLAIMER.>
Groningen, Netherlands.
The ICO was successfully completed ahead of schedule, 7,500 ETH raised, half of FSC’s 10 trillion tokens distributed to investor’s Ethereum wallets, & listings on a few minor exchanges secured.
“So now we actually have to do this, right?” Aart says, as Guus gushes to the rest of the frat about their new-found wealth.
“Sure.”
A week passes — a week of heavy drinking & missed university classes for all at the frat house, empty bottles of liquor piling up on every surface in the main living area, days ebbing away as the frat lads give themselves up to the night.
“We’ve got to do this,” Aart says. “It’s almost two weeks since the ICO now. We can’t just keep blowing the money on getting wasted.”
“Sure. I’ll talk to Nguyen about it.”
Days pass, all but Guus curbing their drinking & returning to lectures. Guus spends his evenings with Nguyen in The Three Sisters or Oblomov, drinking glass after glass of Belgian beer — La Chouffe, St. Bernadus, Gulden Draag — & nights in ZO, or Ocean 41, or Kokomo, flaunting their wealth & the enormous confidence it’s inspired. Aart cycles to The Three Sisters one afternoon after class & finds Guus & Nguyen sitting at a table with eight blonde German psychology students, a dozen cocktail jugs in front of them, the German girls laughing & smiling & leaning in & listening intently to everything Guus & Nguyen say.
“Aart, you’re here!” Guus almost knocks a girl’s glass over as he rises & embraces him. “I was just telling the girls about Future Synergy Coin.”
“I can’t believe you guys are all millionaires!” one girl says.
“This is the genius behind our entire marketing strategy,” Guus declares, arm draped over Aart’s shoulder, his breath heavy with booze. “If not for him, we would not have made even one cent.”
“I thought you wanted to discuss the development roadmap?” Aart says as Guus pours him a rum cocktail.
Guus: “Nguyen, do you want to tell him?”
“We’re going to Amsterdam,” Nguyen says, grinning stupidly, face flushed red with alcohol.
“Why?”
Guus: “For a conference! This is what you’ve been telling us, right? We need to make progress. So this is progress. We go to the conference, we network, meet with other projects and investors, and start really making things happen.”
Aart rarely sees Guus & Nguyen in the week before the conference, spending hours at the library each day working on university assignments, & coming home to see they’re not in the frat house.
Amsterdam.
Conference day arrives & the entire frat crew move boisterously through the streets of Groningen to the train station, beers in hand, as if they were heading down to Amsterdam for Koningsdag.
Singing & chanting fills the carriage for the next two hours, elderly women throwing disgusted looks at the troupe of half-cut hooligans.
“Guus has to go on stage,” Aart confides in Ciara, “in front of all these people, and he’s totally wasted…”
“It’ll be okay,” Ciara lies, trying to reassure Aart. “You know, in England, we call alcohol ‘Dutch courage.’”
From Amsterdam Centraal they take a train to Sloterdijk then head to a hotel fifteen-minutes’ walk from the station. The frat crew roll through reception, drawing worried looks from the staff, Aart smiling apologetically. They enter the main hall & find little more than twenty people inside.
“Where the fuck is everybody?” Guus asks loudly.
“This is everyone,” some nerd in a Bitcoin Cash T-shirt says. “Are you all registered?”
Guus approaches the nerd, still clutching a Grolsch can; Aart steps in front of him & reassures the nerd that, yes, they are registered: “We’re here with Future Synergy Coin.”
“Okay, then would you mind asking your… team… to keep the noise down?”
Aart tries to shush the rowdy bunch, but they burst into boisterous chatter & laughter as pallid skinny Silicon Valley-style speakers on-stage stutter through boring speeches about blockchain & transformative technological epochs.
“This is fucking everyone?” Guus splutters once his turn to speak arrives.
The nerd in the Bitcoin Cash shirt again assures him that yes, this is everyone; Guus strides on stage & clasps the microphone with supreme confidence: “Goedemiddag, Amsterdam! Hoe gaat het?”
Guus’ greeting’s met with complete silence & looks of festering disapproval that have built throughout the frat lads’ conference antics; even the frat lads themselves are silent, most too drunk to summon up any kind of appropriate response to Guus’ opening greeting. After a few moments’ awkward silence, Guus feels the alcohol within his bloodstream evaporate. The confidence he gained over the previous few weeks disappears, leaving him a mouth-breathing mess of neuroses, anxiety pricking randomly-distributed nerve endings throughout his body.
“Wooo!” Nguyen yells at the back of the room.
Guus smiles, thinking you have to do this. Another wave of anxiety: I can’t remember what I was going to say. The anxiety becomes him, swallows him whole: I didn’t think once about what I’d say up here…
His breathing becomes heavier, amplified by the microphone, echoing off the walls, overwhelming the room. Guus stares out at the stone-faced crowd of unwashed crypto enthusiasts, their arms folded, some falling into chatter with the people beside them, others engrossed in phone screens, some lifting their phones to capture his moment of complete capitulation on camera.
The intrusive thought steels Guus against the anxiety; he licks his lips & tightens his grip on the microphone.
Fuck you. You are not Guus van Hooijdink. You are Honey Badger. Be Honey Badger. Be fucking Honey Badger.
But then the stupidity of that thought overcomes him, & he crumbles again, & finally, as he sees the nerd in the Bitcoin Cash T-shirt approach, ready to cut him off, Guus pulls his phone from his pocket, desperate to save himself with the text contained within it.
“I am… ahem… I am here today from Future Synergy Coin. On behalf of. To speak for Future Synergy Coin. And vat ve have is ze very interesting products. Ahem. Not… not… products so much. Ve have ze token, of ze Future Synergy. The Coin. Ahem. And… uh… wait… just… one… second… yes… the Future Synergy Coin is…” & from there Guus proceeds to read almost the entire FSC whitepaper, staring into the reassuring white light of his phone, not looking up even once at the audience’s bored faces.
The train back to Groningen is a sombre affair, Guus in gloomy silence while Nguyen sleeps in the seat beside him, head lolled back & mouth agape, the others clutching beer cans & making small talk about sports & movies & video games.
Groningen.
“Hey, man, about the speech,” Aart says a few days later, entering Guus’ room to find Guus lying down on the bed, earphones hooked up to a laptop resting on his stomach.
Guus removes the earphones & turns his glum face toward Aart.
“I know you must be feeling bad about it, but, y’know, it isn’t so big of a deal. I mean, I think we can take it as a lesson, y’know? Part of the learning curve. We’ve got a multi-million dollar project going here. It’s crazy that we made it this far, but we can’t stop now. It’s like Dre says to Kendrick: ‘anyone can make it, but what’s harder than making it is keeping it, motherfucker.’ Do you understand why I’m saying this?”
“I understand.”
“So we have to move forward with the roadmap-”
“We are moving forward.”
“Oh… did you… speak to Nguyen?”
“I was about to send him a message. You as well.”
“…yeah?”
“There’s another conference. Next Saturday. In Stockholm.”
“Another conference? But-”
“This is bigger than the fucking shit thing in Amsterdam. There will be at least two thousand people there.”
“But before we carry on with conferences, shouldn’t we-”
“David Sontesebo will be there. From IOTA. Giving the keynote speech.”
“Oh… I… don’t know… who that is…”
“And this time will not be such a fuck, I promise you.”
“But-”
“I fucking swear to you, Aart. I fucking swear to you. I will not let you down again.”
“But… don’t you think… we need to work on the product? Or something? I mean…”
“Networking is the product, Aart. Conferences are the product. This is a hype game. Think about Tron. Do you even know what Tron’s supposed to do?”
“I don’t even know what Tron is… I never heard of it…”
“Tron is some fucking shitcoin that some Chinese dickhole made, but this Chinese dickhole goes to every fucking conference, and he’s got half-a-million followers on Twitter, and his coin is worth more than eight billion dollars.”
“But… you’re not Chinese, Guus.”
“Does it matter if I’m fucking Chinese or not? Are you fucking racist? No, he’s Chinese, but he’s charismatic. Charismatic as fuck. And that’s what sells the coin. Charisma.”
“I mean… it’s technology…”
“Yes, it’s fucking technology, Aart. And every technology in human history was only adopted because some charismatic kankerautist fooled people into believing in it.”
“That’s… that… isn’t true…”
“Yes it is, Aart. Yes it is. Think about it! Steve Jobs comes along with his black roll-neck sweater and a fucking MP3 player just like a thousand other MP3 players, and the world goes crazy for him. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk — these are the superstars of our time, Aart. Do you really think Tom Cruise is the all-time greatest actor? Do you think Drake is the most talented rapper? Do you think Donald Trump is qualified to be fucking President? They have charisma, Aart. That’s all it is: charisma.”
“But… you… don’t…”
“There are two kinds of people in this world, Aart: those with a fixed mindset, and those with a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you think that you are a shit, and you can never do anything, and you will wither and die in a fucking government-provided hovel with six kids who fucking hate you and a failed marriage and a fucking heroin needle hanging out your arm. But if you have a growth mindset, you can do anything. You are the master of your own destiny. Do you think cavemen thought that we would one day walk on the fucking moon?”
“I… what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a growth mindset, Aart. I’m talking about being the change I want to see in the world. I’m talking about walking on the fucking moon.”
“I… don’t…”
“Look at this motherfucker,” Guus says, turning the laptop to face Aart. In grainy black & white footage relayed via YouTube, Adolf Hitler is gesticulating wildly, while an enormous crowd of his downtrodden countrymen karate chop the air in crazed approval. “This short, ugly, dumb-moustache-having motherfucker, this piddling little failed artist, conquered half of fucking Europe, Aart. He marched right through this city, through this country. He didn’t stop until he got to the fucking Eiffel Tower. He brought the continent to its knees. And when you listen to him speak, you see why; the passion! The fire! The fury!”
“But… Hitler lost the war, Guus…”
“It’s not only Hitler, Aart; it’s Obama, it’s Trump, it’s JFK, Reagan, Churchill, Ghandi, Martin Luther King; I’ve been watching all of them, Aart, all of them; and the comedians! The way they control the crowd! Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, George Carlin, Louis CK — the way they build around an idea, pull an audience into believing it. The actors, the rock stars, the rappers, the rabbis, the priests, the imams — I’ve been watching all of them, Aart. All of them! And I promise you, I fucking swear to you, I swear with every fibre of my fucking being — I will not disappoint you again.”
Aart stares at Guus, at the mad certainty & wild-eyed intensity of his bed-ridden business partner, & slowly backs out of the door: “Okay… cool…”
Stockholm, Sweden.
A two-hour train ride to Amsterdam & 15-minute transfer to Schiphol Airport & four-hour flight later, Guus, Aart, & Nguyen are in Stockholm, Aart & Nguyen remarking favourably of its brightly-coloured smörgåsbord of architectural styles, Guus as quiet & intense as a death row inmate being conveyed to the execution chamber. Guus spends the whole night in their room at the grand waterfront Elite Hotel pacing & rehearsing his speech, tweaking its pacing & delivery, while Aart & Nguyen recline on the bed & complain about the price of the beers they’re drinking.
The next day, the hotel’s conference room is alive with activity, a half-dozen crypto teams & expert guest speakers mingling with tall aging bald men in sharp Scandinavian suits who stroke their chins & ponder all the industries blockchain will disrupt, while beautiful blonde Swedish waitresses move through the crowd offering platters of wine & hors d’oeuvres while trying to catch the eye of a crypto millionaire.
Guus is the first on the stage & instantly captures the imaginations of an as-yet unsettled audience, prowling confidently across the stage, staring into the eyes & souls of more than 2000 crypto-curious attendees: “How many of you have ever lost an ID card? A passport, a driver’s license… okay, there is quite a few of you. Now how much did it cost you to replace it? Anyone? You? Wow! Sweden’s expensive, ja? Oh, you’re from Denmark! And how long did it take for you to receive a new document? Wow! That’s even worse than the Netherlands! What the heck’s gone wrong in Denmark? Okay, now imagine all those documents were securely stored on a decentralised distributed ledger…”
He strides & builds as his speech moves through an easily-digested breakdown of FSC’s utility & technology, the audience enraptured. The climax draws a standing ovation from a conquered crowd.
Aart: “That was awesome, man!”
Nguyen: “You fucking killed that shit, bro!”
& Guus smiles & basks in the glory of a job well-done, exchanging small talk with a bevy of Scandinavian tech-experts & finance people, the Swedish waitresses batting eyelashes & exchanging flirtatious looks with Guus as he accepts an unending stream of wine & hors d’oeuvres.
Guus’ glory fades through the next four speeches, then dissipates entirely as David Sontesebo takes the stage & delivers a thundering speech, carrying himself like a viking & speaking like a Stephen Hawking-scripted Jordan Belfort. The tangle, directed acyclic graph, the monetisation of data transfer within the Internet of Things: these lofty concepts are relayed with clarity & precision, & when the speech is over, Guus is almost forgotten, until he & Nguyen wangle their way through the conference horde & interface with Team IOTA directly, every single woman in the room & even a few of the married ones forming a circle around them, all angling to flash the best smile at the men of the hour; & when Aart interrupts & reminds Guus & Nguyen they need to leave soon for the airport, Guus is irascible, a junky who’s had the finest fix he’s ever found snatched away from him.
Groningen.
Guus & Nguyen spend the nights after the conference moving between the pubs & clubs of Groningen, impressing new women at the bar & disappointing them in bed.
“How the fuck is he doing this?” Federico asks one morning, as Guus’ fifth new girl of the week leaves the frat house.
Guus’ days are spent hungover smoking weed in bed, watching hour after hour of TED Talks & conference speeches & the tubthumping delivery of every despot who’s ever been immortalised on YouTube.
“Hey man, don’t you think you ought to go to class or something?” Aart asks, hovering in the doorway of Guus’ smoke-filled room.
“I don’t need to go to BSc Computer Science classes,” Guus replies. “FSC is worth more than a fucking PhD.”
“Then what about the roadmap? We’ve made no progress since the ICO.”
“Oh, we made progress, Aart. Did you check the price today? We’re at six-thousandths of a cents per coin. $60 million market cap. We’re ranked at number 132 on CoinMarketCap.”
“That’s why we’ve got to work on development, man. The roadmap. People have invested millions of dollars in us. We can’t spend all the development budget on partying and conferences.”
Guus laughs: “Why not?”
Aart pauses, struggling to think of a reason.
Vienna, Austria.
The next conference is in Vienna, in the splendour of the Park Hyatt, a monolithic hotel with grand Greek columns at its entrance & chandeliers dangling from every ceiling in its interior.
“How much did this place cost?” Aart says, going into Guus’ rooms after dropping his bag in his own.
“I don’t remember.”
“We should’ve stayed somewhere cheaper, man. Or at least shared a room, like in Stockholm.”
“We can afford it.”
“But we need to use the development budget to actually develop something…”
“Aart, please; I cannot deal with negative energy within 24 hours of a conference speech.”
Aart leaves Guus alone to rehearse & tweak his speech, the grandeur of the hotel & the refined cityscape beyond the window seeping into Guus’ words & energising them; as he paces & practises, he stops at the window and stares across the city’s spires & slanted roofs, hearing the call of history, feeling the same world-conquering firing of the soul this city inspired in a piddling young painter named Adolf.
“What if there’s a better way?” Guus pauses for effect, all eyes upon him amid the ornate Viennese refinement of the Park Hyatt’s Grand Salon. “What if these documents could be stored securely and immutably within the blockchain? Enter Future Synergy Coin…”
The audience is smaller than Stockholm’s, & the applause that greets the speech’s end is less thunderous, but the impact of Guus’ speech upon all in attendance is in no doubt.
Aart & Nguyen congratulate him on a speech well-delivered, but Guus is left unsatisfied; he craves an audience’s total submission to the brilliance of his words & ideas.
The keynote speaker is Sunny Lu of VeChain, & Guus & everyone else in attendance is enraptured by the genius concept of adding tiny RFID chips to all manner of products that can be scanned using any smartphone operating the VeChain app, with consumers having instant-access to the blockchain’s full record of the products’ origin & movements through the supply chain, ensuring all branded goods are genuine, & all food products safe & sanitary, &etc., & Sunny Lu even has a neat solution to the problem of most crypto coins & tokens being largely useless accessories to an otherwise-neat blockchain-enabled idea: holding VEN will generate another token, THOR, which will then be sold back to businesses looking to buy into VeChain’s supply chain solutions; & Guus is mesmerised, but he doesn’t move as the audience rises at the end & gives Sunny Lu a standing ovation.
“We need to think bigger,” Guus says to Nguyen once Nguyen stops clapping & sits back down. “We need some kind of business-to-business solution. That’s where the real money is. And we need some other token that gets created just by holding FSC.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome,” Nguyen says, nodding enthusiastically to each jargon-loaded sentence.
“But we need to actually have some kind of working product first,” Aart says. “We need to make some progress on the main idea FSC’s supposed to be based on before we start promising a load of new features. We need to start delivering on the roadmap.”
“And what if we created a kind of social network within the FSC ecosystem?” Nguyen suggests. “And instead of just liking or upvoting people’s posts, you could give a boost to how much of the other token their FSC generates?”
“Oh my God, that’s fantastic!” Guus says. “That’s total genius!”
& Aart tries to remind them that if they still haven’t even begun working on storing documents on the FSC blockchain, or even creating a blockchain for them to be stored on, and they’ll probably never get around to adding all these extra features, but neither Guus nor Nguyen is listening to him.
Aart’s struggling to sleep upon the soft king-sized bed within the spacious luxury of his hotel room, rolling over & shifting position, fretting over Guus & Nguyen’s sudden obsession with creating a coin that does everything, & the mounting costs of conferences & 5-star hotels, & the tens of millions of dollars riding on them delivering something, & the catastrophic consequences of the whole house of cards falling apart, when he hears a knock at the door, & then a voice outside it: “Hey, Aart, open up. It’s Guus.”
Aart rolls out of bed & pads across the room, opening the door to see Guus in his underwear & an unbuttoned shirt, pupils dilated, demeanour clearly chemically-altered: “I need condoms.”
Aart looks at the shelf above his room’s mini-bar, where a box of condoms sits among tubes of toothpaste & other toiletries: “Didn’t your room have some?”
“I’ve used them all already,” Guus says, brushing past Aart & moving towards the shelf.
“But it’s a pack of six.”
“I know,” Guus says, snatching up all the miniature bottles of liquor from the shelf, then opening the mini-fridge in search of more alcohol. “These girls are insatiable.”
Groningen.
“Wow,” Ciara says as Aart enters the frat’s kitchen/living room, a dramatic haircut having removed his dreads & imbued him with an air of corporate maturity.
“I’m getting worried,” Aart tells her, after bashfully accepting her haircut-based compliments.
“It’ll be okay,” Ciara lies, trying to reassure him, as she chops some leeks & adds them to the simmering peanut-based Indonesian broth she bought on discount at JUMBO. “You already made a ton of money, right?”
“But we cannot do anything with it,” Aart says. “If people see on the Ethereum blockchain that the founders of Future Synergy Coin have moved their coins, they’ll lose confidence in our project.”
“Yeah,” Ciara says, pretending to understand. “I guess that’s true.”
“That smells good,” Wesley says, entering the room a little while later, Aart now helping Ciara prepare the meal. “Can I help you guys with something?”
Ciara’s about to tell him no, she’s got it under control, when the back door swings open, & Guus & Nguyen enter, carrying JUMBO bags with a dozen bottles of top-shelf alcohol.
“You don’t have to cook,” Guus announces, depositing his bags directly on top of the onion Aart’s half-way through chopping. “I’ve ordered catering.”
“Catering?” Aart says — not takeout, catering.
“I spoke to the Indonesian restaurant down the street. They agreed to close for the night and allow us exclusive use of their premises. They’re gonna cook for us.”
“But… what… why?”
“Because we have a business meeting,” Guus says, staring at Aart in bemusement. “Everyone’s invited.”
“There’ll be drugs and hookers,” Nguyen says, clearly stoned, grinning ear-to-ear.
Guus: “Not hookers, Nguyen; hostesses.”
Aart: “A business meeting with whom?”
“With investors, Aart,” Guus says, as if talking to a child. “Like you said a million times — we need to start delivering on the roadmap.”
They’re soon sat around a long table at Indonesisch Huis, the old woman & her daughter who run the place running from the kitchen to the table to place platters of satay sticks & bowls of salad, Guus filling glasses with Grey Goose & Chivas Regal, nodding approvingly as Nguyen — seated on Guus’ right — explains to the business consortium the benefits FSC can bestow upon them: “…your own private blockchain, transactions completely hidden from any government agency — “ — until the advent of quantum computing, Nguyen just about stops himself from saying — “-allowing you to keep perfect records of all product, all income, all expenditure, without having to keep any kind of unencrypted ledger recording your transactions.”
The hulking Jamaican yardie sitting across the table scoffs: “Why we need a blockchain for this, mon? We run our business fine no blockchain, why we gon’ start now?”
“I don’t think you’re quite understanding the magnitude of what my business associate is proposing,” Guus says, one eye on the other end of the table, where Federico & Wesley are flirting heavily with the half-dozen heavily made-up girls in micro-cocktail dresses, they wrapping thick hair around fingers as they laugh at the frat lads’ jokes. “This is a revolution for your line of business. Imagine if you could expand and supply every Coffee Shop in Gronigen — nee, in Amsterdam — nee, in the country — with cannabis, and know at all times what is where, and how the supply’s doing, what’s selling…”
“Data,” Nguyen says dramatically.
“…exactly, data. Data is the oil of the new digital economy,” Guus says, stealing a line from IOTA. “If you can harness data, it is like the English harnessing the power of the combustion engine for to create the Industrial Revolution; the sun will never set on your cartel’s empire.”
At that reference to England, Guus winks knowingly at Ciara, seated between Aart & the Jamaican on Guus’ left.
Aart shifts uncomfortably in his seat, still trying to make sense of what’s going on.
“I will to you be honest,” says the greasy-haired Dutchman with a big hooped earring on the Jamaican’s left, “but my English is not so good, so do you mind if I continue to you in Dutch?”
Guus gives a slight nod: “Lekker.”
(In Dutch): “Our business is not a business that requires data; our products sell themselves. There is always more demand than our supply can possibly meet, be our products powder-” the Dutchman gently pushes a silver tray of neatly-racked white lines across the table towards Guus — “-or flesh;-” — he nods gently in the direction of Feredico & Wesley & the girls at the table’s end, while Guus takes the rolled-up 20 Euro note from the tray & snorts a line. “I like you, Guus,” the Dutchman continues. “We are very impressed by the rate at which your cryptocurrency has increased in value over the past few weeks and months. But I’m just not sure how it could possibly benefit our business model.”
Guus gently pushes the silver tray towards Aart; Aart waves a hand to decline; Ciara reaches in & takes the note & snorts.
“The only two paths open to any business,” Guus declares, “are progress and decline. Today, you are successful. You operate the largest cannabis distribution network in the Northern Netherlands. More than half the windows in Groningen’s Red Light District are operated by your girls. But to stay still is to make your competitors stronger; in five, ten, twenty years, what will your business look like? Do you think men will still wander the Red Light District? Do you think people will still buy narcotics from street dealers? Nee. The most tech-savvy of our generation have already become accustomed to ordering narcotics over the dark web using cryptocurrency. Imagine the possibilities that this opens to you. Imagine every drug user and whorefucker on this continent with an app on their phones that allows them instant access to a catalogue of all your products. Imagine a decentralised rating system, capable of protecting your girls from abusive clients, and your dealers from any police sting operations. Imagine the transactions that take place on this app being completely obscured from any authority, until you’ve grown rich enough that it is you and your cartel who fund the continent’s main political parties. Until you’ve grown to a size where you are simply too big to fail. When you’ve become the kingpins of Europe’s biggest drug and prostitution network. When you’ve become akin to Gods.”
The Dutchman & Jamaican lean back in their seats, overwhelmed by the grandeur of Guus’ vision for their business. Aart looks at Nguyen, who’s grinning stupidly, in awe of Guus’ grandiose delivery, then at Ciara, who rubs her nose & stares at the lines, clearly contemplating the social acceptability of snorting another. Aart sips from his water to calm his nerves, now regretting having refused a glass of Chivas Regal.
The Dutchman reaches for his cigarettes & asks Guus in English: “Is it okay if I smoke?”
Guus nods.
Within a moment of the Dutchman lighting his cigarette, the elderly Indonesian proprietor returns from the kitchen pushing a trolley laden with the various bowls & dishes of the meal’s main course; upon seeing the smoke emanating from the Dutchman, she begins blabbering worriedly at him in Dutch.
“Please!” Guus shouts. “It’s lekker.”
“It’s nee lekker,” she says in broken Dutch, before ranting about the strict smoking prohibition her business operates under, while Guus reaches for his wallet. He peels off three crisp 50 Euro notes, then pauses & adds another, & hands them to the woman, who bows her head & falls silent, returning to the task of placing the plates and bowls upon the table.
He just paid 200 Euros to fucking smoke, Aart thinks, staring at the immensely unsavoury characters seated either side of the table, wondering just how huge a disaster their project can possibly become.
“My country once had a man who dreamed of creating such a grand empire,” says the huge heavy-browed Croatian on the Dutchman’s right. “He united all Yugoslavia, and for a few decades, all was well. Then he died, and his vision crumbled, and Yugoslavia descended into civil war. These grand visions and ambitions may sound attractive, but they almost always lead to disaster. What we have now is safe and stable and in no danger of falling apart; if we reach too far, we risk losing what we already have.”
Guus smiles: “Marshall Tito was indeed a great visionary. I have studied his speeches closely. But Yugoslavia did not fall apart because it was too big; it fell apart because it was too small. Bordered on either side by the monoliths of the USSR and NATO, fitting in fully with neither; such a position is similar to that historically occupied by the Netherlands…”
The others pass the tray around & snort as Guus continues, Aart’s head spinning from the ludicrousness of the situation & pomposity of Guus’ words & the incredible gaping chasm opening up between their original vision and whatever the fuck FSC is turning into; feeling dizzy, Aart excuses himself from the table, though no-one cares, & heads to the toilet, splashing water on his face & looking long into the mirror. As he stares & asks himself who am I?, music booms outside the door: it’s Honey Badger, asking why everyone calls him King of the Earth, over a pounding Eurodance beat.
Aart exits the bathroom as Honey Badger gives his answer — because I’m the King of the fucking Earth, bitch — and sees Nguyen dancing with two of the whores upon the tabletop, kicking satay-loaded dishes everywhere, while the drug kingpins & Wesley & Federico laugh & clap & glug straight from the bottle, Ciara staring at the carnage, mesmerised, while Guus leans back in his seat at the end of the table, hands clasped in front of him, the king smiling regally at the debauchery of his court.
“Neuken in de keuken!” — the chant echoes through Wesley’s mind as his eyes blink into wakefulness the following morning. “Neuken in de keuken! Neuken in de keuken!” — as he & who else? — Federico? Nguyen? — bent — who? The hostesses? The Indonesian girl? Ciara? — over surfaces in Indoensisch Huis’ kitchen, rutting like coke-crazed animals. Bleary-eyed & dry-mouthed, desperately craving water, the night a distorted kaleidoscope of fucked-up imagery, some primeval descent into he-knows-not-what… & Wesley looks up, sees the wallpaper of big-boobed blonde models & hears the endlessly-playing Honey Badger track that tells him he passed out at some point on the bathroom floor, back at the frat house… & he moves his eyes down slightly, & sees Aart standing over him.
“We need to stop this.”
“Ja,” Wesley says, sitting up, utterly frazzled.
“This has gone too far. Guus has completely lost it.”
“Ja,” Wesley says, rubbing his temples, brain half-destroyed.
“Lost what?” Guus says, emerging from Ciara’s bedroom.
Aart stares at Guus; in complete contrast to Wesley, he appears fully sober, utterly in command of himself.
“This… madness,” Aart says, struggling to find words for the chaos & debauchery FSC has become. “Those guys you were meeting with are dangerous.”
Guus laughs: “They are small little fishes in the ocean. I am the man with the billion-dollar yacht, casting a net into the sea and scooping them up to bring back to shore.”
Aart: “We’ve already made tens of millions… we’ve already so much to do… and now you’re making promises to pimps and drug dealers…”
“To stand still is to die, Aart. Cryptocurrency is a grand zero-sum game of pan-continental warfare. Those who adapt and grow will survive and prosper; those who shrink to protect what they have will wither and die.”
Frankfurt, Germany.
The next conference is in Frankfurt, the grand open space of Kap Europa hosting powerbrokers from Germany’s largest financial institutions — Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, UniCredit Bank AG, &etc. — & a few dozen leading crypto teams & expert speakers. A long day begins with a series of roundtable discussions with titles like ‘What is blockchain?’ and ‘What does blockchain mean for banking?’, Guus yawning through the dry detail of the sessions, Nguyen doing the heavy-lifting in explaining the mechanics of the blockchain to serious German finance workers.
At a gap between discussions, Guus approaches a beautiful brunette from Commerzbank: “You know, the technology is great and everything, but I don’t think that discussion got across the magic Future Synergy Coin is performing.”
“Really?” the Commerzbank brunette says, cold & cynical. “And what magic is that?”
Guus boasts of the skyrocketing price, now at $0.0000125, giving FSC a $125 million market cap. The Commerzbank brunette frowns & doesn’t even pretend to feign interest, leaving Guus a moment later, all her worst suspicions about nouveau-riche crypto geeks having been confirmed.
Guus downs two cups of free coffee & heads to the bathroom, Aart frowning in his direction while trying to explain to a stern balding Deutsche Bank fund manager just how important & revolutionary FSC’s original roadmap as a decentralised storage solution for official documents is, while Nguyen keeps interrupting & talking over him with all the ill-defined mission creep he & Guus have added to the roadmap over the past few weeks: “…and we’re gonna be, like, a decentralised social network, Facebook 2.0, and a platform for dApps, blockchain 3.5, and the Dutch Ethereum, and the Netherlandisch NEO, and we’ll offer a privacy platform that boasts 10 times the anonymity of Monero, with rewards of FSC Junior for anyone who holds the coin longer than our designated minimum staking period, and we’ll provide a better payments solution for established financial firms than Ripple or Stellar, and…”
The Deutsche Bank fund manager nods until there’s a gap in Nguyen’s rant & excuses himself.
“These fucking dinosaurs,” Nguyen snarls. “They know projects like ours are gonna destroy their whole fucking industry. They’re terrified. You can smell the fear in their eyes…”
Aart nods a few times, quickly tiring of Nguyen’s coke-comedown twitchy cynicism. He watches Guus exit the bathroom & approach two women in sober suits & gesticulate wildly while talking to them, until the women make an excuse & walk away from him, & Guus repeats the same futile routine with the next woman he reaches.
The speeches that follow are detail-heavy & finance-focussed, Guus missing the first as he snorts his way through an entire gram of cocaine while vigorously & seemingly-endlessly pounding his cock while staring into a mirror in the disabled toilets, finally splooshing white gunk over a sink already caked with white-powder residue. Guus cleans himself in the sink & returns to the conference, somewhat calmed.
“Banking is a dying industry,” Guus boldly begins a half-hour later, only five minutes’ late for his allotted speech. “The days of extortionate fees and tacked-on costs and surcharges are at an end. Every one of you gathered here today is like the band on the Titanic, gamely doing your designated duties while water rises around your ankles. What the speakers from every other cryptocurrency are offering you here today is access to a lifeboat. But as you all clamber from the icy ocean swallowing the banking industry, clawing at the lifeboat’s sides, these cryptocurrencies will all capsize and sink to zero. I am not here to offer you a lifeboat. I am here to offer you the gills and temperature-tolerance needed to dive deep into the icy ocean and discover the bountiful treasure hidden in its depths.”
As Guus speaks, throwing out wild coke-fuelled gestures & insane proclamations, he feels he’s shaken his audience to the core; when he leaves the stage to stony silence, he takes it as confirmation of how completely his world-conquering vision has affected them. When he retreats to his opulent hotel room alone that night, he takes it as a sign the women of the German finance industry are too overawed to spend long in his presence; angels terrified of singeing their wings against the immense heat generated by the Sun.
The price of FSC falls to eight-point-two-thousandths of a cents as word of Guus’ overwrought conference performance spreads online, causing Aart to warn it’s a sign of their overreach resulting in inevitable collapse; but Aart’s silenced as Guus bamboozles a small used car dealership in Zwolle into a vague promise to consider implementing some form of blockchain into their account keeping, which Nguyen hypes on FSC’s Twitter as a full partnership with a major automotive industry player, prompting a spike to $0.0000137.
Dubai.
The next conference is in Dubai. Guus spends the 6 & ½ hr flight flicking through The Old Testament in the comfort of his private first class suite, underlining passages where God is particularly grandiose or dramatic, like Chronicles 21:14–15: “Behold, with a great plague will the LORD smite thy people, and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods: And thou shalt have great sickness of the bowels, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day,” all the while drinking endless red wine & consuming lavish platters of gourmet cuisine, & when they land Guus feels his own bowels are liable to fall out by reason of overstuffing them.
They’re greeted in the sleek Arrivals hall by a troupe of white-robed men clutching a sign reading “FUTURE SYNERGY COIN”. The white-robed men take Guus, Aart & Nguyen’s bags & lead them through the air-conditioned airport to the baking heat & blazing sun outside, where a fleet of shimmering chrome Rolls Royces await.
“Mind if I smoke?” Guus asks the chauffeur.
Aart stares out a closed window at the hulking skyscrapers straddling the sun-kissed boulevard as the Rolls Royce rolls through the desert city, irritated by the smoke wafting around him in the air-conditioned car, but able to distract himself with the strange city outside the window, until the smoke becomes thicker & denser, & Aart turns to see Nguyen puffing on a fat cigar.
The Rolls Royce sweeps along a private highway leading directly from the wide boulevards of downtown Dubai across a golden-sand beach and glistening oceanfront, their hotel overpowering the horizon ahead: the iconic sail-shaped Burj Al Arab Jumeirah.
Aart smiles at first, recognising the place from TV or the Internet or somewhere, excited to be staying there; but then a thought strikes him: “How much did this place cost?”
“Relax,” Guus says, lighting another cigarette off the end of his last one, “I got us a shared room to cut down on costs.”
They’re ushered through a grand gold-plated lobby, with swirling red & yellow weaved through its carpets & brilliant ocean-blue walls all around them, a gigantic staircase rising up at its center; to the elevator, & the 50th floor; & as the doors open, Guus hands the bellhop €100 & apologises for not having withdrawn any of the local currency yet.
The trio are led by red-velvet-suited butlers into a sprawling suite lined with deep royal reds & dotted with black & gold flourishes, all the furniture seemingly antique, windows looking out across the desert city’s skyscrapers & over the endless immensity of the shimmering ocean far beneath them.
“Holy shit…” Aart mutters, as Nguyen flops upon the 3-wall-hugging sprawl of sofa at the room’s edge, & Guus directs butlers to begin preparing cocktails & hors d’oeuvres, they nodding meekly & promising it won’t be a problem when Nguyen declares he wants to eat authentic Vietnamese pho & bun cha.
Aart explores the suite, moving through a cinema room with a giant projector screen & a dozen sizable armchairs in front of it, then back to the main room, & up a central staircase, onto a landing, into a huge study with a giant bookcase & hundreds of foreign language newspapers & the largest globe he’s ever seen; Aart pauses at the globe, using both hands to rotate it, gazing at the distance they’ve travelled, to Dubai from Amsterdam; & he moves through a master bedroom, with four-poster bed, drapes hanging over it; & another room, no less spectacular, with a similarly grandiose four-poster bed in its center; & into a marble-carved bathroom containing a huge hot tub with room for six or seven people, with two completely separate shower & toilet rooms, everything overwrought with opulence & grandiosity fit for a pre-revolution French king.
“How much did this place cost?” Aart asks, heading back downstairs to the suite’s main room.
“Care for a Bon Fire?” Guus says, he & Nguyen sipping bright orange cocktails as they recline upon the room’s enormous wraparound wall-hugging sofas — a 7-star remake of the frat house’s quad-sofa.
“Guus. How much.”
Guus sighs. “Ten thousand dollars per night.”
“Ten thousand fucking dollars per night?!” Aart flips. “And you booked it for what, three nights?”
“Four.”
“Four! So forty thousand dollars?! Why the fuck have you booked the place for four nights?!”
Guus rolls his eyes, leans forward, drains his cocktail, & waves the empty glass at a velvet-suited butler, who rushes across the room to take it from him: “This conference is a fantastic networking opportunity. I thought that it would be prudent to stay another day after the conference ends and try to set up a few deals with major Arab investors.”
“Arabs are rich as fuck,” Nguyen says, seemingly already drunk from the bright orange cocktail. “They got that oil money.”
“That’s right, Nguyen,” Guus says. “Now, Aart, won’t you settle down and have a Bon Fire?”
“A Bon Fire…” Aart mutters, taking a seat at the edge of the hulking sofa; Nguyen is fully reclined on the opposite side, holding his cocktail glass over his stomach as he lies on his back, while Guus sits in the dead center of the wraparound sofa, feet resting on an ornate wooden-legged pouffe, looking every inch the master of global economics in his crisp tie-less Gucci suit.
“The Bon Fire is the signature cocktail of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah,” Guus says. “It is prepared with blazed Havana Maximo aged Cuban rum, to which is added the essence of smoke and aromatic bitters. The fragrance of this potent-but-refined blend is further enhanced with the addition of freshly-picked kaffir lime leaves and authentic orange zest. The delectable final product’s understated sweetness is underscored with the addition of select dried fruits and highest-quality brown sugar. The Bon Fire is typically served in the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah’s Sky Bar — which I would suggest we visit at some point, given the legendary views it offers across Dubai’s distinctive skyline — but as residents of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, we have at our beck and call an entire fleet of butlers, who are only too pleased to deliver this potent and refined cocktail directly to our rooms.”
Aart hasn’t paid much attention to Guus’s info-dump, instead watching with disbelief the immense stillness of the two butlers standing with hands behind their backs in the room’s kitchen area.
Ten thousand dollars per night, Aart thinks. For four nights. Plus the first-class flights… “The cocktails are complimentary, right?”
“Guests of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah’s suites enjoy a range of complimentary cocktails and other drinks and foodstuffs,” Guus drones on in a gratingly-fake British accent, all Dutch inflection completely eliminated from his speech, “but the Bon Fire is regarded as a delicacy of supreme rarity and highest quality, and as such there is a surcharge for guests wishing to purchase it; however, as residents of the Royal Suite, we are entitled to a fifteen-percent discount on all purchases from the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah’s bars and restaurants.”
“How much does the fucking cocktail cost, Guus?”
“Normally, it would be a little over three-and-a-half thousand dirhams,” Guus says, “but with our discount, it’s closer to three thousand.”
“How much is that in a currency I can understand?”
“Aart, part of operating a major financial concern with international aspirations is keeping abreast of exchange rate movements and fluctuations in the global marketplace,” Guus explains, as a butler enters with a trolley laden with silver-sheathed platters of food, another butler behind him carrying Guus’s cocktail on a silver tray.
“Would sirs like to dine here or in the dining room?” a butler asks, approaching the sofas.
Nguyen groans theatrically before sitting up & draining the last of his cocktail: “Fuck it, let’s see the dining room. And bring me another Bon Fire.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Let’s eat,” Guus says, belly still bloated from the mass he ate and drank on the plane.
“How much are the cocktails, Guus?” Aart asks again, as Guus accepts the butler’s offer of carrying his freshly-made Bon Fire through to the dining room.
“Oh, could you please bring another for my friend here?” Guus tells the butler. “You really must try one, Aart. They simply are divine.”
“How much is three thousand fucking dirhams, Guus?” Aart says.
Guus sighs theatrically. “I cannot tell you exactly, Aart. These exchange rates are forever changing. But last I checked, it would be somewhere in the region of a thousand US dollars.”
A thousand US dollars. Aart starts to calculate how many Guus & Nguyen have already drunk, but is quickly overcome by the realisation of a four-night stay ahead of them, & endless cocktails to follow; his head spins as the calculation of costs overwhelms him, bringing forth the burning sensation of nausea in his stomach.
“We stand on the precipice of an epoch,” Guus declares to a thousands-strong audience in the blue-hued black of the Dubai World Trade Center’s Sheik Saeed Theatre. “All that hitherto now hath been known shall be cast aside, dashed upon the rocks by the rising tides of tech and progress. Industries shall be devoured by Artificial Intelligence; economies shall crumble before cryptocurrency; the world and all within it shall be the domain of the blockchain. This grandiose desert-mirage of a city is a miracle of an era that is almost at an end: an age of oil bounties, of international trade and commerce; a world in which gadgets are designed in California, manufactured in Chengdu, and sold here in Dubai; where all the world’s economies are interlocked in a delicately weaved web of mutual interdependence. The new epoch shall replace internationalism with true unbridled globalism; a fully decentralised global economy with independent-yet-connected nodes in every city and state upon this planet. He who hath grasped the blockchain shall be unto this new world a master. He who hath grasped not the blockchain shall be but an ant, crushed underfoot in the stampede and panic that follows.” Guus’s speech is sprawling, mesmerising, but utterly unfocused; when it ends, no-one feels they’ve understood it, but all have the impression that Guus is a savant with bold, visionary, world-changing ideas, akin to Darwin or Copernicus, & that he’ll only be fully understood once the revolution he prophesises has come to pass.
Guus leaves the stage to rapturous applause, & his speech upstages most of those who come before & after; but when Da Hongfei of NEO takes the stage to deliver the keynote speech, Guus’s mouth grows dry & palms sweaty as he watches & listens, just as they had done when he’d stammered through that awful first conference speech back in Amsterdam; while Da Hongfei talks of NEO’s integrated & regulatory-compliant platform for the future smart economy, and the many dApps that have already been deployed utilising the NEO NEP-5 framework, & the Chinese government institutions already getting on-board with interconnected projects like THE KEY & Ontology, Guus feels dizzy & weak, realising for the first time that what Aart’s been saying for weeks — maybe months now — is true; they need to turn their grand words into concrete action.
“You were right, Aart,” Guus says, grabbing Aart’s arm, light-headed & unsteady, “we need action. Action.”
Guus carries on mumbling to himself, feverish, delirious, like a man possessed of some half-divine & half-wicked spirit.
“You okay, man?” Aart says, Guus’ pallor frightening him. “You need some water?”
“Yo, Guus, Da Hongfei’s speech is over,” Nguyen says, strolling toward them at the side of the stage. “Let’s get some bitches.”
Guus staggers away from them both, mumbling to himself, in search of a bathroom.
“He’s looking fucked up,” Aart says. “Maybe he should go back to the hotel and rest.”
“Guus gets like this when he’s not had coke in a while,” Nguyen says. “I tried asking a waiter for some but he said you can get in serious shit for even mentioning it here. This country’s drier than a camel’s asshole.”
Nguyen spots two alluringly eye-shadowed women in hijabs standing further into the backstage area, & he walks away from Aart to try his luck with them.
Guus stares at his pallid reflection in the lavish bathroom’s mirror, water running down his face, right eye twitching involuntarily. Be the water-bearer, a voice within Guus’s mind says. Be He who washes away the sins & wickedness of late-stage capitalism. Be He who ushers in the purity of the Age of Blockchain. Be He who all the world fears & adores — the Alpha & Omega — the Genesis & Revelation… the voice falls silent as the bathroom door opens & a white-robed Arab enters.
Guus chain-smokes in an asthmatic-nightmare of a hazed ante-room, each dose of nicotine further energising the voices competing for attention within his mind, until he’s out of cigarettes, & all voices hath coalesced into one, & he leaves the smoking room & begins a flurry of mingling, talking with representatives of Arab oil consortiums & Emirati government initiatives & power players from Western Fortune 500 companies, dazzling all with his slickness of speech & the limitless potential of the FSC dApps platform & integrated world-changing vision of a blockchain for all Internet-of-Things connected devices & industries & supply chains within the fully global & decentralised smart economy, & as he leaves each with a promise to be in touch very soon about the possibility of collaboration & partnership, Guus moves from conversation to conversation with just one though repeating in his mind: I’m King of the Earth, bitch.
That night, Aart sits alone in the suite’s lavish study, pouring out glass after glass of cognac as he stares out the window at the impossibly-tall skyscraper lights illuminating the alien darkened desert landscape & taps out messages to Ciara: I don’t know what to do… Guus is having a mental breakdown… Nguyen’s turned into a complete asshole… and this trip must’ve cost us almost $100,000…
& Ciara says: But the price is still going up… last time I checked, ur at $150 mil market cap…
& Aart replies: but it cant last 4eva, tho… the price is unsustainable… & guus is making all these promiszes…
Guus & Nguyen’s night is a wild blur of bars & clubs & booze & bitches, chauffeured chariots ferrying them between the Islamic-law desert’s drink-den oases, running wild in strobe-lit places with names like Sanctuary & Sensation & Catwalk & Boudoir & Alpha, throwing down cash, throwing back drinks, throwing themselves @ women, women throwing themselves @ them, moving, moving, dancefloor, to street, to car, to bar, to dancefloor, to seat, to street, to car, Guus laughing, always grabbing, clutching, pulling closer, meek warnings of “remember where you are,” Guus scarcely remembering who he is, & when that thought takes hold, he’s standing on a bar, screaming a hellfire-throated freestyle that skids & crashes over a deep house beat: “I am the fucking God of Blockchain / know my name / drink my champagne / and bask in the fantasticness of my accomplishments”; applause is polite, girls smiling, seeing how fucking rich he is, the way he throws down wads & discards bottles, while Nguyen is lost, dancing with two blonde Russians who work for some oil- or energy- or something-company in a club beneath a hotel, while Guus’ bizarre performance plays out across Dubai’s hottest nightspots, anyone who’s anyone of a UAE Saturday night celebration bearing witness, until night is lost to morning, & the driver says to each place Guus rattles off his phone (no care given to overseas data charges) that it’s closed already, & finally he’s driven to one of the last remaining outposts of night-time entertainment, another club buried beneath a hotel, in a district some distance from the central mirage of the desert city’s main street, & Guus enters, & the black girls flock to him, & in one continual blur he’s leaving with them, he-knows-not-how-long later, sky weak blue now, commandeering two cabs to take he & his harem back to the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah.
Aart wakes up slumped across the table in the study with a burning desire to piss & an uncertainty over whether he’s already emptied his bladder where he sits, followed by an immense wave of confusion at the unfamiliar surroundings, followed by the groaning despair of headache as his eyes find the near-drained cognac bottle on the table next to him, half a glass still remaining in front of it. He stumbles out of the chair & across the room & into the hallway, bumbling through the Royal Suite in search of a bathroom, happening upon a door, throwing it open, seeing Nguyen on the bed rutting a loud-groaning Russian woman, while another lies at his side playing with herself, looking at Aart first with shock & then a smile as the door opens; Aart slams the door shut, & staggers back away from it; finds a staircase, grips the banister, but still almost slips as he descends; & enters the main entrance hall, just as the grand gold-lined door at its center creaks open, the laughing sound of Guus & six African girls growing louder, until Guus is stepping into the hallway, girls behind him, Aart stumbling down the stairs, scarcely able to hold himself upright.
“Aart, you’re awake,” Guus says, smiling. “Care to join us in the room adjacent for a night cap?”
“These cocktails cost more than a thousand US dollars each,” Guus is telling one of the girls, near the center of the giant wraparound wall-hugging sofa, falling into a ludicrous half-British half-French accent as he rattles off the earlier-memorised screed about the Bon Fires that each of the six girls & Guus & Aart are holding one each of, Aart too smashed to bother calculating that each round is now costing them $8,000 US. “It’s prepared with Havanius Maxima aged rum and the finest fresh-plucked zaffir leaves and — Tiffany, would you mind removing your dress?”
“Who the fuck’s Tiffany?” asks the girl Guus has turned to on his right.
“Yah, that’s me,” says a girl a few seats away who’s been waiting for her chance. She stands up & moves into the center of the room, slow-grinding to the Beethoven Sonata booming through it.
The first-asked girl on the sofa beside Guus stares at the eager exhibitionist with disgust. She stands up: “You not got something with a bit more life in it than this old music?”
“Zaire, would you mind helping Tiffany with her dress?” Guus asks the girl on his left, ignoring the other girls request re: the music.
The girl on Guus’ left dutifully gets up & joins the other in the room’s center, awkwardly balancing on her high heels to roll the dress down below her waist.
“Garçon,” Guus calls to one of the blushing butlers standing guard at the edge of the room. “May we have another round of Bon Fires, post-haste?”
The red-suited butler bows his head & retreats from the room.
“Say, Aart, mon amie, are you not finding this music a little pondiferous?”
Aart says nothing, eyes lolling about in his head as he tries to focus on the massive exposed breasts bouncing around in the middle of the room.
“Say, Melanie, would you do something about this dreadful music? Get some of that lively African stuff we were jiving to in the club on.”
Aart’s mind is a mess of wh- questions — where… who… what… why… — as he awakens face-down upon the carpet of the living room in a pool of vomit. He blinks several times before noticing the congealed mess upon the carpet, then recoils from it & springs to a seated position in a panic, unsure of whether the puke is his own. He then sits & stares at a room that feels wrong somehow for what must be several minutes until he realises; the wraparound sofa has been completely shredded open, its white insides covering almost every inch of wall & carpet. As the sheer confusion of the scene gives way to a realisation of its cost, he screams: “GUUS!!!”
“What the fuck happened here?” Nguyen says, padding into the room in an embroidered hotel-issue dressing gown & slippers sometime later, with Aart spending the intervening period trying to calculate the cost, hyperventilating as he begins to realise the enormity of it:
“I… don’t…”
Aart can’t finish the sentence, can’t think straight, his mind tumbling back through the flashes of shapeless insanity that remain as the previous night’s only residue; the only concrete fact among the confusion & new faces being the endless stream of thousand-dollar cocktails that left him face-down, puking on the floor.
“That fucking bitch Tiffany,” Guus says, strolling into the room & lighting a cigarette.
“Can we smoke in here?” Nguyen says, fiddling with his dressing gown in vain search of a pack.
“We can do whatever the fuck we want in here,” Guus says, throwing the cigarettes across the room; Nguyen catches them. “I’ve just been settling our bill. It turns out that your little indiscretion has cost us a little shy of eight-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars.”
Aart, still sitting on a carpet strewn with sofa guts, stares at Guus for a moment, then at Nguyen, then returns his eyes to Guus & realises who the comment was directed at: “Me?”
Guus takes a languid drag upon his cigarette & surveys the room’s carnage: “At least we managed to subdue her before she finished smashing the kitchen up.”
“My indiscretion?” Aart says, standing up.
“Yes, Aart. It’s all your fault this bloody mess happened. We were having a lovely time — you seemingly more than most — and then you had to ruin it.”
“Guus — what?! What the… You! Did! Everything! This! The girls! The cocktails! It was you! It was…”
“Yes, yes, Aart; I brought six charming young ladies home, provided them with cocktails, one of them took a fancy to you, you whipped your old boy out, one thing led to another, then as she was introducing the tip of said old boy to the inner recesses of her throat, you decided it’d be appropriate to vomit a few thousand dollars’ worth of Bon Fire all over the poor girl’s head.”
“I… what?!”
“Jesus fuck, dude,” Nguyen says, shaking his head in disgust.
“WHAT?!”
“Calm down, Aart. It’s all taken care of. I told the staff we were good for the money, and I paid the girls to get out of here without making too much of a fuss. But all told, this has been quite the expensive sojourn.”
“Would you stop talking like a fucking Harry Potter character!”
Guus sighs as Aart seethes, eyes ablaze with rage; Guus calmly takes a drag from his cigarette & steps back towards the door: “When you’ve calmed down, Aart, perhaps we could talk about this like adults in the anteroom? Come on, Nguyen; I’d like to go over a few of the business proposals we received on the back of our conference speech.”
“Dope.”
Nguyen follows Guus out of the room, leaving Aart alone in the debris-strewn site of the previous night’s debauched meltdown, Guus’ admonishments ringing through his dehydrated brain: your fault… your fault… your fault…
Groningen.
The cold of Dutch winter’s contrasts with Dubai desert heat the second the plane hits the tarmac at Schiphol, rain lashing the terminal’s windows as Aart shuffles miserably through the endless identikit airport bowels to the sphincter of Customs, doing all he can to stare straight ahead & make no pretence of avoiding contact with those cloying shits, Guus & Nguyen. Passport down, eyes in the scanner, & he’s into the Baggage Claim area, but as he wills the carousel creaking round empty to hurry up & return his luggage to him, considering abandoning it altogether for the sake of getting away from them, Guus & Nguyen appear, flanked by a nerdy couple in matching Ethereum T-shirts, talking about FSC’s unstoppable rise & the future of the blockchain.
“Hey, maybe we should go with these guys into Amsterdam?” Guus says, catching up with Aart as he trundles his suitcase through the cavernous commerce-lined halls of the airport toward its train station.
“Why?”
“I dunno, it might be fun,” Guus says, grinning in the direction of Nguyen & the nerdy couple, the glasses-wearing girl twirling thick black hair around her finger as she speaks with Nguyen, who’s leaning on the handle of his suitcase, clearly trying to give the impression of being larger than his especially-diminutive-for-the-Netherlands 166cm height. “Decompress from Dubai. Smoke a little weed. What do you think?”
“I think I should get back to Groningen.”
Guus shrugs & loudly shouts something at the couple, Aart turning away from them, heading straight to the platform & on to a train, falling asleep almost the moment he leans his head back against the seat.
“Ticket?”
Aart’s eyes open to an inspector hovering over him, ticket-checking device in hand.
Aart blinks & pats his pockets, then a realisation hits him: he didn’t buy one.
The ticket collector — a stern man of 40-something in a padded jacket bearing the orange logo of the Dutch national rail service — sighs & explains rules & regulations, asks Aart where he’s going, & issues a €120 fine.
Sleet is hammering all in Groningen, Aart standing glumly at a bus stop, wondering if he shouldn’t just spring for a taxi, eventually yielding to the impulse; the endless expense, spiralling costs, uncontrollability of Guus & Nguyen, the slow-death of all FSC was supposed to achieve & stand for, all gnawing at his sleet-soaked consciousness.
“How was the conference?” Wesley asks.
Aart says nothing, but retires to his room in a depressive funk, one that hangs over him for the next few days, as sleet turns to snow, ice turning the city’s streets into a maze of unseen dangers, Guus not returning from Amsterdam until the following weekend.
“Did you see this?” Aart asks Guus soon after his return.
He hands Guus his phone, showing hin an article entitled ‘Why FSC is all hype & no product.’
Guus barely scans the article before smirking & handing the phone back: “It’s some idiot spreading FUD. He probably invested heavily in another coin.”
“The price is tanking already,” Aart says, tapping at his phone to bring up CoinMarketCap. “We’re at $68 million market cap and still falling.”
“So what? We rose to more than double that in a matter of weeks. This is just a healthy correction. This is good for Future Synergy Coin. We need to consolidate the price and establish a base support price if we want to see real sustainable growth.”
The price continues falling through the week that follows, Aart scarcely seeing Guus to discuss their response. Aart’s fallen behind on university work, consigning him to long nights in the library attempting to catch up on missed lectures & assignments.
“This is all going to end horribly,” Aart tells Ciara in the library one night, when she’s working alongside him on an essay. “Our market cap’s fallen from over one hundred million to less than fifty in the last three days.”
“That’s insane!” Ciara says, horrified, but beginning to understand cryptocurrency fundamentals.
“And Guus and Nguyen don’t give a shit about it. This whole thing’s headed straight to zero. I’m thinking I should cash my coins out before it all collapses.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah.” Aart explains to Ciara how his share of FSC tokens are all stored in his private wallet, with a private key allowing only him access, & how movement from a founder’s wallet might crash the price completely, but there’s nothing inherently illegal in doing it.
“You should do it, Aart.”
& Aart can barely concentrate on writing his university report, thinking that with each word he types the price of FSC is dropping further; every wasted moment bringing him closer to crashing from being worth millions to being worth nothing at all. Finally, an hour later, as Ciara disappears to use the bathroom, the impulse overcomes him; he opens his wallet on his phone, stares at his 833.33 billion personal stash of coins, then opens CoinMarketCap to check his stash’s dollar value, & sees what he can only describe as an early Christmas miracle: the market cap is suddenly at $202,406,183 & rising. He stares in disbelief at his phone as Ciara returns, tells her what’s happened, tells her he doesn’t know why, googles ‘Future Synergy Coin’ & finds dozens of crypto news sites all reporting the same story: ‘FUSION SYNERGY COIN ANNOUNCES AMAZON PARTNERSHIP: PRICE SKYROCKETS MORE THAN 4000% IN 2 HOURS.’
“What the fuck…” Aart staggers from the table, saying nothing to Ciara, moving to the library’s stairwell, calling Guus as he walks; Guus doesn’t answer. He calls again; nothing. He calls Nguyen:
“Yo, dawg, waddup?”
“Nguyen — what the fuck?! You signed a partnership with Amazon?!”
Nguyen laughs: “Yeah, right.”
“But… how?! Amazon! The world’s biggest online retailer… partnership… how the fuck did that happen?!”
“It’s easy, man. I just signed us up for an account.”
“An Amazon… account? Like… for buying things through Amazon? For buying books and shit?”
Nguyen laughs again: “Nah, bro. Not, like, books and shit. Amazon Web Services. It’s a business-to-business cloud hosting solution.”
“But… you just signed up for an account?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like… you paid them to set up an account?”
“Yeah. Relax, dude. It wasn’t even that expensive. It’ll be, like, less than a hundred bucks a month, US.”
“But… the Internet’s saying we’ve gone into partnership with Amazon…”
Nguyen laughs: “Right.”
“…why?”
“I mean, we have… kind of.” Nguyen hears a doorbell ring behind him. “Oh, shoot, the girls’re here. I’ll speak to you later. Peace out, homie.”
Those fucking idiots, Aart thinks, returning to the library. But as he moves through the hush of studying students & returns to Ciara, he thinks maybe I’m the idiot — maybe it really is that easy. Maybe ordering a Domino’s pizza is the equivalent of entering into a partnership with a household-name global food distribution company. Maybe taking out an iPhone contract is essentially entering into an exclusive deal to have Apple provide all of your telecommunication infrastructure. Maybe Guus was right all along — maybe all that matters is hype.
Aart barely notices Christmas creep closer, his mind ricocheting between approaching end-of-term assignment deadlines & the implausibly ever-rising value of FSC. He submits the last of his assignments & rides his bicycle back from the library through the icy chill of Groningen’s snow-piled wind-struck streets to find Wesley, Federico, Jako, Wander, & Max stapling tinsel to the walls & carefully arranging bottles of booze & platters of finger food around the frat’s central living space.
“What’s going on?” Aart asks.
“It’s the Christmas party,” Wesley says, taking a pizza from the oven. “What, you forgot about it?”
“You guys’ heads is obsessed with these cryptocurrencies,” Federico says, brushing past Aart to extend a line of tinsel across the room.
“Merry Christmas!” a strange figure declares, entering through the front door, wearing the finery of a royal court jester, his face painted with the deep black & reddened lips of a minstrel.
“What the fuck…” Federico says, almost falling off the stool he’s stood on to staple tinsel in astonishment.
“I’m Zwarte Piet,” Guus-the-minstrel says, strolling through the room & grabbing a Hertog Jan bottle.
“Guus, you’re the head of an enterprise worth almost quarter-of-a-billion dollars,” Aart says, colour draining from his face & leaving him as white as Guus is black. “You cannot run around in black face!”
“Why not?”
Aart starts listing every reason ‘why not’ he can think of: the controversy that would ensue were pictures to leak online, the thousands of irate blog posts & boycotts of their token such a thing might inspire.
“Nonsense,” Guus says, smiling with recently-treated bright-white teeth & snapping a selfie.
As Wesley, Jako, Wander, & Max speak over each other, defending Guus’s decision to black up as an essential part of Dutch Christmas tradition, Aart takes his phone out to check Instagram & sees with horror that Guus’s bright white smile & black-caked face is top of his Instagram feed.
“Guus! Delete it!”
“Aart, most of the people who invest in cryptocurrency are libertarians,” Guus says, sitting on a stool at the kitchen island. “There is nothing in this world that they hate more than Internet Outrage Culture and the Cultural Marxism of the left-wing liberal Social Justice Warriors who try to police all thought and culture under the banner of ‘political correctness.’” Guus continues, explaining at length why it’s a form of cultural genocide to eradicate much-loved European traditions like the Dutch practise of blacking up at Christmas while the others try to explain to Federico what relevance Zwarte Piet has to Christmas & why it’s definitely not racist.
“Zwarte Piet takes naughty children away with him in a sack to Africa!” Aart shouts, giving up on Guus to argue with the others.
“He takes them to Spain, not Africa,” Wesley corrects him.
“And he’s literally Santa’s slave!” Aart continues. “Santa’s African slave who makes toys for all the white European children!”
“How is that any worse than Santa using elves as toy-making slaves?” Jako argues.
“Because elves aren’t fucking real! And Europeans didn’t spend hundreds of years raiding the coast of fucking elf land to ship elf slaves to their fucking colonies!”
“But elves are just as offensive to short people as Zwarte Piet is to black people,” Wander says.
“And I believe J.R.R. Tolkien intended his elves in Lord of the Rings to be based on the stereotype of cunning Far-East Asians,” Guus says. “But you still see Hollywood movies being made based on that gross racial stereotype. The hurt feelings of social justice snowflakes and other virtue-signallers should not be the basis for throwing away a centuries-old Dutch tradition.”
Ciara enters the room & greets Guus’s blacked-up visage with a heartfelt “WHAT THE FUCK?!”; the others speak over each other in a flurry of condemnation & defence of Guus’s attire, only stopping when Nguyen appears in the doorway behind Ciara, wearing the exact same minstrel costume & deep-black facepaint.
“Nguyen!” Zwarte Guus exclaims, leaping to his feet to embrace him. “You blacked up!”
Aart spends the next couple of hours sitting on the quad-sofa solemnly sipping Hertog Jan as the party blossoms & swells all around him, the frat house filling with dozens upon dozens of half-recognised students & previously-unseen faces, Guus stumbling around & spouting loud-voiced madness, the white rings around his black nostrils & white dust upon his black chin growing thicker as his loud-voiced madness grows ever louder, until he emerges from the hallway & begins shouting for attention, smashing plates of food & bottles of alcohol to the floor in a final successful attempt to hush the party.
“What the fuck!” Federico shouts, as Guus clambers onto the half-cleared kitchen island.
Aart tightens his grip around his Hertog Jaan bottle, cherishing the thought of cracking it across Guus’s head.
“Frat brothers, students, countrymen!” Guus rambles. “This is but the prelude to the Christmas party to end all Christmas parties! The largest celebration of Jesus’s birthday since our Almighty Lord arose on Easter Sunday, two-thousands years prior ago. Outside, a fleet of carriages awaits to abscond us to the venue of the real party…” & he continues rambling loudly, jumping back off the kitchen island & placing an arm around an unsteady Nguyen’s shoulders, then leading the horde out through the hallway.
“Are you going?” Ciara asks Aart, the room rapidly emptying around them.
Aart sighs & stands & follows her out of the frat house, to the ridiculous sight of a dozen reindeer-drawn sleighs on the street outside. The assembled party-goers laugh & cheer & congratulate Guus on this epic twist in the night, as Aart stands in the doorway, glaring out at his black-faced business partner.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Guus yells, drawing the startled attention of passers-by on the street & smokers outside the many nearby pubs. “We are heading to the seaport, 35 kilometers due north-west, where the grandest seafaring vessel you have ever seen awaits the continuation of our celebration! I have purchased for your enjoyment a multi-million dollar superyacht, upon which platters of sushi will be served upon the naked bodies of a hundred A-class models! The original dream and vision of Pussy Sushi Coin tonight collides with the incredible success that Future Synergy Coin has become! And, whatismore, entertainment on-board this grandest of vessels will tonight be provided by none other than the original King of the Earth himself — ladies and gentleman, I have hired for our party tonight none other than Mr. Honey Badger!”
A huge commotion of cheering & football-chanting erupts as the revellers clamber into the reindeer-drawn sleighs.
“Aart, are you going?” Ciara asks.
“No.” Aart doesn’t even bother to calculate the multi-million dollar cost of a superyacht & reindeer-drawn sleighs & Honey Badger’s performance fee; whatever it costs, it’s clear whatever was left of FSC’s development budget has been wasted on Guus’s coke-fuelled blacked-up insanity.
Aart walks away from the door & Ciara follows him back into the mess of the frat house, its floor carpeted with spilled food & broken glass. Aart opens the door to his bedroom & Ciara follows him inside. He opens his drawer & takes out the scrap of paper on which he scribbled the private key for the wallet storing all his Future Synergy Coins.
“I’m withdrawing everything,” Aart says, his mood as dark as Guus & Nguyen’s make-up. “And then I’m leaving here.” He turns & stares into Ciara’s deep green eyes. “Come with me.”
“Aart,” she says, tenderly grasping his wrist.
He drops the paper to the floor & leans in to kiss her; their tongues lap in & out of each other’s mouths as the clattering of reindeer hooves & cheers of drunken revellers echo through the streets outside. They’re on the bed as the sound dies away, frantically removing each other’s clothes, hands exploring each other’s bodies with desperate passion.
Ciara wakes in the morning to see Aart sitting in bed beside her, staring at his phone & a YouTube video of Honey Badger performing on the deck of the FSC superyacht, a cascade of fireworks illuminating the night sky in time with the beat.
“Aart,” Ciara says softly, kissing his neck as she sits up beside him.
“The price is up,” he says, voice aching with misery. “We’re closing in on seven hundred million dollars market cap. Goldman Sachs and Price Waterhouse Coopers have expressed an interest in buying up Future Synergy Coins for institutional investors. ING have issued a statement saying they’re considering backing FSC as the official cryptocurrency of the Dutch banking industry. Guus was right, Ciara: hype. It’s all about hype…”
“Aart…” Ciara says, pulling him toward her & kissing him softly on the lips. “Aart… I really like you… and last night was… it was incredible… but… we have to live together… for the next six months, at least…”
“I understand.” It’s the final cruel blow; the final confirmation that he’s wrong, eternally wrong about everything, and Guus is right; development, partnerships, blackface — none of it matters. All that matters is hype.
She gets dressed quietly, she telling him a few more times that she’s sorry, he telling her a few more times he understands, he stealing a final glance at the beauty of her naked form between the gyrations & explosions of Honey Badger’s firework-backed superyacht performance.
The frat house empties over Christmas, most returning to family homes for the holidays, a few returning to the house for New Year, while Guus & Nguyen head to Thailand for a four-day beach-based conference called Crypto & Hallucinogens, wild speeches delivered around campfires by thick-bearded true believers, brains bolstered & re-shaped by acid & mushrooms & ayahuasca & strange new Japanese experimental chemicals, Nguyen shedding his clothes & dancing naked in front of the fire on the final night, chanting primevally as Guus — deep within a hallucinogen-cocktail trance — delivers a rambling six-hour speech, climaxing with Guus boldly declaring “I AM BECOME BLOCKCHAIN, DISRUPTOR OF WORLDS,” while lightning strikes illuminate the sky from a storm hitting a distant island, all around falling into an almost coma-like state of acceptance of his insane proclamations.
Bitcoin falls from a high above $20.000 a few days before Christmas to as low as $12.000 on Christmas Eve, subreddits & Telegram groups & forums across the Internet full of theories on incoming institutional investment once Wall Street doles out its New Year bonuses & once those who’ve cashed out for the holidays buy back in. Bitcoin’s dollar value bounces sideways into the New Year, but FSC & other alts remain resilient, with FSC’s market cap hovering between $800 million and $900 million as 2018 begins.
“Aart,” Guus says, he & Nguyen clearly deeply engrossed in important work upon the frat’s quad-sofas, as Aart re-enters the home on the evening of January 5. “We’ve listened to what you said, and you were right about everything: the speculative crypto bull run is nearing its end. Only the projects with real utility and working products will survive. So we’ve done what you were forever telling us; we’ve begun working on the real launch of the Future Synergy Coin mainnet.”
“Good,” Aart says.
“The testnet will go live this week,” Nguyen says, before rambling through a lightning-fast & highly-technical breakdown of what they’ve done & how far along they are & their strategy for allowing existing FSC holders to test their creation before the mainnet launches in Q2 2018.
“Awesome.”
“And there will be a ‘dry January,’” Guus adds. “Ciara told me that the British do it — “ Ciara; Aart’s heart flutters at the mention of his one-night love’s name — “to cleanse the system after the Christmas excess.”
Aart nods, hoping but not quite believing what Guus has said will prove true.
“And we’re going to Moscow,” Nguyen adds.
Aart’s hope collapses, a fact Guus senses immediately.
“But this conference will be different,” Guus says quickly. “There’s strong rumours of government representatives attending, and they’ll report back directly to Vladimir Putin himself — “
“Putin.” Aart almost spits the name out, so severe is the shock attached to it.
“Putin is obsessed with blockchain,” Nguyen says, staring at the screen as he types a thousand keys per minute. “There’s reports that he’s keeping his advisors up until 3am holding meetings on it. He thinks it’s Russia’s best chance at skirting sanctions and smashing the US Dollars’ control over global finance.”
“This is big, Aart,” Guus interrupts, seeing Nguyen’s rant has made Aart worried. “The keynote speaker is Vitalik Buterin.”
“Vitalik Buterin?” Aart repeats. “The guy who made Ethereum?”
“The one and only,” Nguyen says.
“And we’ll be flying straight from Moscow to Hong Kong,” Guus continues. “We’re lining up meetings with some of the island’s biggest financial firms.”
Nguyen: “And after Hong Kong, we’re going to Seoul.”
Aart: “To Seoul?”
Guus: “South Korea.”
Aart: “I know where Seoul is.”
Guus: “South Korea is the world’s largest per capita cryptocurrency investor. If we get listed on one of their exchanges, there’s no telling how far we can go.”
Nguyen: “Beyond the moon, beyond Mars…”
Guus: “…beyond the galaxy, Aart.” Nguyen: “To fucking Andromeda.”
The above extract appears in the novel $hitcoin., available now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin. [NOTE: these are Amazon affiliate links.]
Originally published at https://deadbirdpress.com on October 13, 2020.
