Currency of Lies

Vivek stood in front of the panel of judges, hands trembling. This was the moment of truth. The moment when the fifteen-year-old high school student will prove that he was the best of the best. The smartest one in a boarding school that was created to polish the most remarkable young minds in the world. It was the moment to prove that he deserved his place here.

Two years earlier, he lived with his parents, grandmother, and four siblings in a two-bedroom flat in London. The family had recently upgraded from a one-bedroom apartment thanks in part to Vivek's computer programming savvy. He had created a program to help his father, a humble data entry employee who worked from home, to create work accounts under the names of all the members of the family who were of age and two who weren't so that he could hold five jobs at a time instead of one. Vivek had also automated the job's essential functions, so his father would only need to perform about a quarter of each profile's workload. His old man still worked 80 hours a week, but he now brought home five times the income. They were painfully aware of its risks, especially the misrepresentations of the accounts for two of the children. Still, in a year, the family had gone from almost starving to thriving, so they planned on keeping it going for as long as it felt safe to do so.

But then, one faithful day, a mysterious woman knocked on the door. She was dressed impeccably in an outfit that cost more than a year's rent of the two-bedroom flat. The woman identified herself as Miss B, just the letter, and asked to speak with Vivek and his parents in private. When she explained that it was about the kid's computer expertise and how he had created the fake identities program, they all felt bile rise in their throats. Was she MI5? Scotland Yard? Interpol? Where they all going to prison for rigging the system?

"What you did is not necessarily a crime," she explained. "It's more of a grey area." They all let out a collective sigh of relief. "The company Baba works for is private and not a government agency. All you needed to do was enter the dates of birth in the application but did not submit any documentation to prove it; you violated a private company's age requirement but nothing else. There is no law against an employee subcontracting their work."

"Then what is it that you want Miss B?" Baba asked roughly.

"To offer Vivek a great opportunity. I'm the headmistress of an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. We recruit children from all over the world if they show tech skills that are unusual not only for their age but for any adult human. You will live on a luxurious campus, have all your needs take care of, including health care and cultural or special dietary needs tended to you by world class chefs, and be provided with every tool you need for success. By the time of graduation, you won't need a college education: you will be already in charge of your own company."

"And what is in it for you," asked Mother.

"We ask for one percent of each company created on our grounds. Since we invest only in future unicorns, that is plenty of money coming to us. It's a great investment."

Two years later, Vivek walked in circles around his luxurious bedroom overlooking the Swiss Alps. Every year the students were offered a challenge, and the school board would back up only one to become a full-fleshed company. As a freshman, Vivek had managed to be the challenge runner up. This year he would win. Miss B's words from this morning were an earworm in his mind:

"The challenge for this year is the biggest one we ever had: banking. To win, you must create a new way of banking. You will create it and upload it to our simulated web, so your procedures' details cannot be hacked. As you already know, our intranet is a perfect replica of the internet minus the junk. It contains minimized versions of all major sites, so you can create a perfect simulation that would work flawlessly in the outside world. Let the games begin."

After two days of pondering, Vivek finally got an idea, sat in front of his top of the line laptop, and got to work. For six months, he poured every minute of awake time into it. On the last day of the challenge, he stood in front of the judges, ready to roll.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Bitcoin." He turned on the screens behind him to start the presentation. "Since the world's currency is in one way or another in the hands of established banks, we will create a new currency. It's a software-based, open-source means of exchange. Anyone can buy these coins, and the system will automatically keep records of ownership in a strongly encrypted database. Since it is all completely open-source, no banks can get a monopoly of it."

He went on and on on the details of the software, the encryptions, the process he called "mining," and so on. He showed his account, created under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, already filled with the equivalent of two million dollars while the circulation of the currency would multiply that amount a hundredfold in a matter of days. At the end of the presentation, the panel was silent. Miss B's eyes were like fire. This was it. The headmistress stood up, clapping. The judges followed. In his excitement, Vivek missed the moment when she gestured to one of the counselors sitting by the side. The smiling man patted him in the back and motioned for him to accompany him outside the room to await the final judgment. On his way out, the man offered him a bottle of juice that Vivek gulped down in two seconds. The adrenaline rush washing off now, his body felt heavy. He felt a bit dizzy. The counselor suggested he should go to his room and take a nap.

When Vivek woke up, it was sunrise. He must have slept for eighteen hours or more. His mouth felt parched. He walked out of his room to find some water. The place was utterly silent. As he got to the dining area, it was empty. No sign of breakfast, no employees anywhere around. They didn't even clean the plates from the night before. One by one, the other children awoke and came together, confused. The teachers were gone. Miss. B was gone. There were no adults left on campus. The children looked at each other, wondering if this was the moment when things would get all "Lord Of The Flies." Vivek realized he had a vague idea of where he was, but besides that, nothing. His memory was a blank slate. He didn't know why he was in this place or what had happened. He heard one of his classmates cry into their cell phone:

"Mom? Can you fly to Switzerland and get me out of school? I'm scared."

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