Antinote

Antinote

Investment in stocks, property, or other ventures in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss.

Takami recanted the search engines first result defining speculation. For the fifth time and to one in the room.

He sat among the hum of the fans cooling his modem.

He was pushing eight hours of trouble shooting remotely from his home on his day off work.

His work phone vibrated next to his private mobile phone and sat phone.

The hum of the fans was becoming Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven teasing him with death. With the phone to his ear and his other arm crossed across his chest tucked under his arm. He leaned back and stared into the transitioning lights glowing from his custom-built CPU. The single Japanese American twenty-eight-year-old created his living room into his Dream computer hub. The minimalist swiss furniture and assortment of monitors and TVs all with their specific functions. Complete with a German brand surround sound system.

On top of his desk in the middle of the room. Were two monitors, one screen filled with program code running live test. The other, a view of the computer remote accessed from the cloud company he was employed.

Behind the monitors, a TV was mounted on the wall displaying the National Business News. The closed captions positioned just above the channel’s ticker of live market prices. From the lights on his modem, he looked up at the news to see a debate between federal reserve quantitative easing and the stagnation of commodity prices.

“Ok! Sounds good. It looks good on my end as well. Call me if you need anything else!”

Again, he kept repeating the definition of speculation, memorizing the markets future weapon of choice.

The phone call ended on the other end. He placed the phone in the exact spot next to the other two.

He unmuted the TV with the remote next to his mouse pad and stood up to catch a buzz from the fridge.

Walking toward the fridge, he overheard the guest anchor complaining about the price of silvers manipulation created by silver certificate trading.

Centralization. Decentralization.

Centralization. Decentralization.

The words appearing at random in his head as he opened the fridge and reached inside for a plum soju.

The cap cracked as he twisted open the new bottle.

Holding onto the bottle cap, he took a swig. Again, repeating the two words in his head.

The memories of his now incarcerated friend from who he shared a vision of an anonymous black-market intranet, for all goods legal or illegal. To him and his friend this is what America was established upon.

But like all things! A peer-to-peer network built on bartering between close friends, eventually grew! All of a sudden, Takami found him self adding Credit Card encryption and working with coders who helped build the offshore servers for online sports gambling.

He minimized the timed out remote session.

Maximized his new intranet network he was creating as a way of righting the wrongs of his previous silk road of narcotics, guns, gold, silver, stolen credit card numbers, cars, motorcycles, designer clothes and hacking services.

He had no honest plans of taking this network live. He was doing this for the betterment of his pride that he had fallen victim to of his past hubris.

Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock.

The knuckles tapping against the wood door passed by the foot of the stairs and down the hallway of the middle-class suburb home.

Takami pushed his chair back. Looked down the hallway and stared at the door in fear of whom it may have been.

The recluse stood up, grabbed his soju from his desk and took another sip as he headed toward the door.

He peeked out the window next to the front door.

He hung his head behind the drapes, confirming his fears.

“Hola! Buenos Dias Taka…May we come in?”

Taka remained expressionless and swung the door all the way open.

The Reyes brothers, Raul and Pablo were enforcers for the Cali Cartel.

The Cartels reputation was ruthlessness and anything but heedless. Takami was even unfortunate enough to see the blood-filled wrath the two were capable of carrying out. They specialized in torturing their enemies into poverty and watching them beg for death. This day in age, being economic hitman was more tact in this surveillance state.

Raul was wearing an all-black suit and a silver button down shirt.

Pablo was wearing a silver base glen checkered suit, with a black button-down dress shirt.

For the cold-blooded killers that Taka knew them as, this did not take away from their manners.

The two brothers removed their flashy New Rock dress shoes they always paired with their custom suits.

“I hate to jump right into the matters at hand, you know! With the Prince of …”

Raul ceased as he approached the noise of the national business news down the hallway.

“You need any drinks or food?”, Taka offered.

Pablo refused.

Raul fixed his gaze on the computer monitors after a brief envy of Takami’s bachelor life.

“What are you working on?” Raul asked, taking a seat in front of the two monitors.

“Taka! I hope this is not live. You and your number two’s pipelines are frozen right now. You know you are still being investigated. I can’t have my golden goose behind bars.” Raul talked toward the screen scrolling and clicking through Takami’s new interface.

Taka stood at the kitchen bar, still in the middle of the hallway thinking about the millions of words formulating in his head. All of them sounding more evasive that the last. Then he thought about making a run for the garage to his 1972 Skyline GT-R.

“Don’t lie Taka! That is not in your character, do not start now! Talk to me! That number two of yours, is not one of my favorite traffickers, it would bring me an enormous amount of satisfaction that he set you up to do this behind our back.”

Taka saw Raul already setting up a benefit of the doubt for Taka to believe his mind game to get him to admit the truth of another Silk Road. But this was not the truth at all. Taka could not even avoid their paranoia without talking. He had to think of something quick.

“Of course, no Jeffe!” Taka smirked and stepped out closer to the Reyes brothers looking at Taka’s work still.

He twisted the Soju cap of the glass bottle threads. The shing of the aluminum on the glass top sprung an idea of legitimate design into his mind. The soju filled his mouth to bulge out his cheeks. His eyes widened, he nearly spewed out the plum flavored alcohol in an urgency to let his ideas flow.

He shook the bottle cap in a loosened closed fist and gulped down the rest of the excessive pour.

Taka tossed the cap at Pablo, whom had been looking at Taka in caution as he coughed a little swallowing his soju.

“Excuse me, what is the difference between that bottle cap and cash?”

Pablo stared at the bottle cap in his palm, “I can’t wipe my ass with this!”

The three men juggled a laugh.

“Good point! What is the difference between all that silver your father mines and mints and the amount that his publicly traded by silver certificates?”

“There’s not enough physical silver in the world in the world to fulfill the number of certificates.” Raul said still lost in the genius of the security code Taka was creating for his new Silk Road.

“Exactly! See that interface is missing one thing!”

“A payment model!”, The brothers said simultaneous.

“The future is data. I know that and you both know that! The intelligence agency connections we use for sure know that! By their own admission they have told us that there is no way they can physically keep up with the hardware demand of servers to maintain and store all the data they collect for as long as they want.”

“Ok, I am not following!” Raul said spinning in Takami’s chair facing Takami.

“What is I told you! We could get the intel community back on our good side. We take their most high valued data streams in a hack and re route them to one of our offshore havens. We will have the only access key to view the block chained Merkle tree data. The data will be impervious from modification, due to the block chain data would become null from its original origin. This encrypted data pool from the intel communities, would be our first set of minted data. A pool of currency we cap in our own centralized, decentralized currency.”

The two brothers still confused; Taka could tell he was losing their ideas of him being a stable sane genius. He sipped his soju and walked over to grab the remote between the two brothers next to the mouse pad and put the Tv on mute and walked back to his last point of presentation.

“Ok! Look we get servers that store all our acquired data. Data that has real value on real assets. The Blocked chain data is a encryption cloak of the personal data that we have access for our own nefarious value. From online purchases to confidential black mailing sex trafficking. The smoke in the screen of what the encrypted data coin is, is the amount of hash rates that this data creates amassed. This scarcity then creates a value that we set based on our intrinsic value, as to what it’s worth.”

Raul was starting see from the scope Taka was zeroing.

“You’re getting it! I See. Then we create a secondary market set up of assets that you would like to help profit off this new shadow net currency. They, like your father for silver. They will be the miners of this data. From our data coin server pages, they can log in with the secondary market hardware we sell them. With that hardware they will “mine” at random the blockchains we encrypt. Taking a storage burden away from the intel communities and making them feel empowered by being on the tip of the spere of this new intrinsic value of minted data.”

Pablo was nodding a head a bit, a little confused but he was almost there.

“A decentralized currency for our network of goods. That we profit twice off even three or four times depending how much of a bubble we can create for its potential to be a real valued asset. But what it real is . . . is!”

“Is the American people investing in a new currency built on their own silicon addiction.” Raul snickered a bit and spun back toward the screen and grasped his hands together.

“What are these mining machines?” Pablo said.

“They’d just be a series of solid state or even thumb drives that could be active twenty-four seven by the miners! Logged into our …”

Raul waved off Taka from finishing his explanation to Pablo.

“I’m tracking, Taka! I fucking like it! I like it a lot! How much time do you think you will need? And could you make the data minted … coins anonymous.”

Taka waved his finger in tuned and happy that Raul was a head of the conversation.

That would be the easy part. Only we would know where each mined block chain mint … bitcoin! Yeah! Only we would know the location of each bit coin mined and used. The profiles for investors could be another service we could sell. Online bitcoin banking. Anonymous ownership, Anonymous investing, Anonymous purchasing power. We just added value to our bitcoin bubble. Decentralized, Anonymous, Future currency!” Takami’s creative shock was concealed by his subtle reiterations to the tile and Taka another subtle sip.

He looked back at the brothers who stood in a manic but excited gaze.

“But how do we convert it to cash!”, Pablo asked.

“We wouldn’t. We let the bubble fill with the smoke of its mystery and anonymity! The value is the goods they we supply! It is a risk for us somewhat! But like he said, we have assets in the investing, and secondary markets that we also own. We would monopolize the future currency through a series of fronts.”

“I need a cigarette!” Pablo said as he walked for the door.

Raul stood up to follow with a smile on his face.

“Speculation! I like it! Finally, me and Pablo can have something to rub in the face of old money and their digital rape on our privacy!” Raul said patting Takami on his shoulder as he passed!

Takami droned to his chair and fell into his new position for the next 48 hours straight. In a whirlwind of information flowing through his mind. The task was daunting, but the challenge was what he was exactly what he was looking for!

“We’ll be back in a few weeks Taka! Don’t be so nervous answering the door next time! Oh! And tell that number two to relax with his blood lust! He is making a few of our enemies a little more nervous than we want them!”

The brothers slipped on their New Rock dress shoes. The unnecessary metal on the trim clanked against the tile as they closed the door behind them. Pablo speaking in fast Spanish to Raul trying to make better sense of what Takami just pitched.

Takami turned to his two monitors and his fingers started typing away at velocity alike Pablo and his native tongue.

He took a deep breath and smiled. He scrolled his mouse and double clicked.

The surround sound speakers engulfed the living room with bass drowning out the hum of the modem’s fans and the chimes of sanctuary bells rang.

“In a circle of hands, the dagger out was sacred.”

THE END.