The Midas Touch

As routine would have it, in the mornings I stare in the mirror wondering what was there yesterday that’s not here today? Sometimes they’re insignificant, as you wouldn’t believe how many body parts one can lose without noticing, their absence noticed during the mundane tasks suddenly difficult to do. Today, it was my left ear: I noticed as I tried to tuck my hair behind it. Smooth skin greeted my hand instead, so I tapped it to test my hearing. Nothing.

I’m on borrowed luck. With every missing part of me I’m made increasingly aware of it. Every phasing carries with it deaths fragrance. My next missing organ could be vital.

In his stroller, my baby sits with a hollowed expression. His eyes like saucers, face round like the moon, he soaks up the sun’s rays clueless of the threat to his existence. He watches the kids race and toy with one another at the park with palpable fascination. Wonder. It evokes guilt in me. Barely able to walk yet, I’m unsure if he will ever get the opportunity to play like them.

It seems I am a careless mother. I’m unable to think of the welfare of others when presented the choice. I know this because I have done just that. I chose stability and security over the life of my child with the rationale that stability and security will bring a life of prosperity to my child. This is the hill I will die on, so let me say that. In hindsight, this is where I and everyone I know, went wrong. This was the beginning of our greed.

Back on my planet, the people are worn out. In every sense of the word. We may look human but our eyes are dead like taxidermy mounts, even when we can muster up the energy to smile. A full set of fingers? Haven’t seen one in years; no such thing as “grip” where I used to live. Hair? Lifeless. Corpses have skin more vibrant than ours. We’re dying from the inside out. And you know what’s the worst part about it? We chose this for ourselves. For money. For wealth. For bitcoin. ‘They’ came from their planet and sold us dreams, told us that we could give our poor a way to climb out. They softened us with flatteries and made us believe our people were now on a higher plane of sensibility and for this we need not worry about the cost. We needed the new currency to close our wealth gap, level the playing field, give our people a fresh start – a fighting chance. But we didn’t have the power to create bitcoin, to fabricate a coin that would regulate us and punish us for repeating our mistakes. ‘They’ did. They said we’d only ever have to reap the consequences in flesh if we became an esurient folk with bitcoin and we? We were no such thing. I wouldn’t wish this proposition on any planet if I had the luxury to make that choice, but it appears I don’t.

The cursed gold coin sits in my pocket like forgotten bus fare. Its physical existence merely symbolical. There was only one condition to this currency: It could be given to another planet so long as their representative was made cognizant of its consequences and fully accepted them on behalf of all their citizens. It’s what made it so hard to be rid of it - to pass on ownership and stop the phasing for us. No matter where I travelled, it was only my people up above who were hungry enough to agree to this.

Until today.

Now, at the park on earth, there are people. A little girl who chases an animated puppy, a little boy who shoves another down the slide eagerly. Two lovers on a lone bench kissing overzealously. A man grumbles into his phone, passively watching as his young boy – no older than seven – earnestly makes his way across the playground in my direction.

Before I continue I should ask, do you know what true peace of mind feels like? True security feels like? For my husband and I, it was like a deep breath that never ran out. Or like waking up in the morning after a deep rest following a long day. A fireplace at your toes when it's below freezing outdoors, while you stay wrapped in thick cotton covers. Feeling as though you and the ones you love could live happy forever. Bitcoin gave our people that. No one could take our homes, no one could make us starve. Safety. We slept at night believing nothing could go wrong. But those who began to hoard bitcoins violated its purpose. And where something was given, something had to be taken. Bitcoin was to be for all the people to find security, not as an opportunity for some to hoard currency once again. When that began, so did the phasing. And as the wealth gap grew bigger, the phasing intensified for every single one of us, planet-wide. The rising blush would consume our bodies, holding us still in its grasp as we were left helpless and wincing taking with it a piece of flesh. Here and there a person lost a finger through the phasing. Maybe the next time it would be a toe. If you were unlucky perhaps a foot. For my husband it was his brain. He was dead before the phasing could finish. This is when I realized that we’d made a grave mistake for which we’d all equally suffer for. With its unpredictability, your first phasing could very well be your last.

The boy who walks towards me, his name was Randy. His father is a businessman that spends most of his time barking at others on the phone. While people watching one day, I had left my baby momentarily to fill a water bottle at the fountain and when I returned, I found Randy peering over the stroller soothing my baby who had begun to cry in my absence. He was gentle with him but more so, he seemed curious. My baby was already missing a foot and he was enthralled by the softness of the skin that replaced it.

“It’s like it was never there.” He had said watching my baby suck on his own leg.

“Skin grows over open wounds to protect us from infection.” I had said to him. Still, he watched my baby with fascination.

“Isn’t he going to need them someday? To walk and stuff?”

“If he really wants to, he can get a replacement. But he doesn’t have to. He will be okay like this.”

“But don’t we need all our body parts?”

Not all of them. But I hadn’t the time to explain why to a small child. At the time, I was impatient to return to the task at hand – to finding the person who would be willing to accept this coin.

Every day I saw him at the park after that, he would tell me yet another body part that one could live without. Gradually, he discovered that there were ways to function without fingers and deducted that we did not need those for survival. He made the same deduction about toes. Then hands and arms. Legs. Hair. Until eventually I made him a promise. If he could tell me all the things one needed to function, then I would give him a reward.

“I figured it out, Satoshi!” Randy shouts as he walks over towards me at the park today. I give a slight wave and smile to his father, who waves back half-heartedly. Randy carries a sheet of paper with him that threatens to flutter away from his hands in the wind.

“Did you?” I reply in a singsong voice as he approaches “You’re quite keen then, aren’t you?”

Hopping up to sit next to me on the bench, Randy wobbles to adjust himself. “It took me a while, and my dad helped me a little.” he unfolds his paper speedily, presses it flat on his lap.

“My dad told me that the brain is what helps us live so we need that.” He began. “And we need our lungs to breathe. And we need our um... heart to beat and we need to eat and drink so we need mouths and noses. But maybe we don’t need both? I don’t know, but we need everything up here!” out of breath, he motions to his torso, running his hands across his ribcage. “because it does like all the other stuff our body needs.”

Was I to tell him we could lose a kidney and be fine? Appendixes weren’t required. The stomach, the gallbladder, the spleen. Was I to explain to him what a colon was and that we did not need this as well? Should I have told him about the birds and bees and mentioned that he didn’t need reproductive organs? Would you have bothered to explain all this to a child when his quest for knowledge was never the point?

My baby had only lost his foot. I need not allow it to be more than that.

“That’s amazing!” Rubbing the gold coin in my pocket I briefly reflect on my morality. I think of all my people hollowing out above, each day as unpredictable as the last, not knowing what challenges the next will bring. The choice we made for our security knowing – while not knowing – what the consequences meant. Believing that we were a good and fair folk. Sensible. Rational. Not at all greedy. How we had doomed ourselves and our children by accepting this proposition. If we were once again only thinking of ourselves in passing this coin along.

Randy sits proudly next to me; he believes he has discovered the requirements for survival. My baby pacifies himself on his foot once again. I produce the coin from my pocket.

“Here.” I quickly say, knowing that once I had announced it, I would feel forced to go through with it. “All hard work deserves a reward.”

The golden coin reflects sunlight like a flashlight on one’s eyes; the letter “B” engraved with two single lines crossing through it shines brilliantly. Its weight is substantial... On sight it demanded ones attention, ones curiosity. ‘They’ had made it that way. Compelling, alluring, inescapably irresistible. Randy was no exception, hypnotized almost instantly.

“There’s only one condition,” his eyes fixed to the coin I continue along. “You can’t be greedy with it, okay? You have to share. Or everyone will start losing those body parts we talked about.”

I see no need to make him aware that he was now the representative for his people on earth.

Breaking the trance for only a moment, Randy gazes up towards me with concern “For real?”

“For real.”

“Okay,” he whispers. “I’ll share.”

I placed the coin in his palms, causing his eyes to glimmer as he holds it for the first time. I had planted a seed.

From across the ways his father waved to me. I nudged Randy in response. Taking note of this signal, he hopped back off the bench, holding the coin tightly in his hand. “Bye, Ms. Satoshi.” He murmurs distractedly.

“Bye, Randy.” Competing with knot in my throat to speak I mustered a weak “See you next time.”

Inattentively, he goes back to his father.

In a perfect world, Randy would keep the coin. He would sleep and wake with it by his side, too enthralled with it to let anyone else possess it. He would never ever unleash it to the world as cryptocurrency. He would never give his people the chance to feud over the finite crypto coins available. He would grow old with this single symbolic coin and pass on and perhaps his grandchild would stumble across it whilst hiding in a dusty, cobwebbed attic playing hide and seek with their siblings. The cycle would repeat until there were other, more irresistible gold coins to be fascinated by. They would never discover it's worth. Him, and everyone he loved would never experience the phasing.

But Randy does not reside in a perfect world and a coin so valuable, would not go undetected. Randy’s fathers resting gaze on it, loaded with lust, is proof of that.

At the moment, I do not feel guilty. Not when I look at my baby and he plays happily with his foot. When I know the fear of a phasing for me and everyone on my planet is no longer shackled to my ankles. It is no longer my issue. That is for earth to figure out because of as now, I made it right for my people. We are rid of the coin.