My name is Robert Must. I'm a sysadmin by day, a ghost by night, and I've been trying to orange-pill people who don't want to be orange-pilled for longer than I care to admit.

Not VCs. Not tech bros. Not your libertarian uncle with a Ledger he doesn't know how to use.

Dealers. Sex workers. People who already live off-grid by necessity, who already don't leave traces, who already don't trust banks, the state, or anyone with a badge. People who figured out the answer without reading the whitepaper.

I'm just the guy at the other end of the same equation, trying to hand them the tool that formalizes what they already are.

This is Haven, or not. Stories from a deprecated sysadmin. Published here, in sats, as it's written.

Prague. 2:17 AM.

The apartment smelled like cold coffee and cigarettes he didn't remember smoking. Robert Must was sitting in front of three monitors, the middle one casting a pale blue light across his face, the other two dark. It was 2:17 AM. Prague was quiet outside, or as quiet as Žižkov ever gets, which means someone was still arguing two floors down and a tram was grinding its way up Seifertova like it had somewhere important to be. He had a glass of Becherovka on the desk, untouched for forty minutes, and on the middle screen a terminal with a cursor blinking at the end of a line he hadn't finished typing, something about a firewall rule that stopped making sense an hour ago. He'd get back to it. He always got back to it. VLC was running in the background, Dronezone, low enough that he could pretend it wasn't there.

His phone buzzed and he looked at it without moving his head, just his eyes. Karolina. 20 min. He closed the terminal without saving.

She arrived in twenty-one minutes, which he noted without saying anything. She was wearing a coat too light for February, heels wrong for the cobblestones, and the particular expression of someone who had learned to read rooms fast. She read his in about four seconds. "You look terrible," she said, and he said "Drink?" and she said "Sure."

He poured. She sat on the edge of the couch, coat still on, and looked at the screens, the two dark ones, the one still glowing. "What are you working on? Nothing interesting. Then why are you awake?" He handed her the glass, she took it, he sat back down at the desk, not at the monitors, facing her. This was the part he actually liked. Not what came after.

"Can I ask you something," he said. "You're going to anyway." "How do you get paid." She looked at him the way people look at a question they weren't expecting but probably should have been. "Cash. App. Transfer sometimes, if I trust the guy." "And the app. What app." She named it and he nodded slowly, the way he nodded when someone confirmed something he already knew was broken.

"They have your ID," he said. "Your face. Your location history. Every transaction, timestamped, linked to your real name. You know that, right?" "I know that." "And?" "And what, Robert." Not a question. The way you say a name when you want someone to hear themselves. He picked up his glass, put it down without drinking. "There's another way. Peer to peer. No intermediary, no record, no platform that folds under a court order and hands them everything." "Bitcoin." "Bitcoin."

She looked at him for a moment. The argument two floors down had stopped, the tram was gone. "You do this with everyone," she said. "No." "You did it with Dana. She told me. She said you spent two hours explaining it to her and then tipped her in sats and she didn't know what to do with them." "She could have asked." Karolina smiled, just slightly, just enough. "Robert. I already don't leave traces. I've been not leaving traces since before you knew what a blockchain was. I know what I'm doing."

He looked at her. She was right, and he knew she was right, and she knew he knew. That was the thing nobody understood. She wasn't the problem. She had already solved for survival, he was just standing at the other end of the same equation, waving a whitepaper at someone who had figured out the answer without needing the proof. "I know," he said. "So." "So nothing. I just." He stopped, started again. "It would be cleaner. For you. That's all."

She finished her drink, set the glass down on the stack of paperbacks he used as a coaster, and stood up. "You're lonely," she said, not unkindly, and he didn't argue.

Later, after she left, he sat back at the terminal. The cursor was still blinking at the unfinished line. He finished it, ran it, the firewall rule worked, which meant he'd been staring at a correct solution for an hour without seeing it. His phone buzzed again, different contact, Berlin. Need you for something. Not big. Call me. He stared at it for a while, poured another Becherovka. Outside, Žižkov had gone properly quiet, the kind of quiet that only lasts an hour before the city remembers itself. He typed back: When. The reply was immediate. Now would be good.

Next: The Berlin call. The contact from Berlin has a job. Simple, he said. They always say simple.

Follow the story: Nostr: npub12nx5pjy8xg9avvgmdrmvq8wuj2rrla4gwpdx4r23gpsdavnnw6mqlmgxn7 GitHub: github.com/RobertMust21 Site: robertmust21.github.io/trustmebro