And Then She Disappears

Chris had inherited a quirk from his mother. He had, over the years, accumulated enough mugs to fill all the little hooks under the cabinet that hung above the coffee machine. He had, of course, filled the cabinet itself with the normal glassware expected of any small group of people living together. But in addition to this, he had also put excess mugs on the shelves in this cabinet and had even begun stacking them on top of one another.

At the risk of beginning in a state of total chaos, we need to immediately step aside and install some thoughts in the back of your mind. For just a moment, let us put Chris on the back burner and the mugs back on their hooks. This is primarily a document about consciousness. Isn’t any quirky horror story really at it’s root a record of this bizarre phenomenon? Let us clarify.

You’re at the movies and the protagonist awakens in the middle of the night. She peeks out the door and her daughter is standing in the hallway, motionless. Her arms are extended upwards and her head is pointed down. Or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s looking straight-up in the air and her arms are hanging at her side. Maybe she’s just staring ahead blankly. Our point is, the creepy element isn’t her specific posture. It’s not even what might happen next. The horror lies in the possibility that her consciousness has been expelled from her body. Or worse, it’s been replaced by a different consciousness altogether. Potentially most horrific of all, their whole relationship was a ruse and the real personality possessing that body is finally revealing itself. As our protagonist knew her, the daughter never existed at all in the first place.

Here’s another case study. Maybe you’re exchanging emails with a friend. One day you’re speaking with that person face to face and discover they are unaware of the conversation. You may have been interacting with a bot. Its algorithm was simply interacting with the information you fed it. A human impersonator controlling the friend’s address might be scarier. Scarier indeed though would be a disembodied consciousness sending emails to impersonate your friend. This consciousness isn’t a program run by algorithms, but something that has a personality all to itself. Its origins predate the equipment and maybe predate human life as well. The bot or the imposter human’s intentions would be a need for concern. However, the disembodied person or persons would, by their very nature, be concerning, regardless of their intention.

This only concerns Chris inasmuch as why he’s remembered at all. We won’t let you fret any longer that some creepy scenario will befall our current subject. At least we can say that he’ll never know if he’s interacting with a consciousness that isn’t bound to a human body. We’ll even let you know ahead of time that this is not a ghost story. The events that proceed during Chris’s lifetime that might seem that way are all events which he died believing had a human explanation. Nevertheless, Chris’s life and some of his idiosyncrasies certainly persist in a lot of the postmortem related to miracles and horrors that we will need to explore later on.

Chris dug through the cabinet. It’s hard to say whether the sound or the feel of ceramic rubbing on top of itself is more unpleasant. The collecting of the mugs always slightly annoyed Chris’s children, but the daily rituals of finding the right mug actively angered them. Mugs in that house were receptacles for cheap caffeine. The house, cabinets, and mugs were expensive, but the coffee was cheap. This routine was ritualistic for Chris and didn’t have anything to do with a love of coffee. It was a logistical thorn that came with the broader personality of the tech billionaire.

This particular evening, Chris thought he had found the right mug once, poured his Joe, and then decided to keep digging. When the final decision was made, one brand new mug of coffee was poured right into another. He then made the trek through brick hallways and past glass-walled rooms to the end of the house that was opposite the lake. The twilight sky wasn’t actually all that dark on the other side of the house, but the wooded sloping hillside made this shadowy area very unpleasant to the rest of his family by the hours around dusk.

The undesirable environment was precisely why he chose this particular patio from which to work this evening. Neither his children nor their spouses knew about Chris’s true work, and he had kept it that way for over twenty years. They knew about his day gig, but Chris also had an alter-ego that existed exclusively in the digital realm. On the particular evening we have been discussing, he had a long night ahead of him examining headshots. After a quarter-century, Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of bitcoin, had supposedly announced that he was revealing his true identity to the world. Unlike previous fraudsters, this person had already proven that they were legit by removing some of the Bitcoin in one of Satoshi’s long-dormant wallets.

Chris was concerned for many reasons. He was immediately concerned that the use of bitcoin by the so-called “Spanglings” might be compromised. When the World Monetary Unit was first distributed in the late 2020s, many had long been concerned about the rights of fringe political and religious groups. Of course, the concern of using it as a tool for oppression of racial minorities was real, but not discussed as openly. A digital currency controlled by the government can be erased from someone’s account at any time and these were the expected segments of society to go first. However, when English was declared to be the universal language in the autumn of 2029, very few were expecting such an immediate and brutal response to dissenters on the issue. As starvation became weaponized through the World Monetary Unit, certain segments of society started using bitcoin behind closed doors to feed those people whom the United Global Counsel had pushed off grid.

The Spanglings in the western hemisphere had a parallel group in Asia. These were referred to as the “Wimps.” Both terms were slurs devised by state-sponsored media. The United Global Counsel had no love for the Pacific-Indian Federation, but the two world powers both desired a passive, productive population. The Wimps in the east were more willing to cooperate than the Spanglings, but were declared to lack the intelligence required by the Pacific-Indian Federation to make most life decisions. They lived on a fixed income, and excess unspent money was wiped out of their World Coin accounts every week. So World Coin was the currency in the PIF while the World Monetary Unit reigned in the UGC’s domain. Those cast out of the system like the Spanglings and Wimps, or just general rebels and dissenters, had adopted bitcoin again.

The practical use of other alleged decentralized blockchains in the mid 2020s was short lived when much of the developed world violently cracked down on users and many were unmasked as scams. Chris had thrived in this period though and stayed low-profile while accumulating bitcoin. Much larger groups of people started using it after the abuses of the government currencies got into full swing. Chris had always known the need would arise, but he always assumed hyperinflation would be the immediate catalyst in most regions. This is one of the reasons he had continued his double-life, unknown to friends and family alike. The network being compromised at this point would mean mass starvation and disease, not to mention all of the brutal violence that rides on the backs with these evil twins. Fortunately, every attack on the network from its inception only made Bitcoin more resilient. Nevertheless, the reveal of Satoshi meant his character might affect the credibility of the network and the moving of the coins would certainly have a short-term affect on the money’s value.

He had another fear related to the motive behind the reveal. The person moving the coins from the treasured Nakamoto wallet was going to use this fame to some end. At various points in the last decades, Satoshi Nakamoto was arguably the most influential person in the world. Chris knew there must have been a number of other reveals set to follow as well. The potential for harm to both the human race as a whole as well as Chris personally was staggering.

Chris had scrolled through a few dozen head shots. They were all pictures of old employees for a company he led in the first decades of the new millennium. These were the pictures that sat next to biographies on early websites. He was cross-referencing them with a mugshot that he held on the right side of the screen. The mugshot was apparently of the person claiming to be Satoshi. He had provided it anonymously to the world before sharing that the coins were going to move. The person in the mugshot was badly disfigured from a fire that he claimed had been the result of a government raid. Apparently, his house was destroyed in the process and this person lost access to the rest of his resources after a robbery on the street shortly thereafter. When this person’s government was overthrown by the UGC in the consolidation years, his digital identity was deleted do to his association with Spangling hunger relief. Chris thought the disfigured mugshot looked familiar. He may have even known this person well.

His final concern with the big reveal was related to this suspicion. He knew for certain that whoever was moving the bitcoin was definitely not Satoshi. This is because Chris’s dead wife, Shanika Grey, was Satoshi Nakamoto. He had watched her develop the code behind closed doors for years, watched her release it to the world, and watched her die shortly before the rise of the two totalitarian states. Perhaps most curious, he was the only remaining person who had the keys to access the wallet in question. He had tried to forget it over the years. Chris had many other Bitcoin wallets and this particular Nakamoto wallet had become a strong symbol over the years for the strength of the network. He only knew the key because they had spent so much time with it in the earliest years. But, to Chris’s knowledge, no one else but Shanika had ever known that special combination of words.

He picked up his mug. The feel of ceramic brushing concrete was one that fascinated Chris just as much as that of ceramic touching itself. The full mug was cold and it was dumped in the mulch. He went back in to the house to microwave a new one filled from the now-cold coffee machine and wracked his brain for other places to find pictures of old associates.