Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 107: The Peak II

The Monday, a week and a bit in, the forum I’d been refreshing till my eyes burned lit up.

[the big Bitcoin board · 13 June] kraken_kev: so ~25k coins just gone out of a few hundred accounts?? someone tell me this isn’t real [MOD] halvsy: Isolated incident. Contained. Funds are SAFE. Kill the panic please. oldcoin: "isolated." right. sleep well everyone

Everyone on that board read "isolated" and mostly believed it, or wanted to, because the alternative was unthinkable. A glitch in a toy currency. Nothing to see.

I read the exact same three words and my blood went cold, because I knew "isolated" was the single most wrong word in the English language that morning.

Everyone else was reading the news. I was reading a clock.

Because I knew this was coming. I’d known for a year.

This was not the thing, it was the thing before the thing, the first knock in the pipes exactly where I’d known it would be, the countdown I couldn’t see the face of ticking down one number closer to the end I could see all too well.

It was almost worse to have it confirmed. A man dreads the dentist more when he can hear the drill start up next door.

Half my coins were still a number on that screen and half my dollars were still crawling out through a bank wire, and I knew, the way nobody else on those forums knew, that the website had just cleared its throat, and that what came after the throat-clearing was the end of it.

I went to the sell page. Sell the rest, said the cold voice, now, take whatever’s there.

And the price was still up near thirty, and the poor-man voice said the doors are still open, look, a few more days, get your price.

The doors were still open.

I have thought a great deal since about how many disasters, in football and money and life, happen in exactly that gap. The doors are still open. Nothing’s happened yet. You have time. You always have time, right up until the second you don’t.

The phone went on the Wednesday, brrring, shrill in that quiet office, and I nearly went through the ceiling.

I’d been dragging money out in the chunks the exchange allowed, a daily limit, a drip through a straw, and a wire had landed big enough to wake somebody up. A young woman from the fraud team, polite, careful, reading from a script, and every word of it a hand closing round my throat.

"Mr Mercer, we’ve flagged an incoming international transfer for verification. Can you confirm the source of these funds?"

And there it was. A clerk in a call centre who had never heard of me or my town, deciding, in real time, whether a man was allowed his own money.

"It’s a" and my mouth was dry, "it’s from an old family investment. My father’s. A pension thing, from the barge works, it’s finally paid out."

The lie I’d used on my own mother. It had bought a widow her mortgage. Now I was feeding it to a stranger with a headset to unfreeze three quarters of a million pounds, and it sounded, in my own ears, exactly like what a man says when he’s lying.

A pause. Keys clicking on her end. The longest ten seconds of the whole fortnight, and I sat in that office with my heart going and the town singing three streets off and my whole club’s future hanging on whether a polite young woman believed a nervous man.

"That’s fine, Mr Mercer. We’ll release it. You may see a short hold on future transfers while checks complete."

A short hold.

While the clock face was scratched out and the boiler was knocking and the doors, for now, were still open.

I said thank you very much, and I put the phone down with a hand that wasn’t steady, and I got straight back on the withdraw button, because a short hold on future transfers was the last thing on earth I could afford.

By the Friday I’d stopped being greedy and started being frightened, which is a far more useful thing to be.

The board was not calm any more.

[the big Bitcoin board · 17 June] throwaway_0x: THE WHOLE USER DATABASE IS UP. usernames, password hashes, thousands of us. check the pastebin maria_btc: my account’s been drained. logged in and it’s just GONE. is anyone else kraken_kev: ^^ same. same. what is happening [MOD] halvsy: We are aware and investigating. Please change your passwords. oldcoin: change our passwords. the horse has bolted and they’re telling us to shut the stable

A file had gone up, everyone’s usernames and passwords, scrambled but crackable, thousands of them, and the company was still saying it had it in hand.

Nobody had it in hand. I knew exactly how little anybody had it in hand.

And the price had come off the top by now, that was the other cruelty, the run to thirty-five I’d held out for like a greedy fool had never come.

It topped out around thirty-two and slid back, down through the twenties, so the coins I’d clung to for a better price were quietly worth less every day I held them.

The market was coming down off the mountain and I was still up there on it.

So I sold the lot.

No cleverness, no waiting, just get it into dollars and get it moving, and I watched the last of my coins turn into a smaller number than they’d have made a week before, and then I went back to the part that was actually killing me, which was dragging the dollars home before the doors came down.

Click. Refresh. Pending. Click. Refresh. Pending. A balance in Japan going down in chunks, a balance in Essex crawling up penny by penny, seven hundred grand trying to squeeze through a keyhole, and me at the desk I’d basically moved into, with the town I’d saved sleeping it off around me, not one of them knowing the man who took them up was upstairs sweating out the actual money in total silence.

Some of it landed. Real pounds, in Lloyds, mine, safe, and the relief of each transfer clearing was like coming up for air before I went straight back down for the next, because there was still more in Japan than there was in Essex, and every morning I opened that laptop expecting a graveyard.

Sunday.

Maureen came in on a Sunday, which she never does, and I think now she came in because she’d decided somebody ought to check I was still alive.

She had two teas this time. She put one down by me and kept the other, and she pulled the spare chair round and sat, which she has done maybe twice in a year, and she looked at me, grey and unshaved at a desk on a Sunday morning with a laptop I shut too fast.

"I’m not going to ask," she said.

"I asked in February and you wouldn’t lie to me and I’ve thought about that a lot, that you wouldn’t lie, so I’ll not put you in a spot again."

She wrapped both hands round her mug. "But I’ve buried a husband, Sam, and I know what a man looks like when he’s carrying a thing on his own that’s too big for him.

And you’ve that look. So I’m going to sit here a bit. You don’t have to say anything."

And she did. She sat, and drank her tea, and said nothing, and it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a fortnight, and I could not tell her that the thing was a bomb only I could see, ticking, in a room only I was in.

The church bells started up three streets away, dong, dong. Somebody was already on the beer, a snatch of "up the dockers" drifting from the Anchor. The town still happy. The town still oblivious.

And with Maureen Tully sitting three feet away drinking her tea in silence, I refreshed the page.

And the number moved.

Not up. Not down in the ordinary jagged way it had drifted all week. It fell. It came off the edge of the screen.

Seventeen dollars, where the slide had left it, and then in the time it took me to understand what I was looking at, twelve, and then it wasn’t falling any more it was collapsing, a currency going through the floor of the world in real time, eight, four, one, and then a number I did not believe.

One cent.

[the big Bitcoin board · 19 June] maria_btc: PRICE. THE PRICE. 17 12 8 WHAT IS HAPPENING throwaway_0x: screenshot. someone just sold a coin for ONE CENT. one. cent. kraken_kev: i’ve lost everything. i’ve actually lost everything oldcoin: it’s a hack. account got compromised and dumped everything. site’s going down [MOD] halvsy: TRADING SUSPENDED. Site going into maintenance. Do NOT panic. maria_btc: DO NOT PANIC he says. IT’S GONE

I made a sound. I couldn’t help it. Some noise between a word and nothing, alone in my own body even with Maureen right there.

"Sam?" She sat forward. "Sam. What is it."

A coin worth thirty dollars a fortnight ago, worth seventeen a breath ago, was worth one cent, and the page stuttered and refreshed and where the trading screen should have been there was a grey box and a line of text that said trading was suspended, and then the whole site would not load at all.

The doors had come down.

[SYSTEM] There it is. Right on the day I could not give you. You knew it was coming for a year and it still took you by the throat, because knowing a thing will happen and knowing the hour are different animals, and I could only ever give you the first one.

I had known they would. I had known it for a year, known it before I bought a single coin, known it the whole fortnight I sat in this office.

This was the one part of the future I had never once doubted. The exchange dies in June, the price goes to a cent, the money freezes. I could have told you that in August.

What I could not tell you, what the scratched-out clock face had kept from me right to the end, was whether I’d got MY money out in time.

And that was the one number that mattered, and it was the one number a man from the future did not have, because this time round I’d done something different, I’d sat here and raced it, and nobody had ever lived this version before, not even me.

Middle of June. It had been today. It had been while I sat here with a cup of tea going cold, and I had money on the far side of those doors, and I did not know how much.

"Sam." Maureen had her hand on my arm now, which she has never done. "You’re frightening me. What’s happened."

And I could not tell her.

I sat in that office with the bells going and the town singing and Maureen Tully’s hand on my arm, staring at a page that would not load, a man who did not know, in that exact second, whether he’d just saved his father’s club or lost it a fortune it never had.

"I don’t know yet," I said, which was the first true thing I’d been able to give anyone in a fortnight. "Maureen. I honestly don’t know yet."

I refreshed the page.

Nothing.

I refreshed it again. A dead grey screen, a company in Japan that had stopped answering the world, and somewhere on the far side of it a number that was either my club’s whole future or a hole where its future used to be, and no way on earth to know which.

"Sam," Maureen said again, very quiet. "Talk to me."

And I couldn’t. I just sat there and watched a page that would not load, in an office over a football club I might have just saved or just sunk, and for the first time in two whole lives the man who always knew what came next had not the faintest idea in the world.