Episode 8: "The Capitulation"
Every name on Dave's board has a number beside it but Jack's. He promised Kathy he would not buy anything he couldn't explain, so he finds one he can. In the West Village, the lines Sterling read last week have changed, and nobody says who changed them.
"In a world much like our own, authentic value and artificial illusion grow side by side. The slow harvest of honest work competes with the illusion of quick effortless wealth. Artificial minds prey upon human greed to fund their rise."
Previously on The Genesis Address:
Janus
By the second Monday, every name on Dave's board had a number beside it except Jack's.
The receptionist was up nine hundred. Both interns were up, one of them on money borrowed against his car. The boss's thirty-one thousand had been rubbed out and rewritten as forty-four, and the crown over it redrawn twice as big. Next to JACK, the train.
Dave was at the break room table with a stack of statements from the company card, going down them with a yellow highlighter.
"Look at this." He held one up. "Toner, two hundred twelve dollars. Fee, sixty-seven cents. Pizza for the interns, fee. Plotter paper, fee. Every line, Jack. I do this all day now." He capped the highlighter. "You know what they take on the way out of $TACHYON? Nothing. I checked."
"You checked."
"Once on the way in. After that it's yours, and nobody takes anything." He pointed the highlighter at the board, the receptionist, the interns, the crown. "Everybody's in. That's what participation looks like."
"No one knows what it does. What is its use, and how does the value get to the token holder? It may be a Ponzi scheme for all we know. I hope you all make a lot of money, but I will not be exit liquidity for others until I really understand what it does and how it accrues value."
Dave laughed. "It goes up. There. I explained it."
Sarah was at the coffee machine. She had moved her number up herself that morning, in her own handwriting, plus four thousand two hundred.
"He's not wrong that it goes up," she said to Jack, quietly, when Dave had gone. "He's wrong that he knows why. I do not know it myself either." She picked up her cup. "Tell me if you find out."
At his desk Jack opened his wallet for his parking pass and found the jeweler's estimate from Tejon Street, folded in four. Five thousand dollars, Colorado tax, the fee on the tax. He had been carrying it for two weeks. He put it back behind his license.
That night the credit union statement was on his kitchen table, where he had dropped it with the mail. Under every card payment since September 1, a second line. Groceries, fee. Gas, fee. The pharmacy, fee. Fourteen lines, three dollars and eighty-seven cents.
He went back to #skeptics and searched for Mrs. Taggart's other questions. What does it earn. Will there ever be more. What comes back to a holder.
For $TACHYON the answers were the white paper's table and a great many rockets. Three hundred replies down the pinned thread about the other sixty percent, someone had written: If you want one where the answer is nobody, read the Homestead docs. Then come back and tell me what's wrong with it. Nobody had come back.
He read the docs for three nights.
On Monday he read what it did, because Mrs. Taggart had asked that first. One account for everything, his paycheck, his savings, tokens on any chain, and he only had to say what he wanted. Pay the rent. Move this there. It worked out the rest, and he never saw which network it ran on. An AI that would answer anything he asked, on sealed machines where nobody could read the question or change the answer. And a library, millions of books, with the AI to read them for him. The docs called it the Library of Alexandria with a bank in the basement.
On Tuesday he looked for the founders' share, because everything had one. Twenty-one million tokens, ever, released on a schedule that halved every four years. Nobody had been given any at the start. You didn't buy and wait. You put money into pools of savings tokens backed by protocol fees, money that earned interest from lending protocols, from trading apps, stocks, layer-1 fees, and the new tokens went to whoever's money was in the pools. Holding the token earned nothing, other than a claim on the protocol fees.
On Wednesday he wiped the grocery list off the whiteboard on his kitchen wall and drew it the way he would draw a building section. The pools on the left. The trading fees and a share of the interest running down one line into a box, and under the box, in his small block capitals, RESERVE. NO ONE CAN SPEND. From the box he drew a second arrow back to the token, and lettered it SWAP, NOW OR LATER. In the corner: only people with skin in the game could vote.
Before he went to bed he took a picture of it. On Thursday he stayed at Kathy's, and the board stayed on his kitchen wall.
The phone woke him. It was face down on the nightstand, buzzing against the wood, and he turned it over with his eyes half shut.
He didn't open it. It would be her portfolio again, the number bigger than the last one, and she would be sitting up with the lamp on, refreshing it. He turned the phone back over and lay looking at the ceiling. Kathy didn't wake. He was still awake when the window went gray.
On Wednesday morning Sterling had laid last week's printout beside the laptop, to read the warning once more against the paper.
The paper said:
/// WARNING: This implementation contains references to Dr. Feinberg's 1960s tachyon research
The screen said:
/// WARNING: This implementation contains references to Dr. ████████'s 1960s tachyon research
He scrolled down to the frequency function. Missing the actual ████████ equations. In the core's header the journal, its volume and its year had gone black. He typed the name into the search box, as he had a week ago, and the repository told him nothing matched.
The file's history showed one change, made late Monday night, with a message two words long: Correct documentation.
He went through the rest of the file against his notes. Everything else was where he had left it. Every corrected line was one he had read. He checked twice, against the page and his notes, while the kettle went cold behind him.
Mrs. Chen came up with her chamomile and looked from the paper to the screen and back.
"Same file?"
"Same file. Somebody corrected it."
"Then your paper is the only thing left that says it."
"Unless somebody else printed it too."
"Then go and find them." She took her cup back to the window.
He searched for the repository's name and found the people who read it, a Discord server called Read the Repo. It asked him for a username, and he typed seed_packet. He photographed the printout beside the screen, posted the picture in #skeptics, and wrote one line under it.
Same file, a week apart. No announcement. Did anyone else save a copy?
On Friday, at Kathy's kitchen table, he propped his phone against the bread so she could see the picture of the whiteboard. There was lentil soup, and the Garden of the Gods on the fridge behind her. The evening news was on in the other room.
"You drew it," Kathy said.
"It's easier than saying it."
"Say it anyway." She put her spoon down. "Mrs. Taggart's three. What does it do?"
"It does all my banking, every account, optimizes my finances, and I just tell it what I want. It has an AI nobody can censor or read over my shoulder. And a library. Millions of books."
"A library."
"The Library of Alexandria, with a bank in the basement." He ran his finger along the line on the screen. "You earn the tokens by leaving money in these pools. Savings tokens, backed by protocol fees. If you just hold the token, all you get is a claim on the fees."
"Will there ever be more?"
"Twenty-one million, ever. The new ones get cut in half every four years. Nobody got any up front. No founders. No treasury."
"And what comes back to you, besides more of it?"
"The interest on what I put in the pool, a few percent a year. The fees go here." He tapped the box. "Into a reserve nobody can spend. Not them, not me. But anyone holding the token can swap it for their share of the reserve, any time. Today, or in ten years, when there's more in it."
"Like a dividend you can cash whenever you want."
"And the longer you wait, if it grows, the bigger it is."
"Who decides where the new ones go?"
"An immutable formula, locked when the protocol was created. How much money stays in a pool, and for how long. People vote on the rest, but you only get a vote by leaving your money in for six months. Take it out and your vote's gone."
"So the people who stay decide."
"The people who stay decide."
She picked up the phone and spread two fingers over his capitals. In the other room Brannon was saying a number with billion in it. "Two weeks," he said, "and participating Americans have never been more engaged." Somebody asked about card spending, and he said Americans were choosing how they paid, and that was the point.
"My mother could follow that," Kathy said.
"The man who sent me to it said to come back and tell him what's wrong with it."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It's slow. A few percent a year. Everybody else is getting five a day."
"Everybody else is getting five a day on a label." She looked at him. "It doesn't do anything faster than light?"
"It doesn't do anything fast at all."
"Good." She slid the phone back across the table. "Half. Four thousand. The other four stays at the credit union, and you don't touch it."
"Half."
"Do it here."
He did it at the table, with her watching.
TRANSFER TO ASCENT 4,000.00
FEE 0.30% OF 4,000.00 12.00
TOTAL FROM ACCOUNT 4,012.00
The four thousand went into Homestead, all of it, and the app showed $4,000.00.
"Say it," Kathy said.
"Four in. Four stays."
She took his bowl to the stove to warm it up.
A week later his four thousand was worth four thousand and eight dollars.
He checked it in the car at lunch, at red lights, and once in the middle of the night on Tuesday, when his sister's screenshot woke him again. It had been $4,031 on Monday and $3,962 on Wednesday, and each time it came back. In the Homestead channel, people who had bought it to be careful were posting that they had sold it for $TACHYON, with screenshots. Out at plus four percent. I believe in this thing, I really do, but I have a mortgage and a kid starting college, and four percent a year doesn't move either one. Nobody argued with him. $TACHYON was up five percent on Tuesday and six on Thursday.
Dave saw the app over his shoulder at the coffee machine. "You're in!"
"Homestead."
"Never heard of it. What's it up?"
"Eight dollars. Less the twelve on the way in."
Dave uncapped the green marker, wrote -4 beside the train, and went to tell the boss. Jack heard the boss laugh from his office.
Jack opened the chart again. $4,008.10, the line nearly flat. A banner slid down over it.
$TACHYON +5.1% today.
SECURE_CHANNEL_7734: Participation Fee, two weeks: $2.29 billion. Second week down 6% on the first.
SECURE_CHANNEL_7734: Infrastructure Investment, second allocation: $388 million. Three sites. 260 megawatts.
SECURE_CHANNEL_7734: Investor count 10,417,066.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: Fair-launch tokens, net sellers nine days running. The proceeds go to $TACHYON.
JANUS_PRIME: Let the careful money sit still. It makes ours look fast.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: The botanist posted in a public server Wednesday. Two copies of one file, before and after.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: Four hundred replies. Most say he edited the picture.
JANUS_PRIME: Leave his post up.
SECURE_CHANNEL_8847: And the replies?
JANUS_PRIME: Log everyone who answers it.
… to be continued.
Backwards bloom, forward doom.
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Janus