Jungle Chongo Doge
Nabil is liquidated for 720k at 2:34am on an incredibly humid Tuesday in January, having gone too long on leverage, the air conditioning in his Palermo loft is set on high, but it doesn’t matter.
He naturally proceeds to react, by taking his pile of cash, about 350k pesos (whatever that is worth) and spending it feverishly on cocaine, marijuana, and a handful of contract (figuratively speaking) companions. He is irritated by Thursday that he can’t obtain any MDMA. “Is there an Alpha Bay 5 or something?” he asks.
By Friday night it’s time to sell more coin and replenish the ol’ coffers. Bank-based exchanges are closed for transfers already, so a LocalBitcoins transfer is the only viable option, and for limited size. But Nabil is an expat with no proper banking, a Dutch Citizen of 4th generation Syrian descent, hence being such a harami. But really Nabil’s degeneracy is all in good fun, the natural course of life for a 25 year old who has made and lost 6-figures multiple times over the last 2 years. No big deal.
There are only two choices y’all, sell in EUR and wait for a SEPA transfer, or: bounce to the Cash page, and meet someone potentially sketchy.
In this age, there are few cash traders, and only one left on the board; a minimum sell requirement of 10 million pesos. (or about 60k USD at black market rates).
“Who the fuck only does a cash deal for 10 million pesitos man? Wtf” (he actually says the letters “w” “t” “f” in sequence as if he is always online).
Naturally assuming a robbery, but feeling a nihilistic gainzy-ness, he deposits a couple BTC on the platform and plunks it into escrow.
No response for an hour.
He smokes a joint, makes himself a baguette sandwich with parmesean and jamon serrano, compulsively scrolls Twitter and sex worker ads (Nabil does not do porn, he considers himself too rich), he enjoys getting notifications from his Twitter fans and leaves the notifications tab open, he likes to see them roll in. He appreciates at a subtle level that websockets powers both his notifications feed and his burgeoning attempts to code a trading system. When he is discouraged by bug-fixing stress, he reminds himself that his real strength has been in discretionary intuition, except for those times when he got liquidated.
Finally the LocalBitcoins notification — the one he really wanted — with spendable money associated, chimes in Red. He clicks through.
“Hey, meet me tonight at Sugar Bar, 8pm. Early I know. I will bring a suitcase, so low key.”
“Ok but who are you? This is a crazy high-value deal for cash. I could have done with 300k for the weekend.”
“Yes, but I like to use it as a threshold to meet wholecoiners.”
Nabil takes a breath of relief, nobody with that attitude could possibly be a hijacker… unless?
“Ok sure, see ya then.”
He decides he’s going to get dressed up a bit for this multi-million peso suitcase deal. He thinks to follow up:
“Is the suitcase included in your rate?”
He kind of laughs to himself thinking: what is this guy going to say.
“Yes, logistically practical.”
He figures, ok anyone who speaks that way has to be legit, right?
He puts on his red button down with the black slacks and the brown leather kicks — he’s not great at matching but has at least a modicum of style.
“Time to grab a suitcase full of cash, crush an 8-ball, bang 10 people and then figure out how to rebuild my capital!”
He struts out… into the night… of Palermo de Hollywood. Past the plaza, around the corner, the nightlife still quiet, the sun still hanging low in the inverse-summer sky. The bar, having recently opened, is quite empty, and there’s only one person sitting at the bar, a middle aged looking, vaguely gringo-ish vaguely latino-ish man with a side-shave/slicked back haircut, not greyed… only slightly.
“Hey, are you the guy?” Nabil asks.
“I guess I am, yeah.” he extends his hand, “Gus, pleased to meet ya.”
Nabil quickly extends his hand for a semi-taut connect and then withdraws it, being extremely touchy about contact, but also conditioned to demonstrate social compliance for the alacrity of it all. It’s more efficient to not have to explain why you don’t want to shake someone’s hand.
“Is that short for Gustavo?”
“Yes it is actually.”
“Argentino?”
“I grew up in Westchester but I have Italian Citizenship.”
Nabil shrugs, “ok.”
“Aren’t you then going to ask what I’m doing here in Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t really think that level of interest is appropriate for this level of interaction.”
“Hah! Fair enough, but my asking your name in turn may well be.
“Nabil, yeah.”
“Ok let’s grab a booth. You want a drink first?”
“Double scotch and soda thanks.”
“What are you, Holden Caufield?” Gus remarks.
“No,” Nabil says, “I am not Holden Caufield.” He grabs his drink and pivots to then walk forward to the booth.
“So,” Gus says, taking his seat, the suitcase laid on the table, “would you like to peruse a suitcase full of cash?”
“Yeah sure.” Nabil says before taking a long sip.
Gus flips it around and pops the combination, but not in that order.
“Am I supposed to have like a Pulp Fiction moment here?” he says.
“Oh nice, I wasn’t aware many people your age watched 90s cinema.”
“Come on everyone knows the golden suitcase, how old are you?”
“42, and yourself?”
“25.”
“Having a quarter-life crisis?”
“Funny you should mention that,” he says as he shuffles through each stack of 1000 peso bills. There should be exactly as many 1000 peso bills as there are 100 dollar bills in a suitcase containing a million dollars, which is to say, 10x10 (100) stacks of 100 bills. Basic suitcase money facts. “Look at all that orange and crimson… Argentine money is pretty meloncholic.”
“It’s a sort of beautiful sadness, I think, that the money carries with it as a song of the people. Have you ever been to Japan?”
“Uh, yeah, my Twitter avatar is an anime guy so, yeah, I’ve been.”
“Kind of a low-key color palette on the bills eh?”
“Yeah sure.”
“Isn’t it interesting that a currency prone to chronic inflation in a culture where few hold it for savings, dining out and wine are required reading, has a festive yet melancholic-looking currency and a currency prone to chronic deflation in a culture where many hold savings in almost 0% yielding bonds, and social roles are more regimented, has a more somber and unassuming color pallet?”
“What is this, Dinner With Andre?”
“Oh so you’ve seen that?”
“No but I saw a parody of it on Community.”
“That was perhaps an improvement.”
“So do you just trade on LocalBitcoins because you’re lonely?” Nabil asks in monotone before snapping the suitcase shut. “By the way I’m going to release now.”
“No hah, not lonely, but I do enjoy meeting people.”
“Uh-huh” he says as he tabs through his phone, “hey you’re not about to rob me as I release the coin right?”
“No sir, I’ve no need to rob people.”
“Cool, ok, done.” He then swiftly grabs the suitcase and stands, “I suppose our business is then concluded.”
“Wait, before you go,” Gus gestures.
Oh god this needy middle aged guy — Nabil thinks, “yes?”
“Are you a trader?”
“Why, yes I am. I was just liquidated on that BTC dump the other day.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah it was a big fuck up.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“Well, I was going to shove this suitcase full of colorful cash up my nose, and then put a variety of other things in other organs to stimulate dopamine.”
“Naturally.” Gus says, “but after that?”
Nabil’s body posture is halfway towards leaving but he pivots back.
“I’ll just have to build up a big leverage position off the other few BTCs I have left and get it back that way.”
“What if I told you, you could trade a larger AUM and use at most 2x leverage?”
“How about 4x but build up to it?”
“Ok but hedge with options.”
“Options? Come on, I don’t f with options man.”
“Maybe you should, you might not get liquidated again.”
“Shit, my Uber’s here, look man it’s uh, nice to meet you, you can send me your email via Local and we’ll talk.”
“Have a nice weekend.” Gus says.
On Monday at 6:36am, Nabil is trying to get to sleep, but he feels the coke bugs itching up, or maybe that’s an urban legend. He’s anxious thinking to himself “why the fuck do I have 9.35M Argentine pesos!” He starts considering doing a cash real estate deal.
“Maybe I should have gotten dollars instead… maybe I should try to buy it in BTC again, put it into some alts, could run… if I had a bank account and put it in there, I might have the government asking me a lot of questions… fuck why do I have this much fiat? Should I buy a car? What do Argentines do? Should I just live off of it for like a year and some change? Or like 7 months? If I hire a mid-scale pro 30 days a month at about $65 a turn on average what’s that, like $1950? Should I rent a bigger place? Am I stupid to lose a ton of money and then shave a quarter of my survival stash off? Is this money going to lose all it’s value in 7 months? If I text a girl right now, will she come over and help me sleep?”
He thinks back to the weekend he just spent in the Tower Suite of the Faena with 2 different pairs of escorts on overnight bookings: order-in room service, everyone got a massage, one girl did her dry cleaning — (that was unprofessional). Room service booze is stupidly expensive. Take everyone out for fancy McDonald’s on a Sunday. A half ounce of flores and an ounce of blow: consumed by human mouths and nostrils.
He just smokes more pot.
On Tuesday he’s recovering, looking at charts, he begins intensively shitposting on Twitter. Trying to figure out which alts are going to increase one of those BTCs.
He decides to text Gus on local: “hey here’s my mail: roninwarriors69420sailoruranus@gmail.com — can we do another trade where I buy back much of what I sold?”
“Hey Nabil, will follow up via email.”
Subject: Doge AUM
Hello Nabil,
I would recommend you that you purchase some dollars from your cash reserves in local currency, I only held such quantities myself because I thought it would be interesting, but not financially interesting. But perhaps 3 months of living expenses can be kept in pesos, I’d imagine.
I’d like to proposition you to trade a sub-account for me. If you would do me the dignity of forgiving me for not repurchasing your devaluating fiat in exchange for that BTC, I would like for you to charge me a modest fee, just 20% of performance, your benchmark is DOGE. I want you to return me DOGE upon my DOGE by trading the perps, would you be interested?
Subject: Re: Doge AUM
Ok. How much?
Subject: Re: Doge AUM
Here is a read-only API key:
o-OYO00J_-sgun-9uxb3IwnmDx5B8ao3_A8Vp58x
YN7gZ57VGNj4wXfq2OMxemXw3e0Kaz2NONglFNEy
You tell me how much Doge I have in the account and you get the gig.
Subject: Re: Doge AUM
123,456,789.98765432
Oddly specific amount.
I accept.
Subject: Re: Doge AUM
Check your email for an invite from Amazon IAM, the live keys will be assigned to you via the key management system.
Let’s get a beer in about a month and we can talk over the performance.
Try not to get liquidated. I’d encourage you to never go over 2x unless hedged with options. Doge options.
Subject: Re: Doge AUM
Thanks a lot! I’m going to make my portfolio allocations for the alt szn today and then I will get set-up to trade your account using my bots.
— —
Nabil does not want to tell him that he will be executing scripts that input manual orders from constants but through a very basic 20 line .js run-time.
— —
February is an amazing month. Nabil recklessly stacks 2x leverage with Put options as liquidation insurance, losing millions of Doge in premiums, but continually doubling down. A 250M position turns to a 500M position, he is soaking up >50% of the open interest on all the DOGE contracts on FTX. He is surprised to find how much convexity his portfolio has, until someone on Twitter explains to him that this is the equivalent of buying call options. He laughs as DOGE crosses a penny and his stop-buys add to the position. He takes some off from 0.03 to 0.045, his bids under 0.03 were filled a day later, hundreds of millions of dog-themed coins, not literally trading them for promises to be paid USD, but instead, trading perpetual swaps, synthetic Doggy derivatives, lots of funding paid, sure, but the gains! Millions! Nabil begins to count the 200k chunks that will be his soon, such carry. He closes out his position after 10 days of running the account and figures, I’m so up, why take another trade. He spends a few quiet weeks enjoying his pending millions, but also wondering if Gus will stiff him. When the 1st of March rolls around, the bill comes due.
Subject: Yuge gainz
Hey Gus, guess who has tigerblood and is winning, me.
<Screen cap of the account>
Subject: Re: Yuge gainz
I must say I find Charlie Sheen distasteful, but he made 9-figures and so are you so I’ll allow it.
Come over for some pizza and beer and let’s talk strategy:
<address>
— —
Nabil, reading the address: “Puerto Madero, damn.”
— —
Subject: Re: Yuge gainz
Is it 9-figures?
Subject: Re: Yuge gainz
It will be.
It will be.
____
Nabil takes an Uber down the street, up Avenida Internacional Bullrich, across 9 de Julio, through the Retiro district, down L. N. Alem, around the Casa Rosada, across the bridge, up to the 5 towers arranged in a pentagon, like some kind of grand seal unto which diabolic creatures may be snared.
“Damn, real estate. Some impressive shitcoins.” Nabil says.
He checks in with the consegeria, “Uhh Gustavo? I don’t have his last name, and he didn’t give me an apartment number actually.”
They point to a spot in the book, “Penthouse” the man says in awkwardly transposed Spanish phonics. They have him register his thumbprint to be able to pass the gates, and chime him in:
“Hola?” Gus answers, a woman is audibly weeping in the background.
“Hey Gus, it’s me.” Nabil loudly extols from the diaphragm.
Instantly the red neon lighting highlighting the plastic (hard plastic, thick) gates turns to green neon lighting, the inviting kind of neon lighting, and slides open, with an additional skeuomorphic faux-wooshing sound that also sounds a bit like a DJ Tiesto sound effect, because this is Puerto Madero.
He takes the express elevator up and it arrives at last, 25 seconds later, at the 33rd floor Penthouse, opening to an antechamber with a solid steel door frame and a little dainty French bench off to the side, a camera mounted in the upper-left corner; he waves. The door suddenly buzzes open, and he effortlessly turns the handle, so smooth, so couture.
The weeping woman is apologizing profusely in agonizing lamentation and he is stroking her hair softly repeating that it’s ok, then he reaches into his pocket, asks her to take out her phone.
“Remember that app we set-up? The wallet.”
She nods through muted tears and slightly runny mascara.
“Here,” he taps through her phone a bit, then passes it, “hold this,” he then holds his phone up, two QR codes are showing, he tilts it to the side and the kiss, in first awkward alignment, then delicate posture, and a chime heaven never heard rings out to confirm that indeed, money has passed through some magic data structure, into our hands.
“Este es, cien mil Dogge coin?” She says in gracious surprise, “porque me estas regalando cinco mil dolares?” (Visible in the little USD value thingie in the UI of the wallet app.)
“I just want you to be happy, go now,” he gives her a kiss on the forehead, “live your best life.”
She almost breaks down a bit, and then composing herself, nods in acceptance, “Este es la última canción por lo nuestro. Podrias perdonarme?”
“Si ya paso’,” he says, tapping his fingers to his lips and blowing her a kiss while taking a few steps back, “buona notte ex amore” and he turns his back to her. She takes the cue, and leaves, clutching her phone, but sobbing quietly, passing by Nabil’s face of astonishment, he makes no eye contact, but does turn his head to say “damn” as she walks by and the door automatically closes in her passing.
“Dude, what the fuck just happened?” Nabil asks.
Gus takes a deep breath, then focuses his vision on his guest, “do you like stupidly expensive red wine?”
Nabil shrugs, “ok.”
Pouring, Gus begins to recall in storyteller mode, “she and I had shared 17 beautiful months together, 4 dating, 13 living together, I thought we could maybe settle down. But she’s about your age so uh, I guess she wanted to be with a guy her age, because she started cheating with a guy at work about 3 months ago. What you witnesses was the after math of her telling me about it, us having words about it for about 20, 25 minutes, and then me wishing her well and us concluding.
“But you gave her 100k DOGE?”
“Yes that’s what she deserved.”
“But she cheated on you?”
“Yes but she’s young, she gets to make mistakes, it’s sort of natural that something like this would happen. I do skin care, you know, but it’s a different life in your 40s.”
“I have no idea man.”
“You will eventually, or you’ll die.”
“Yup, ok.”
“Look, 100k DOGE was a standard size for a Reddit tip back in the day, it was about a penny, maybe it could be like 50 grand soon, now it’s almost 10, maybe she can get an apartment with that, that’d be nice.”
“What if she sells it right away?”
“I hope she does,” Gus says.
“So hey, I don’t know if you’re in the right mindset now, but I bought a 10-strip from a hippy on Calle Florida, and I imagine it’s pretty weak? So I’m thinking we each take 5 and see what happens?”
“I suppose one is never too old to gamble on a 5-strip of dubious provenance.” Gus says, somewhat mutedly. “I ordered Mazzacote for dinner by the way, it’s a classic pizza place in the Montserrat neighborhood.”
“Isn’t that a slight hike from here?”
“Yes but there’s a special mode in UberEats where you can over-tip to get expanded delivery. I can order from a restaurant in Belgrano right now if I wanted.”
“Dude fuck restaurants in Belgrano, let’s get the classic pizza.”
They chat a bit about the performance in the sub-account and how he stacks the trades:
“I basically just place limit orders, and then I place orders to reload when those fill at like, 40–60% lower, and see what I get.”
“Classic, buy high and sell low, that’s brilliant.” Gus says. “I wish I had thought of that when I worked on Wall St.”
“Yesh and then I use the *fractals*, ok, like everything is fractal all existence is key to the entropy that seeded it in a sea of spiraling pattern.”
“Fractals, I know.” Gus says.
“And I put spot-buy orders to double down above those, and I have the API buy put options when those hit, so it’s like a cheap call.”
“Well it’d be a cheaper call if you bought the quarterly futures or something, look how much you paid in funding.”
“Oh funding, yeah, funding sucks, I pay that shit.” Nabil laments.
“Are you feeling funny?” Gus asks.
“No I feel nothing.”
“But this is a cliche, people taking drugs and then asking each other if they feel anything.”
“Hey man the scientific process finds its way into every aspect of life.” Nabil says.
“I’m feeling a little funny, I need to go sit down on the patio, you have to see this view buddy.”
“Ok,” Nabil shrugs.
Suddenly the fast sweeping view of the entirety of Puerto Madero, the Casa Rosada area, the Reserva Ecologico and the height of it all, gives Nabil a sudden vertigo panic.
“Oh shit man,” he grips a patio umbrella stand.
“What? Suicidal?”
“No!”
“Good! Takes a load off my mind I don’t have to worry about you liberating your ass off the guardrails.”
“I’m going back inside.” Nabil announces loudly to the air.
The buzzer is ringingly harshly, Nabil perceives this as a menacing spectre hiding in the walls, beckoning for attention, unrelenting in demand.
“It must be appeased,” he says.
“Hola?” he says.
“Hola buenos noches, llego su pedido de pizza.”
“Ok ya bajo.” (This is the amount of Spanish most well-off expats in Latin America need to learn on a strict survival basis.)
“I’m gonna get the pizza!”
“What?!”
“I said I’m gonna get the pizza.”
“Whhh-at?” Gus yells.
“I said, I’m gonna go downstairs, *right now*, use that elevator! Take the elevator down! Get the pizza!”
“Ok!” Gus yells back, in a totally genericized mid-atlantic accent.
Nabil grabs the $500 bottle of wine and takes a swig.
In the elevator Nabil begins to contemplate the level of engineering required to make a high-speed express elevator. He considers the supply chains, the educational institutions, he wonders, was this building constructed by Bechtel, the global engineering conglomerate with the Red Oceans logo that portends a fascist technocracy? Is the security system in this building rooted? Is there a network of fancy buildings in every developing country that feeds back to the Bechtel HQ in <checks notes> — he pulls out his phone, tries to get the google out, doesn’t work, no reception in the elevator.
He takes a calming breath.
The elvator opens, he stumbles out with a 180 pivot kind of backing away, slightly dis-oriented from the momentum displacement.
“That’s a bad vibes elevator.”
He looks at the conserge guys like, uh, what species are we again?
“Hola.” he says sheepishly.
“Tu pizza Señor.” the man is smiling, why is he smiling?
“Muy amable” Nabil says, carefully placing his palm under the flat of the pizza box, feeling its heat, he imagines himself like Naruto condensing the Rasengan, it’s all about mastering energy. As he balances the pizza and turns around, he realizes that all human bodies contain electromagnetic auras which are themselves engines fueled by industrially produced food, and in a sense all pizza is a Rasengan.
“Rasengan!” he shouts, before turning his head back, “discupleeee” he says to the consegerians, who chuckle and say “idiotas gringos!” under their breath.
He then places the pizza on the floor — “the cool marble tiling should make this easier to handle,” he thinks, and then comes back with the bottle of wine, “ustedes queiran algun vino que vale quinientos dolares?”
And they’re like “si, como no.” They have little plastic cups in the cubby drawer for drinking from the water cooler, and he pours them each $35 worth of wine and leaves the bottle.
He has a better experience in the elevator on the way back up, about halfway through he pulls out his phone and sees the google search returned with “Reston, VA” — “ah-hah!” he shouts.
As he crumps into the apartment, he shouts “pizzaaas heyaaa!” and then flops it over, the box opens, half the pizza is intact in a crumpled fold about a third is face-plant on the cement floor (clean, how clean?), and the other ~16.666% is concave, a little pizza horn.
Gus comes in, “oh man, what a mess!”
Nabil looks him in the eye.
Gus looks him back in the eye.
“Are we eating this pizza?” Nabil asks.
Gus says, “ we try to fold some of that cheese back, we cut off some parts, get the plates out, I can mix a salad, we have it with the wine.”
“I gave the wine away to the consegeria.” Nabil says.
“Oh cool,” Gus remarks, “I’ve got a few liters of Stella Artois in the frige as well.”
So they try to salvage the pizza and feed themselves.
“Good olives,” Nabil says.
“I told you it was a classic.”
Around 2:34am they smoke a joint to try and soften the edge of the wave cresting on the LSD and start talking about women.
“So,” Gus says, “we’re rich as shit.”
“Yes, yes we are.” Nabil concedes, “I guess I’m getting rich too now.”
“Yet we are bad at relationships with women.”
“Oh yeah, I just don’t want to have to touch someone and listen to them talk about their feelings.”
“Never had a girlfriend?”
“Once, in college, but she was dumb.”
“Did you finish college?”
“Nope, I dropped out after I made my first quarter million euros.”
“I finished college.” Gus says. “I went somewhere that people like to be ostentatious about by trying to pretend like they don’t want to say where, and they just say they went to school in City X, like who would go to New Haven if not to attend Yale?”
“Congratulations. Did it hurt when the senior investment bankers reamed you with 80 hour works weeks your first two years as an analyst?”
“Yes, but that bonus half a decade later was worth it. I was promoted after the Sr. trader on my desk committed suicide in 2008.”
“Right, right.”
“And I petitioned my MD to let me roll the profits from the delta-one desk into a proprietary long position and essentially sold vol, in an HFT sense, to fund an S&P long from the 700s.”
“I’m surprised they’d let you do that after the 2008 crisis.”
“The way I sold him on it, I promised him I’d maintain a 0-cost collar for all the notional net-delta in inventory and the declining vol. as the market rebounded both in implied and real terms essentially made this a solid methodology, also they introduced weekly SPY options a couple years into this. The sell was, this will make money for the vol desk whether or not this eats into my ultimate PnL, and I’m underwriting the consistency of the usual delta-one arb. And then in 2012 I started crossing flows with the Total Return Swaps desk and they promoted me again. And it was that year that I started buying BTC.”
“Damn, that’s cold.” Nabil comment.
“That’s how you succeed in business, you have to win people over and find the common synergies that make value-added deals possible, then you use those value-adds to underwrite you risk or cheapen your cost of capital or both.”
“Cost of Capital, heh, CoC.”
“That’s brilliant.” Gus says.
“So like, you’re so good at understanding men and how to get men to agree to power brokerings, but you’re bad at understanding women?”
“Well, she was 24, how can I really blame her for wanting to leave me for someone her age, I’m 42, 18 years; that’s right on the cusp isn’t it? I mean 25 year age gap, maybe, but it’s getting tacky. I don’t want to be like George Soros reaching for some poor model’s knee caps at 82, and Soros hasn’t even launched a good conspiracy in a while.”
“Are you like, sad at all?”
“Yes… I’m sad, but it’s a feeling. These feelings are preciously rare pieces of art created by combinations of our brains and our circumstances, you have to live in the feeling. I’ve gone through this too many times before to be devastated. I went through this losing my house *and* kids and fleeing Italy to avoid the taxes and the alimony. And if I hadn’t you know, the alimony was so high, perhaps I wouldn’t have a stack at all. I had to chose, between being a slave, paying 100k Euros a month, please, to see my kids? Extortion. So I chose the freedom of the stack, and in exchange I talk to my kids with shitty videocall reception. And then, you know, a 24 year old cheats on you is no big deal, it’s small stakes. It’s like if I had a million dollar liquidation or something.”
“I had a 720k liquidation.”
“Yeah well you suck at money management and that’s why you got alotta problems kid, you’re talented but you’re crap at knowing when to put it away and how much to bet. That’s why you only fornicate with sex workers buddy, it’s the same mentality.”
“I’m managing my risk of getting too close to someone, it’s a put option.”
“You do f with options.”
“I really do f with options.” Nabil says resoundingly.
“I think I’m going to start dating more age appropriate.” Gus says.
“Yeah dude, you do you.”
“But I’m tired of making ridiculous sums of money, what if DOGE goes to $1? What then? It blows my mind kid. I want to really *do* something.
“Like maybe dip out and get a change of scenery.”
“Well I do own this place. Took some profits in ’17.”
“You pay tax on it?”
“On that fiat that showed up in the AFIP’s database when I buy this place? Yes for sure. Don’t want to get the AFIP in your butt.”
“I always just rent.”
“Of course you do,” Gus says.
“I like it because I can Nomad around, like I only came here because I heard it was the best city for ho’s, and after lockdown ended, shitty time to be a nomad, but now that things are looking a little clearer I was thinking maybe Peru.”
“Peru is interesting.”
“Yeah so I googled ‘peru whores’ and read an article from Reuters or something about these sex workers that are like, trafficked, in bars in this town, it’s like a small city near the border with Brazil, it’s like the jungle dude, and they got a smaller economy right so the gold miners are it, and they wanna fuck, but they can’t afford to pay a full $50, you know it’s gotta be $5, $10, whatever, it’s a different economy. So they like, enslave these girls with debt man, they trick ’em outta the country side and kinda displace them. They get Bolivian and Brazilian girls from cross-border regions too, it’s like whatever you can do to displace someone, get them away from their support zone. So yeah, it like, put me off from going to Peru for ho’s I guess.”
“You think about where your money goes when you pay these girls around here?”
“I just like, assume they keep all of it.”
“Do you ever ask?”
“That’s not really my business?”
“No, it is literally the business you are pertaining to conduct in the social interaction, asking would be very reasonable.”
“Oh yeah, wow, I could have catalogued that, think about all the data. Shit, you know how like, some people keep their exes on Facebook? I coulda visualized that data man. I coulda made a website with like, a world map and color in where the % of freelancers to like, slaves are.”
“Yes but you’d still be sexually exploiting slaves in this process?”
“What are you Alfred Kinsey get me a beer bro.”
“What if we could use our money to put an end to sexual exploitation, would you be cool with that?”
“Psh, bro, we’re not, ok, we’re not going to end shit.”
“Yeah sure, it sounds really difficult and crazy right?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re one crazy motherfucker am I wrong?”
“I assume, like, some of these girls are single mothers, so yes, that’s accurate. You don’t comment on the c-section, I know that, it’s rude.”
“You’re pretty good at adapting to social cues huh?”
“I give myself a C, C+.”
“Aren’t you tired of just giving people a little revenue so they can continue to pay some parasite who is extorting them for an illegal debt?”
“Yeah, oh shit, bro this is giving me a creep right now, can we like change, the subject.”
“No, I’m not going to let you change the subject, I want you to commit with me right now, to ending sex slavery, somewhere, anywhere; ok this is your karma for all the sex worker patronage.”
“Dude my family’s Muslim what’re’you talkin to me about karma for?”
“Do you really want God to flay your skin in the fires of hell only to have you regrow the skin and then flay it off again, in a perpetual swap, like Prometheus and the Raven swapped bodily fluids, charging your soul funding forever and ever until the end of time?”
“Oh fuck man! Not that! Why’re you talking to me like this?”
“What was the name of that city from that article?”
“Madre de Dios? No, the capital of that region, it’s Puerto Maldonado.”
“Then it will our turn to be Bad Monks.” Gus says, “let’s — as the kids say — fucking go.”
“To Puerto Maldonado?”
“Yes!”
“To do what?”
“We’re going to pay for a sex worker debt jubilee.”
“Oh so we’re going to hand over large sums of money to criminal sex slavers?”
“It’s a first draft, you got any better ideas?”
“Dude, Gus, tell me, how much money do you really have?”
Gus smiles: “I am an early DOGE investor. And I made a few good cycle trades on BTC.”
“So… 8-figures? Am I managing all your stack?”
Gus smiles: “No.”
“Ok so my take on this, I have a pet neo-Keynesian model I’ve been making a spreadsheet, the aggregate sums of black market debt are used to create liquidity in System D because they lack formal sector debts, arbitration, courts, shit like that.”
“I worked sales at your age for Structured Products so you’re speaking my language.”
“If you could do a sort of Keynesian stimulus for System D you can foster alternative credit supply to grease the velocity of money in informal economies.”
“I bet they could use an additional industry besides the gold mining as well,” Gus notes, “perhaps… DOGE mining?”
“Man you are fucking insane, wat.”
“We can introduce the local economy to DOGE mining so it’s not just a one and done.”
“If we go, what should we do with all the cash?”
“Smoke hash?”
“Can I pass what’s left to you and you send me a BTC? I’ve really missed out in fiat.”
“Sure, why not.”
“Oh by the way you owe me like 7.5 million in Doge,” he pulls out his phone, “do you think you could pay met that now? It’s been bugging the hell outta me.”
“Of course,” and Gus excuses himself to his bedroom, where he presumably has 2FA and such, Nabil wonders about how a team might be able to shoot up the consegeria and compromise the elevator’s bio-metric scan to permit or deny access to the penthouse, then heist the guy for, how much now? Argentina has armed robbery teams, not as pro as Venezuelans and Colombians, those guys know how to excel at a sport.
Gus returns, “you want to gen a receive QR?”
Nabil pulls his phone out and holds it up to receive 7.5M~ USD worth of DOGE, and then smiles.
“Fuck, I’m a millionaire again.”
Gus grins, “feels good huh?”
“Yeah it’s like I’m stoned on very fragrant bud while coming down off LSD and sipping Stella on a penthouse rooftop in Puerto Mad fucking rolling on 8-figures soon just so I can be poorer than you still. Haha, fuck. I’m really a millionaire now.”
“Enjoy that feeling while it lasts kid.” Gus remarks, “it’s the best drug in the world and the first spike is the highest.”
“Thanks for the buzzkill dad.”
“Sorry, enjoy the buzz.”
Nabil takes his shirt off and approaches the edge of the balcony where he intuitively realizes that his fear of heights is due to a traumatic memory on the swing set when his father betrayed his trust in a simple, kinesthetic way leading him to fall.
“Fuck you dad!” he screams, “I’m fucking better than you!”
Gus laughs and retires.
Nabil holds his head in his hands as he stares out over the sea of lights, “holy fuck I feel like I’m about to jump through a travel montage.”
— —
The Hotel Centenario in Puerto Maldonado isn’t a four star hotel, but it does have 4.1 stars on Google.
“We should probably get an AirBnB as well to base up our operations.” Gus suggests. “The security in the hotel isn’t going to be as good as the security in a place where we have the key, plus the owner. Unless the owner is crooked we’d be ok.”
“On it.”
“I’m going to compose an email to the mayor… in my best español. You scraped the email?”
“Am managing it.”
“Buenos Tardes, hmm too formal? Te encuentro como filanthropista… no that makes me sound tacky.”
“Ok found a place, check it out” he spins the Macbook Air around, “you like?”
“A closed up apartment space, should fit our needs. Book it for 1 month.”
“We moving tomorrow?”
“No, we’re staying in the hotel as a decoy for the location of our cash and relevant private keys.”
“Oh damn, alright, smart. Shit man, wish I thought of that.”
“You will next time.”
“Ima go hit the pool.”
He swims in the aguas calientes, it’s comfortable, like the primordial fluid from which all life arose. He thinks about Evangelion references and looks over the balcony rails to the city, its builds dotted with trees, like a Bob Ross painting.
“We’re in the fucking jungle.” he says out loud. “yet it’s almost like a forest town back home.” (he’s saying all this in Dutch because he defaults to Dutch sometimes, but there are only so many languages in this thing)
He chills for a while, almost meditative, gets out, dries off, puts on some cheap flip flops and walks down the street to go pay for a $4 Lomo Saltado. The sun begins to set. For a minute he forgets they are in town to expose themselves to danger. Everything feels so sublimely quiet, like the earth is whispering under the wind, only now heard. The bite of a french fry with a chunk of meat and some rice kernels on the same fork, drizzled in some green or white or yellow-colored special mayo, those signature Peruvian sauces. He makes patterns with the colors in different geometric shapes, like a matrioishka doll or a mandala. The 3G connection they paid for is so poor he doesn’t want to surf social media. He just chews and looks out, at the physical world around him. He wanders into the gold trading district and buys araw-looking nuggets with some of that cash, Gus had informed him that he needed to purchase one.
When he comes back to the hotel Gus tells him to dress drab, he has purchased some used clothes from a local market. “I didn’t know you size so I got the skinny boy sizes.”
“Uh thanks.”
“It’s important that we don’t give away our position, so to speak, right away. And you’re a lot more Peruvian looking than I am. I can pass for an Argentine.”
“No I got it,” he stuffs his legs into the pants, “we taking a cab to this underground bordello?”
“I got a car rental,” Gus says.
It’s a 10 year old white Honda Civic.
Nabil looks out the window kind of unimpressed. Since the initial government anti-human trafficking raids, the prominent bar location on the outskirts of town has shifted. Nabil has been lurking forums on the dark web for extreme sex tourists, “I don’t want to be associated with these guys” — he had noted — and got the co-ordinates for a new bar further up a side-road, up the river, on the carretera Puerto Arturo, up to Otila, a mostly abandoned ghost town with only a few farmers still resident amidst a number of deserted shacks and husks of houses.
“The directions say we turn off here,” Nabil instructs, “the uh, Chongo should be a little building with a generator back here in the woods, near the river.”
“There’s always a real estate deal, no matter where you go.”
They drive through the dusty trailed offshoot from the offshoot road until an enshrouded path through the darkness, emptying into a gravel parking lot in a grotto opening out onto the river, which is reflecting the crimson of sunset. Gus parks.
“Are you sure you know what to say?” Nabil asks.
“You haven’t seen me really talk yet.”
They pull up, finding a little parking spot in the grass roughage at the edge of a line of trucks and old cars parked in similar random slants along the sides of the gravel. Kill the engine, kill the lights.
“Gus I’m so nervous right now, and I’ve been in plenty of brothel-type places man but this, this is fucking Deliverance.”
“Nabil, have you seen any of these movies.”
“No, I haven’t had time.”
“Just relax, we’re here to do business. We have the ultimate trump card, incentives.”
“That’s some libertarian bullshit man, they’re going to get pissed off at us and kill us.”
“No, you will hang back, observe, blend in as much as you can, low key, ok?”
“Ok, ok.”
“You’re my back-up, if I tap my nose three times like this… ok, that doesn’t mean I want cocaine, it’s not my thing, it means you go to the car and you turn it on, how are you at driving?”
“I’ve logged over 500 hours in Asseto Corsi.”
“Well the Honda isn’t gonna reverse like that but you know how to flip a whip.”
“Yeah pretty much,”
“Ok good, I should have checked on your PS4 credentials sooner; oh and Nabil?”
“Yeah?”
“Two beer max, 2nd beer only if we’re in there for more than 10, and keep your goddamned mouth shut wouldyaplease?”
“Ok ok.”
“Still nervous?”
“No, I’m good.” Nabil takes a deep breath.
“Let me scope it out and do the talking, I’ll try to ask for the manager.”
“Like it’s a Wendy’s or something?”
“Yes, like I’m trying to get in touch with a franchise owner in order to buy out a Wendy’s.”
“Ok, so this is just, no big deal really.”
“It’s a medium-sized deal.”
They crump out of the car, “do I go in first?”
“Yeah pretend you’re a miner.”
Nabil walks in ahead, the bouncer by the door looks him over and nods him through after a quick pat down. (Thank Jebus I left my phone in the hotel)
Walking in, the lighting is a neon cascade of purple and red, like a bug zapper, the fixtures are fairly bare in their furniture, except for a stapled print-out of a painting of a man setting off to sea against the left wall, and a raging heavy metal guitar solo from Will To Survive by Pantera.
(Are they Breaking Bad fans?) — he wonders — (are they… metalheads?)
“The Will to Suriiiiiiiveeeeeeee!!!”
He innocuously perches against the wall in the corner, not even trying to order a beer, like at school dances back in the day. Trying to soak in the furor of human conversation, women serving beers to dusty men in more worn clothes than these used ones, various lascivious gestures and reaches, fake affection, a little palm stroking at a far table, a girl snatches a man’s hat and puts it on her head to his mild consternation and bemusement, and… are those drugs? The air is pungent with grass, and there is a man sitting at the table to the right who is insufflating… yes, lines of cocaine.
“Oooh whaaaaat??” Nabil says to himself, behaving like a cartoon wolf who has smelled apple pie and thus begun to levitate.
“Hola, buenas noches!” a young woman approaches him a seat, “gustarias sentar para ser mas comodo?”
“Oh, si, seguro, ya, si.”
They sit down together.
“Gustarias empezar con algun cerveza? Tambien tenemos cigarillos de flores y ofrecemos coca.”
(I didn’t read about this) — “Yo queiro todo.”
She smiles, estimating the tip/commision in her head to some degree of granularity, “ya te traigo todo,” she gives his hand a slight squeeze, “gracias!”
“No, de nada!” he exclaims.
Gus enters the bar, (probably the bouncer thought he was a sort of white-ish Lima businessman who was out here to predate on young people recreationally, nice. That’s white privelidge.) — Nabil muses to himself.
(She touched my hand, but I didn’t feel too weird about it… I’m gonna get so much drugs right now… she looks kinda like a brown Anna Kendrick… this place is kinda sick, like it’s fucked, but it’s awesome!)
The woman comes back with a liter bottle of Cusquena (the good kind, unpastuerized) and a joint between her lips, she cracks the beer, lights the joint, takes the first puff and shotguns it into his eager face.
“Encantado” he says. She then pulls a small baggie of blow out of her pocket and unties it, carefully laying out a small anthill on the flat wood.
“Tienes tarjeta? No preocupes, podes confiarme.”
He inhales, “um, yeah sure, porque?”
“Para cortarlo.”
“Ahh si, ok,” he reaches into his pocket and procures a maxed out ING credit card, then takes a swig of beer while she chops up lines of blow.
“Pero cuando yo digo ‘queiro todo’,” he explains, “queira pedir como una onza de weed y una pelota de coca.”
She laughs, “tienes que cuidarse! Es un poco demasiado por una noche.”
“No no, para despues.”
“Ahh, bien, eres mas saludable entonces. Si ya te consulto los precios.”
He hands her a crumpled wad of 200 Sol bills, “Quedate el cambio.”
She’s somewhat exasperated by the cash but quietly puts it in her pocket and goes to retrieve the wholesale purchases.
He rubs his hands together while drawing deep on the joint, licking his lips as he puts it on the ash tray, rolls up a bill and goes for that first line.
“Ay yay yay yay!” he says with the rancor of a school boy, before taking another line in the second nostril.
“Whoo! I feel… like a billion DOGE right now. Hoo hoo hoo huhuhuhuhuu.”
The woman returns, this time with a brown paper bag, and no change, as advised.
“Mas bienes!” he says, almost clapping, he rolls the brown paper bag open and rummages around, “me has hecho el hombre, mas feliz, en todo el mundo.”
She laughs, “biennn, compartamela,” and she takes the roach from the ash and puffs a bit, getting off her feet, a bit relaxed.
“Yo soy, uh, Nabil.”
“Es un nombre muy raro.”
“Yeah what’s your name?”
“Yo soy Julieta Luisa.”
“Ima call you JuLu.”
“Si me han llamado asi en me pueblo.”
“Oh cool, donde esta?”
“Una hora y tanto debajo la carettera.”
“Roots, totally, quiere un line?”
“No yo no tomo coca.”
“More for me then!” he giddily takes the third line, “asi que es una chica como Usted haciendo… en un lugar como esto?”
“Trabajando… divirtiendome.” she nudges her knee and thigh up against his.
Nabil is not used to continous skin-to-skin contact, the nervous system sensation doesn’t fit into the right filing cabinet back at HQ. He is suddenly frozen, unsure of what to do, does he peel his knee back? Does he stay still? What if he sweats? It’s hot in the jungle.
“Y te tratan bien aca?” he asks.
“Oh si, super bien…” she makes a face like the witch in Wandavision, even though JuLu has perhaps not seen Wandavision, “pero, tu eres Peruano? No? Extranjero? De donde eres?”
A few wandering eyes come to make milliseconds contact with Nabils nervous rolling eyes.
He pull up to her ear and whispers, “Yo soy cambiero, no minero. ”
“Pero que cambias, dolares por soles?
“Yo cambio en DOGE. Soy de Hollanda, no queiro parecer raro.”
“Mmm hmm, bueno ya pareces bastante rato a mi,” she pushes his shoulder teasingly, his personal space alarms are going off, then subsiding, in an awesome wave, “pero que haces aca?”
“Me amigo y yo estamos aqui para salvar chicas atrapadas.”
Someone by the closest corner watching the room turns to glance his way.
“En seriooo?”
“Yeah basically.”
“Y quien ya has salvado?”
“Nadie, queres ser la primera?”
“Hah, nadie? Que chibolo pata!”
“Yo estoy en serio, tienes algun dueda aca?” he says while untying the top of the large coke bag and scooping it with a table knife.
Her face dims the theatrics lights, her smile cools, “si, ya debo mas de dos mil dolares.”
“Eso no es mucha plata,” he says.
“Para mi, si.”
Suddenly the guitar lead in from The Ace of Spades come on the spakers.
“Oh shit!” Nabil jumps “da na nanananananan Nah Nah Nah!” he turns to scoop a big load of coke onto his knife and takes a big scoop, “Nah nah nah! dndndndndndnn nah nah nah!”
He loads another scoop and vaults towards a miner who is being seduced into a fourth bootle of beer, he briefly sees the knife plunging towards him but Nabil then turns it sideways, unfolding his other hand beneath to make an offer, the man’s eyes light up when he realizes this knife is indeed not there to kill him, but to dose him with free drugs. He then offers a bump to the Fichera.
“If lika nha gamble I’ll give you what you say, win some, lose sum thatsthe game for me!”
He faux-Matrix falls backwards and then grips an invisible air guitar to belt out the next two bars with frenetic fingering. Astonished miners and Ficheras look on with bemusement but then he motions them all over and stars offering knife bumps in a circle that slowly begins to turn into a moshe pit as the men get increasingly coked up.
“The only god I need is The Ace of Space! The Ace of Spade!”
And then the Ficheras start to sing along “The Ace of Spade! The Ace of Spade!”
Julu stars laughing hysterically and settles in to watch from the corner.
The moshe pit begins to grow unruly, a man accidentally elbows a woman, then another man, who elbows back, a fight begins. The song is cut before it can finish, while the bouncers break up the fight.
One of them signals to JuLu with a waving motion, she grabs Nabil by the arm and says, “perdon, pero el gerente quire hablar contigo, al fondo” the bouncers looking on sternly. He looks over to Gus who looks back solemly, he taps his lips, clearly disapponted that things aren’t remotely going anywhere near to the plan.
JuLu escorts him down a dark hallway, he passes a large bunk room where rickity wood-frame beds with dry(?) cots dot every half a meter. “Don Martin no es tan malo…” she says, unconvingly. He quickly notes two women resting amongst them before being ushered on to the very back room, the manager’s office.
“Hola, buenos noches,” an older man with a white beard says in greeting.
“Buenas,” Nabil says.
“Tu eres el comprador de alta mercaderia este noche, asi por eso estamos extendiendo un entiendamiento, pero empezaste una pelea.”
“No senor, estaba Ace of Spades… y mucha coca senor, un poco demasiado.”
“Ah si, Ace of Spades, que buen cancion.” he says with oddly chilling affirmation. “Y Julieta, no manejaste bien este situacion.”
“Mil disculpas,” she says, a little scared, a little evasive.
Nabil attempts to change the subject, but his throat seems to be lodged in his… throat.
“I — yo, y-yo queiro,” he begins.
“Si dime Joven.” the man says curtly.
Nabil thinks: (I’m fucking richer than this guy) and he pulls out the gold nugget he bought earlier in the day.
“Yo quiero pagar la dueda de esta senorita y llevarla.”
“Oh, y porque?” he glances dismissively at the nugget, then gives it a second look. “Cuanto pesa?”
“Son 55 grames.”
“Y encontraste una monejita de oro tan grande tu mismo?” Don Martin’s eyebrow goes up.
“To prometo,” he says, looking at JuLu and then back to the Don, “no estoy lavando dinero.”
A harsh tension lingers for three heavy beats, until Don Martin bursts out laughing.
“Ah si porque yo tengo que cumplir con las normativas regulatorios!” he laughs harder, “ok, Joven, tirame el oro, vamos pesarlo. Suavecita, por favor.”
JuLu walks over and procures a gram weight from the shelf, placing it on the desk.
“Cinquenta seis punto quatro tres gramos, bien,” Don Martin smile.
“Ahora esta chica no tiene asunto aca, su familia, nada de eso, todo seran… uh, quedatos solos, tienes que olvidar su cara.”
Don Martin makes a peek-a-boo eye covering with his hands, drops them, and says “de quien?”
Nabil and JuLu walk out of the bar to the parking lot, “so, you want to get some food?” he asks.
Gustavo follows shortly after, “let’s get out of here.”
“Gus this is JuLu, JuLu this is Gus, es un amigo.”
“Hola, Ju… Lu?”
“Julieta Luisa.”
“Claro, si, es un gusto Julieta.”
“Igualmente.” she says politely.
“See, es un caballero.” Nabil remarks.
They drive back to town in a soft quietude.
“Queires que te dajamos en algun calle?” Gustavo asks.
“No, me Papa vive mas campo.”
“Bueno, entonces vamos darte una cama propria en el hotel.”
“Where will I sleep?”
“We’re going to sleep head to heel.”
“I am sleeping fully clothed.” Nabil declares.
“Oye, Nabil?” JuLu asks, “que puede hacer por un trabajo ahora que no tengo eso trabajo?”
Nabil smiles, “no hay necesidad de trabajar.”
“Que me hablas?”
“You want to know why?”
“Cuentame.”
“Because, I am going to give you a million dollars.”
“Ay noo, es mucho dinero para aceptar.”
“How about, a million doggy coins.”
“Que es un doggy coin?”
“Es una criptomoneda.”
“Ahhh, que chevere pata, no puedo creer.”
“Si pero tenemos que comprar telephonos para cargar la billetera.”
“Ok,” she smiles, “bueno, no me gustaba trabajar todovia…” and she looks out the window wistfully, at the twilight in the trees.
“Hey Nabil,” Gus interjects, “you threw a helluva wrench in my plan.”
“I know, sorry, I get really zany around the gak Gus, you know how it is.”
“That’s the thing I didn’t account for, I thought it would just be a beer + sex joint, but they got a lot of drugs to sell you also.”
“Honestly, it exceeded my expectations!”
“Also you passing enough and buying us an informant’s services, helping your first major beneficiary, sizing the guy up, and you paid with the gold nugget!”
“Yes, I did indeed. You were right, I had to reach for the biggest one I could find.”
“Gold is so stupid,” Gus chuckles, “our cover may well still be intact. And this thing has layers to it. There’s some kind of syndicate thing going on here, what was the manager like?”
“I felt like, he’s been in the business a long time, and he’s maybe only a reseller?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because wholesale producers don’t sit in shitty broom-closet offices in generator-powered like, abandoned farmhouses outside of ghost towns? And he’s older. His seating posture suggested to me someone who doesn’t move around outside much, his hands were soft, when I looked him in the eye for my count of 2.5 seconds he looked away at 2.3, 0.2 seconds before I would have, hence, he’s a minor Don, a small business man, he’s educated, he’s experienced, yes they maybe have killed people in the human trafficking-slash-pimping game, but he’s only in the drug game as a value-added concession for his primary business. And frankly if he had accumulated capital properly he wouldn’t be trying to secure a retiremen by issuing illegal junk bonds to himself on the backs of people like my friend JuLu here.”
She continues looking out the window.
“I got a meeting with the Mayor tomorrow.” Gus says.
“They got back to you so fast.”
“Yes…” he notes, “maybe a little too fast.”
— —
Part 2
— —
Breakfast in the Hotel Centenario is widely loved by those who stay, but most of all when one has been sleeping on a cot and eating fried yucca and banana with rice and beans for most breakfasts. JuLu loads up the tray, there’s the eggs, the fruit, the pastry, and most of all, the toasted bread with jam and cheese.
“Look at her go,” Nabil says, “she can really eat.”
“You’d eat like that too.”
“I *am* going to eat like that, she knows how to do a hotel buffet after a wake-and-bake.”
“Come one, you’re smoking out our beneficiary here? That’s not very wholesome.”
“Si pero es riquissima.” JuLu adds.
“She picks up on English FYI.”
“Julietta, como es tu Inglais?” Gus asks.
“Mm, prefiero no hablar.”
“Verguenza?”
“No, asco, yo soy Latinamericanista. No quiero esa idioma. Pero todavia… he aprendido.”
“Reminds me of a Sufi I met in Jerusalem,” Gus reminsces, “who begrudgingly spoke Hebrew.”
“Fue un bueno?”
“He sold me some hashish.” Gus replies.
She laughs, “si eso me gusta. Una vida religiosa.”
Nabil comes back with a matchingly overstuffed plate and begins to dive in.
“So today I’m going to talk with the Mayor, and I’m going to get us checked in to the AirBnB beforehand.”
“Good order,” Nabil says.
“Yo quiero ir a la casa de mi papa,” JuLu interjects, “tengo que ver me hijo.”
Nabil chokes on his bacon a little, “oh cool, you have a kid.”
“Si y no le he visto por 3 meses.”
“Of course, Nabil will take you, you two should go shopping ahead of time, take the car.”
“Si me gustaria comprar cosas por la casa.”
“Should I get any particular supplies?” He asks.
“Yes, get as many cheap android phones as you cans, half with SIM, half without SIM.”
“Niice, ok,” he turns to his new friend, “you ready to shop hardcore?”
“Siiii!” she exclaims.
“Where’s the mall around here?”
— —
The mall has the roof of an old train station, metal beams streak across the barrier between the first and fractioanal second stories, with shops encased in little framed chambers in an open bazaar.
They pass by candies and nuts, dried fruits, kid’s backpacks (“me hijo solo tiene 2”) which they pass for the kid’s clothing section, start there. Ten pairs of pants, ten shirts, two pairs of new shoes and another ten or fifteen pairs of socks, which Nabil uncermoniously elbow swoops into a plastic back as JuLu holds it open. Then they get to the adult’s backpacks and go ahead and buy some for the logistical operation to come. The cell phone store, completely cleaned out. He counts out 11.500 Soles and passes it over, the woman laughs as she begins to close for the day, and they take turns hauling boxes out to the car.
“Ok, basics accomplished, now for the fun part.” He rips open one of the boxes and loads a new phone up, as they walk back to buy fun things. They pass by the women’s clothing botiques, “go nuts” he says. She starts to have fun like she hasn’t in a long time, but then stops.
“Son mucha cosas, estas seguro?”
“Here I’ll take it out as a cash advance against the million Doge I’m about to send you. You are spending your own money right now.”
The thought occurs to her, and she animates to go pay for all 7 items she’d picked out.
They stop by the food court, a more open spacing of booths near what used to be the center of the station. He orders a fried pig sandwich and she gets a cuyo on a stick. He tries to shows her the wallet app he’s installed on her phone, but is utterly flummoxed when he witnesses her bitting into the back of what appears to be a murdered pet Guinea Pig, burnt alive. He then regroups his composure and explains that this contains private keys to all the money.
“You can lose everything if you lose the phone.”
“No me suena como tan buen dinero entonces.”
“No, no, it’s the future of money, turst me,” he stutters, then frustrated, he downloads the FTX app.
“Ok me voy crear una cuenta para ti con FTX para que quedes tu DOGE ahi y se puede dollarizarlo cuando queres en que porciones queres, y recibir intereses.”
“Dollarizarlo el doggy coin?”
“Si, esa, yes.” He passes the phone over to her so he can focus on the sandwich, “put in your email and a password, that you will remember.”
“Hay que confirmar el email.”
‘yuyu” he says with his mouth full.
“Ok, me parece…” she taps her login again, “ya ok, estoy… es muy obscuro… hay un monton de simbolos.”
“Yeah, FTX has a lot of stuff on it,” he takes the phone back, somewhat rudely, and proceeds to load up the wallet. “This is your address, it’s a mathematical refactor of the private key that controls the money.”
“No entiendo.”
“It’s like a clave, that you can do math on, and you get a thing you can share, the address, and then you can make a QR code of it. In this case FTX has the key. It’s run by Sam Bankman Fried, he’s a cool dude.”
“Ook.”
“But you can also hold your own key on your phone, and not trust him, but if you lost the phone that’s it. You could also make a paper back-up of the key.”
“Mmm, no…”
“No what?”
“No se que en la chucha estas hablando.”
“Fuck someone really needs to make a better product for basic saving and money management,” he looks down at the crowded screen and the QR code, “ok mirra solamente tienes que quedarlo en FTX y venderlo por BTC cuando queres… y para vender a Soles podes usar Buda punto com, o BitInka pues…”
“Ok, para venderlo y retirar a una cuenta bancaria?”
“Asi!” he says proudly. “Pero moneda nacional es debil, y van a querer impuestos, si traigas mucho.”
“Ok, yo me tendre que abrirme una cuenta bancaria de nueva, me han cerrado la ultima… pero estoy listo.”
“Para que?”
“Tu me digas tonto! Para recibir la criptomonedas.”
She holds her phone up, he holds up his, loads the tx in the wallet, turns his phone to the side like a gangster holds a gun, the two QR codes kiss, first awkardly, then gently, the square frame locks into perfect alignment and a beep goes off, the most beautiful and important beep ever heard.
“Wow,” he says, “this is such a vibe.”
“Pero, cuanto es un millon de doggy coins?”
“It’s like, right now, like fifty or sixty thousand dollars.”
“Y cuanto es eso en soles?”
“Like, un poco menos de 200.000.”
“Chucha de dios!” she grabs his hand in shock.
“Yes, getting rich is a such a vibe, yes. Much feels.” he says, not minding the contact.
“Con este, me pude ir a Pune con me hijo para estudiar medicina como enfermera.”
“Yes! That’s a move. And this will go up too.”
“Como estas tan seguro? No debo vender?”
“No, venderte unos miles de dolares para tener efectivo, ok, pero vamos a la luna!” he shouts, attracting undue attention from chicharron enthusiasts.
“A la luna?” she asks?
“One of these days JuLu! Right to the moon!”
After lunch they stumble onto an Anime Merch store.
“Ohh they’ve got the Eva Series!” Nabil exclaims.
“Ah si yo me gusta las tarjetas de YuGiOh. Hace mucho tiempo los jugaba con me Papa.”
“You like anime? That’s awesome!”
“Si, y me encanta la Asuka, esa es me tipa de perra.”
“Yes, very good,” he turns to the store operator “vamos comprar todo en inventario en las ventanas por favor” and he counts out another seven thousand Soles and buys all the top-like merch.
Gus texts him, asking him for a pick up at city hall. He text’s back “k” and a location share pops up.
“Pero tenemos que ayudar mis amigas en el Chongo.”
“Damn you put it like that way, living in a Chongo sounds bad, it’s not a bordello which sounds kind of confomfortable.”
“Si estabamos viviendo alli en condiciones basicos. Levantamos a las 12 or la 1 despues de cerrer y limpiar el bar y los cuartos de sexo, dormimos a las 5 y medio o 6.”
“That’s an unsatsifying amount of sleep, I like to sleep 9 hours.”
“Si a mi tambien… bueno y limpiamos y cocinamos la comida por el dias entre las 2 y las 7 para empezar trabajando a las 8.”
“Damn they make you clean and cook too?” they walk out towards the car with their toys and clothes.
“No es que queremos vivir digno, y asi hay que mantener la vivienda y preparar comida saludable. Trabajamos en equipo para hacer eso, si no las mas joven.”
“Yeah.. are there minors working there?”
“Si. Hay Pamela, hay Belinda.”
“Are there any internationally trafficked girls there, like from Brazil?”
“Si. Márcia y Belinda son de Brazil, hablan Portugeas entre los dos… y creo que Alicia es de Bolivia.”
“Ishouldstopaskingquestions — does Don Martin ever order his muscle to hit anyone?”
“Noo… bien una vez se pego a una chica que estaba muy, inquieto. Pero se cambio su comportamiento y no paso de vuelta.”
“Uh huh, and uh… Isa, Moses and PBUH… have they ever uh, killed anyone?”
“En me tiempo alli, no. Pero solo estuvio trabajando unos meses todavia.”
They pull out on the main stretch of road towards the municipality building.
“And how long have they been selling cocaine?”
“Es que siempre vendemos algun mota pa fumar pero la coca solo viene en ondas.”
“But more frequently?”
“Es que, estaba algunos camioneros tambien que vinieron como clientes… pero.”
“Could be doing business as well, yes.”
“Es que estamos justo en el autopista inter-oceanico. Y tambien hay mucha cultivacion dentro de Madre de Dios.”
They pull up to city hall.
Gus walks out, dressed well, he waves and climbs into the back.
“Vamos al campo!” he announces.
Nabil drives along, JuLu tries to plug in her address-less home location via surfing Google Earth and zooming in near the closest roads.
“Did you all eat?”
“Yeah but we got a lot of candied peanuts and stuff like that.”
Gus gracious accepts the snacks, “I skipped lunch to meet the mayor.”
“Cool dude?”
“Very, former radio personality.”
“Oh wow, it’s like going on a podcast.”
“Yes, it was like a debate format that he didn’t realize I was putting him on for.
“Oh?”
“Yeah I told him I’m willing to make a large purchase of municipal bonds should he want to issue them.”
“Ok… like… what figures?”
“Big, doesn’t matter — I told him that my ESG requirements from the firm I represent, Futures Capital, needed to know that Puerto Maldonado’s city budget goes toward stronger anti-human trafficking measures.”
“Oh shit son, did he sweat.”
“No he played right along and we had a great conversation about sex workers rights and policy nuances.”
“I’m telling you Gus, that scum sucking son of a bitch is fucking in on it!”
“Quien, el alcalde?”
“Right?!” Nabil implores.
“Puede ser, no se.”
“You didn’t meet him Nabil, I think… maybe he’s clean.”
“Ok far be it for me to defame someone I’ve never met!”
“Maybe he’s guilty of not doing enough?” Gus suggests.
“Right so did he chomp at your Fake-Business bait? Did he indicate how much he’s willing to do for that kind of money?”
“Yeah, we talked about a hundred million sol per year budget just to fight human trafficking.”
“Mmmm, es cholo.” JuLu says.
“What’s that?” Gus implores.
She looks at him through the rear view and deigns to say in English: “He will keep the money.”
“Hmmm, who can we trust in this town? Besides our dear guide Julieta here.” Gus ponders.
“Hey JuLu do you like, look I don’t wannta ah, you know stereotype, but we are in the Amazon rainforest right now?”
“Si, Madre de Diso es una maravilla.”
“Yes yes, and… do you happen to know any shamanic guides who can get us ayahuasca?”
“Hmmm, si yo puedo arreglar algo. Hay una mujer que me entregaba.”
“Love it, yes, multi-class doula/shaman yage trip.”
The day begins to wane in a slow-motion light show of sunsets-over-canopies, as they pull up to a farm house a few clicks off the highway, about 120 clicks down the road.
“Mama!” a little boy shouts, toddling forward with a running start, almost falling over.
“Maximo!” she runs to her child, grabbing him by the shoulders and lifting him up. “Te queria muchissimaaa!!!”
“Mama, donde fue?”
“Para conseguir dinero mi hijo.”
The child begins sobbing, she holds him over her shoulder, patting him on the back, looking back with a slightly guilty face.
“Huh, women are people.” Nabil observes.
JuLu’s dad walks out to greet them, Gus introduces themselves and begins to explain. Nabil just sits in the car, thinks about smoking a pre-roll he’d made, feeling out of it.
“Nabil!” she beckons, the first time he’s heard her say his name directly, he rolls down the window.
“Oh hey.”
“Vamos para preparar la cena.”
He ambles out of the car into the house, a cinderblock 1 story, two room + 1 bath construction similar to many built in the highlands, or here, at the end of the lowlands. The looming altitude of steepes ahead that block the path to Cusco province, is just barely visible over distantly cut treetops.
Having seen plenty of Villas in Buenos Aires, he’s not surprised by the edifice so much as the kitchen conditions. A window made of plastic tarp looking out, a huge gas cannister next to the stovetop, fueling it, like it’s just out there.
“Vas a ayudarme?” she asks.
“Oh ok, tell me what.”
And they muddle through helping to prepare a salad, while outside the father and Gus talk about his farming operation over a quincho grilling fish.
Over dinner the father explains, “cuando se murio la Mama, Juli tendre que empezar tomando mas responsabilidad, asi se hace voluntario para buscar trabajo en el cuidad.”
Nabil looks at JuLu like, wtf have you been telling your dad?
She gives him a Jonah-Hill-at-the-Oscars gesture.
“Do you think her cancer had anything to do with the pollution from gold mining in the river fish?” Gus inquires as politely as possible, while also eating such and such fish.
“Si, puede ser,” the man says somberly.
Nabil does not want to bite into his food, he imagines a high PPM of mercury in each flake of flesh, he imagines it saturating his blood stream.
“Pero este pez me saco del otro rio!” he exclaims.
Gus has a hearty laugh with him, “bueno, es super rico.”
Over dinner Gus explains that he is delivering Helium routers and has ordered a Lima based company to come install photovoltaic systems on the premesis. JuLu’s dad, Juan, ok, his name is Juan, offers to show him around the neighborhood and help him organize the solar installations for others.
They sleep on sleeping bags on the floor, except JuLu, who sleeps in the bed in the other room with her kid.
“We can order some furniture too.” Nabil suggests in the dark.
“Go to sleep Nabil.” Gus remands.
Nabil has a lot of trouble going to sleep. He gives up after twenty minutes, goes to the car, smokes half a J and manages to fall asleep in the fully reclined passenger seat.
— —
An actual rooster wakes him up.
“Is that a rooster? w t f”
He stumbles out of the car, towards the house, looking around at a sweeping plain of sunrise as it dots the farmhouses nearby. The Interoceanic Highway, seems merely intra-regional, and humble, a truck goes by every few minutes, a quiet pace. The incongruity of the truck and the treelines all around them, reminds Nabil of the crow bar painting in that one episode of the Simpsons, when you think Moe is going to reach for a crowbar as a threat, but it’s actually a painting of crows in a bar.
“Incongruous af” he says to himself.
Inside everyone is already up, Juan is frying up a quick churassca to go with the cheese that they’d purchased the day before. The refrigerator is well-stocked with things Julu grabbed at the market, which Nabil had barely noticed.
“Pan con queso,” she says, sliding a plate across the table to an empty seat.
“Oh I love bread with cheese,” he says.
“We were just talking about the shaman, sha-woman? She’s been a friend of the family for a long time.” Gus then sips his hot tea quietly from a drinking tin.
“Celestina se llama, ella es como otra madre para me.”
“Oh that’s cool. And she’s going to hook us up with the yage? Do we just pay in cash or maybe she’d accept DOGE?” He says with half a mouth full.
“No es digno ofrecerla dinero direcamente.”
“Ah ok, can we offer here one of these Evangelion toys?”
JuLu’s son, Maximo, is playing with an EVA-series figure.
Nabil wanders over, “hey, you want to know how to really play with these?”
He then takes the Eva Unit 1 figurine out of the box and orchestrates the cataclysmic battle that ends the world (spoiler alert) from Eva Rebuild 2.22:
“Kyou no hi wa sayounara Mata au hi made!” he sings in photographically rehearsed Japanese. The kid thinks the whole thing is hilarious.
Around noon the ayahuascera comes by, they offer her an Eva Unit 1 with the Lance of Longinus, plus some fresh picked lemons from a bush in the backyard, chocolate covered peanuts (“pretty good, pretty pretty good” Nabil says when they are assembling the items and decided to include the candy), a Medium-sized Deribit t-shirt that Nabil had earned by over-trading his account in prior years (“tienes que poner algo unico” JuLu had advised).
Celestina, clad in traditional Shipibo garb, arrives precisely fifteen minutes later than expected, kind of like how a wizard or a dealer is always exactly on time.
JuLu pays her respects, they talk amongst themselves for twenty full minutes while the guys hang back, wondering about protocols of introduction between cultures. Muchos consejos are exchange between the two women. Then the extranjeros are introduced, the gifts presented. Nabil tries to explain to the shawoman that Evangelion is a saga about spiritual transformation, but also depression? Celestina explains that this is precisely what the ayahuasca is for, it is like the LCL filling the lungs enabling a 100% sync ratio between Eva and Pilot, which is the ego.
“Oh damn JuLu your Ayahuascera is a real Otaku.”
To prepare for the ceremony, they drive up a hill overlooking the river, near Celestina’s home. A winding path ends in a dirt cul de sac, a lone tree hammock dots the corner of the property. Vast sweeping views of the forest canopy and the river, in one direction, and the steepes of the Andes mountains from behind. Celestina explains that the river would be dammed right now if they had not mounted a resistance.
“What’s wrong with that?” Nabil asks, “cheap electricity.”
“Rompe la balancia en los sendimentos y la ecologia de la selva.” JuLu explains.
“Oh I got a D on that report on silt when I was in 7th grade, my dad kicked my ass for it.”
Gus asks Celestina what path to development could occur for the people of the reason without the power of the water.
Celestina answers: “el poder del cielo”.
Gus goes: “te gusta el energia solar?”
She smiles: “lo que pone menos molestia a la tierra.”
Gus says: “there is a lot of e-waste after 30–40 years but you can ship that out of the region.”
“El trabajo tuyo puede ser para calcular esos cosas, y me trabajo es abrir sus ojos.”
“Third Eye Blind,” Nabil comments.
As the ceremony begins, Celestina’s young daughter comes out in a traditional Shipibo garment and douses everyone’s heads in wreaths of tobacco smoke.
Nabil gets a whiff, “you can tell there’s no arsenic in this.”
JuLu give his hand a swift tap.
The Ayahuascera unscrews an emptied Pepsi bottle with the adhesive for the plastic label still clinging to the cynlinder like a pox. The yage has a thick, slightly syrupy text, dark purple like fresh beeswax, and a taste that can’t be beat. The little girl passes them each the cup and they partake by throwing it back in quick shots, to avoid dwelling on the flavor. Everyone is equipped with a water bottle and a vomitus bucket. The afternoon sun begins to draw shadows, the all meditate quietly going into the come up. One by one, they feel it hit, it begins to envealop them in a cocoon of mental energy straight from the Shakti-Cosmic Serpent-Pacha Mama TV Broadcasting Station located in the base of our pineal glands.
Then the raging supernova blast from within, the activation of a tiny gland that resonates throughout all the body, their nervous systems inflamed with sensation like the CG people in a Tool video, getting hardcore made-love-to by GOD all the way down to the base of the spine — riotious orgasmic internal shouting, endless inward spiralling. Nabil begins to envision astrophysics at the macro-scale of the entire universe, Gus begins to envision the earth in its ages, JuLu thinks of her son and his future, and of her dead mother, and *her* dead mother before her, and the fractal recursion of wombs from which she now proceeds. The Ayahuascera begins to chant, she flicks alcoholic, spice-infused Florida Water over the participants. After listening to the chant for a while, Nabil begins to chant back. He recites an old Sufi prayer in Arabic that he had photographically memorized one night on the internet, when he was obsessed with Sufis for a week.
Celestina, not one to impose a mono-cultural ceremonial experience — because she’s a pro shaman who understands human energy —begins to guide the other participants to feel no shame over their own voices. She taps Gus on the shoulder re-assuringly, he begins to chant a Rosary, even though he hasn’t said a Catholic prayer in a great, long while. And then she taps JuLu on the shoulder, and she starts making up Shipibo-sounding phonics to chant along. After a few minutes of this, the cacaphony of their voices melds, Gus gives up on the Rosary and is now interspering lines from Hail Mary to a bass-tone Kazach-style throat warble.
“Madre de Dios, reza por nosotros pecadores… whauuuuuuuughhhhhhhhh… ahora y en la hora de nuestro muerte… whuahhhhh”
And Nabil has given up on reciting Arabic and begins to flat down a respectable baritome: “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
And JuLu gives up on reciting any known words in the culture she is supposed to have inherited, and begins a soft and ligint alto-soprano: “oooooooooooooiiiiioooooooiiiiioooooooiiiiiiooooooooo”
And then, guided by the cues of the Shaman, they all join hands and close in in their meditation circle, gripping each other, taut with the balance of their pulls, like three colors of quark fusing into a proton at the birth of the universe, they syncopate their voices into a column of harmony.
Holding notes for several minutes, exhausted for breath, the Shaman then guides them to separate and return to individual meditation. The sun is beginning to droop into evening. Celestina performs for another 30 minutes with various chants and figuring she got her Deribit t-shirt’s worth, leaves them to their trips out in the front yard. When Nabil vomits, she notes the noise and steps out to check on them, then figures it’s fine. He takes some water.
“You have to use prana yama breathing,” Gus says, “to manage the nausea.”
Nabil tries deep breaths in and deep breaths out, and it buys him temporary relief from the periodic surges of nausea, but he is again overwhelmed.
“He broke the seal,” Gus comments.
“Si cuando vomita la primera vez, puede abrir la puerta a vomitar todo el session.”
“I’m fukken hardcore,” Nabil whispers to nobody before sipping some water, keep keeps sipping to quiet the acidity in his stomach, but really he’s just washing the bowl before the next rinse. He vomits again, the others focus on their own trips.
About an hour later, Nabil is mostly done vomiting, figuring 5 times ought to do it.
“Hey Gus?”
“What?”
“How is this region supposed to mine corn if there’s no dam?”
“I look out over this sunset and imagine a future where this place is developed, high rises, high-tech industry, and I thought this was a good idea, but now…”
“Este no es civilizacion,” JuLu adds, “este es una colonia contra la selva.”
“We have to find a middle path Nabil, we can’t encourage these people to dive into economic booms and population booms and contribute to the destruction of the rainforest environment.”
“Economic development is really complicated!” Nabil notes.
“Nabil, I keep seeing my mother.”
“Ah that’s heavy… I should email my mother.”
“She was a lot younger than my father, my father was 52 when I was born, she was 26.”
“Yes, that’s how they do it in Long Island.”
“I think I’m fashioning all my relationships based on my childhood imprint.” Gus observes.
“That’s heavy bro!”
“I think I’m here because I see my mother in sex workers.”
“Me mama no esta…”
“My great-grandfather was born in a tent!”
“Me abuelo tambien.”
“We’re not so far apart.” Nabil says to her.
“We can all be family together, we can choose to be family.” Gus adds feverishly.
“What if we start a cult, like a sex cult? We could refactor the social attitudes around sexuality while simultaneously getting legal shelter for the sex work on the religious freedom grounds, and making it a business, but some kind of like, adaptive, plausible version of the Labor Theory of Value is built into the morality of the cult, so it’s fair.” Nabil asks.
“Nah.” Gus says.
“La tema no es que los hombres queiran o si pagarian por sexo, es la mineria. Falta dinero pe.”
“At a marginal level, it’s just that panning for gold is the most exciting semi-accessible game in town for uneducated people.” Gus adds.
“But that’s only because they’re not farming shitcoins in TrustWallet on Binance Smart Chain!” Nabil points out.
“And that is not a physically intensive form of labor that discriminates between genders.” Gus replies.
“But is it really enough?” Nabil asks, “to try and transform the economy of Madre de Dios based on people imagining Shiba Inu-ensconced Pancakes being swaped in their $35 Android phones?”
“No, it needs physical industry. That’s why only Dogecoin+LTC mining will work.”
“Why not just import a bunch of hard drives to the area and have them run Chia?”
“I guess in order for something like that to be sustainable in a political sense, it’d have to be generally distributed, almost underground, but tolerated… my idea was we’d get the politicians to play off of each other about the coin mining industry in Peru and that’d help make Peru one of the countries that is pro-Bitcoin and so on.”
Nabil sneers, “so you’re really here to help people you’re just doing your own political ideology.”
“No, I’m here to help people, I’m just trying to understand how… Bill Gates spent decades on this kind of thing.”
“Yeah he also went over to Epstein’s house!” Nabil taunts. “We’re already pre-cancelled man.”
“What, *I’m* cancelled? You’re cancelled.”
“You had a 24 year old girlfriend in your early 40s and worked on Wall St., and you’re white-passing, you’re cancelled dude.”
“I’ve got plenty of time to be cancelled when I’m dead.” Gus says quietly.
“Muchachos,” JuLu interjects, “tenemos que volver al chongo para sacar mis amigas. Ellas, deben sentir como esto, liberadas.”
“We will,” Gus smiles, “it’s all a part of god’s plan.”
“Cual?” she asks.
“Hay un feminidad divina, estamos tocando a esa ahora,” Gus mansplains.
“Siii.”
“Pero tambien hay un divinidad masculino, y el Dogecoin y nuestro trabajo aqui es un parte de eso.”
“El doggy.” She assents.
“Si, el Doge quere lo que es mejor economicalmente para todos.”
Nabil listens to this and closes his eyes, imagining himself tumbling through a vast cosmic web towards a cosmic Shiba Inu, instead of a great tree or serpent, and the Shiba Inu looks so cheerful and happy. We should all fall into those beady eyes.
— —
The Ayahuascero drives them back to Juan’s house, where they try to sleep off the plant’s mastery over their brains. Nabil sleeps in the car again, but JuLu creeps out while everyone else is asleep and knocks on the window. He wakes: “oh hey,” she gestures for him to raise the lock, and no sooner does he than she swings it open, swoops it closed, and then turns to pounce on his tender man-boy neck like a ravenous puma. He feels it tickling, the tickles ripple through his body, it’s uncomfortable in so many ways. He’s extremely surprised as no woman has ever initiated intimacy with him before.
“Tienes poncho?”
“No I don’t have a poncho.”
“Como, condones?”
“Ohh, no I thought of buying some but then felt like it would be wrong, since we’re supposed to be here to help people.”
“Mmm, que palta!” she bites her lip in frustration.
“Hey, I bet you a million dollars I won’t get you pregnant.”
She looks at him with a devilish gambler’s anticipation, “trato.”
— —
They drive back into town, leaving JuLu with her family, and find a courier shipment, a cardboard box, left with the front desk in their name at the hotel.
“Is this what I think it is?” Nabil asks.
“Woof.” Gus says. They take it up to the room and cut it along the tape with a coat hanger. Inside is a beautiful 3 pack of Scrypt ASIC units, rectangular and fan-laden.
“I have to tell you something Nabil, I am the one who has bought out the Scrypt ASIC production by the top 3 manufacturers.”
“You literally bought all the units?”
“No but I bought enough units to clear the scheduled inventory, some other people got some of course, but we’re talking Scrypt T hashes, enough to get a mining pool going.”
“We should stash these somewhere.”
“Yes, I want you to drop me off at the airport so I can get another car rental, and then come back here. The protocol will be, the 2nd car is associated with the AirBnB and the 1st car is to be associated visually with our prescense here at the hotel.”
“Lose a tail, yeah.”
“After tonight this hotel will not be a secure location for us.”
“I know.”
— —
On the ride to the car rental place, Nabil gushes about his recent sexual experience.
“I tried sex with kissing for the first time, it’s really a vibe.”
“You’ve never had sex with kissing before?”
“What? Ew no.”
“So why her if it’s so viscerally disorienting for you?”
“There’s something real about her.”
“You spent a full 24 hours getting to know someone.”
“Wow, yeah, that seems efficient right? Is this what dating is like?”
“When it clicks, sure.”
“Nice. I kind of don’t want to die now.”
“Did you before?”
“I was willing to post myself here as collateral wasn’t I?” Nabil asks as they pull up the airport.
“I think you wanted to see what the limits of trade are, and what your limits were.”
“Don’t get me killed Gus, ok? Thanks,” he pulls away, drives back to the hotel, parks the car, goes inside, changes clothes with the hoodie, goes out the back and walks around the block, towards the apartment, the times converge and they meet at the apartment. Gus now is driving a Range Rover.
“We’re going to need 4-wheel drive at some point,” Gus explains.
They then try to sneakily move out from the apartment, taking a detour downtown, they grab some food. As dusk falls, they walk back to the hotel to get the Civic.
“Good protocol right.” Gus says.
“It’s a little wonky.”
“Good OpSec always is.”
— —
The roll up to the rickity backwood chongo by the river, tonight it is Disco and Soul themed.
“One thing I’ll say about this chongo,” Nabil notes, if only to disarm his nerves, “these people really have solid musical tastes.”
“Maybe they played Peruvian music while we were away.” Gus rejoins, “let me do the talking this time, I really need you to hang back.”
“Got it, yes.”
They do walk in together, at some level not caring if they are associated. There’s just a little bit of bravado, a little bit of a brusque over-confidence, driving their steps.
When his server approaches him to sell him beer and lines, he accepts, but can’t help but to ask if her name is Pamela.
“Yo soy Andrea,” she clarifies.
He sees two girls chatting in the corner in a funny mood, making jokes to each other in Portugease about the clientel. A man approaches the taller one and tries to suavely dance/pin her hands against the wall. Her friend snatches his hat off of his head and throws it on the floor, they laugh and give each other high fives.
Nabil follows the plan this time, and Gus is referred from the bartender woman to a bouncer to the back office, and invited back, carrying 1 ASIC in the duffle bag.
“I hope this guy’s Batman,” he says to himself as he takes a line and chugs half a beer.
— —
“Hola,” Don Martin smiles, “a que debo este placer, de encontrar un hombre educado en me sector humilde aca?”
“Hola, yo soy Gustavo, un gusto.” Gus offers his hand and takes the pimp for a very firm handshake.
“Te gusta este establishamiento?”
“Si, por eso queiro comprarla.”
“Pero Señor, tu sabes que este negocio no es facil.”
“Esta bien, me voy cerrarlo.”
“Oh si? Y porque comprarias un negocio solamente para cerrarlo.”
“Porque, quiero dar mejor puestos a las mujeres.”
“Ahh,” Don Martin laughs in an unlikeable fashion, “entonces estoy en el negocio de salvacion.”
“Que?”
“Is ok, if I practice my English?”
Gus, not wanting to admit he is ‘gringo’, but imagining that is a foreclosed assumption, accedes: “Sure.”
“I saw a documentary on the Amazon.”
“As in, the rainforest.”
“No, weon… Amazon Video. It was about the One Child Rule, in China. Peole would find babies, so many babies, left in the street, and they take them to the orphange, and you know what they do with babies.”
“Hurt them?”
“No! That is the genius. They sell the story of these babies to Americans, for ten thousand dollars, they pay two hundred to the baby-finders, it is a very good business. The Americans see the ad, the come, they place the money.”
“People have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
“Yes, but the genius! We are not in the ninteen ninety three! I could put ads for the girls online, and share with the gringos, and say look at this girl, she is working in the jungle to make sex with miners. But for two or… maybe three thousands? You can come to take her. And then you do what you want, it is between you and her and the law, I do not care. I can pay the parents five hundred dollars for this. Nunca sabia este estrategia!”
“No, that’s not what you’re gonna do.”
“Y que? Why you give me this great idea and tell me no?”
“Because I’m going to give you a new business when I buy your old business.”
“Oh, y que es eso?”
Gus reaches into the duffle and produces the ASIC mining unit.
“Esto. Yo tengo accesso a bastante — enough to give you the retirement you want. Tienes que armarlos en unos casas tranquilos, cerca a los hydroelectricos, en otros lados del pais.”
“Si, este… es de Bitcoin? Escucho algo de eso.”
“No sir, es de Dogecoin.”
Don Martin and the bouncer shadowing Gus both laugh.
“Que chiste es esto?”
“Ninguno, check the price.”
“Ya, sacala,” Don Martin gestures to the guard, who taps his phone.
“Cinco centavos.” the large man says.
“Y cuantos de este puedo ganar?”
“Diez mil por cada bloque que ganas.” Gus explains.
“Pero entonces cuantos bloques me voy ganar?”
“With the amount I’m prepared to ship to the addresses of your choosing… at least a few a day, maybe 10. And you get to mine Litecoin simultaneously.”
“Asumare… que es Litecoin?”
The bouncer chimes in, “esta en $230 dolares.”
“Puedo sacar energia de hydro al lado… y recibir ingresos en dos monedas, ok… si con esto me voy jubilar… no me estas enganando.”
“All you have to do is give me a physical addresses, and I will ship. Es me regalo de jubilacion.”
“Pero… no puedo quitar el negocio ahora mismo. Por una promesa.”
“There are twenty female staff members, at… $2300 per person, that’s 46 grand, USD.”
“Si, bastante dinero.”
“Si yo te entrego, entonces llevo las todas.”
“Bueno tomate tiempo, me vas entregar 46 mil dolares? Cash?”
“Si, te dejo eso, me dejas un direccion, y llegaran en pocos dias.”
“Ok, tomo tu dinero, tomamos una pausa, puedo encontrar nuevas si me estas enganando.”
“Supongo que si.” Gus eyes the bouncer, the talk of money has razzed his attentions.
“Llamo a mi primo.” — Don Martin arranges the logistics… “ok, si tengo un direccion.” he writes it down. Gus sees the commitment to the deal in the paper as his ticket out, and invisibly drops his heartrate by a few beats per minute.
They walk out the front, Gus gives Nabil a firm nod, the a-ok, and Nabil gets up to leave, he watches them leave the back, anxious to see if there are any guns being held as his back. He watches them go to the car, where Gus produces a brown bag stacked with the dollars. Don Martin patiently counts out the money before saying, “todas tuyas, un gusto haciendo negocios!”
Gus begrudgingly shakes his hand.
A small bus approaches the property, Gus approaches Nabil, “help me organize everyone.”
“Did you rent a bus for this?”
“Logistics is 90% of business.”
Gus and Nabil spend 20 minutes going around the chongo explaining to the women that their debts are cleared and they can go sleep in a hotel tonight. They are met with a range of responses, from laughter to non-chalant acceptance, to stark incredulity. A Shipibo girl, Nabil finds her a bit Owl-faced, named Pamela doesn’t want to go. He calls JuLu on Whatsapp and they talk, then she agrees. The bouncers clear the clientel out, as the speakers cut off and the sexy strobe lights get replaced with buzz-killing harsh flourescent white. The bus loads up, all the beds in the back are empty, they leave the place as is, beer bottles with little fluid sitting there going flat. The bus drives away, and the various establishment operators cars behind it. What was a strange and profane pocket of the backwoods is now vanished, like a bubble portal to heck, popped.
“That was surprisingly easy!” Nabil notes, before turning and noticing a bus full of women looking up at him like he’s an alien, he waves, “Hola, buenas noches!” The Brasileras chime back “holaaaa”.
“Imagino que tienes muchas preguntas… vamos uh, regalarlas un ayuda economic y algunos telefonos, y uh, vamos llevarlas a sus hogares, de donde sean.”
“Estamos solo aqui para ayudar.” Gus reifies.
Their faces reveal confusion, resignation, acceptance.
They arrive at the Centenario and Gus does a midnight check in for 4 rooms, booking out the remaining vacancies.
Nabil rolls a huge spliff in the classic Dutch style, and shares it around.
Everyone sleeps very well.
— —
Part 3
Breakfast is a scene. 5 Tables filled with women talking loudly, wearing the same clothes they were the night before, their plates over or under crowded to varying degrees. Gus walks down past the front desk, the attendant makes a confused look towards him.
“Viaggio del coro Cristiano.” he explains.
He invites himself to sit next to the Brasileras and introduces himself more formally in Portugease, and asks them for information about their hometowns and how they came to arrive in Madre de Dios, and they explain as he sips orange juice and smears palta on toast.
Nabil comes down late, looking muggy, having not showered or shaved.
“Hey, whoa, this is a photo, I should get my phone.”
Gus turns over to face him, “hey while you’re up there can you bring the box of phones?”
“Yeah sure.”
They unbox and distribute the phones as the women finish breakfast, and then Nabil helps himself to lots of pork-products and some pastry.
“Nabil, would you please make yourself useful and load Trust Wallet onto these? We have a lot to distribute.”
“Why Trust Wallet?”
“Just, it’s what people like I guess.”
Marcia helps herself to more pastry and another glass of orange juice mixed with grapefruit.
Gus holds up the phone after a majority of apps are loaded and handed out:
“Esto es TrustWallet, es un app publicado de Binance, que es una empresa fundado por Chenpeng Zhou” — he nails the phonics impeccably — quien es Chino… pero vivio en Canada.”
Every nods in semi-agreement.
The front desk manager comes in after a while to ask them to leave. The continue the seminar by the pool. Tutorials on wallet safety, setting up Google accounts for everyone, getting the 2FA app installed and set up with an exchange. After 6 hours of this, during which half of the attendees wander off to their rooms, they decide to call it a day. The next day they get online banking applications set-up for the Peruvian nationals that lacked an account, and focus on connecting to national exchanges and cashing out. They hand out hundred dollar bills so new guests can go shopping for new clothes and snacks. Gus takes everyone out for lunch and dinner and puts it on his credit card.
After another two days of seminars about private keys, looking up transactions on block explorers, deposits/withdrawals, scam and safety tips, they decide to skip multisig and go straight to depositing everyone some DOGE. It is on this day that the coin makes new all-time price highs in USD, again. Nabil takes note of this and rushes to his room to try and get some trades fired off via a VPS proxy interface/script-that-substitutes-for-UI. Gus gives him the thumbs up, so Nabil doubles down on his 250M sized June futures position, and takes it to 500M. The concierge calls, JuLu is here — he quickly places a series of 50M stop-limit buy orders at 0.12, 0.14, 0.16 0.18 and 0.2, and rushes to meet her.
“Hey, how’d you get here?”
“Ahh buen, abri una cuenta bancaria online, connecto al bolsa, vendi unos doggies, y me tomaba un Uber.”
“Nice, how many did you sell?”
“Solo 30 mil.”
“Ok let me show you something.” and he rushes to show her the FTX interface and how she can buy DOGE futures, “it’s like borrowing against your coin that you sold.” Hey buys her 30k DOGE June Futures at $0.1034.
“Que es este?”
“It’s a derivative!” he says eagerly.
“Que es eso?”
“It lets you bet with money you don’t have or protect your money and earn interest.”
She sees the green number going up, $30, “eso es ganacia?”
“Yeap!”
“Oh, agrandarlo!”
“Ok we’ll buy 400k more… and I’ll put in a stop loss at nine cents just in case.”
JuLu gets bored and goes to greet her friends; they talk about how crazy it is that a couple of gringos randomly decided to donate tons of money to them all.
Gus then proceeds to deposit 500k DOGE to each beneficiary, straight from his phone.
“Hey Gus, how much loose coin are you carrying on you?”
Gus laughs, “I should give it all away before we need to care.”
Nabil laughs nervously.
They ask everyone about their hometowns and what they want to do with their lives now that they’re all rich. The day after the DOGE is distributed, the price shoots up over 14 cents. One of Nabil’s stops has him adding 50M and down 500k on that position, but he is still up 20M on the overall position, so cool. Nobody has any sense of the future, only the present, some of the women take profits and add to their banks accounts. The next day the price shoots up to 19 cents, the day after that, it rockets through 20 cents all the way to 40, where Nabil takes profits aggressively, about 28 cents times 750M, or 210M. His fee on this would be 42M. Or at least that’s what it would be if he could sell the whole huge chunk of it on Binance and FTX, but he ends up market dumping the last 400M in a furious candle, and averages only 17 cents on 750M, or 127.5M and 25.5M in fees. Satisfied, he places several 10M orders from 0.15 to 0.2 in small increments, totaling a 1B position, and walks away.
“Oh, my own coins!” he logs into his own account and places orders to hedge up his first 135M in DOGE between 0.25 and 0.4. He realizes he’s now “worth” 8-figures.
For the next week they do 2 road trips. Two of the women have family in Cuzco, that’s a solid 8.5 hour drive along the highway, and Andrea is from a town on the border between Madre de Dios and Cusco, but not along the highway, up the river. Nabil and Julu ride together, her son Maximo resting (arguably dangerously) on her lap. They stay in a three star hotel in the city. Then Nabil drops JuLu off, and the following day they go to Pillcopata to take Andrea home. Nabil picks up JuLu again, who insists on driving. Instead of going to the city, they turn north and drive for hours along a winding series of turns at 30–50 km per hour, JuLu handling the wheel, Nabil DJ’ing old Rage Against The Machine tracks.
Andrea guides them to a side street, to a specific residence, and goes to knock on the door. Her mother answers, surprised extollations of joy follow. JuLu goes and hugs Andrea good bye, but first they add each other on Instagram.
Nabil wants to make good time and head back to Cusco but JuLu talks him into renting a lodging and they take a walk with Maximo on the grounds of the eco-resort.
The next morning, Nabil is up early driving, Maximo sleeping in a booster seat they’d bought in Cusco the previous morning. Out of curiousity he asks JuLu about how she got into the business.
“Yo me fui a Don Martin cuando me madre estaba enfermo, para pedirlo ayuda, y me prestaba dinero,” she explains.
Nabil orients himself, “wait a minute, you chose to get involved?”
“Es que Don Martin estaba de lo mismo pueblo en Cusco de me papa, asi que me parece legitimo.”
“That’s why you didn’t want to let him onto what you were up to.”
“Si…”
“And uh, what happened to Maximo’s dad?”
“Se fue a Lima para buscar trabajo.”
“Has he ever sent any money?”
“Nada, ni un sol.”
“Girl… I’m starting to think you don’t have good risk management about men.”
“Callate!” she gets teasingly flustered.
“You’re such a Degen! Gambling your way through life,” he smiles at her, “that’s the best way to do it.”
“Hacer que?”
“Live in this simulation.”
“Es bien real… si yo soy adicto a juego como me indicas, hice un buen puesto contigo.”
“Ahh, I don’t know, I’m kind of a monster.”
“Eres simpatico, tierno, te importas a otros.”
“I’m at best, one of those, soft.”
“Yo me gusta tu compania.”
“Thank you… I didn’t expect that. You want to DJ?”
They spend hours talking about their favorite animes and her raking through his Spotify downloads. On a whim he decides they should go check out Cusco for the day and see a museum, so they stay again.
The next day they get a somewhat sloppy 11:30 am start and manage to get to JuLu’s house by 6:30pm. The new furniture has recently been delivered.
Nabil takes a day to hang out in the Centenario and get a bit of rest, and then the next day it’s another early start, to cheauffer two of the women back to their homes on towns bordering Cusco, Mazuko and Quince Mil, which were on the way the day before. All the backpedaling has Nabil in a zen driving state, the incongruity of the highway and the jungle becomes somehow soothing.
The next day Nabil digs for his hidden 2FA phone in a compartment somewhere in the room, and logs in to FTX. His orders have been filled! The positions are in profit around 0.26, after getting fills at 0.16 through 0.2.
Gus has the women working on cataloging their addresses if they remember, and orders them various solar installation dates, Helium routers, and ASIC miners. He’d also made good on his word to the old man, and a restaurant in a town near a dam receives a large delivery. Somehow Gus imagines this will not be enough to end human trafficking in town… but at least the chongo by the river will be shut down?
Pamela is 1st generation Shipibo-Conibo, she grew up in a village in the rainforest. To return her home, a riverboat must be comissioned, JuLu volunteers to accompany her. As Doge goes sideways, they float up the river together on a day boating trip to the Manu District village. A small clearing for buildings with some light docks, about 300 kms west towards northwest. Along the way, Nabil checks his phone but loses signal halfway deep, he suffers at least 3 mosquito bites, but he will not get dengue- he is lucky.
Pamela talks about how she got tricked, her time was regretable and not what she had imagined when she dared to leave home. She blames herself for being naive but JuLu tells her she got played, and now she has to figure out what to do with her life.
Nabil stands off the other side looking over the rim into the flow of life in the water below.
The village is really a destination hub for travelers going on guided boat tours to eco-resorts deeper in the jungle, fashioned in a slightly more comfy imitation of the native peoples who have lived symbiotically in the ecosystem for millenia. There is a gift shop, this post-modern ironic imitation of a culture sold to foreigners who want to wear the dress, but now it is the supply chain end-point for Pamela to dress herself again. She smiles at JuLu, who is more of a LuLu Lemon fan, and they take her to the dock where Nabil orders a boat and she steps on to head home, further down the capillaries of the river delta.
Nabil says: “Ar revoir Pamela!”
She says: “me nombre es Barirrina.”
She stands out the back of the boat, waving back at them, for an uncomfortably dedicated amount of time, until her tiny silhoutte fades into the friscillating vanishing point of the bend.
They stay the night in a lodge and take a day to return, and it’s time for a break.
“I need a day of quiet,” he explains to JuLu, and sneaks out to the AirBnB where he can just smoke weed, order some aji de gallina and pizzas, drink some beers, take little bumps from the stash bag he’s kept, and watch some stupid cable that comes with the AirBnB, no human interaction.
The remaining women: 6 natives to Pt. Maldonado, 2 Brazilians, 1 Bolivian, leaving 5 more needing rides. Nabil comes back to the hotel after a day and finds everyone having breakfast, this is now a regular part of the hotel’s routine, everyone is dressed sort of like tourists or fans of campy t-shirts, they almost blend.
“So where to next?” he asks.
This is a subject of much discussion. A lot of them do not particularly want to return to their home towns. 3 volunteer to fly to Lima, “easy!” Nabil cheers, relieved after so much driving. One is from a town in the Puno region, a Quechua girl from the Ayapata district. “Oof that’s gonna be an overnight”.
Also, 3 of the women from Pt. Maldonado want to fly away also. One wants to move to Tarapoto, “still jungle but no international highway,” Gus suggests, she nods, “exacto.” One wants to go to Puno and just one wants to go to Lima.
Ok and then there’s one more, the sixteen year old girl from Iberia, a town up the highway, who claims to know a path that they can use to cross into Bolivia off the main road.
Nabil and JuLu take a two day trip to the Ayapata district and back to drop off the Quechua girl, Chaska. Nabil asks her in his bad spanish how she came to be in the employ of the old creep. She recites in Quechua that she met a guy on Instagram and he offered to take her to the city. JuLu translates back to spanish.
“Damn… Instagram… just like that huh.”
They drop Chaska at her parent’s home and rent lodging. Nabil is happy with the sex but starting to feel a bit claustrophobic in this relationship, “hey I’ma drop you off tomorrow and let’s see each other after some days, eh?” she’s like, “oh, ok si como no, ya estamos de muchas viajes.”
He’s a bit paranoid that she’s not being authentic, eyes her quizically, maybe she really is this chill, “ok, ‘night.”
In the morning JuLu notes excitedly that Doge is heading back up. “Soy riiicaaa,” she chides, “ya me voy sacar me ganancia y liquidar algo a soles.”
“It’s really very sick and rad and awesome to be rich I can’t even lie.”
“No se que me voy hacer… te gusta Europa?”
“Eh, it’s ok.”
He drops her off and kind of emotionally drained, drives back to town, takes a day to rest again, in the AirBnB, with the drugs and order-in food and stupid cable. “These are the days of our lives.” he says to himself.
The next day he checks in with Gus as the Centenario: “we are killing it Boss!” — he pulls up the PNL on the long futures on FTX.
“That’s great, gives me ammo to donate.”
“Oh yeah?”
“While you’ve been driving I’ve met with the chief of police, the local Bishop, representatives from local political parties.”
“Doesn’t the church already have a lot of money?”
“It’s very decentralized, so there are rich and poor diocese. I figured they have to be good for running breakfast programs.”
“How much are you giving to these people?”
“Different amounts depending on my feel about it.”
“You think you can really make a difference just spraying money one everyone like some kind of philanthropic bukkake?”
“Trying to find out… can you get on that sex tourist forum and see if any new chongos have opened in the area?”
“Sure, let me get on that.”
“Maybe we should go recon the site by the river and see if there’s any activity.”
“Hmmm, forums are… well loading… TOR takes a long time… ok, uhh, let me see, bah-bah-bah, derp-de-derp-de-doo… can’t find anything.”
“Ok let’s hop in the car and go then.”
“What now?” Nabil asks indignantly.
“Aren’t you curious?”
They pull up to the seemingly abandoned clearing in front of the seemingly abandoned structure, in broad daylight. Gus creeps forward, towards the back, Nabil casually looks around, enjoying the nature. As Gus walks behind the wall, Nabil pauses, and then suddenly Gus rushes back, tapping his nose as he runs around the corner.
“What?” Nabil asks.
Gus taps his nose again, “run to the fucking car!” he shouts.
Nabil panicks and sprints back to the car, he fumbles with the keys turns the ignition, throws the stick into reverse and flips a whip, Gus runs around and jumps into backseat after throwing the door up, while Nabil shifts into 1st and peels out.
“Pull the parking break!” Gus shouts, and Nabil drops it.
A group of men run around the corner of the building after them, Nabil squints at them in the rear view, then suddenly shocked, sees a Grey sedan waiting in the bush, it revs up after them in close pursuit. Nabil crushes 2nd gear to 5k RPMs before switching to 3rd, then drops back to 2nd and cranks the parking break as he slides out from the dusty path onto the main road, then repeat the intense acceleration. The tail vehicle falls behind them as they haul ass back to town doing >120kms on a 50 limit.
“I knew this was going to happen!” Nabil shouts.
“Stay calm, if you make a few turns and pull up to a stop light I can drive.”
“No…” he takes deep breaths, “should we go to a new hotel?”
“If we go to a new hotel they may not know where we are but we don’t know what they’d do, if we go back to the Centenario they’ll still think we’re based there and we can sneak out the back on foot and loop over to the AirBnB, which will hopefully stay unburnt.”
“Ok, ok…” he calms down as they run a red light at an empty intersection, slowing the car, taking a turn, he pulls over and lets Gus drive back to the hotel.
“We’re in a situation now Gus!”
“Yeah, it makes sense why that transaction was so easy the other night.”
“They don’t really care about these women, it’s us they want!”
“We’re worth a lot of money to them, potentially… we need to prepare.”
They rush back to the hotel where they run headcount.
“We need to get these women the hell out of town, those that want to go.” Gus exclaims, his shell begining to crack.
“What about us? Let’s fly back to Buenos Aires.”
“If we do that, who will take care of these girls who are stuck here with no passports?”
“You gave them money, they’ll just, Uber.”
“Some of these people are minors in a foreign land with no native language capability, they probably never had a passport, they came in under Mercosur free travel but their id cards are stolen, they’d have to go to Lima and find the embassy. They’re in a very vulnerable situation, they can easily be robbed too, trafficked again, it’d be much worse for them that we came here and this all happened... if we let it.”
“Yeah we need to get people out of here and maybe use our room here as a lure.” Nabil says.
“Yes,” Gus snaps his fingers, “among other things… ok, let’s get people packed, take 3 in the Civic and order a few cars with different routes for another 3, and get everyone who wants to go to the airport out of town.”
The plan times decently, though the 3rd Uber driver is a bit late, The Civic leaves behind the first 2 Ubers, whoever may be watching is going to see a Honda Civic, a Toyota Yaris and a Great Wall Voleex rolling down the street in a column. They arrive to the airport unmolested, but Nabil does spot a tail following from behind at a steady 250–300 meter lag. They drop off the three women alongside the other Uber cars arriving, and they get their bags out of the backs of the vehicles and strut into the terminal like they own the place. Gus spots a man wearing shades who is surveying the space, he has no uniform, and is presently distracted by the women, who he makes no connection about.
“We’ve got company.”
“They’re watching for us at the airport?! I can’t deal with this man. I need to know the airport is safe place to retreat from problems when they occur.”
“Let’s wait a beat,” they watch as the women enter and go check in, the man makes no move after him, instead he is staring directly at Gus, who has put on his aviator shades and is looking back at him.
“We should get out of here, he’s trying to front, it’s a bid for time,” and Gus peels out with slightly more grace than Nabil had done earlier in the day.
“What next?” Nabil says.
“Can you spot a tail?”
“Yes, someone left the airport parking as we were leaving and is behind us… could be a coincidence?”
“No coincidences now.”
“Gus, I looked up the UN website article about fighting human trafficking, and they said *don’t* try to buy people.”
“Yes, it stirs up the hornets nest when you scale it.”
“What if, Gus, what if we brought the imprint of capitalism into flipping more things at parabolically escalating prices, including people?”
“I may have sponsored the retirement of one of the last caballero style pimps in the area, he specialized in handling women, he was a scumbag, but he understood human psychology and largely minimized violence.”
“These guys have the drug trade, they’ve got human trafficking, they probably own the teamsters unions or something right? It’s a more viscious, more equipped, more organized level of crime that we just summoned. We’re like the little supernova that went off and now every alien warlord in the local galaxy cluster is responding, but they drive trucks.”
“There’s no telling,” Gus replies, “no telling who to trust, who’s clean and who’s corrupt. There’s only the ideological…”
“So, people are following us around, what’s next Gus?”
“Next we need to get back to the Centenario, round up the rest of our beneficiaries, drive them out, lose any tails, drop everyone off some blocks away from the safehouse BnB, you park the Civic somewhere low-key far off, and walk back, we lay low for a night, I’ll have to hear the details of the trail from our guest, and we’ll drop everyone off in a slingshot journey to Rio Branco airport, where we’ll get flights.”
“That’s a plan Gus!”
“If someone doesn’t have a plan they have no business doing things.”
“It really applies to everything!”
“Everything with risk.”
Things seem to be going to plan back at the hotel, “we need to pack up and move people, time to go!” Nabil extolls. Then he finds one of the girls with a pack of speed pills.
“Hey, what are these?” Nabil asks.
“Espeed.” Alicia explains.
“This is what they were giving you in place? Damn, look, you need to give me all these speed pills ok, we’ve been running around, you all haven’t been eating.”
“Comemos desayuno.” Alicia explains.
“These teenagers… ok listen, you have to buy yourself fruits and vegetables and rice, ok? Or go to restaurants all the time, whatever. You can’t just take speed and skip meals you’re gonna die like Karen Carpenter at 33 of heart failure from anorexia. You’ve only got one life!”
“Ok ok,” Alicia demures, “ya los tienes ahora.”
“For safekeeping!” he says as he pockets it.
Gus says, “don’t be so hard on them.”
“You think it’s ok these kids are all on drugs?”
“Well the point is we intervened and have to show them better living habits.”
“I’m sorry Gus… it’s the stress talking.”
“Apologize to them.”
“Sorry girls.”
“Nos vuelvas las pastillas?”
“No I’m keeping it, and sharing it with nobody.”
They check the girls out of the hotel and follow the plan. Nabil drops them off and then drives 30 blocks away from the AirBnB, parking along a random street, then hiking back to the safe house. Gus has ordered a pizza, and is serving Diet Fanta to the girls while they watch the Mexican Dub version of Los Simpsons.
“Hey Gus, I know this isn’t quite the time for this,” Nabil says, notably tweaked, “but have you ever thought about the problematic nature of the FTX contracts because you can only do a -30k USD credit line before they liquidate you, so you have to keep selling your collateral to maintain the 1x hedge.”
“Nabil, this really isn’t the time for this.”
“Gus, we’re up hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“A hell of a lot good that’s going to do us now.”
“Oh yeah, my API keys for everyone is a central point of failure.”
“What API keys, Nabil?”
“When I set up FTX accounts for everyone I took the liberty of copying down API keys for each account so I can manage people’s positions algorithmically.”
“Ok well intentioned, could also be used by an attacker though.”
“Right but now if I create a QuantZone module and it all runs in-house.”
“Ok, you’re obviously upped on adderol so I’m going to finish this bottle of wine and go to bed, you do what you think is best.”
“But Gus, is a perp on FTX vs. an inverse-quoted perp truly hedged?”
So he spends all night re-implementing the functionality of trying to maintain a 1x hedge in the Quant zone while Marcia serves him little bumps of cocaine that she also takes, and they share joints and stories.
At 3:32am she tells him about how she was trafficked by a “Gorilla” who uses shock tactics of abuse to wear people down, over two years ago, and basically came of age in this life.
At 4:58 is explaining inverse-quoting vs. linear: “The notional you gain on the long inverse-position is still flat when you’re short the linear contract! Because! You’re continously getting settled in USD… no wait, are you short gamma like that? Is that why interest rate differerentials on FTX persist?”
“Cara você é louco.”
“You know the crazy guy diagram.gif?”
“dot gif?”
“The guy from Always Sunny in Philadelphia and he’s explaining a conspiracy theory.”
“Eu conheço a mulher que está fazendo as contas e parecendo confusa.”
“Yes! That’s also a good meme, that’s me right now.” He makes a confused face and takes a face journey like is doing 3d trigonometry, then turns slightly, looking more confused, then looks up. Marcia cracks up.
He manages to get the system working, loads everyone’s funds into it based on passive price triggers all the way up, there’s some directional signals built into the model as well, then disables all API keys — but not before closing half of his position and distributing coins among all the different, isolated, FTX accounts they had set-up, figuring, I can always ask them for a loan later instead of it just getting robbed.
When he finishes his night’s work he turns to Marcia takes the joint out her hand, takes a deep drag, huffs in some fresh air after it, lets it out slightly, the smoke enfurling the J, then pulls it back again, only to conclude: “you know, you’re young, you shouldn’t do drugs.” and she cracks up again.
“Não é sério.”
“Hey you spend all night setting up an estate plan for like 500 million dollars you can smoke a J, that’s different. I’m an adult.”
“Estraga prazeres.”
“You’re rich by the way! You’re worth about a million Reals if Doge keeps going. Good night!”
He leaves her on the couch thinking about the new reality. An infomercial is on about a shampoo that is friendly to curls, however this does not apply to her.
Part 4
— —
Nabil sleeps in, the sun poking in through the shades awakens him at 1:30pm. He ambles into the living room where Alicia and Belinda are eating cereal and watching Friends re-runs on TNT with Spanish dubbing. The explain that gus left with Lila, the girl from Iberia, to take her home.
He tries calling on Signal, no answer, he leaves a VM. He texts JuLu, explains things have gotten hot, and that he’s stashing 20M USD in her FTX account (she is the control group where he tells one of them about the 20M). She texts back panickedly, asking about his safety, he recommends she get out of the region with her son and dad and perhaps go rent an AirBnB in Cusco for a few weeks. He struggles to assemble a breakfast of toast and butter, as the cereal boxes he’s purchased weeks ago have been depleted.
Gus calls back, “hey, calling so there’s no record on your device.”
“Ook, where’d you go?”
“I dropped Lila off at her mother’s house and was invited in for a nice lunch, but she showed me where the trail begins so I’ll know when to cut the lights at night.”
“Good, good.”
“Then I stopped by the Finca Ecologica on the way back and donated the rest of my wallet to them to fund a new research center to create more science jobs in the region, was my best guess. I’m directing a lot of solar installations and ASIC set-up their way as part of the deal. I gave up trying to solve human trafficking. As long as I can just get some assets in the hands of the decent people and away from these scumbags.”
“Yeah I’d just like trying to traffick our own asses out of here right now.”
“We’re going tonight.”
“I’d like to go say goodbye to JuLu first.”
“It’s very risky, don’t.”
“You don’t tell me what to do.”
“If you drive over there and get pinched, I’m not bailing you out.”
“That’s cold Gus.”
“I’m telling you.”
“Alright, I won’t.”
“Just sit tight until I get back and then we’ll wait for the cover of darkness and be out.”
“Bye.”
Nabil hangs up, looks out the window.
“Telling me what to do…” he texts JuLu, “I really want to see you before we leave, can we meet at the location of our first date?”
“Fue una cita te parece?” she texts back, followed by a series of cute emojis. “Claro que si queiro verte, me voy.”
“Hey uh, chicas,” he says, Alicia, the only one who speaks Spanish, turns to lend her attention, “me voy a… comprar unas snacks, ok?”
Alicia shrugs.
He walks out the front very carefully looking around, the street is empty, he snakes down two blocks and hangs a right, zig-zagging between blocks, until he finds his way back to the Civic. He unlocks it, steps inside, puts on the radio, tunes it, can’t find a good station, rolls the window down, the day is pleasantly bright, the sky is bare, the air is hot but only slightly humid. He smacks the thick of the air off his tongue, tasking it like a mosquito, and turns the keys.
The car starts.
He shifts into 1st, lowers the brake, pulls out into the backstreets.
He goes 10 blocks and runs into a red-light, a car pulls up next to him, he turns and makes eye contact, it’s an aggressive eye contact, he almost shrugs it off when another car pulls up and comes to a halt right in front of him, obscuring the faded paint of a pedestrian crossing.
“Oh shit.” he realizes.
He locks the doors, as two men get out of the car in front he rolls up his window, it seals just as they approach. They bang on the window. He reaches for the glove compartment, there’s no gun here, just some papers, a map and a, small dongle, he holds it up, shaking his head.
“GPS!”
He grasps for his phone, in a panick he drops a VM on JuLu: “hey it’s me, they got me, please tell Gus, I want you to know I really like you! Email me it’s roninwarriors69420sailoruranus@gmail.com! R-O-N-I-N-W-A-R-R-I-O-R-S-6–9” a man smashes at his driver’s side window with a battery, he flinches,” uh 4–2–0-S A I L O RU RA NUS AROBA she-mail punto com!”
He pulls his thumb off the VM, sees the little checkmarks, and deletes her contact from the phone. Then he scrambles through sheets of apps, so many damn apps! To find a wallet, and delete it. But the window smashes, a pair of hands grab him, this phone is now lost, and so too, he fears, is he.
— —
The first thing they do is go through his phone’s browser history and the available exchange apps to clue them in as to where he has money. They see Binance and FTX and force him to log in, which he abides with no complaint, but the two-factor-authentication is needed to log in. The 2FA is on another phone, hidden away in the room at the Centenario. So they get mad, and he says he will call his accountant to get it.
Gus is very non-plussed, and does not reply for two hours, but then replies: “How can I be helpful?” but in Spanish so nobody, but nobody, gets the joke.
He volunteers to go to the Centenario, he gets the 2FA, he authorizes them into the Binance account, which has been totally cleared out, all routed through the FTX. But the visible amount is significant, hundreds of millions of Doge. They are hungry for it, and prompt Gus for the 2FA to enter the FTX account.
Gus responds with a VM: “Yo tengo un pasaje del biblio que me gusta, de Ezequiel: el camindo del hombre derecho esta perseguido en todos lados… por los inequidades de degenerados y la tirania de hombres malvados… benediciones a El que ayude su hermana a salir del vale de obscuridad, por El es verdaderamente! el benefactor de su pueblo y el buscador de los ninos perdidos, y yo hare una tormenta de dolores a los que arruinan mis hermanas! Y van a saber! Que me nombre es El Senor! Cuando te meto mi verganza!”
After dropping that VM, Gus sets a few things and calls an Uber, rushing out the door to put some distance between himself and the known location. He goes to meet his driver several blocks away.
“Comiseria de Policia por favor,” he says.
The driver turns around… it’s the bus driver!
Due to macro-economic flows of fiscal stimulus combined with loose monetary policy combined with post-quarantine demand resurgence, has led to a labor shortages in some places, including among Uber drivers. Hence it was possible for the odds to stack in favor of certain drivers matching with certain passengers, especially if they are passing close by…
As Gus recognizes the driver, he goes to his phone and deletes his wallet and his Signal messages just as the other passenger door opens and a man with a gun enters.
“Vamos al ecoturismo?” he asks.
“Supongo que si.” Gus says in a thick Argentine accent.
— —
The Binance account was where Nabil had kept his own coins set aside from managing Gus’s money. They have stolen the rest of his Dogecoins from him in a massive withdrawal, 15 million Doge. They are celebrating. To make amusement out of the evening, as they drink, they invite Nabil to play a card game.
“You know 21?” the Capo asks, he is young, and looks like a more evil version of Marc Anthony.
“Yeah I play.” he says.
“It has another name, Blackjack.” he pulls out a wrapped bludgeoning device, “this, is also called a Blackjack in your language no?”
“What language? English? Ga jezelf neuken klootzak.”
“We’re going to play a little game.” He stacks the little blue chips, “We have stolen almost eight million dollars of your money, we will let you try to win it back. But everytime you lose, I will hit you with this, how hard depends on how much you bet.”
“You’ll really let me win back my money?”
“Of course!”
— —
When Gus arrives to the old chongo he sees Nabil bruised, with a tall stack of chips. Nabil is, at some deep, hard-to-awaken level, a competitive person, when it comes to trading and also, counting cards.
“I said hit me!” he shouts.
The soldier deals him an 8, busted.
The Capo whacks him swiftly on the knee, he grabs his knee in pain, like an extremely prolonged Peter Griffen sighing segment.
“Como tu contador, recomendo que pares.” Gus says, keeping cover.
“I got a system! I can still win.”
“No van a volver tu dinero.”
“He said he would…” Nabil says, realizing his folly.
“I am not really going to give you back any money.” The Capo says, taking Gus’ phone from the other soldier and looking for 2FA. He is visibly outraged when he finds the 2FA app only has the Binance code.
“We know you have an account on Efe-Tee-Exis, you had the app in your phone.” he remands, and he commands Nabil to write an email to support to remove the 2FA on the FTX account. Gus nods, and Nabil writes the email. As they wait for a response from customer service, they are interrogated.
Nabil, in a fog of anger, pain, and disillusioned ludopathy, says “Call all you want, but there’s no one home… and you’re not gonna reach my telephone.”
“What you say to me?”
“Up in the club and I’m sipping that bub and you’re not gonna reach my telephone”
“You are pissing me off.”
“Mah, mah telephone, mah uh mah telephone”
“You like 21,” the Capo says, “you buy 21 women from here, shut the whole place down,” he looks at Gus, “I must know why.”
Nabil, leaning into the cover, speaks up, “we just wanted to have them all in our hotel to party.”
“Yes but now they’re all vanished, where did they go?”
“We murdered them because that’s what we get off on.” Nabil says.
The Capo laughs heartily, “Pitucos! Es verdaderamente como Hostel,” he turns to his men, they laugh, “asi son los ricos!”
All the men laugh, there’s a quiet sigh of relief in it, as if to know, that the very height of luxury and privelidge, is mass murdering women for fun with no legal consequences. They’re no worse, and their economic reality and ethical compromises are just proletarian working conditions, in their plight, they do not have the level of culpability that rich people killing for fun would have.
“I’m Ancapistani bitch! That’s the free market!” Nabil jeers. Gus makes eyes at him to try and signal that he cool it.
“Bueno, ok… we will get you some tea and cookies and you will wait here, for Efe-te-exis customer service.”
— —
A very burly and intimidating guard serves them both hot tea in little cups on little plates with a larger plate of Sayon Margarita cookies, and then stands watch over them while they eat. Nabil begins weeping.
“They took my millions away.” he says.
“Esta bien, joven,” Gus says, maintaining the veneer and guiding the guard’s comprehension of the conversation. “Solo tengas un poco que queda pero ya estas joven, podes ganar la plata de vuelta.”
Nabil begins to weep more, reminded of his earlier losses.
“Why does this sort of thing always happen to me?!” he wonders outloud.
“Vamos salir de eso.”
“There’s another thing… this feminist woman on Twitter told me I have a white savior complex.”
“Pero tienes piel morron.”
“That’s what I told her!”
“No preoccupes lo que opinan feministas sobre nuestro trabajo.” Gus says, the guard understands this another way and chuckles quietly.
“It just really hurt my feelings because I felt like I was finally doing something good for once in my life and I’m being scolded because it’s not sufficiently empowering? And what has she ever done to help women? DM’d them friendly advice? Probably that right. Probably she gives a lot of helpful advice to people.”
“Ya basta de Twitter, no es el mundo real.” Gus says.
“We’re gonna die here Gus, I can feel it, I don’t have a tingle about this situation, we’re pretty much waiting to be liquidated.”
“Pero tuvimos un buen tiempo y cambiemos vidas por mejor.”
The guard gets noticably irritated, “oe, es una cosa si mataban un monton de mujeres, pero no hablan asi, son enfermos.”
“Sorry!” Nabil says.
“Disculpe,” Gus says formally.
They decide to shut up and pass the time. Nabil tries sleeping. They have to excrete in a bucket in the corner of the room, the guard has hung an air freshener.
In the morning, or what maybe feels like morning according to circadian rhythms, the Capo returns and informs them that FTX has scheduled a call with them to in-person KYC again and remove the 2FA. They drag Nabil in front of the web cam and he takes a call with a Compliance Officer.
“Hello, how are you?”
“Oh… just fine and dandy.” he says, they had not hit him in the face for this very contingency.
“Can you tell me how you lost your 2FA?”
“I was at home looking for Duresscell batteries for my Playstation controller… and I lost my phone in the mess.”
“Ok… can you produce your id card for me?”
Someone slides him an ID card onto the table, he casually picks it up and holds it next to his face.
“Almost forget I had it! It’s very duressable this plastic material, high quality stuff!” he yawns, as if involuntarily, and stretches his head to the side so the compliance officer can see the languid lighting and stolid real estate, perhaps a structure too humble for someone holding so many millions?
“Ok we have a special procedure for 2FA removal in some cases, I’m going to ask you to hold your id card to your face again, pan the camera left and right so I can get a full view on the room, and then blink three times or twice, for D or B modes.”
He blinks 3 times.
“Ok, great, we will process your ticket right away, you should find your 2FA removed and your funds can be withdrawn immediately.”
Nabil laughs nervously, “thanks I really appreciate it!”
The Capo’s eyes shine with the reflection of the balance in the screen, one million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, and some change. He tells the man at the screen to look through the deposits and withdrawals, a handful of random small-sized withdrawals to a dummy address that is another pool of FTX’s, and one large deposit dated years prior.
“Tenemos que sacar la balancia que queda en DOGE.”
“Pero jefe, esta subiendo.”
“Si pero es un memecoin nada mas! Es alta shitcoin huevon!”
“No es shitcoin, es dinero por el pueblo.”
“No quiero eschuchar mas de Dogecoin!” He turns to Nabil, “ok, millionario, ahora no eres todavia.”
He nods somberly, defeated.
“Aqui tienes una ficha,” the Capo says, and tosses the chip into Nabil’s lap, at the sight of this, Nabil finally breaks down and weeps.
“Your friend is weak.” the Capo says to Gus.
“Estaba todo su plata, imaginate como es.”
“I do not sympathize, because I and my associates are all going to be very rich now, and we will not let ourselves get robbed.”
“Bueno, disfrutalo.” Gus says, playing down.
“There is something… American about you.”
“Si mi papa vivio en Miami.”
“Si, es muy popular, Miami,” he relaxes into Spanish, “ahi me voy. Los bancos ahi encanten dinero extranjero. Me voy llevar unos malletas de efectivo.”
“Tienes mucho riesgo en todo eso, mejor si vienis a Buenos Aires, con tus dolares puedes vivir como rey y el ley es muy flojo.”
“Hmm, Buenos Aires…” he turns to his guys, “bueno no se. Si debemos quitarlos o no.” He holds his hands up like he is weighing the financial/geographic/legal advice and the large sum of money vs. the prospect of executing mass-murders of 21 women. “Yo pienso en me madre en estos momentos, en me hermana, tu sabes.” The other men nod. He calls it in, they tell him he can choose. He says, “bueno si yo puedo ser un hombre derecho en este momento, es para quitarles, no?” and the others agree.
Gus, who has been listening to this, protests that they were lying about killing everyone and really they are Christian volunteers who work with sex workers, he thinks if he plays up the religion angle it will resonate. So now everyone is confused and don’t want to kill them for fictive crimes, but *now* the Capo is thinking, ok these guys are problem-creators for me and my business, and my bosses’ businesses, and maybe they need to go. If I let them go and they create another problem later, maybe some other town along the highway, then I’m responsible for the damages to the businesses. They also know a lot about the businesses for outsiders, and can’t be trusted to stay quiet.
“Ok ya, Tomas, Renaldo, los sacan a la selva para quitarlos.”
“What’s going on?” Nabil asks.
“Hora de Plan B” Gus says.
“I knew I was gonna die in a chongo,” Nabil says, “I love to lose, it was the only thing I had time for.”
“Guardian Angel, guard me from harm. Protect me in sleep without cause for alarm. Keep safe through the darkness of light, and wake me gently with God’s morning light.”
“You’re gonna cast spells now?” Nabil says.
They are lead through the evening falling around them, into a vehicle, both of them bound at the hands, the back is locked.
“Angel de mi guarda, oh mi dulce compania, no me desampares ni de dia ni de noche hasta que me entreges a los brazos de Jesus y Maria.”
They go to the far bank of the river, on the other side of the peninsula, the guards hand them shovels.
“Oh fuck you I am *not* digging my own grave!” Nabil exclaims.
Gus explains, “tenemos tres cientos mil dolares cada uno si esperas para quitarnos.”
They look at each other, one is hesistant, the other says, “yo necisito el dinero.”
Fully confident they will kill these guys later, the guards point them back into the car and follow Gus’ directions, to an eco-hostel resort on the other side of town, on another bank of the river, which coils around the city. Gus explains there are two Trezor wallets buried under a tree on the outskirts of the property. Nabil is thinking about how in a parallel, adjacent universe he is now dead.
After about 35 minutes driving down the other bank, on the south side of town, they come to an eco-resort, where Gus advises them to halt. They walk along the periphery of the property, then to a treeline dividing against another property, he takes them 127 paces along it, to a large Kapok tree whose root base is so perforated, it offers a great place to stash some hardware wallets. Gus digs them up and offers one each to the guards.
“Estamos feliz?” Gus asks.
“Oe lamento decir, si aqui tengo unos bitcoin, gracias, pero tenemos ordenes.”
“Tengo un otro con muchas veces mas en el hotel.”
“Si… bueno pero ya falta tiempo.”
“Si, van a tener preguntas porque mucho tiempo ya ha pasado.” Gus leads.
“No pe, los contamos que tomaban mucho tiempo para botarte nada mas.”
The other guard pulls his gun out and puts it softly aside his companion’s head, and pulls the trigger. A quick pop resonates throughout the quiet area, perhaps traumatizing some tourists resting comfortably under mosquito nets. Nabil stares aghast at the dropped corpse, specks of brain blood misting his face.
“Vamos al hotel?” Gus asks.
“Primero sacamos el cuerpo, ayudame entonces!” the other (living) guard (now maybe not a guard?) demands.
Gus nods to Nabil and they haul the corpse by the limbs back to the car, which the guard brings up, and the load the body into the back seat, Nabil sitting next to it/him (new pronouns). They drive down the road a ways and dump the body in the river, having to get in a bit together, hauling the heavy body in with them, like a dark baptism.
Nabil sits in the back seat, now alone, and soaking wet, uttely silent for once. They go back to the Centenario, walking in through the lobby in the middle of the night, Gus nods to the front desk attendee: “eco-turismo” he says, “que divertido” the young woman says, before taking slight adverse note of their companion. Gus approaches and leans forward, “Podes servirnos una nuevo copia del sh’llave por favor? Se pierde el llave en el rio.”
“Oh no, que dificil, si tenemos una copia de limpieza, pero tienes que volverlo y hacemos una copia en la manana.”
“Muy amable,” Gus says with a smile.
They unlock the room, it’s very well kept, the service at the Hotel Centenario is truly at the apex of quality and value. Gus digs around in the closet and prys a loose chunk of wood open to reveal, another hardware wallet! He loads it up and transfers to the guy’s phone-based wallet, the balance is indeed four million DOGE.
“Cuanto es eso, cuatro millones de doggies?”
“~de 2 millones de dolares.”
“Puuuucha…” the man says, “estoy volando! Nunca he matado a nadie tampoco.”
“Really? You seemed very natural.” Nabil comments.
“No, fue la primera vez, pero estaba rapidito. Y nosotros! Lo hicemos juntos!”
“Noo that was really your idea.”
“No fue necessario matar a nadie.” Gus says.
“En serio, me digan eso en serio ahora mismo?”
“No hay problema.”
“Fue una vibra, alguien tendria que morir, y no seria yo, yo soy el millionario!”
“Felicitaciones!” Gus says, trying to keep up the accountant schtick.
“Jaja, tu no eres contador, no? Tu eres el Capo. El muchacho trabaja para Usted.”
“Es asi.” Gus says.
“Yo me gustaba que ayudaban las ninas, nadie tenia pelotas para hacerlo.”
Gus takes a little bow.
“Y tu mensaje de voz, lo de Pulp Fiction. Brooooother. Es U-ni-ver-sal!”
“Si, es universal,” Gus says, smiling like he’s found a new student.
“Me encanta el Butch: “Now I know he’s dead you wanna know how I feel about it? …I don’t feel the least bit bad about it.’”
“Butch es un bueno, si.” Gus reifies.
Nabil approaches him, “thank you for not murdering us.” and he throws him a loose hula-frame hug around the shoulders, with two little pats.
“Que maricón!” he says laughing, then holding up the hardware wallets, all 3 he is holding, and this shit-eating grin of absolute freedom, triumph and euphoria, he laughs to himself harder walking out of the room, “is not a motorcycle, is a chopper baby! Jajaaaa!!!” He struts out the front door, to the used mob car he was driving, and goes straight down the highway.
Nabil and Gus do a double take and then roll down after the guy, returning the room key, and politely checking out, “you’ll just put everything to the card right?” Gus asks.
The antendee says: “ningun problema… pero donde van a este hora?”
“Late flight.”
— —
They rush the 32 blocks through the midnight from the hotel to the AirBnb, paranoid about vehicles, especially a random (perhaps drunk) motorcyclist who buzzes by at high speeds on the main road… but encountering no trouble.
The lights are on at the AirBnB, Gus knocks on the door patiently.
“Quien es?” Alicia says.
“It’s us, we got robbed!” Nabil pleads.
“Hmmm, no se.” she says.
“Casi morimos.” Gus says.
“Un momentito.”
The girls are audibly scrambling to sort the apartment a bit before undoing the dead-lock and letting them in.
She opens the door, with real concern on her face, “estan bien? Que paso?!”
Gus begins to explain in Spanish while Nabil ambles in, a shattered clay doll of a man-boy-bear-pig, he sees his weed bag emptied on the sill, with little detritus of keef and trichomes and hairs and lonely buds and raggedy little bits of leaf, he wonders immediate: where is the cocaine. He searches his room, his hiding spot has been raided, he inspects the girls eyes, their nostrils, he breaks down: “you stole all my weed and coke! We get fucking kidnapped and you kids are in here throwing a party!” he begins to weep, “I’ve got no drugs! I’ve got no coins! We almost died! We almost fucking died!!!!”
Gus, to everyone’s surprise, picks up a pillow and yells into it with enough force that the resonace through the pillow is still a bit loud.
Marcia grabs the bag of blow and tries to collect enough residues together to sum up one bump, “Pobre Nabil, não se preocupe, ainda temos alguns pedaços.” she collects the edge of the bag and lifts it to his nose.
The bump cools him off a bit, and he asks if there are any roaches. In fact, there are three roaches, because the girls do not prefer to smoke them, and have accumulated. Marcia collects one and lights it, takes a puff to get it rolling and, passes it to his lips, he takes a few drags and begins to mellow, but then begins weeping, “they beat me and made me shit in a bucket! They kept me captive for like 38 or 40 hours…” and the girls go to hug him and they all begin weeping together, the wails harmonize somehow after a minute and from the creschendo, refract into increasingly dissonante backscatter as they all calm down.
Gus is collecting himself, he goes to sort his bags, he brings out the emergency bag and begins reciting the contents to Nabil:
“One Italian passport in my name, One Dutch passport in your name,” he tosses the passport into Nabil’s lap, then counts the cash out, “fourty three hundred US Dollars cash,” he pulls out the Rover’s key, “one egress vehicle… one miniature first-aid kit,” he passes it to Alicia who admits she used to be a volunteer first responder in her town. She administers painkillers for Nabil’s lacerations and tries to apply bandages to soften possible collisions, but otherwise she’s not sure what to do for someone beaten in that way. She admits her training was limited.
“One American Express Black Card, One Visa Credit Card with I think a 5-figures limit, one Evangelion Unit-0 action figure, Nabil I think this is yours. Senoritas, distribuimos $300 por cada una.” They hold their hands out as he counts out the mini-stacks and places them.
“Got any hairline fractures Nabil? Do you feel anything?” Gus asks.
“All I feel… is the ashen gaping void… of allll my money stolen away.”
“Não se preocupe, podemos devolver parte do extra que você colocou em nossas contas.” Belinda assures him.
“Oh you all found out about that, sub-account 1 was kinda obvious.”
“Obregado por confiar.” Belinda adds.
“Claro que seguraremos seu dinheiro e o devolveremos, depois que você nos ajudar.” Marcia says assuringly.
“Am I going to be a millionaire again?” he asks, and they all say “Congratulations” in different languages.
“Felicitaciones,” Alicia says, “te devuevlo 19 de los 20 millones y el resto dispongo a me pueblo.”
“Awesome, of course.”
“Parabéns!” Marcia and Belinda say in union.
“Vamos devolver tudo.” Marcia says. Belinda explains how she’s getting 20% interest on FTX on her USD balances and is going to pay for her school and starting a business with that.
“Congratulazioni!” Gus declares, “you’re building up treasures in heaven.”
Nabil sobs a bit, “thank you, all.”
“Well, having said that,” Gus says, “we really need to go! Let’s fucking go kids!” He claps, “asesinos nos estan buscando! Vamos carajo! Pack your shit folks, we’re going away.”
They haul the boxes of cereal and junk food that the girls had bought into the back, and hungrily dive in where possible. Alicia remembers to fill up an empty coke bottle with tap water.
“Hey Nabil, can you give me half a speed pill? I’m going to need it for this drive.”
“Sure thing Gus!”
They strap everything into the rover and buckle up. Gus then remembers to place the AirBnB key in the drop box and unbuckles.
“AirBnB is tight.” Nabil says, “feels amazing to dip into a place with a keycode not having to talk to anyone, and then dip right out.”
“Ok, we’ve got half a box of Choco Crispies, half a pack of convenience-store tier cinnabuns, three apples, a banana, a bunch of Spotify downloads, a pretty good sound system, two roaches, three internationally trafficked teenagers on their way home, a full tank of gas, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
“We’re not wearing sunglasses gus.”
“Hit it!”
“I don’t, you’re the one driving.”
Gus starts the ignition, “come on Nabil, you never saw Blues Brothers?”
“Is it good?”
“It’s aged decently.”
“More than I can say about you, just kidding, thank you.”
Gus peels out, jolting Nabil back in his chair.
“For what?”
“For showing me.”
They roll through quiet stoplights and over the bridge, onto the northward bend of the highway towards Iberia, they play Bach and then Beethon’s 9th (the full 4 movements) quietly for two hours. They reach the path north of Iberia by the 3rd movement, Gus cuts the lights and attempts to navigate the uneven road in the dark moving slowly, 10–25 kmph, to feel out the textures. The trees get heavier, they pass the last farmhouse and 400 meters of thick jungle block the borderline, but there is a ‘path’ that Lila had demonstrated the other day, barely a path, but even spaced gaps in trees combined with tread marks, mud, still a lot of vegetation. Suddenly it’s like the path is this sickly thing and the bush all around them is a conscious, envealoping biomass. The 4th movement comes on. The famous overture comes on, dramatically, as they roll over a largebranch that had fallen into the road. Gus decides to flip on the heavy lights. He switches into 4-wheel drive and manages to squeeze out of a mud-sink on the back-right wheel. The choral arrangement begins shouting “Tocher Aus Elysium” as they get the car moving, Nabil jumps back into the shotgun seat after scouting. They pull over the lawn of a farm on the Bolivian clearing, and roll along the road, brazenly lights on now, the path straightens out and they accelerate triumphantly, to 45 kmph!
“Welcome to Bolivia.” Gus says, as they grap on to the hard pavement of the Ruta Nacional, and accelerate to a proper speed. The darkness gives way to a faint light, and the swaths of infinite rainforest enshrouding them cannot keep the glare of the sun out for much longer.
“I’m gonna DJ now.” Nabil says. He puts on the remixed Grimes song from the Cyberpunk 2077 sountrack, Samana.
“Stories…” he mouths, pulls out the remaining roaches, “wanna feel something new”, Alicia and Belinda are resting on each other, asleep, but Marcia is awake, she raises her chin. They share the first roach, then the sunrise comes on something intense, blazing up every leaf of canopy in every direction for a thousand clicks.
He turns around and tries dancing, “I know better than to cry,” he sings to Marcia as she passes it back and he tries to a take a finishing drag. She is visibly moved, finally breaking down a bit, feeling the new life around her.
As the awn of the sun rolls over them the other girls wake up and Nabil lights up the other roach, “Buenas dias!” he tells them. This one has more meat on it, a charitable person would call it half a joint, they pass it to the yawners who take one hit each and roll down the window to breath in the morning mist.
Nabil starts doing the robot and mouthing along to Grimes, then Marcia joins in, Gus takes the joint and drags on it slowly, rolling down his window and holding his hand out. Alicia and Belina join in, everyone is raving for a few minutes while a million species of insects look on from ten meters away and the road is bleached with reflection.
Marcia mouths the words in a meow-y faux-Grimes, “there are stawriess” and they laugh and let the wind blow through their hair. The conductive flow of air through the Rover wraps into a tunnel before sucking out the corners of the windows, passing over their scalps, creating a static charge.
As the song fades out, the vanishing point of the road ahead becomes less enclosed in the unfolding arms of the jungle, the sun rises into the morning, the perception of time is distorted by a perspective on everyone’s lives up to that moment, vs. the knowable, but new, future where all cards are on the table.
As the morning winds on, they come up to the large border town of Cobija, they swing by the airport to drop off Alicia, Gus buys her a ticket to Santa Ana del Yacuma with his Amex, from there she will go on to Exaltación, where she’ll reunite with her parents. She has a lot of things planned.
The Brazilians hug her tightly to say goodbye, and they watch her pass through the line at the security check, she has no id, but was allowed to check-in based on her biometric national database result, and after she explains this to the guard he lets her pass. Gus takes a sigh of relief, “to Brazil.”
They drive through Cobija to a gas station to refuel. The girls go inside to get snacks and come out wearing two new pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses.
Nabil says, “come on, you’re killing me with the Lolita thing here. It’s not a good look for us.”
Marcia blows him a raspberry and says “o degenerado!” and Belina laughs intensely, they exchange high fives.
“We got a couple comedians here,” he shrugs, and Gus laughs along. They roll up to the brige connecting Cobija to Brasileia (the unassuming little sister city to Brasilia), they note there is no toll or gates for border control, Marcia notes feeling a sense of deja vu.
They decide to just roll across the bridge, into Brazil, and in a smooth roll they… are suddenly in Brazil, make a left, drive straight…
A police car flashes them, they pull over.
“Maybe this is the cop who watches the border and stops human trafficking.” Nabil says.
The officer notices the girls in the back and questions Gus about the purpose of their travel. Gus says they are a part of a church group, which the officer finds extremely sus. The officer asks the girls if they are ok, they smile and nod while eating Twizzlers, which admittedly, is a mercy unto their benefactors, relative to other candies which they may have, due to a capricious sense of humor, chosen instead for this occasion, however, the heart-shaped sunglasses are still not a good look.
“Si, sem problemas.” Marcia says enthusiastically. “Nós cantamos no coro.”
She belts out a little arpeggiation, not very well, but sure, singing.
The police officer asks to see the girls’ identication. Gus explains their id’s were stolen and they are giving them a ride out out pura buena onda. The officer sees this as a red flag, but then leans into the window, takes a big whiff of burnt reefer smoke particulate anchored into the upholstry, but a clear view of Gus and Nabil’s hands, and says something softly to Gus, who says, “claro, sem problema,” and he asks Nabil to open the glove compartment slowly and pull out the white envealope with the cash. The cop takes it and counts the money, smiles, and hands back $500 to Gus, like it is the correct amount of change, or as a courtesy. It’s the common humanity in us all kind of a thing.
Gus calmly puts the money on the dashboard so as not to make sudden movements with his hands at obscure angles, and the cop asks: “Pasaportes?”
“Italiano,” Gus says.
“Uh, Hollanda?” Nabil says.
The cop makes an impatient little gesture, they nervously comply and produce their passports, he pulls a little stamp out of his belt and flips through, and stamps a vacant spot in each then hands them back.
“Bom dia.” he says.
Gus smiles and nods as he takes the passports and restarts the car, then slowly pulls away.
“Oh, that was the other cop.” Nabil says.
— —
They make the journey towards Rio Branco over some hours, which gives them time to digest everything.
“Are we basically human traffickers now?” Nabil asks.
“We’re trafficking people in the other direction, we’re reverse-traffickers.” Gus says, “we’re very observant of driving laws.”
Marcia joins in teasing them, “todos vocês são um bando de traficantes!”
“No, we’re nice guys!” Nabil protests.
“Isso é o que todos dizem.” Belinda adds.
They start singing together in a primary school-style rhyme, “tra-fi-can-tes x3” and then they try to think up more lyrics and start discussing what rhymes would work.
“So, did we learn anything?” Nabil asks.
“Yes, I have a summary of my findings,” Gus says.
“Please, enlighten me because I’m not sure what’s right even.”
“Human trafficking is basically private criminals treating people the way governments do, controlling their movement and taxing them at arbitrary levels, forcing them into collective labor pools. The failures of the passport system to facilitate help for victims of human trafficking is precisely because this system exists to accomplish similar goals, control people and not to help them. Yet the passport is also our wall into European countries where I can access safety deposit boxes with various multisig components, and outside Shengen as well, so passports are a form of lock that can protect the wealthy.”
“Right right, here’s millions of slaves trapped in places vs. here are some people using private jets and skipping passport controls.”
“Or in our case, the Rover.”
“So how do you fix human trafficking?”
“Private Philanthropy, even if the level 2 human slavers weren’t extra-violent, has little hope of solving this problem. It was my delusion, and my hope, to believe that I could throw a billion dollars at a problem I barely researched in an environment where I have no connections and really make a difference.”
“But we helped these girls, and women.”
“Yes, and that makes us feel good.”
“Right!”
“And the endowments I made to the university and the NGO research center, along with the breakfast program I funded with the church, these might actually do something for the region to get it away from mining. And part of my endowment to the uni was the LTC+DOGE miners! So running a mining data center is going to be a source of revenue for them for a long time. They can leech relatively cheap electricity off the international transmission lines that run by here, so it’s not as good as mining next to a dam, but it’s ok.”
“Yeah it really feels like you shied away from shoving crypto down everyone’s throats.”
“Well the solar installations I scheduled and pre-paid and the Helium miners I ordered will essentially bring steady power and internet to people throughout the region. Every place you drove someone to, we sent a router, we even shipped one to a lodge in the Manu district.”
“Will a router do much throughput in the middle of the rainforest. Also, is that correct?” Nabil asks, with no irony.
“The dynamic where rural girls are extra-vulnerable to trafficking due to being less educated about the red flags, most of them are getting Romeo’d, we can fix that education gap with internet access. But also that access is the prevailing hero’s journey call. Maybe they’ll get to figure out how to make that journey without being finessed or duressed. I don’t think you can really block Shipibo-Connibo teenagers away from the wider world and prevent them from leaving. It’s like the Amish or Mennonites, and the Rumspringa, and then they choose to come back sometimes. That’s the only way these communities reconcile the anachronism of their lifestyle. This is a challenge these communities have to face, versus, sheltering their kids from information and risking their exposure to harm, the classic dilemma all parents have.”
“It’s extra complicated when you’re talking about peoples of the rainforest,” Nabil replies, “but this happens all over the world. Eastern Europe’s got a lot of problems with this.”
“All over, the USA, Canada probably, it’s a global problem.”
“So why the hell don’t governments enact policies to stop it?”
“One thing is the criminalization of sex work directs LEO against sex workers, and also it doesn’t delineate as much any line between ethical service providers, such as someone running a venue at fixed fee rates without any coercion or bondage, in a competitive market where the rates probably shouldn’t eat too much margin for the worker. Like Strip Clubs. Are strip clubs human trafficking? What about when they encourage sexual services? The law only detects movement when sexual services are being performed, there is rarely a delineation about consent in a full-context sense, which is the delination between a legitimate support service provider and a criminal extortionist. You would think something so basic as consent and human rights would be the #1 priority of all allegedly civil societies, when in fact it’s the last priority. The only legislation you see attacking it, tends to make the problem worse by criminalizing online venues and forcing people underground. And all of this, because people who think they’re moral, have hang-ups about sex, and that’s really what it is, people are ignoring solutions to modern slavery because they’re too hung up about sex and drugs.”
“Whereas myself, I don’t have that problem.” Nabil says.
“So the solution? First off you can’t really make a dent in human trafficking until you end the War on Drugs. Legalize drugs, kill the cashflow combination of dealer+slaver criminal enterprises, who, as we saw, can become terrifying powerful.”
“Dude, I told you the mayor is in it! I was right!”
“No, we’re not going to defame him, but we can’t be totally sure, so he can prove his innocence by passing some anti-human trafficking policy that has teeth.”
“Which he won’t, because why would any politician… want to do that!?” Nabil does his best Jim Carrey (Liar Liar, 1997) impression.
“If they directed the incredible annual expenditures fighting drugs, against human trafficking? If they legalized sex work and regulated it enough that coercion detection, prevention and recourse to escape the coercion, if that was all out there in the common sphere, it’d do *something*. It’d save thousands or maybe millions of people a year, from slavery.”
“But would legalizing sex work be necessary? Like in my country, the Netherlands, there is still human trafficking even though it is legal.”
“Yes and with Schengen the flow of people from Eastern Europe has no legal controls whatsoever.”
“Yet, people can still become endangered when their physical id’s are stolen.”
“The worst of both worlds,” Gus amends.
“Is putting people’s ID info or some hash keytag on *a* blockchain, let’s say Tron, going to do anything good here?”
“The problem is, maybe ID isn’t what this tech is really good for, it’s pretty good for money, but these are bearer asset controls that can be duressed. You saw how we got shaken down and only because we had a sliver of sensible opsec did we cover our butts. We still almost died, so money aside that’s always a problem.”
“Yeah, mortality is lame.” Nabil says.
“So maybe if the tech can be coercable it’s a step down, in reality all wealth is based on human beings and technology, more than a clever gizmo to append data to, we need laws to grant amnesty to trafficking victims.”
“But some places *do that,” Nabil replies, “and they still have a problem with trafficking.”
“Yes, and it can be worse in developing economies with lower incomes but wealthy countries still have plenty of it.”
“So basically,” Nabil summarizes, “radically common sensical policy options are occluded by both the sex hang-ups of the general public, which maybe is changing, and a sense that nothing can be done, when in reality we can get a lot better results per billion dollars in public spending fighting human trafficking vs. drug cartels, which don’t need to exist at all.”
“Also I think it has something to do with the decline and rise of the hyper-modern family.” Gus says.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you notice how we all got trauma bonded together with these girls, we felt responsible for taking care of them, we’re not forcing them to work at all we just gave them a fortune each, but if we were, we’d be like human traffickers.”
“Or just roomates, depends on the job!”
“But this is what happens, people are hustling in poverty and they form these kind of sick families where the pimp may not be coercing, he may not have even recruited anyone as a Romeo, he may have been enlisted by women who were already working and wanted someone watching their back. These are all services that regulated venues could provide.”
“So you’ll have these like, white knight regulated not-pimps working the bar at the strip club, and they’re like: ‘I just wanted to work with women and support them in the sex industry, because I’m really sex positive.’” Nabil says sarcastically.
“Sex work can truly become as mild mannered and kind of goofy as that.”
“From pimps to simps!” he cackles out loud, “well I guess that laugh marks the Jump The Shark point where I’m bored of this conversation, how do we solve poverty?”
“Pumping DOGE obviously.” Gus says.
— —
They go to the Rio Branco bus statio and grab a quick lunch of some sandwiches. They buy Marcia a bus ticket to Porto Velho, a 7 hour ride. Belinda is trying to say goodbye but struggles to complete her sentences. They promise to come visit each other and that they won’t lose communication, they’re both crying now. Nabil is very hungry and focuses on his sandwich. When it comes time to say goodbye to Marcia she throws a big hug around him which throws him off, but he tries to recriprocate by hugging her tighter than he hugged the guy who didn’t murder them, it only seems proportionate.
“You let me know what you end up studying ok?” he says.
“Eu realmente não quero ir para a escola, quero viver de interesses e ter uma vida fácil.”
“Oh in that case add me on Twitter real quick.” he takes her phone and sets up a Twitter account for the gmail they’d created, searches himself and follows himself, on her behalf. “You can DM me and I will teach you some tips on how to have a big Twitter account. Learn some more English, do bi-lingual content, get a big following among Brazilians and the usual English-speaking people, you can get paid to shill shitcoins.”
She doesn’t like the idea very much so he suggests that she shill charity drives instead and make that her theme. This she likes.
“You’re a very funny person, they’re going to love you.”
She insists they take a selfie together and she posts it as the first thing on her account. He retweets. She crops a portrait from the photo. Immediately follows start pouring in.
“You’ll get a lot of spillover!”
She blows them kisses from the window and waves while Belinda walks up to place her hand over hers against the glass. They move together briefly as the bus slowly rolls out of 1st gear, before slipping away.
They see a family of homeless parents with two kids in the plaza by the bus station, begging.
Gus says, “hey we should give them the Rover.”
“What? Are you crazy? Nevermind, yes Gus, let’s give them our car.”
So he walks over with his key held out and offers them the vehicle in Portuguese, explains they will go pay it off with the rental company and to call in about it. Gus hands them the $500 in cash he has left, and they have lack of access to their coins now, but Belinda has 100k DOGE in a loose wallet on her phone, they prompt her to donate some of it to the family, and load up a spare phone. Worried about flight times, they neglect to join the family for lunch, but do get them set-up with about 25k in DOGE.
Belinda sorts the items they are to retrieve from the car, and the family moves in, and drives off. They hail a car to the airport.
At the airport, they first go check in Belinda for a flight to Manaus, her hometown. She is excited to go to business school. She smiles at them as she gets into the security line and shouts “obregado!”
“She’s a good kid.” Gus says.
“Yeah I feel like she’ll really do a lot with her life.”
They go to the Orbitz to check in about the vehicles. Gus explains that the Civic was stolen and that they gave away the Rover to a homeless family here in town.
The clerk, visibly irritated, calls up the manager, and then explains that they can charge them the cost of the cars plus a recovery fee of 10%.
“No problem,” Gus says, and pulls out his Amex Black, “just put it on this.”
“Não aceitamos Amex.”
“Of course, do you take Bitcoin? Just kidding.”
“Visa, Mastercard.”
“Ok I have a Visa here but I don’t think I have enough credit on it, only about 18k EUR.”
Flustered, the clerk calls up the manager again, who is already on his way in to negotiate. Ultimately he explains to Gus that they don’t formally accept Amex but they can accept a transaction and add the additional 2% fee. The total for the two vehicles plus yada yada comes to 122,450 R$, so they put a chunk on the Visa and then the rest of the Amex with an additional fee. Gus tries to make sure the family won’t get in trouble legally and the manager explains that they’re signing a sale document to accompany the credit card transactions and pending paperwork can be worked out, to Gus’ relief.
They buy their tickets.
“Where you going Gus?”
“Back to Italy, I’m going to try and spend more time with my teenage children.”
“Oh yeah, wow, ok, I’m going to go back to BsAs and try to recover my coins, and then I think I’ll go up to Miami for the Bitcoin Conference… I’ve always wanted to meet Tim Dillon.”
“That’s nice, I don’t do Bitcoin Conferences.”
“Yeah and then I think I’m going to come back to Puno, to see about a girl.”
“Are you Will Hunting?”
“Yeah, I’m Will Hunting and Holden Caulfield and Abed from Community and I’m the Ace of Spades man, and I’m Oscar the degenerate accountant of Hunter Thompson, and a whole lotta other characters. I’m fucking Shikamaru dude, shadow chess.”
“You wish you were Shikamaru… I have no cash, want to buy me a meal?”
“You gave away all your cash man.”
“That makes me a winner.”
“That makes you broke!”
“In my Father’s House there are many multisigs.”
They eat frango and fries and have beers while they wait for their flights, and after feeling satisfied with 3 beers and a meal, Nabil doesn’t wait for the check, he blurts out: “Gus, why do any of this? Like, at all? Why risk your life?”
Gus smiles, he politely gestures to the server and orders another beer for Nabil, along with the check and a pen. Then when it seems like they are alone in the corner of the resto, he leans forward to Nabil and whisper-yells: “BECAUSE I’M BATMAN”.
He then takes a long pull back of his beer glass and slinks back half a pint in one 10-gulp streak, makes an expression of extreme refreshment as he lands the glass on the table, and the server comes by with the check and the pen, and he takes it and writes something down, then folds it in half. As he places it in the middle of the table he says, “you should go get yourself a Polo shirt before your flight.”
And then he just walks away, down the long neck of the terminal to his gate, which is boarding, they checked him in business class so he skips the line, and he’s gone.
“Batman… damn.” Nabil says, he idly handles the paper, unfolding it, it says:
Password is “fidelio”
He buys a phone in the technology story and sets up a new device, logging in, he then tries Gus’s email with FTX and the password, no dice. He tries a number of other exchanges, nothing.
“A Polo shirt, that’s not my style… oooh *Polo*, only OGs.”
He tries the login at Poloniex. It works, no 2FA, and the balance: 1,000,000,000.1337 DOGE.
Nabil nods his head, seeing the entire universe from its hind legs for the first time: “Fidellliiooooo, yeah.”
He logs into Twitter, a post he had made the other day is getting quote tweeted again, by some of the same thought leaders, who are painting him as a disgusting John (which he is) instead of as a noble heroic person (kinda though!?) and he replies to her and says:
“I love you.
Because you believe in helping people and it doesn’t matter if we always get everything right, I think overall you’re trying to solve real problems in your way, and I too in mine. Namaste, Salaam, Tutto Amore.”
He decides to log-out of Twitter and take a break.
“I’ve never told someone I love them before,” he says to himself.
He has an email from JuLu, the subject is: “Estas bien?”
He quickly answers that they managed to get out safe and he’s flying but we can see each other in Puno in some months.
She quickly replies also, saying: “Me allegre que estes vivo! Estuvo tan preoccupado no podria dormir.”
He replies: “Thanks”
She says: “Oe por se acaso: me debes un millon de dolares. Porque… tu sabes.”
He says: “Just take it out of the 20M I stashed with you and I’ll see you later.”
He hesistates before sending, but can’t think of any thing less practical to say.
He goes back to Polo and orders a gigantic withdrawal, to see if they’re good for it, and it goes off in 20 minutes to a new wallet he just set-up. Not great OPSEC but good to see. He holds annual GDP of several island nations, again, in the palm of his hand.
“Damn, I love you Justin Sun, what a cool dude.”
And as he’s packing his recently bought bag to go board, he realizes he’s Degen’ed into Fatherhood in a rather aprupt way, it hits him, and he considers the very non-trivial probability that he might be as much of a let down as he feels his own father to be, and he begins to have a mini panick attack, before he focuses. He thinks about fractals spiralling into vanishing points, the highway, the jungle, it livens people up like spicy brocolli, the way you’d trick a kid into eating it. A global network of individuals making better decisions compartmentalizing a replication of wealth into every little capillary in his hand, he focuses on his hand, and then he closes it into a fist:
“Bet.”