Edmund looked around his basement. He was still sweaty and a little out of breath from his mile and a half run that morning. That, and the weight set he’d recently bought secondhand were the only things keeping him sane these days.
The sunlight from the dusty windows barely lit the large room, and he pulled the chain to his left to turn on the light.
He closed his eyes and sighed. He had to be at work at Best Buy in just a few hours, but he had a little time. And he needed to clean up and sort out some of this mess. After all, this house wouldn’t be his much longer. Jennifer had already packed up everything of hers and Cassie’s and moved out. So all of the assorted junk down here was either his or . . . trash. And he had another week to sort through it.
He pulled the dartboard down from the wall and tossed it in a “keep” box. He hadn’t played much lately. His friends from ViaTech Solutions hadn’t come around much since he got fired. . . .
But, he’d make other friends, he guessed. And some of them would play darts while putting away a few beers.
He turned to the shelf behind him. Among other random stuff he’d neither found a real home for nor thrown out, he found an old external hard drive.
“Huh. Wonder what I’ve got on here?” he mused.
He ran up to his (now mostly-empty) bedroom and came down with his laptop. He set it up on a card table in the corner. After waiting a few seconds for it to wake up, he plugged the hard drive into the USB port.
There were a few old games he’d decided to archive, and . . . what was this folder? BCW? He knew he didn’t actually need to create short file names, hadn’t for a long time, but old habits died hard.
He opened the folder. Oh, it was a bitcoin wallet. He didn’t remember this. He checked the date, It was last updated in . . . January 2010. Well, this was interesting.
Now it was starting to come back to him. He’d bet $200 on a Florida State game that fall. He won $500. Since he’d just heard about this new thing Bitcoin from some of his programmer friends, he figured easy come, easy go and bought $500 just to see what happened. Nothing much did for a while, so he stopped watching it and . . . eventually forgot he had it.
So how much did he have here? He opened the wallet program and read his balance: ฿9.672. Huh, a few thousand dollars. That could come in handy. He turned back to the shelf and started sorting through the board games. Catan? Toss. That had always been Jennifer’s game. He’d never developed a winning strategy. Clue? Keep.
Wait a minute . . . he’d spent a little over $500 on this back then. That number didn’t seem right. Edmund turned back to the laptop. That wasn’t a period. That was a comma. That wasn’t nine Bitcoin. It was nine thousand. When he read the number again, he jumped back so suddenly he nearly knocked over the table and his laptop.
“Holy shit! I’m rich!”
After he caught his breath, he looked around the basement again and thought about the empty house above. Yeah, he was rich, but money wasn’t going to bring Jennifer back. That ship had sailed. And even if it did, no amount of money could bring Gunnar back.
Great, he could quit Best Buy, but this didn’t begin to fix his real problems.
And then . . . Edmund realized one more crucial fact, and wheels began turning in the back of his mind, wheels that would start an engine of terrible power.
He was rich . . . and nobody knew it.
Although he couldn’t explain why just yet, Edmund went back to work at Best Buy an hour later, and stayed on with the Geek Squad for another month.
The Mayor of Christ Mountain 
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