Bitcoin Clowns, page 15
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
Two motorcyclists suddenly appeared on our flanks. The one near me tried to wave us down.
“Who’s that?!” Kelvin frowned, annoyed that someone dared challenging his GranTurismo.
I squinted my eyes and looked at the sign on the license plate of the motorcycle near me, and got the answer.
“Paparazzi,” I hissed.
Where were they when you were kidnapped by an escaped prisoner? Where were they when you almost got shot in the head by a crazy South American gangster? They always come after the fact, when the only thing you want to do was to go home and sleep.
Kelvin floored his gas pedal as soon as we hit the highway. The Maserati roared like a hungry lion and the paparazzi were out of sight in no time.
“You know what,” he began his evil speech, “I told my dad I have given you money to dabble in the cryptocurrency market.”
“You what?” Rolling my eyes, I knew where this was going already without really hearing more from him. We knew each other since we were young, and whenever his dad would catch him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, he would always tell him it was my idea, that I did it. I usually did not mind taking the rap for my swore-brother, until Mr. Zhang would tell my dad and he would come running after me with a cane, threatening to split my butt cheeks as if I was an unfortunate Singaporean criminal. (Go look it up online what it means for your butt for cautionary purpose against committing crimes in South-East Asia. A picture is worth a thousand warnings.)
“He grumbled a bit, but he’s fine with it. You know how he trusts you a lot more than me. He wouldn’t even blink if you lose all his money.”
“How much was it?”
“Fifty thousand USD.”
“And how much is it now?”
“I don’t know. It was sixty nano-cents or something when I bought it. It’s now hovering around seven.”
“Shit! Kelvin.” I howled at him. I doubted that the intelligent Mr. Zhang would really believe that I was so incompetent as to lose so much of his money in such a short amount of time. I meant I am someone who did not even feel comfortable buying a flatbread from the neighborhood hawker after its price went from fifty to seventy cent a piece.
“Everything is virtual! It didn’t feel real.” He exclaimed in his defense.
“Get off at this exit,” I demanded. “We’re going to see your father and apologize.”
Reluctantly, Kelvin took me to his dad’s mansion on the mountain She, their regular abode on the west side of the river.
I was caught off guards when the two paparazzi rushed up to us as soon as we stepped off the vehicle. They were already waiting outside the Zhang’s residence. With Kelvin’s Maserati GranTurismo I guess there was no mistaking of its owner and where they should go to catch us. A nice expensive car such as this had to be locked up in its carefully designed garage at the end of the day, even I knew it, if one wants to see it again the next day in Shanghai.
“Chief He! Chief He! Can you tell us something about what happened at Max Venture? Was it a suicide or was it a murder?” One of them pushed their recording smartphone toward my face. I dodged left only to find another jabbing his at me. “If you don’t want to talk about that, can you tell us something about PissCoin? Almost 90% of its value has been wiped out because of the announcement by the government yesterday. Do you have something to say about that?”
“No, I have nothing to say,” I pushed my way forward. Suddenly, a man in baseball cap appeared from behind the decorative bushes near the entrance to the Zhang’s mansion and approached Kelvin and I. “I don’t want to do any interview!” I raised my hand to block the running cellphone cameras.
“Little Buddha?!” His baseball cap got knocked off his head during the tussle, revealing his face. He picked up his hat in panic. Kelvin pulled him over and pushed us both into the house as soon as the doorman opened up.
“What are you doing here?”
“I have the biggest news for you two. We need to talk!” Little Buddha spoke as he raised his head to look at the artifacts surrounding us at the reception hall. He had never been inside the Zhang’s impressive mansion, a place so stuffed with art that was reminiscence of the Getty’s extravagant home.
“We have something important to do,” I grabbed Kelvin by the sleeves and yanked him towards the direction of the staircase that led up to his father’s study. It’s imperative that his father be informed of the terrible investment, lest the value of PissCoin and whatever crap Kelvin bought would fall through the floor.
“Is Mr. Zhang here?” I asked the butler who nodded amiably and told us he was indeed in his study. Kelvin was dragging his feet, but he did walk after me, since I already volunteered to speak for him and bear the brunt of his dad’s imminent anger for him. There could not have been a better deal in the entire universe.
“No! You guys just listen to me!” LB ran in front of us and stretched out his arm. “I have insider information! Tonight’s the night. There’s going to be some real big movements on PI2S-Coin!”
“PI2S-Coin?” Kelvin looked baffled.
“That’s the new name of PissCoin,” I explained sadly, lamenting at the waste of my coin-naming literary ingenuity.
“Trust me! This is 100% for real. It’s been announced in a P&D group on Telegram!”
“Announced?” I repeated that word with contempt. C’mon, what kind of proper insider information was ever ‘announced’?
“What’s P&D anyway?”
“Pump and dump, you know?” LB said triumphantly. There were not many situations where he could tell us two new information, with the exception of new must-see pranks on 9Gags. “A bunch of people, probably Russians, form groups and have everyone buy the same coin at the same time to pump up the price, and once it has reached a certain threshold, they will tell everyone to dump.”
“That’s brilliant.” Kelvin’s mouth was agape in admiration. “Everyone can make money together!”
“That’s…market manipulation,” I wanted to add the word ‘again’ at the end of my sentence, but I refrained myself to avoid having to share what I had gone through at the conference. “Is that not illegal?”
“It’s illegal if it is regulated,” LB said confidently. “Cryptocurrencies are not regulated at the moment. Besides, these exchanges they used do not accept fiat currencies, so double not-regulated,” he gave me a smug smirk, as if he had already thought of counterarguments for any question I could ever throw at him.
“Show me what they say already!” Kelvin begged. LB shoved us to the center of the living room where we sat around a tall coffee table and looked into the madness that was happening right now on the PissCoin-BTC exchange on Carbit. “Look! It’s shot up 500% already! It’s happening!”
“500%?” Kelvin was grinning from ear to ear. His investment was recovering its value at an incredible speed. I rubbed my eyes and stuck my face closer to the phone screen to make sure that I was reading the price chart correctly. The upward sloping line was getting steeper and steeper as the market got excited about the sudden jump and rushed in on the price hike.
I squeezed Kelvin hard in the arm and said, “sell all your PissCoins now!”
“Sell?!” Kelvin gave me one of those looks that asked for a punch in the face. “The rocket’s shooting for the moon at the moment, and you want to call off the mission?!”
“Sell them! That way you will recover all your money and can avoid the conversation with your dad entirely!” I extended my fingers to fish his phone from his pants pocket. He whimpered and objected to my approach adamantly, shifting himself away from me, dodging my Monkey Fist.
“Wait a minute, the price is dropping…” LB exclaimed in surprise. “Why didn’t they announce it yet on Telegram?”
“Just sell all your coins!” I insisted. Turning his back towards me, Kelvin pulled out his phone and looked at this portfolio on Carbit. The recovered value was slowly dwindling. The time to sell was now or never.
“Okay, okay, I’ll sell but let me entered a better price than the market’s.” He typed carefully with his trembling fingers on the tiny keyboard of his phone.
LB on the opposite side of the table was swiping through pages and pages of Telegram message to find out whether he had missed the dumping announcement.
My eyes hurt looking at these two idiots and so I buried my head in my hands. Even then, I could hear distinctively the feverish clicking sound produced from their cellphone keyboards. Dai Ah Yi (Nanny Dai), the maid at the Zhang’s whom I had known since I was young, came over and gave us all a glass of cold water. I supposed she knew that was what we needed exactly, to cool down.
“Shiitttttttttt!” Kelvin shouted and threw his phone on the tabletop eventually, causing the contents of our glasses to splash out of the rims all over the table.
“What is it this time?” I pretended to be interested.
“My sell order is stuck. Arghhh!!” He grunted in frustration.
“Mine too!” There were almost tears in LB’s eyes. “We missed the damn peak! How’s that possible?!”
I looked at the price of PissCoin and saw that it had now fallen below the rate it was less than ten minutes ago. Whoever these P&D organizers were, they were good, quick and ruthless. The brilliant insider information had caused LB even more money than what he had lost before. I face-palmed myself internally and thanked the Gods for my lack of savings. Otherwise I might fall into this kind of get-rich-quick temptation as well.
“The dump signal is finally announced!” LB stood up in anger with his phone in hand.
“It’s fairly obvious you are not close enough to the P&D core to hear it before the market crashed. And you’ll probably never be.” I had to break the truth to him. I just had to.
All kinds of curse words in Shanghainese dialect could be heard reverberating the mansion for the rest of the evening.
Chapter 28: Billionaire
I was expecting something about the death at Max Venture on the headlines the next morning, but instead the headlines of all the major news media were about Simon Li. His fat, ugly face was plastered all over the television screens and the internet, as the man who became China’s very first Cryptocurrency Billionaire to my utter disgust. Kelvin was equally agitated, and rightfully so, since he actually had the capital (notice the tense of ‘had’ here) to actually compete with him from equal footing.
“How the hell did he do it?” Kelvin washed down the ham that Dai Ah Yi prepared for us for breakfast with orange juice and blared at LB and I. He had some really heavy panda eyes today, likely twisting and turning in his bed yesterday evening after losing more of his tuition money on the market. For someone whose major was psychology, he ought to have a better understanding of the human greed and treacherousness than the rest of us.
Mr. Zhang had joined us for breakfast today, happy to see some guests in his giant mansion that were not here for business. “That could have been you,” he said to his son, Kelvin, who was so embarrassed that he looked like he was about to implode. Kelvin was the youngest of all three boys Mr. Zhang had, and probably the idlest one as well. His brothers were so busy with handling his dad’s business that they were not even around on Chinese New Year’s day. And despite his occasional harsh remarks, I do think that Mr. Zhang doesn’t really mind that his youngest was a sissy’s boy that amounted to nothing even at the age of thirty. At least he was filial and was always around at home, keeping his old man companied and busy, solving his shit for him, so to speak.
“The world’s so unfair!” He pierced with his fork another slice of melon wrapped with Parma ham, and complained. LB nodded in agreement as I played with the pieces of overpriced slice of Spanish pig thigh that must have been soaked in brine for ages in my mouth and wondered how unfair the world was. Life was good. Mr. Zhang shook his head at his son’s comment and winked at me knowingly. “The news said his assets reached the one-billion mark yesterday at around 2 AM. That was during the height of the PissCoin rally!”
“Damn, he got out early!” LB hissed, banging his fist on the marble tabletop.
One PissCoin, at its height, was worth 0.0035 USD a piece. To own a billion would mean he had 1,000,000,000 divided by 0.0035 = at least 280,000,000,000, or 280 trillion of PissCoins!
I jumped from my seat, upsetting the plate in front of me.
“What?!” Kelvin looked at me annoyed.
“There can’t be that much PissCoin out there! It made no sense!” Something was seriously off. There were 20 billion pieces of PissCoins by design (I mean, who would have thought billions of them would not be enough?!), and Simon Li becoming a PissCoin billionaire shows that he had at least couple hundred trillion of PissCoin, and that was a giant waving red flag.
Foul play! There was definitely foul play somewhere.
“Rebecca,” we abandoned our breakfast and hurdled over the conference phone in Mr. Zhang’s study, “what’s with the thing with Simon?” Mr. Zhang watched us ‘kids’ going berserk over that little bit of money with mild amusement.
“Oh, that! That’s great, isn’t it?” Rebecca answered unexpectedly cheerfully. “That’s giving us so much free publicity, you know? I’m very proud of him!”
Proud of him? That guy did nothing but benefit from people’s stupidity. Why was there never anybody being proud of the guy who creates true value? — Let me ask you this, Mark Zuckerberg and Winklevoss Brothers, who did more to mankind? If you get to pick, do you ask Warren Buffett to be your Jedi master, or do you ask Elon Musk? Somehow I have a feeling that my choices would not be the popular ones.
“Listen, Jong,” Rebecca interrupted my wave of indignity. “Do you think you can come back and work for us? I mean like as a third-party? Obviously I can’t put you directly back on our staff. Simon wouldn’t like it at all…”
“Like a contractor?” Contractor, temp, freelancer…that seemed to be my unshakable fate in life.
“It will pay well, I promise…And I’ll make sure you’re included in the Chinese New Year bonus recipient list.” Rebecca avoided answering the fallen-from-grace head-of-department’s question directly. “I have hired an excellent assistant for you already. She’s wonderful. You’ll like her.”
Kelvin was now making a huge cross with his arms repeatedly in the air, appealing to my reason.
Mr. Zhang cleared his throat behind his desk, not looking at any one of us. His signal was pretty clear: a man must work, whether you have a ‘rich dad’ or a ‘poor dad’.
“Come by this afternoon,” Rebecca pleaded. “There’s something I want you to look into. You know now that Simon took an interest in the bank’s operation, Teddy’s not really working on any of the regular stuff anymore…”
“I’ll stop by,” I conceded eventually, and got a subtle nod of approval from Mr. Zhang, my second dad.
Chapter 29: Racks
It was five degree Celsius outside, but inside Bilious’ Office Building, it felt like a hundred degrees.
“Is the air conditioning broken?” I asked Candice as soon as I got in. She looked at me with twisted facial features, not knowing whether she should flatter or insult me. To relieve her of the stress that receptionists face every day, I let her know that I was here on the boss’s invitation, not uninvited. Immediately I received the biggest smile I had seen all day.
“No, I don’t know what’s wrong.” The light above us flashed. She turned pale when that happened.
“Even the lights are not working properly?”
“The maintenance guys have already come here and checked it out. They said everything’s okay. I don’t think it’s okay at all…” Candice whispered at me, “Chief He, to tell you honestly, I think there’s bad spirits in this place.”
I frowned at the superstitious woman. She immediately got defensive and was eager to fill me in on the tales of the building. “Don’t you know there are a lot of office suicides lately around here in Liujiazui? Just yesterday, some guy jumped off his office building and killed himself. Perhaps it’s one of those poor dead souls coming back to haunt its ex-bosses now…”
I was wondering whether Candice actually meant the accountant at Max Venture, when Rebecca came out to welcome me back.
She cut to the chase almost immediately. I needed work and she offered it. We signed a new contract quickly and I immediately got back to the computer lab to work.
Soon as I opened the door to the lab, I was blasted with a wave of hot air. The lab was so hot it felt almost like a sauna.
“What’s that?!” I looked suspiciously at Rebecca, who probably knew about this before she offered me the job. This was what she wanted me to deal with.
“I don’t know what Teddy and his guys were setting up in there, but it’s a mess inside!” She walked in front of me and pushed through the door to the server room. Deafening noise assaulted my hearing. Rebecca shut the door almost immediately after the brief tour of the core of my assignment. “You hear that?! That noise’s driving me nuts! I could hear it even in my own room! —I kept telling Teddy to do something about it but he kept brushing me off. Anyway, you deal with it, without breaking anything, of course.”
“You know I won’t,” I reassured her and disappeared into the room.
To be dead honest, I rarely went into the server room. Server rooms were usually kept cold under some serious air-conditioning to prevent machine damage from high temperature and avoid potential fire hazards. Generally kept dark such that any error signaled by the color-swapping LEDs and the blinking sequences of the computer towers could be seen clearly by the technician, they were eerie places that one tended to avoid if possible. Now a sweltering sauna, I felt even more anxious going in. Something was definitely not right in here.
Gingerly, I walked down the aisle between two rows of server racks at least twice my height in the semi-darkness, careful not to trip on any cable, hit my head and bleed to death in here all alone. Indeed, with the noise over here, no one would be able to discern my screams from the symphonies of whirling fans at high speeds in here at all.
