Bitcoin Clowns, page 6
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“Both of you have PissCoins, and I do not. The irony…”
“Just buy some then,” LB said, in his LB fashion.
“I’m the creator of PissCoin! Why should I have to buy my own coins back?”
“The speculative train is running and you’re gonna miss it completely. Look at all these people who bought Bitcoin when it was still worthless. Look at where they are now.” LB poured himself a big glass of complimentary coconut juice to placate his taste buds. “All these people that missed out, even the Gods won’t forgive them, these people who won’t help themselves.”
“C’mon LB, Jong wrote the algorithm. He can put some PissCoins in his digital wallet with a few clicks of buttons, and sell them when the price’s right. He can even put some in our digital wallets, can he?” He eyed me suspiciously.
“This is exactly what I’m not going to do,” I snatched LB’s cell phone and switched it off, as the trading notifications were disturbing my mood to stay calm and human in face of great losses. “I told you what they wrote on the warning letter from the company lawyer. If I dare to change a semi-colon of the original code, they would sue me for damage.”
“But they didn’t write the source code,” Kelvin was spitting fire, after having one too many chili peppers covered beef slices, “You did!”
“Well, I’m pretty sure Teddy Wang is taking apart the whole PissNet as we speak…”
“As long as he hasn’t reverse-engineered it yet, you are still in control!” He dunked a pair of beef meatballs into the pot, and the chili oil splashed into my eyes. I almost stood up and punched him in the face. Ouch, my eyes.
“No, Kelvin. The source code is up on Github. Everything is open-sourced.” I wiped my eyes with the sleeves of my favorite Alibaba YunOS t-shirt. Its pearly whiteness was stained a dirty yellow which I would have to live with for a week or possibly two when I finally felt like turning on the washing machine. Yuck! When are they going to start realizing that people who would wear free t-shirts were not gonna be hygiene warriors? These things should all be black.
“What the eff did he just say?” Kelvin asked LB, who replied he hadn’t had a clue.
“Open-sourced meant the whole thing is public. Why am I explaining this to you idiots? I don’t think you even know what Github is…” I lowered my head to avoid looking at Kelvin in the eyes after I called him an idiot. Opportunities like such did not happen very often, and I was not very accustomed to having the upper hand.
“Jong! Seriously! Why would you put all your hard work up online for everyone to steal?! This makes absolutely no economic sense!” He jabbed his chopsticks dripping with chili oil at me. Instinctively, I Wing-Chun deflected it before they would poke out my already burning eyes.
“Dude, open-source development is the foundation for effective technological advancement. It’s the best thing that had happened ever. Period.” Then I elaborated. “Besides, the boat to manipulate PissCoin’s ledger has sailed. I don’t have the longest chain on the network anymore. This is the beauty of Blockchain technology. It’s decentralized. You can’t manipulate it once it is deployed into the network, unlike real currencies. — It’s that good.”
“Blah blah-blah blah-blah!” Kelvin tried to blah me off again whenever I explained to him something technical that he didn’t understand. And LB had now completely given up trying to understand our conversations and was shoveling a whole plate of sliced lamb into the pot in a hurry.
“I don’t eat lamb!” I had cautioned him a million times not to put any lamb into the stew until I was done eating but he was taking advantage of my momentary shift of attention and my brain could not switch gears fast enough to activate my limbs and stop this atrocity.
“Anyway, no one leaks a word about this to Marvey during Chinese New Year, okay? Nor my parents. Actually, nobody. Don’t talk to anybody when you guys come over for Chinese New Year.” I demanded the full loyalty of my soccer brothers on the penalty of a series of kicks in the nuts in the upcoming game when the season resumed after the holiday was over.
“Jeeze, I doubt we can even begin to explain this shit in plain Chinese.” LB scratched his head with the back of his chopstick holding hand and made a sarcastic laugh. Specks of white flecks danced in the air as I wrinkled my nose at how the pot of food would have been too far contaminated for me to continue eating.
“I don’t know who you’re referring to. I totally get it.”
“The two of you have a combined of a couple hundred thousand vested in these cryptocurrencies and you have no clue how they work.”
“I invest with intuition,” Kelvin retorted.
“That’s called gambling.”
“Says the man who built the casino,” Kelvin said.
Chapter 12: Intruder
I heard a loud scream coming out of my apartment. The scream was so distinctively ‘Western’ —there must be something about its frequency, length and other physical characteristics that gave it away which I would love to explore someday by passing it through a MFCC algorithm and compare its power spectrum with a scream of an Eastern woman — that I immediately knew it belonged to Marvey, who must have entered the house with the spare key. I fumbled for my set of keys to unlock the front door but before my shaky hands could insert the darn key into the keyhole, the door swung open and a Chinese man with dark skin scrammed out and ran straight at me. Survival instinct kicked in. I swerved left, avoiding the oncoming crash and grabbed him by the arm before he would fall face down. He lifted his head to look at me in a mixture of gratitude and surprise and there was something about the way he looked at me that made me release my grip on his rather muscular biceps hidden beneath his dark blue hoodie. No, I wasn’t scared, in case you were wondering. I just thought it a priority to check on my girlfriend, and the man, whoever he was, sprinted down the broken flights of stairs and ran off.
“Marv, are you okay?” I dashed through the living room when I didn’t see her there. “Are you hurt?”
I heard a low grumbling sound in the hallway and traced it back into my bedroom. On my unmade bed, there sat my girlfriend, wrapped in a towel, her dirty blonde hair dripping water all over her bare shoulders and the only bed sheet in the house. Her eyes were reddened, and so was her nose. I rushed forward and gave her a hug.
“Are you okay? What did that scum do to you? I’m here now…” No amount of words could represent how concerned and pissed off I was about whatever happened.
“I came out of the shower and there he was,” she pointed to the half-opened drawers in the closet on opposite wall, “going through your stuff! No, her stuff!” Marvey was referring to the assortment of rainbow-colored bras and underwear spilling out of them that had belonged to Paula, the rightful owner of the apartment who had disappeared and endowed me handsomely with all her shit. I wrinkled my nose in annoyance. Girlfriend and ex-wife’s personal items, especially intimate ones, should never be placed in one room.
“Gosh, I am so glad you’re okay! Did you see what he was looking for?”
“Money?” Marvey wiped the snot dangling off her nostril with the corner of her towel. “But I didn’t think he found any.”
“There’s never money in this house,” I said.
“That’s what I thought,” she looked mildly annoyed at me for having been put at risk for being the potential victim of desperate hate crime should the burglar retaliate for not have found any money in the house.
“But Marv, nobody store cash in the house these days unless they have money they can’t put in a bank. In fact, I don’t think anyone in the city has cash anymore since Alipay.”
“I still have to use cash since the stupid Alipay customer service wouldn’t verify my foreign ID...”
Then it hit me suddenly. The man could have been here for other reasons.
“Damnit!” I stood up and walked over to far side of the room where the windows were, tuning out Marvey’s endless complaint of her inability to use Alipay and WeChat Pay in China as a foreigner and was forced to live in prehistoric time by using cash at the grocery stores and waving down cabs on the streets physically. I looked up and down our quiet street. The guy who ransacked our house had already fledged and was nowhere to be seen. “He’s gone. But I’m glad you’re all right. That’s the most important.” I gave Marvey a kiss on her forehead and that stopped her torrent of complaints, and I told her that I would call Brother Fei now, before she asked me to call the police. — Americans believed in laws. Breaking and entering unsolicited into a residence was illegal over there, so the knee-jerk reaction would be to call the cops. Us Chinese believes in the laws, too, but it’s the supreme laws of ‘taking matters into your own hands’. It was always the most efficient way of solving problems over here. The Traffic Authority, for example, even created ‘Argument resolvement zones’ on the highways for people to work out their own deal should any car accident occur since it would have taken ages for the police to get on the Shanghai highways on any given time of a workday. So here I was, ringing up Brother Fei, my soccer mate who was a cop by profession, to see if he thought it was worth it for me to report it officially.
“Hey! Someone just broke into my apartment.”
“No shit. Are you okay? He asked. I heard his kids shouting about broccoli and peas in the background. Ah, dinner time. My stomach growled.
“Yes, I’m fine. And so was Marv, she was the one who was actually here in the house when it happened. I don’t think he’s taken anything, at least nothing important as far as I could see.”
“So you saw the guy?” Brother Fei’s voice indicated that he was getting excited about the confrontation. He was the ‘bad cop’, the kind that was given free passes daily to beat the living shit out of suspects as a regular part of his job. “Did you catch him? Do you have him there right now?”
“What?” I rolled my eyes. “Of course not. Why would you expect me to confront a potentially dangerous person who may or may not have weapons on him?”
“So did he have weapons on him?” The sound of screaming kids from the other end of the phone was fading away. I could literally see Brother Fei getting up and walking away from the dinner table to light up a cigarette on the balcony in my mind’s eyes, so he could enjoy the sweet details of the break-in.
“No, I don’t think so. He ran off after Marvey discovered him.”
“Ha! Sounds like he’s not a first-class burglar. He lets both of you saw his face? Definitely not someone from around here. Wanna bring your girlfriend over to the station and do a profile right now? We haven’t had anything interesting since…since forever. China is now ranked as the safest country in the world. Can you believe it?! Can you believe how boring it is for me?”
I pursed my lips at his strange logic. “I don’t know about coming over,” I hesitated, although that would be the right thing to do, because I had a strange feeling about what happened, especially after having looked at the guy in his eyes. “We didn’t lose anything valuable. I mean, he wasn’t really going after any of our stuff either. He was just rummaging through Paula’s stuff. And…” I looked at my desk in the corner of the living room where I had set up my workspace. There were easily picked electronic devices strewed all over the place, including Marvey’s brand new iPhone 8, still lying in their usual spots. “I have a feeling that the guy was looking specifically for something, something that belonged to Paula.”
“…” the other end of the line went silent.
“Are you still there?”
“Hmm…you’d better meet me at the station immediately and do a profile now. He could be someone Triple X’s has sent for herself to retrieve her things. If we catch him, we might be able to catch her, too.”
“Are you guys really calling her Triple X’s now at the station?”
“That’s not important.”
I walked over to the front door to observe for signs of break-in but couldn’t see a thing. Did he come through here with a key? If he has the key to the apartment, could he really be sent here by Paula? The thought excited me, as I had been looking for her and my beloved Jessie for almost a year now.
“So, meet you in ten?” I could hear him shaking off his rubber flip-flops over the phone.
“Hold up! Hold up. I set up a Haven on an old phone lying around in the apartment a few weeks ago.”
“What Haven?” Brother Fei asked, as I expected. He also had an iPhone, which almost never gets any new app before Android did.
“Dude, Haven’s like the coolest low-cost anti-spy app now around town. Edward Snowden developed it himself. It monitors and analyzes for unusual movements in the phone’s surroundings with sensors and accelerometer data and take videos…”
“So, essentially you’ve set up a security camera.” He clicked his tongue in protest of my attempt to elaborate.
“Yes, but it’s a million times cooler.”
“Just shoot me his photo when you’ve downloaded it off the cam.” He cut to the chase and hung up.
“Marv!” I said with a raised voice. “Are you okay in there?”
“No! I’m gonna jump back into the shower. There’s still shampoo in my hair!” Marvey yelled from the bedroom. “Let me know when the cops are here!”
“Okay!” I lied, since no cop was going to show up at all. For the next two hours, I went through every bit of data recorded by Haven on my Huawei phone and sped through the video clips that Haven recorded. Because I wasn’t really expecting for it to have an actual utility, I installed the app, turned it on and threw it back on to my desk. I hadn’t put too much thought into the placement of the phone at all. And now I was just getting a bunch of frames with the guy in from the chin up. There wasn’t one clear frame of his face at all.
Think, Jong, think. What else was there? What other data could you use? Edward Snowden would have thought of something.
“It’s almost eleven!” Marv had come out of the shower, finally and yelled down the hallway at me, and my mind snapped back to reality. “When are the cops coming? I’m dead tired and I’m about to collapse. I took a five-hour flight to get here from Qinghai to surprise you, and I was the one who got surprised. The irony!”
To be very honest, I was about to collapse as well. I hadn’t really had a wink of sleep since I got fired, which I had totally, pleasantly forgotten and was now suddenly reminded of. I closed my eyes for a second to let them rest, then a solution appeared in front of my eyes. I know what to do. But first, I need time and space, and I only had nine more hours before we had to leave for Feng Cheng Village.
“I really appreciate that you came down here for me. Look. Why don’t you go to bed already and let me handle the cops. I saw the guy’s face myself.”
“That’s a great idea. We’re going to your parent’s tomorrow. I don’t wanna look like shit in front of all your relatives. I already look like a monster to them for being different.”
“That’s because you’re so beautiful, it’s a monstrosity!” I yelled down the hallway back at her, to which she did not respond. — Whoever said Chinese people were bad at receiving compliments were totally wrong. They had obviously not met my humble-to-a-fault girlfriend yet. Of course, there was also an off chance that my English was so bad she didn’t get it.
Chapter 13: Chinese New Year
So, it was Chinese New Year again, CNY in short. — I had refrained from talking or even allocating more than a nanosecond of my mental power on the topic because it was just not important. I didn’t mean that it was not important in the absolute sense. Actually it was a very important annual event not only for Chinese on this side of the earth and beyond, but for mankind. Although originally it was simply, a celebration of the arrival of Spring, Chinese New Year was colloquially referred to as the ‘Spring Transport’ (Chunyun in Mandarin) because the majority of the workforces in China were migrant workers and these migrant workers needed to go home once a year. The international media called this whole thing ‘the largest annual human migration’.
Shanghai really bore the brunt of it, being one of the largest and most prosperous cities in China that attracted talents and hardworking folks to come chase their dreams and make money to send home, wherever that might be. One out of every two persons here was practically from out of town and they were all trying to go home to celebrate with their families at the same time. This totally sucked and what sucked more was that no one seemed to have a solution for it and history just repeated itself over and over again. For someone who actually came from Shanghai like me, CNY was the biggest inconvenience and inefficiency to our economy. And whoever denied it deserved to be stuck in holiday traffic for the rest of their lives, so they could relive their favorite holiday of the year over and over and over again.
