Chapter 23: The Secret Map
Friday, July 31, 2015 (Afternoon/Evening)
The afternoon sun filtered through the windows, dyeing Michael's living room a dusty orange. The doorbell rang, exactly at five o'clock.
Michael went down to answer it. It was Leo, Sam, and Nate. This time they weren't coming to play video games. They were coming to work.
"Ready for your close-up, Zombie?" said Leo, walking in with his usual cynical air. He was carrying a backpack that, by the sound of it, was full of soda cans.
"I got the light!" announced Sam, triumphantly holding up an old halogen work lamp of his father's. A bright orange extension cord was coiled around his arm.
Nate was the last to enter. He didn't say anything, he just held up the keys to his car, an old 90s Toyota Camry, dented but clean. It was his main "prop vehicle".
"Great," said Michael, closing the door. "Pizza is on the way. Let's eat first, then we record."
They ate on the living room floor, surrounded by the makeshift equipment. Michael explained his vision to them.
"I don't want it to look professional," he said, chewing on a piece of pepperoni. "I want it to look real. Grainy. Like you found it on an old tape in a closet."
"Got it," said Leo, who was the only one who seemed to grasp the aesthetic. "Like a 90s skate video. Dirty. Authentic."
"Exactly," said Michael, grateful that Leo understood.
They waited for the sun to set completely. The Hollywood "magic hour" was of no use to them. They needed the darkness.
Around eight o'clock, they went out to the front yard. Production began.
"Okay, Nate," said Michael, holding the heavy ten-dollar VHS camera on his shoulder. It felt like a weapon. He looked through the black and white viewfinder.
"Drive down the street, very slow. Pass under that streetlight. Sam, stay on the sidewalk, but don't light the car, just light the steam coming out of the exhaust."
"Got it, Director Mike!" said Sam, plugging the halogen lamp into the extension cord that reached back to the house.
Nate started the engine. The Camry, with its quiet engine, glided down the silent suburban street like a ghost ship. Michael recorded it. The image in the viewfinder was perfect: shaky, grainy, the streetlights creating unreal flares in the lens.
The exhaust smoke, captured by Sam's halogen light, looked like fog from a horror movie. "Cut!" shouted Michael, feeling a rush of excitement. "That was perfect."
They went back to the backyard. It was time for the main performance.
"Okay," said Michael, handing the camera to Leo. "You record this. You have a better eye for angles."
Leo took the camera, surprised by the weight. "Cool. What do I do?"
"Just follow me. Don't zoom. Don't try to be fancy. Just keep me in the frame."
Michael connected his phone to a small Bluetooth speaker and played the narcotic beat of <u>Sodium</u>. The lo-fi music floated in the night air.
He lit a cigarette. Sam aimed the halogen light at him, not directly, but bouncing it off the wall of the house, creating a hard, side light.
Michael put up his hood and started walking around the yard, mumbling the lyrics, the smoke swirling in the cone of light. He felt stupid, performing for his friends.
"Wait, wait, cut," said Leo suddenly, lowering the camera.
"What's wrong?" asked Michael.
"You look like you're posing. It looks fake," said Leo, brutally honest. "Forget we're here. Just... be the Zombie from school. Do whatever you do when you're alone."
Michael looked at him. He nodded. 'He's right.'
"Okay. Again," said Leo, raising the camera.
Michael closed his eyes. He breathed in the smoke. He let the hypnotic beat flood him. He stopped acting. He simply was.
He walked around the yard, staring at nothing, with cigarette ash falling on his hoodie. He sat on the concrete step. He looked directly at the camera, but his gaze went right through it.
"That's it," whispered Leo, recording.
"Hey!" said Sam, moving the light. "Try this!" He turned the lamp off and on again. Off. On. Michael's image flickered, a raw and disorienting strobe effect.
"Yes!" said Leo, excited. "Keep doing that, Sam!"
They recorded for hours. They recorded Michael sitting on the hood of Nate's car, unmoving, while the lights of passing cars reflected in the windshield. They recorded shots of his worn sneakers walking on cracked asphalt. They recorded an extreme close-up of his eye, reflecting the lamp light.
Finally, near one in the morning, Michael raised his hand. "I think we have enough. I'm exhausted."
They were exhausted, dirty, and smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. Sam had a small burn on his hand from the halogen lamp. Nate had already fallen asleep on the patio sofa.
Leo rewound the tape a few seconds and played it back on the small black and white viewfinder. Only blurry, grainy, meaningless images could be seen.
"I don't know what the fuck we just did, Mike," said Leo, handing the camera back to him. "But I think it's gonna be great."
Michael took the camera. It contained hours of aesthetically perfect footage. It had been the hardest and most fun workday he had had in a long time.
…..
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Michael woke up because of the sun, not an alarm. Morning light poured through his bedroom window, illuminating the dust floating in the air. For a moment, he felt disoriented.
He sat up in bed. The house was in absolute silence. The chaos of the previous night, the music, his friends' laughter... it was all gone. He felt strangely empty.
He got up, his body aching from sleeping in a bad position. He walked down the hall, his bare feet on the wooden floor. He saw his father's office, his studio, with the door ajar. The VHS camera rested on the desk, like a relic of a successful night.
He went to the kitchen, expecting to see the mess of pizza boxes and soda cans that he and his friends had left. But there was nothing. Leo, before leaving, must have cleaned it all up. Michael felt a strange pang of gratitude.
He made himself an instant coffee and looked at the kitten calendar hanging on the fridge. The date was marked with a small red circle that he hadn't made. His "mother" from this universe must have marked it, months ago.
August 1.
His birthday.
He was turning sixteen.
He stared at the date, the coffee getting cold in his hand. Sixteen. In his other life, at sixteen, he was learning to drive, worried about a chemistry exam. Now... now he was a ghost.
He waited, out of pure instinct, for his phone to ring. A call from his mother. A text from his father. A greeting from his college friends.
But his phone, the iPhone 5 resting on the counter, remained silent.
His new friends, Leo, Sam, and Nate, didn't know. Neither did Jake. He hadn't mentioned it. How could he? "Hey guys, tomorrow is my birthday, but actually I'm turning twenty-three, not sixteen?" Impossible.
The loneliness he felt in that moment was different from the first few days. It was a deeper, more mature loneliness. It was the certainty that, even surrounded by people, he was fundamentally alone.
He spent it alone in his house.
He tried to be productive. He went to his studio and turned on the laptop. He opened the <u>Sodium</u> project. He looked at the grainy footage they had recorded. It was good, but he didn't have the energy to start editing. Not today.
He felt... empty. The creative high of the previous day had faded, replaced by the melancholy of a personal milestone passing unnoticed.
'Happy birthday to me,' he thought with bitter irony.
He closed the laptop. He needed to turn off his brain.
He went to his room, searched in his sock drawer, and took out the small bag of weed he had left. He rolled a thin joint, put on his sunglasses, and went out to the backyard.
The midday sun was bright, but he sat on the step, in the shade, and lit the joint.
He was smoking weed and looking at the unkempt lawn. The smoke filled his lungs, and with the exhale, the tension in his shoulders seemed to loosen.
He leaned back against the wall of the house, letting the high settle in. It was a pleasant, warm buzz that distanced him from everything.
And in that distance, his mind began to wander.
…..
Michael sat on the concrete step of the backyard, taking a long drag from the joint. Smoke filled his lungs and he released it slowly, watching it dissipate in the darkness. The silence of the house was deafening.
'Happy sixteenth birthday, ghost.'
He laughed to himself, a dry, humorless sound. Today he turned sixteen. His friends didn't know, and the family that would have celebrated it was in a universe he couldn't return to. Loneliness felt heavier on days that were supposed to be special.
His mind, clouded by the weed, began to drift. He felt like the protagonist of one of those stories he used to read in his other life.
He thought about transmigration novels and fanfics. The protagonist always woke up in the past. And they always knew what to do. 'The cliché,' he thought. 'It's always the same. The guy wakes up in 1990 and buys Apple stock. Or wakes up in 2009 and buys thousands of Bitcoin.'
He laughed again. 'How stupid. So easy...'
The laughter died out. The thought, which had started as a mockery, remained floating in his mind.
'Wait.'
The weed buzz seemed to stop. His heart gave a dull thud.
'Wait a fucking second.'
It wasn't a novel cliché. It was his life. He was that guy.
With a sudden, lazy curiosity, he got up, grabbed his MacBook from the living room sofa, and went back out to the patio. He sat on the step, the laptop on his knees.
'Just out of curiosity... how much is it?'
He opened the browser. The Wi-Fi connection barely reached, but it was enough. He typed into Google: "Bitcoin price".
The results loaded. $284.10.
'Hmm.'
Michael leaned back, processing that figure. In 2015, $280 dollars. He remembered that in his world, at the peak of 2025, it had surpassed $100,000. It was a huge return. But the big initial jump, the one that went from pennies to hundreds of dollars, the one that turned a thousand dollars into millions... that train had already left.
He felt strangely disappointed.
'Too late. It's no longer the big x10,000 explosion.'
He was about to close the laptop. But he stopped. His past as a blockchain enthusiast wasn't limited to Bitcoin. In fact, Bitcoin seemed outdated to him, a relic.
His true passion, the technology he had studied for hours, the one he had learned to program, was another. He remembered the sleepless nights in his apartment in 2024, learning Solidity. He remembered the thrill of creating his first smart contract.
With fingers shaking slightly, he typed a new word into the search engine.
"Ethereum".
The screen filled with results. They weren't price charts. They were news articles. Press releases. Blog posts.
The first headline, from a tech news site, froze him.
"Ethereum Project Launches 'Frontier', the First Version of its Decentralized Platform."
Michael scanned the article, his heart starting to beat hard against his ribs. He looked for the date. His eyes widened.
July 30, 2015.
He looked at the date in the corner of his laptop screen. August 1, 2015.
'Two days ago.'
It wasn't a memory. It wasn't history. It was happening. Right now.
The air seemed to grow thinner. He jumped up, the laptop almost falling off his knees. He started pacing frantically around the small patio, his mind racing a mile a minute.
'Okay, okay, think. It just launched.'
He searched "Ethereum price". The results were confusing, from small, obscure exchanges. The price was in pennies, fluctuating wildly.
'What happened after the launch?'
He closed his eyes, forcing his memory, going back to his twenty-two-year-old life. He remembered the charts. He remembered the discussions on the forums. The people mocking the "pre-sale".
And then, he saw it. A price chart from a "History of Crypto" article he had read in 2024. The launch in July. A small spike. And then... a drop. A long, slow drop during the summer and fall.
He remembered the lowest point. The "Valley of Autumn". The moment when all the early investors gave up.
'September. Late September or early October.'
He remembered the exact figure that had been etched into his memory because it was absurdly low.
$0.80. Less than a dollar.
He looked at the calendar on his laptop again. August 1. He had weeks. Maybe two months, tops, to get capital before the price bottomed out and began its true, unstoppable rise.
'Capital', he thought, panic now mixing with euphoria. 'I need capital. Now!'
He had nothing. A few hundred dollars in his bank account from his shitty job. It wasn't enough. He needed... he needed a lot.
His eyes landed on the dark house behind him. The mausoleum. The asset. Only the house.
A $500,000 house.
The full epiphany hit him like a train. The master plan. It unfolded in his mind in an instant, clear and perfect.
Step 1: Capital. Sell the house. Immediately. In a rush. Not at market price, that would take months. Sell it below price, fast, in August, to a cash buyer.
Step 2: Purchase. With those $400,000 or more, wait for September. Buy all the Ethereum he could at $0.80.
Quick calculation in his head: $350,000 / $0.80... '437,500 coins. My God.'
Step 3: Sale. He remembered the peak. The mania. January 2018. He remembered the exact figure from the exchange: $1,110 per coin.
437,500 x 1,110... his mind got stuck. He took out his phone and opened the calculator.
437,500 * 1110 = 485,625,000.
Four hundred and eighty-five million dollars.
Michael had to lean against the wall. His knees buckled. The figure was so big it didn't seem real.
And then, the rest of the plan clicked into place.
The "Crypto Winter". Everything collapsed after January 2018. But what else collapsed? The stock market. Late 2018.
He remembered the conversations on his Twitter feed. The "hangover" of crypto mining. Nvidia. The stock tanking.
And he remembered the real revolution. The AI race. The H100 chips. Nvidia's rise until 2025 to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
'I could buy millions of shares.'
It was all there. A treasure map of a decade, unfolded before him.
He sat on the step, shaking. The weed had sharpened his memory, but now the adrenaline had left him completely sober.
The plan was so perfect, so terrifying in its scale, that he needed to calm down. He needed to process it.
He reached into his pocket, took out his small bag of weed and rolling papers. With hands that shook visibly, he smoked another joint. Not to get high. To think. To make sure he wasn't forgetting anything.
It was the night of his sixteenth birthday. He was alone, in a universe that wasn't his. And he had just found the key to buy it.
…..
The adrenaline of the epiphany was so potent that it almost eclipsed the effect of the weed. Michael stood in the yard, his heart beating hard against his ribs. The plan was there, complete, perfect.
But his mind, although racing, felt slippery. He knew how this worked. Brilliant ideas you had at three in the morning, especially when you were high, had a bad habit of disappearing with the sun.
A new panic invaded him. The panic of forgetting.
'What if I wake up tomorrow and only remember 'Nvidia'? What if I forget the dates?'
He couldn't risk it. He needed to write it down. Now.
He ran inside, stumbling a bit on the sliding door step. He ignored the VHS camera on the table. He went straight to his makeshift studio, to his backpack, and took out his hardcover notebook. The notebook where he wrote down his song ideas.
He went back to the patio, sat on the step under the weak porch light. He opened a blank page. He needed to write it all down.
But he couldn't write "Sell Ethereum in January 2018". It was too dangerous.
This house, although his, wasn't safe. What if someone found it? A friend? A girl?
If someone found that notebook, he would look like a lunatic. Or worse, if his predictions came true, he would look like... something else. Something that would attract the wrong kind of attention.
He needed a code. References that only he, with his 2025 memory, could understand.
His hand shook, not just from the weed, but from the magnitude of what he was writing. He took a deep breath. He started writing.
First, the capital. The source of everything.
PLAN A: Sell the Mausoleum (URGENT - August).
'Mausoleum', he thought. 'Perfect.' That was exactly how this house felt.
Second, the purchase. The most important one.
Mission: Ghost 1.0 (Buy in the Valley of Autumn - Sept/Oct '15 - $0.80).
He called Ethereum "Ghost". For "Ether". It made sense. It was his ghost operation.
Third, the sale. The first big hit.
Ghost Harvest: Execute Order 66 (Peak Jan '18 - $1110).
A small, grim smile appeared on his face at the Star Wars reference. 'Kill the Jedi... or in this case, those who hold too long.'
Fourth, the reinvestment. The master stroke.
Main Objective: Green Goddess (NVDA). Buy in Winter '18 ($124). Wait for the snow.
Nvidia, the green logo. The "Goddess of AI". Perfect. "Wait for the snow" was his reminder that the rise wouldn't be immediate.
He leaned back, looking at the list. It was gibberish. It was a manifesto. It was a billion-dollar treasure map, written in a five-dollar notebook.
When he finished writing the last word, the adrenaline left him all at once. The combined effect of the weed, the panic, and the euphoria left him completely empty.
Being already very high and exhausted, he looked at the sky. The deep black of the night was beginning to give way to a dark blue on the horizon. Dawn.
The night of his sixteenth birthday was over.
He got up, his legs felt like jelly. He went back to his room. He put the notebook, his most precious secret, under the mattress. It wasn't the best hiding place, but for now it was enough.
He crawled into his bed. He didn't even take off his hoodie. He lay in bed, the world spinning around him, a mix of exhaustion and triumph.
He closed his eyes. The plan was drawn. The race had begun.
A single phrase repeated in his head, a triumphant whisper in the darkness.
"I'm going to be rich."
And with that thought, he fell asleep instantly.