by Dara Horn
“Mining money,” he told her. He didn’t look up.
As had been true for centuries, she had no idea what her child was talking about. None of the children ever made any sense to her, not even Yochanan—especially not Yochanan, who threw away two thousand years of civilization in exchange for some pathetic shadow version of it, trading in all those rituals that had formed a connection to God for the chance to study and discuss and write about all those rituals that had formed a connection to God. Kind of like what Rocky was doing right now: spending real money on a coin collection. Again.
“Is that legal?”
“Would I be doing it in your basement if it weren’t legal?”
Rachel did not know the answer to this question. She recalled several visits to the police station when Rocky was a teenager, and two separate bail hearings in his twenties, none of which Rocky seemed to remember anymore. “Mom, seriously, that was a long time ago,” he would mumble on the rare occasions when she dared to mention them. As if he knew anything about a long time ago.
“How can you mine money on a computer?”
He glanced up briefly, a fake smile on his face. “I run SHA256 double round hash verification processes to validate transactions and add them to the blockchain,” he said, “though I’m thinking of switching over to Scrypt.” Then he turned back to the screen.
He was trying to intimidate her. It had been years since anyone had intimidated her. “What’s a blockchain?”
Rocky’s eyes illuminated. He swiveled toward her on his dead father’s office chair, his face radiant with a sudden thrill. “It’s only the most amazing thing that’s happened in technology in the past twenty years.”
She always had one like this, Rachel noticed: the child awed by the future, the one convinced that whatever old people were doing right now was absurd. She remembered a child who insisted on finding a new way of polishing gems, another who disputed everything the barber-surgeon said and finally started bottling her own healing herbs, and another who was convinced that everyone in town was an idiot and only read newspapers from abroad. One son once told her with a smirk that anyone with any sense was reading books now, that only fools still read from scrolls. She remembered her father and objected. But books make people into fools, she insisted. With books, readers skip around, they leave out chapter 3 and go straight to chapter 9, they don’t bother remembering the beginning because they can always go back and see what happened, they only read the exciting parts and miss the important parts, they skip to the end. With scrolls, readers have no choice but to be diligent, they have to read carefully, they have to remember the beginning when they reach the end, they can’t be fools. Books are made for fools! He had listened to her, still smirking. Exactly, Mother, he had told her, and opened a bindery, which thrived until his grandson ran it into the ground. Those future-facing children, Rachel knew, were the most insufferable of all children—disrespectful, arrogant, dismissive, ungrateful, impossible to raise. Worst of all, they were invariably right.
“The blockchain is the foundation for an entirely new internet,” Rocky was saying. He was speaking quickly now, electrified as he always was by something new. He had talked the same way about the company he started five years ago, and the one he started ten years before that, and on back for the past thirty years. It always began and ended the same way: Rocky invented something, or claimed to have invented something, and then some business partner “stole” it from him, and before he knew it, either the company collapsed or his partners kicked him out. His life was littered with failed apps, underfunded websites, computer chip variants that violated some obscure patent, brokerage systems that bent some inconvenient federal law, an archaeology of almosts thirty years deep, starting with his very first telecom jobs, when he already couldn’t get along with a boss. Sometimes he made it out of his mistakes with money, occasionally quite a bit—though more often he lost money, and typically a wife along with it. Thirty years later, Rocky was still all potential. Rachel heard that familiar electricity in his voice and stifled a groan.
“Right now the internet is based on trust,” he was saying. “It’s supposedly this decentralized democratic thing, but it’s not, because almost all your data is stored by a few very large companies. You give your private information or financial details to all these central institutions, and then you just have to hope that they don’t abuse it. The blockchain gets rid of all that.”
“So who’s running it instead?”
“That’s the beauty of it. No one is.”
“No one?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that beautiful?”
Rachel could recall several situations in the past several centuries in which no one was running things. None of them had ended well. “So what’s a blockchain?” she heard herself ask.
“It’s like a ledger, basically the record of every transaction that’s ever happened in the system. It’s a permanent record of the past that can never change, and it happens without trusting anyone at all.”
Like me, Rachel thought. Rocky smiled, and a wave of warmth ran through her, an alertness in her body to the presence of her child—her middle-aged, spent, grizzled, pathetic child, but still her child. Here he was, despite all reason, trying to achieve what his mother already had: a permanent record of the past that can never change, without trusting anyone at all. But that was a live wire she could not touch. Instead she said, “Sounds like a great way to buy drugs.”
“That was true until a big bust years ago. Honestly, if I wanted to buy drugs I’d be better off with dollars. I read somewhere that half the physical bills in the United States carry trace amounts of cocaine.” He shrugged and turned back to the screen.
“So all this money-making, or money-mining, or whatever it is—it’s all happening on your laptop?”
“No. This is just keeping track of the process. I bought shares in a mining rig.”
“A mining rig?”
“It’s a giant hardware system that uses enormous amounts of power. It overheats so easily that it has to sit in a bath of cooling fluids.” He turned to her with a grin. “Aren’t you glad it’s not in your house?”
“Where is it?”
“Some guy on the network runs it. I guess it’s in his basement instead of yours. I bought the shares from him.”
A dead weight fell in Rachel’s gut. “Do you know who he is? How can you trust that he even has these machines?” The fact that she knew the answers did not prevent her from asking the questions.
“God, Mom, you’re so damn nosy. What the hell do you care?”
She gave an indignant huff, hiding her own fear. It was amazing how easy that was to do with children, no matter how old they were. Even grown children never expected their parents to be afraid. “I care because I don’t need the FBI raiding my house,” she said, summoning as much resentment as she could muster. “And because I don’t need you dropping money you don’t have on things that don’t exist.”
Rocky grunted. His annoyance relieved her. “Here it is, okay?” He banged on the keyboard, typing faster than she would have thought possible. “Look, an actual photo. There’s your mining rig. And there’s the guy who owns it. Notice that they both exist.”
He turned the screen toward her. Most of the picture was filled with dozens of enormous hard drives lined up on metal racks, their bases bathed in blue fluid. Wires grew out of them, burgeoning in bunches like thick black uncut hair. It was astonishingly ugly, almost deliberately so. It reminded her of the mechanical water-clock one of her sons had built once, a mess of wooden gears and axles that somehow calculated when to add an extra month to the lunar year. The moon is so beautiful and your machine is so ugly, she had told him. He had grinned at her. But it works, Mother! So what if no one is going to write a poem about it! Yet this time the machines weren’t what caught her eye. In the corner of the photo, a short man who was obviously holding the camera had tipped his face into the frame, one olive-skinned hand held out toward the wires with a sa
lesman’s flourish. Her stomach sank like a stone.
“See how he exists?” Rocky grinned, tapping the screen. A shiver ran through Rachel’s body. “And he’s some Arab or Spanish guy or whatever, so think about it—if the FBI comes after someone, it’s going to be him, not me. You know, this digital currency probably has the most potential in failed states anyway, or places where the regular currency can’t be trusted. Maybe he’s got contacts in places like that. Supposedly in Argentina it’s a going concern, since their normal money routinely falls down the toilet.”
“What makes you think he’s Arab or Spanish,” she said, in order to say something, though she failed to make it a question. It was hard enough to keep the quaver out of her voice.
“My general racism regarding tan people,” he said, and kept typing. He had inherited her dead husband’s pallor, though he had her thick dark hair.
“Tan people like me?” she asked. “Maybe he’s just Jewish.”
Rocky rolled his eyes. “Yeah, except his online handle is
@highpriest. So, no, I don’t think so.” He talked and typed simultaneously. “Anyway, who gives a crap. The guy exists, case closed.”
Rachel breathed as he clicked the photograph away. The man’s face lingered in her mind, a tiny opening in the veil between her and the abyss. The only way to close it again was to change the subject.
“Do you ever hear from Judy anymore?” she asked.
She regretted the question immediately. Judy was Rocky’s latest ex-wife—or rather, his almost-ex-wife—and the source of his most recent financial woes. She had asked hoping for good news, finality, but that was ridiculous. Nothing ever ended, and you could never expect good news from Rocky.
“Judy is eating me alive,” he moaned. “She took my house, she took my car, she emptied the accounts, and now her lawyer calls me every day. She thinks I’m hiding assets somewhere.”
“Are you?”
“Would I be here if I were?” He pulled a face like the child he once was, and still was. “It’s her fault that I’m even doing the mining. Or her inspiration, let’s call it. Three months ago she hacked into my computer and held it for ransom.”
Judy was the receptionist at Rocky’s last company, a college dropout who had worked at a hair salon before a friend got her the job. “That seems a bit beyond her ability,” Rachel said.
“Nothing is beyond that bitch’s ability,” Rocky seethed. “So she paid someone to do it. What’s the difference? The point is, my computer was frozen and some asshole made me pay a thousand bucks to get it back.”
“You actually paid?”
“Of course I paid. What was I going to do, prosecute? But here’s the thing. They made me pay in Bitcoin. ‘Digital currency only.’ They even gave me a list of preferred vendors for the exchange! I go to one of the vendors, and they make me hand over every ID known to man. Not just my photo ID, but a photo of me holding my photo ID. So I got to thinking, this could happen again any time, it could happen to anyone, it’s only going to happen more and more, there are obviously whole office parks full of people in Latvia or wherever doing this every day—so let’s cut out the middleman. That’s when I decided to invest in the rig. There’s gotta be a future here, right?”
There’s always a future, Rachel thought. Unfortunately. “If you’re betting on the future of crime, I would say that’s a winning bet.”
“It’s not crime, it’s everything. I’m telling you, the blockchain is—”
“Rocky, of all the smart people I know, you may be the dumbest.”
He turned back to his screen. Rachel stared at her son, at his fully grown body, the back of his thick head. The sight of him hunched over in her basement, three feet from the blocks he had once played with, made her suddenly ill, as though he and his childhood and adulthood were already buried together underground. She thought of him as a boy, lurking in the basement with his blocks—and all the other centuries of boys lurking in basements, building futures. The girls sometimes looked back, but only rarely. The boys never did.
“I can’t believe you’re still hovering over me like I’m a teenager,” he muttered.
“I can’t believe I’m still letting you live here when you’re fifty-six years old. If you don’t want me hovering, feel free to get out of my house.”
She saw him flinch. The typing slowed, and finally stopped. He spun on the chair toward her. In his weary unshaven face, in her husband’s pajamas, she saw his father—years of mornings, caresses, kindnesses, lies, arguments, comforts, all of it now dust. One day, not that many years from now, her son too would be part of the soil, part of the plants, part of food, part of her.
“Mom, I’m just trying to get back on my feet, okay? In a few months I’ll cash out of this, I’ll be out of your house, out of your life. This thing is going to take off. Then you’ll never have to think about me ever again. I’ll even pay for your retirement. I swear to God.”
“Don’t swear,” she said. It was an old reflex, translated country by country, as though each successive life offered her some way to prevent future regret. She buried the idea quickly, smothering it in words. “I really just came down to remind you that it’s Friday, and Hannah and her family are coming over for dinner in an hour,” she said. “You might want to put on some clothes.”
Hannah’s name made Rocky snap the laptop shut. Seeing his eagerness made Rachel feel lighter, happier. But she was already on her way upstairs, turning away from him.
Elazar’s face on her son’s computer screen had shaken her. As she hurried to finish cooking the meal, she could not loosen his image from her mind. What could he possibly be doing there, on Rocky’s laptop? She didn’t know what he was plotting, but clearly it was something, and the details were changeable and therefore meaningless, as they always were. Elazar had only one reason for living. Her own thousands of reasons for living, including Rocky himself, mattered not at all.
HANNAH MADE A POINT, as children of screwed-up parents like Rocky often do, of being ambitiously, relentlessly normal, grinding her way to conventional success. She had plowed through school, and even her first wrong-turn marriage hadn’t stopped her from collecting every academic accolade in her path. Now she was some kind of medical researcher, doing work Rachel couldn’t even pretend to understand. Her current husband, Daniel, was some sort of technology journalist—and also Hannah’s lover, partner, and best friend, always laughing with her at their two gorgeous children. Imagine if I had had that, Rachel thought every time their miniature family graced her doorstep, each member of that perfect square of people always mid-laugh, a palpable intimacy between them. Not that she hadn’t had families—dozens!—or lovers who had brought her happiness—more than anyone deserved! But that total honesty, that completely shared life, that sense of pristine partnership and common purpose—Rachel ached whenever she saw it, and ached even more knowing how it would end, even if they didn’t know it yet. Even the children exuded purposeful ambition. The older son was six, blond, silent and obsessive, never objecting to anything but doing what he wanted anyway, reading fantasy novels under the table and playing chess against himself. But the younger son, five years old, stirred Rachel with a familiar feeling she couldn’t quite name. He barreled into Rachel’s house with his black curls flying, wearing a superhero cape.
“I’m the Amazing Jumping Man!” he screeched. “Watch me JUMP!” In an instant he had scaled a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and was careening toward a chandelier.
“Ezra, get DOWN!” his mother thundered, as his father grabbed at his legs. The boy managed to swing by one arm from the chandelier before his synchronized parents succeeded in yanking him back to earth. Even the parents’ exasperation left Rachel in awe, the perfect union of purpose as they wrestled the boy to the table with his older brother in tow. Once the appropriate dinner table blessings had been recited—the ones Rachel had first heard from Yochanan—both boys consumed their food as quickly as possible and immediately raced down to the basement to
play, to everyone’s relief.
“Everything is delicious, Gram,” Hannah said as Rachel passed around a dish of noodle kugel. It annoyed Rachel how perfect Hannah was, how openly she tried to compensate for her father. She glanced at Rocky, who didn’t look up from his plate. Rachel was pleased to see that he had shaved.
“Eating here always reminds me of my own grandmother,” Daniel added. “She made everything the old-fashioned way, just like this. It really is true that smell and taste are connected to memory. Thank you for bringing her back to life!”
Rachel smiled to hide a grimace. She had thought she was cooking new things; everything on the table was something she had only learned to cook in the past two hundred years. Was it true that smell and taste were connected to memory? For a century or two, of course. But after that the smells expired, vanished from the world. It wasn’t even possible to cook her childhood foods anymore. They required clay ovens, copper heating coils, inverted iron bowls over open fires, grains that no longer existed, animals whose parts were no longer for sale. Once, about seventy years ago, she had seen a jug of olive oil in a store, for the first time in over a century: ages had passed since she had lived anywhere near where olives grew, or near where anyone might buy them. Olive oil! She had felt a thrill when she bought it. But at home she had discovered that there was nothing to eat it with, and when she tasted it, the flavorless slick on her tongue bore no resemblance at all to what she remembered. She was newly married to a wonderful man then, in a brand-new purpose-built suburb deliberately designed for forgetting, and it had been a long time since she had cried. But that day she did, alone in her chrome-lined electric kitchen. She felt pathetic, like a grown-up trying to play with a doll.
“So what’s going on with you, overachiever?” Rocky asked his daughter. In Hannah’s presence, Rocky seemed at least ten years younger.
“Not much,” Hannah murmured.
Her husband butted in. “Hannah’s too modest to tell you, so I have to brag for her. She and her lab just won a major grant from Google.”