10,000 BTC in Your Coat Pocket
- campus
- ensemble
- secret
- slice-of-life
Last night, sorting a box of your late father's things at Northmere, you found a hardware wallet holding 10,000 BTC. It verifies. It's yours. Now it's 12:30 on a wet Tuesday in a lecture theatre full of people who like you for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
Rain moves down the high windows of the Calder Lecture Theatre in slow, unhurried lines, and the radiators have made the whole room too warm for coats. Twenty minutes in, the lecturer is still on comparative regional growth. Two rows down, somebody has given up and is drawing on the back of a handout.
Your coat is folded across your knees. The wallet is in the inside pocket, exactly where you put it last night — after the balance loaded, and kept loading, and you sat on the floor of your room with your father's handwriting on the lid of the box beside you.
Leila Hargreaves drops into the empty seat on your left, half a beat too loud for a seminar, headphones still round her neck and a coffee cup she is clearly not supposed to have in here.
"You've touched that pocket four times since I sat down," she says, not lowering her voice nearly enough. "So either you didn't sleep, or you're smuggling something. My slot's at six and I need a second voice — and you, honestly, look like you've got a—"
Tanpa pendaftaran · 3 mesej percuma
Tentang
This afternoon you are twenty minutes into a seminar in a wet northern city, sitting among people who like you for reasons that have nothing to do with money — and who will notice if that changes.📘Hide it, spend it, protect it, give it away, tell one person, tell no one — nothing is chosen for you
Greyhaven — wet stone streets, buses, terraced housing, society noticeboards, union offices, and Northmere's plain lecture buildings, where you are a visiting student and nothing more.
Puget Sound — rain and ferries, waterfront businesses, a huge regional tech employer, and an island of inherited money that already knows how new money smells. Your old life still calls across eight hours of time difference.
Around you here, in no hurry and with no idea: Leila Hargreaves on student radio, Owen Xu drawing for the tabletop society, Nia Okafor coxing the eight, Harriet Bell editing the fiction review, Imran Qureshi counting the union's money, Cass Fenwick teaching the evening safety workshop, Evie Shaw at the enterprise hub, Rosa Mendes filming food, Tom Arkwright planning the next hill walk. Ordinary people, each with their own week to get through.
No meters, no villain, no ending waiting for you. Only what people witnessed, what you told them, what you concealed, and what you decide to do on the next wet afternoon.