REKT - Chapter 14
Serbia, Miami, Slack
We are working across space, across time, across realities. Virtual business, virtual insanity, virtual money. There’s a pulse, a groove, a slipstream that you fall into when shit is really getting done. Action items power you deep into the night. Problems spin across your dreams, turning puzzles in your unconscious until you wake with the thread of a solution that tugs at you in the shower and all through breakfast.
The kids call them swim lanes. Agile speak for capacity, projects in motion. For normals, it means that Andy, Nikola, and I are all managing separate tasks in the business. Past, present, future.
I’m history, the face of the Icarus wind down. My time is spent with the Serbs. They are good people with families and mouths to feed. They take their work seriously even if they are not the best at it. There’s a tendency for them to program by Google because they aren’t at the level we really need.
Looking shit up, copying and pasting. That’s ok. We get by using an open-source software package called BckOffice which runs our fake hedge fund. The program does the same work that a hundred portfolio administrators did twenty years ago. If you ever wondered how three jackasses could run a stablecoin through a fake hedge fund, it’s because of BckOffice and our friends in Serbia. If you’ve never wondered that, congratulations you clearly have better things to do with your life.
While I’m home in Chicago, I spend most of my time on video conference with Novi Sad, Serbia. Poor Milos keeps having to bring his laptop over to the white board so that I can follow fund flows and make corrections. Most of the exchanges have chosen to get on a drawdown schedule. That means they’ll redeem a set amount of coins each night until their balance hits zero just before we close our doors on December 31st. Even though we just released an audit showing we have the cash in the bank, our clients have a small suspicion that money might go missing at the eleventh hour. No one wants to be holding a ton of coins on their end without any dollars on ours, so they’ll take a bit out each day. Risk management is all. I understand, I’d do the same thing.
Our task is to make those nightly redemptions as smooth as possible. The fake fund never processed a high volume of transactions, so everything was done manually before. There was no point in automating it because the Serbs charged us so little per hour. With the wind down upon us, our transactions are going to ramp up. This crew won’t be able to handle that much on their own, and I don’t want to bring new people in just to shut things down. Too risky. Instead, we are spending this week automating a lot of our tasks. If everything goes right, I’ll be back on the road with Andy by the weekend.
Niko and the Serbs have been trading insults at each other in Greek since she moved into my apartment. Longer than that it turns out. She says it’s a year-long battle, but Slobodan says it’s been going since the first Serb made the mistake of visiting Cyprus. It’s fun to watch them go at it, but I cannot understand the humor. Even when they take the time to walk me through the layers of nationalism, city vs. villager stereotypes, historical events, and Balkan versions of your momma jokes, something is lost in translation. At the end of the day, I think the joy is just in the back and forth, the give and the take. Sometimes you just want to tell someone they are so ugly a pig wouldn’t fuck them, only to be told that you are so stupid you’d fuck a pig. If it keeps them happy and working deep into the night of the Central European Time Zone then great, insult away.
My phone rings. It’s Andy from Miami. I hold the phone towards my laptop camera, let the Serbs know I need to take this, and wander up to the roof of the building for privacy.
“How goes it?” I ask.
“I’m on a boat. I’ve got a nautical themed pashmina afghan,” Andy answers.
“Nice. Whose boat?”
“Fuck if I know, but it’s gun metal gray with tinted windows and gold trim. All of the boats are down here. I think it’s some sort of a Russian money laundering look. Ryan, the yeyo is off the chain.”
I check my watch, it’s 11:20 AM Central Time. Jesus Andy, that’s way too early for you to be powder skiing across Biscayne Bay.
“So, are you just calling to gloat or is there business to talk about?” I ask Andy.
“I need you to look into an Amy Wu, aka Madam Wu. She’s the proprietress of several day spas in West Palm.”
“Is she a potential investor?”
“No. She’s got a pipeline of women coming into the country. There seems to be an Erskine connection there.”
Facepalm. I hoped his Erskine obsession had passed. He’s investigating rub and tug joints? That’s the polar opposite of where we need his head right now.
“Andy, you are down in Miami to raise money. Remember?”
“I know Ryan, but Esrkine is big down here. He’s got a spot in West Palm Beach. All sorts of dots are connecting for me. I’m starting to know what each tremor on the web signifies.”
“The web? Like the internet?” I ask.
I’m having a hard time following Andy. He’s on a different wavelength than me, plus it’s noisy out on the water. There’s a lot of wind shear and music in the background.
“No man, this whole thing is a spiderweb. An entire tangle of scumbags. Erskine, Hans, Cynthia Dixon. I mean once you get into Ursa Major, who knows where this goes. My guy says all sorts of people come through here. Names you would never expect. I can’t be having this conversation right now. I’m being watched. Look Ryan, get me some dirt on Wu. I’ve got to go.”
Great, Andy is going manic. Perfect fucking timing. Erskine. Detective Andy. I can’t remember this being a trigger before. Has he ever tried playing private investigator? I don’t have time for this. The Serbs cannot manage the wind down on their own and I don’t trust them to be unsupervised. Niko could do it, but she’s putting our million bucks to work in a white-hot crypto market. It’s hard to hunt and farm at the same time. Totally different mindsets. I need her to have that killer instinct, blood lust. I want her out there pushing the limits of risk, insulting Serbs and flipping shit coins.
We are handing back a half billion dollars over nine weeks, just a tiny amount of that could change lives in Serbia forever. The temptation to misdirect a wire, to have a rounding error or two, to buy instead of sell. There are many games that can be played. Ones I haven’t even thought of. The Serbs need to be kept on a short leash and incentivized not to steal. I’m going to issue them a completion bonus if the books balance at the end. The equivalent of three months’ salary should be enough to keep them in line.
Now back to Andy. The fuck am I going to do about him? He’s not coming home on his own. That much is clear. No one gets off a tinted yacht full of coke on their own, unless of course it’s to head up to West Palm Beach to try to infiltrate the inner circle of a hedge fund billionaire. That is not going to end well. Got to get Andy out of there. I’m going to need a jet, some guys, and Dr. Wendy. We don’t have private jet money anymore. Nope. Never had that to begin with. Joe does though. He’s got that sweet Blockstar ICO money. His net worth in fake internet money is over a billion dollars, which means a private security detail assigned to him, and he cares about Andy. The drawback is that he hates Dr. Wendy. That’s okay. I just need a week, and then I can babysit Andy, the Serbs, and Icarus. I just need a week to get on top of everything.
Pick up the phone Joe. Please pick up the phone.
“Ry, good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a real oystercatcher situation.”
“Something’s wrong with the birds? And why do you two care so much about this one species?”
So much for speaking in code. Just spit it out, dumbass.
“No. I mean Andy. He’s losing his edge. This Erskine thing has dug into him and he’s acting erratic.”
“Ryan, if I can level with you, it’s got me twisted too. I could feel the corruption, the power imbalance, the injustice. Where’s Andy?”
“Miami.”
“On his own?”
“Yes.”
Joe thinks he has me on mute, but he doesn’t. I can hear him cursing me out, calling me all sorts of horrible names. The part that hurts most is him saying I don’t care about Andy and am just using him to get rich. It’s not true, but it cuts because I’ve failed my friend. My motivations are all out of balance.
“Joe, I heard all that.”
“Good, you were meant to. Where’s your head man? Andy is your brother, and you were supposed to protect him. He is special.”
“Joe, I need help not a dressing down. He was fine a couple days ago. We’ve got so much coming at us right now. I need a week to get Icarus under control. Can you go to Miami and look after Andy for me? Get him out of there, park him somewhere chill and I’ll meet up with you guys on Sunday.”
“Of course, anything for Andy. Give me some background, what’s he into right now?”
“Cocaine, expats, yachts.”
“No, no, I mean on the Erskine thing. That’s what got you worried right?”
“Yeah, he asked me to check out Amy Wu in West Palm. She runs day spas. Andy says girls flow through there.”
“Amy Wu, West Palm. Got it. Where’s Andy staying?”
“The W in South Beach.”
“I’m in Mexico City. The arts scene is fantastic, but Andy is the priority. I can be there by eight tonight. Don’t worry, I’ve got your back Ryan.”
Great, now what to do about Niko? She’s turned our million into a million four in three days of trading. That’s absolutely bananas if you think about it. A big chunk of our money is in “safe” coins like BTC and ETH. You could just trade the two of them and see astronomical returns, but then there are alt coins which are moving even wilder, sometimes tripling in value in a day, then plunging the next morning. That’s not by accident either. There’s a world out there lingering in private Telegram channels trading information, working in tandem to pump and dump shit coins. If an alt coin is something that isn’t Bitcoin or Ethereum, but has real blockchain aspirations, then a shit coin is something that is hollow, empty, without a real purpose other than to be filled up with hot air, look pretty for noobs, then collapse like a house of cards when everyone who bought early gets out right as the price peaks.
In the real world you can get arrested for pump and dump stock scams, but this isn’t the real world because this isn’t real money. There are no rules here, and Niko has made herself at home in this world. Crypto is very bro-centric, a lot of dudes chasing easy money. It’s a vast and shallow pool where women are rarities. Crypto skews young too. Kids in their early twenties. Never seen a bubble before. Fuck most have never seen money before, so they’ve never taken a fall, have no idea what hurt is. They think they can shit gold, and for now they aren’t wrong.
Here’s Nikola, born into a double-ledger family, growing up playing games of money, having to hold her own in a chauvinist world. It’s not even fair. She is preying on these kiddies, using her charm to get on the inside quickly. A sexy smile, a cheap joke, acting like one of the boys only with boobs. She has them eating out of her spoon. How shallow we are on the edges; how base our operating parameters are.
This is who we are now. Outsourcing mental health responsibilities, snorting cocaine at noon, trading tits for tips. The things we do when money is just sitting there on the table begging to be taken. I’m older than the Telegram kiddies, I’ve been around. I graduated college in 2007, right as the Great Financial Crisis hit. Thank fucking God, I went to ASU instead of USC like I wanted to. In a way, I need to thank Cynthia Dixon for that one. Had my father not been laid off, he would have covered enough of my college tuition to get me behind student debt eight ball at a private university. I dodged a bullet there, only lived two years in my parents’ garage before I saved enough to get to Chicago. Nikola? Her family lost ten percent of their savings overnight. That was after five years of austerity, inflation, and contagion. Turns out little Miss Rich Girl is broke. Thank God, I never shared those words with her. How little we know about each other. How dangerous a wrong step can be with young love.
I’ve decided to keep the Andy news from Niko for the time being. Maybe this is like Barcelona. Maybe Joe can intervene before things escalate, level him off, and this will all blow over. Maybe I am overreacting. Am I transferring my anxiety about our situation into an overreaction about Andy’s well-being? I don’t know. Whatever happens, I want Nikola laser focused. She is fucking killing it right now and there’s no need to upset the golden goose.