Crypto Creep: The World's First CryptoCurrency Crime Novel

Chapter 1
Zig Strang sipped his coffee, keeping an eye on his iPad, which was open to coinmarketcap.com. It was a dry, clear day in Santa Cruz. So nice. So nice to have California’s climate without California’s congestion. The waters of Monterey Bay glistened under the late morning sun. Zig raised his eyes from the iPad and, as he sipped again, off in the distance the glittering waters of the bay broke as a humpback whale breached. Unbelievable. Man, he was a lucky guy. He had so much. A house in a beautiful city. A wife who loved him, and who, unfortunately, was away visiting her family back east. He’d mentioned this last fact on his YouTube channel. As a matter of fact, he needed to finish his coffee and get back to video today’s episode.

As he had told his subscribers, he liked to do his episodes in the morning, after he went to the Santa Cruz Warf for his morning shot of coffee which he always liked to sweeten with hazelnut creamer. He also drank coffee while he videoed for You Tube. He liked to call his coffee his “cornucopia of life.”

Coffee kept him fired up, and kept his mind sharp for the demanding job of researching altcoins and various business enterprises connected with blockchain technology. He scanned the iPad, checking prices on all his favorite cryptocurrencies. He pulled his phone out, opened the calculator, and did a back of the envelope series of sums. When he finished, he leaned back in his metal chair, and took another sip from the cornucopia, and smiled. He’d made nearly $500 while he was sleeping.

He played with a few ideas for the upcoming webcast. He was thinking of telling his subscribers about Buttcoin. Buttcoin had raised just south of $100 million in its ICO. He’d bought in when the price was pennies, and it quickly jumped to over a dollar. He’d hold for a few more hours then sell off and take his profits in Bitcoin.

Zig leaned back in his chair, raised his arms over his head, and stretched way back, his face pointing skyward. He closed his eyes and saw the light of the steadily rising sun as a rosy glow through his eyelids. He opened his eyes, and frowned irritably. High above him a jet was spewing out a chem trail.

Bastards. They thought they could control us with their cocktails of aluminum, barium and strontium. Affect our water and food supply. Turn us all into passive sheeple. That’s why he had the greenhouse. That crap got onto your plants and into your soil. A few years ago the greenhouse had become his go-to place for his webcast. Zig didn’t even like going outdoors much anymore.

A man walked past Zig on the pier, a tray with a piece of strudel and a mug of coffee held in front of him, his head turning this way and that as he scanned for a seat. There were plenty available. The man turned around, facing Zig. Certainly wasn’t from around here. Too pale. Looked a little like a hayseed. Fairly large, muscular rube. Probably bucked his share of bales on the farm. Straw-colored hair came out in thatches around the base of the man’s John Deere cap. He had a half-awake, slack-jawed expression. A bit slow on the go. Gomer Pyle.

Zig smiled to himself and raised his hazelnut-flavored coffee to his lips. The hayseed stood for awhile, then his gaze rested on Zig. He stared for a few seconds, and just as Zig was about to say “Fuck’s your problem?” the hayseed broke into a grin, his teeth all horsey, like mismatched Chiclets.

“Hey, I know who you are!” he said.

“Yeah?” Zig said, his irritation growing. The man just stood there.

“Well who am I?”

“Well, at least I think I know who are. Aren’t you Zig Strang?” The man approached Zig’s table, hunched over his tray, toothy grin looming ever larger. “Or am I wrong?”

Zig’s irritation gave way to a flush of pleasure. He had 25,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, but this was the first time he had been recognized in public.

“Guilty as charged,” Zig said.

“I knew it! Didn’t I tell you?” The man loomed over Zig’s table. “Man this is exciting! I’m actually meeting a real-world celebrity. Golly!”

“Shazam!” Zig thought. The man stood there, obviously too polite to ask to sit down. Country folk were like that. Their parents taught them to say “Yes ma’am and No ma’am, Yes sir and no sir. All that polite crap. Zig liked that.

“Pull up a chair,” Zig said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, of course. Have a seat, rube- uh, dude.”

“Look, I don’t want to- you probably have to go cut a video or something.”

“No, no, no problem,” Zig said, feeling generous. “Have a seat. I got time.”

“Well…ok then!” The man placed his tray on the table opposite Zig. He sat, took his things off his tray, shoved the tray aside and looked at Zig.

“Be my guest,” Zig said and nodded at the man’s strudel.

“I hope you don’t mind,” the man said.

“I already said it was ok,” Zig said.

“No, sir, it’s not that. It’s just that I like to pray before I eat anything. I’m always thankful to the Lord for providing.
“Knock yourself out, brother.”

The man bent his head hands folded. He held that pose for five seconds, then raised his head and unfolded his hands. Then he cut a piece of strudel with his fork, made it disappear into his mouth, and settled back with his coffee.

“What’d you get?” Zig asked, nodding at the coffee.

“Oh just a plain old cup of black coffee.”

“Probably best. Who knows what they put in those creamed additives.”

“Got that right.” The man frowned. “Wait, What do they put in those creamed additives?”

“Well, the container always says ‘non-dairy creamer.’ But is has an ingredient called sodium caseinate, which comes from dairy. But it’s so heavily processed that it’s no longer legally dairy. If you’re lactose intolerant you can’t digest something in milk called ‘casein.’ And sodium caseinate comes from casein.”

“Man, you are a smart guy!” the man exclaimed. He stuck a hand out the size of a porterhouse steak. “Virgil,” he said shaking Zig’s hand the way a terrier would shake a chew toy. “Virgil Rhodes.”

“Any relation to Dusty?”

“Huh? Who’se Dusty.”

“Dusty 'Roads.' Get it?

Virgil gave Zig another one of those blank, slack-jawed looks, and then the penny dropped. “Oh, I get it! Yeah I think I may have heard that one before if I remember right.”

Jeez. Zig began hoping this idiot wouldn’t take up too much of his time. He had to get home, cut his vid, and get onto the exchanges.

Zig had been a tech guy back in the early days of the internet. He’d had a secure job at IBM making a pretty decent salary. So when a friend of his told him about a startup Zig could get in on the ground floor if he had a few thousand to invest, Zig had poo-poohed it. “I’m not worried,” he told his friend. “I have an IRA. I’m comfy. I have a good job. What more could I want?”
His friend had shrugged and turned away. “Well, I tried,” he called back over his shoulder, still trying to get Zig to bite. But Zig wasn’t biting. He had a mortgage, and kids to raise, and could ill-afford to lose money on this startup his friend was raving about, Giggle? Goggle? What was it called? Oh, right. Google. What kind of a name was that, anyway?

Ten million dollars later, his friend called and offered to fly him to the resort in Tahiti he was staying at. Zig declined the offer. Not that he didn’t like the idea of going to Tahiti. But the thought that it could have been him offering to fly a friend to Tahiti would have been a constant irritant and he knew he would have had a hard time enjoying himself.
Well, that was all in the past. He’d missed out on that go-round. He wasn’t missing out on this one. He’s started with $1000 six years ago and now he had about a half million in various wallets.

“So how’s your work going? Still making lots of money?” Virgil asked.

“I do all right.”

“Yeah, those videos are really helpful. I got a friend. He’s better at all that computer stuff than I am. But I heard about cryptocurrencies from a news story and I never forgot it. Some fella from Sweden-”

“Norway.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Not much.”

“Well, this guy…but I guess you know this story.”

“Yeah, I know them all, Virgil. Stories like that about people who win big- what was it, he bought like 1000 Bitcoin for $15.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He was writin’ and article about it and said, “What have I got to lose?
”
“Then he found out he was a millionaire.”

“Amazing.” Virgil was fidgeting in his chair. He drank some more coffee and settled down. “Well,” he said, I ain’t gonna be making that kind of money, and I ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer you might say, but I got good instincts, and I told my best friend, Peter? I said, “Peter, you got to get me into this. Now here’s a thousand I saved up and I want you to invest it for me. You can keep half of anything we make. Well, Peter went to work and-”

“When was this?”
“2015. Summer time.”

“Sweet. You could get five bitcoins for a thousand back then. Great time to buy. They were never lower.”
“That’s right. Then I was looking around on YouTube and found your videos. Great stuff. I told Peter about them and he watches you every day. He subscribed and everything.”

“Well, I appreciate that, Virgil.”

“I- I just don’t know about some of that other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

“You know, all that other stuff. 9/11 was an inside job.”

“It was.”

“There’s so much gold in the Grand Canyon that gold would be nearly worthless if they dug it all out.”

“There is, and it would.”

“Jets are dumping all kinds of stuff on us.”

“They are. The government wants to control all of us, Virge. That’s just the way it is. They’ll use anything at their disposal.”
“I don’t know, Zig. I served in the Army. I salute the flag when it goes by. I love my country.”
Poor guy. One of the sheeple. He just didn’t know. Well, give him a little, but not too much.

Zig went back to the coffee creamers. He told him about all of the toxic fats in them. Like dipotassium phosphate. That made your coffee taste good. But it also led to kidney failure, vomiting, diarrhea, and iron deficiencies in some people. Then there was sodium aluminosilicate. That whitened the coffee, gave it that lovely creamy brown color. But they actually put the same ingredient into laundry detergent to keep it from caking in the box. It contributed to gut problems and Alzheimer’s. You could even set it on fire. That’s why Zig’s creamer was strictly organic.

After they had both finished their coffee, Zig stretched, and, pushed away from the table, and stood up. He stretched there, too, working out the kinks from last night’s marathon trading session. He had been keeping track of four small cap coins at once. It was like juggling, he had to stay sharp and be quick. It had been a good night. He’d shut down his PC at 2:30 AM, $500 richer than when he had booted it up. He’d talk about it in the vid.

Zig wasn’t above preening a little. An astute follower of his YouTube channel could make an educated guess on his wealth if he were patient enough to watch them all.

Which is exactly what Virgil Rhodes had done.

Tomorrow: Chapter 2