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# And Then She Disappears
## A block by block narrative

[Block 1](https://stacker.news/items/680735)

https://image.nostr.build/355a79565270ec7efb67a0318ebad036ed70676cfa81570bf1f77ead412f9249.png

### Block 2 - Cameras

20 years earlier, Shanika Brown sat alone quietly in an ugly room with pale yellow walls and fluorescent ceiling lighting. She stretched her arms over the round collapsible table supporting her laptop. Both tables in the room looked like anachronisms due to their rough particle board surface, ensnared by a gaggle of futuristic looking chairs. Despite what anyone might have guessed, both the table and chairs had been made the same year. However, the tables were never meant to be used this way and were normally covered in tablecloths and decadent centerpieces. She pushed back on her chair to test the conspicuously springy feature in its back. No convention center furniture is comfortable, but the facade of creating comfort, whether in a waiting room or a ballroom, always seems to produce the opposite sensation.

The propped door allowed dozens of smells from catering carts into her waiting space. It also brought in the welcome sounds of shuffling feet, clinking trays, and muffled stories between various kitchen staff. All of these masked the ugly buzz of the fluorescent lights and made Shanika think she might be better off reviewing for her speech on the floors of that cavernous hallway instead of this sad little space.

As she reviewed the idea of relocating, six gregarious photographers barreled into the room. Each held a styrofoam box with the caterer’s sticker sealing it shut. They quickly enveloped the other table. The loud jeering and swearing initially between one another all became directed at their boxes’ contents as each sticker-seal was broken and the stale food inside was retrieved.

“Chicken salad sandwich! The guests get massaged bovine and I get diced big-bird!”
	
“At least you got desert!”
	
“You dumbass, you’ve got a cookie in your hand right hand…right now. The polyethylene wrap on your cookie is stuck to the polyethylene wrap on your sandwich.”

“The poly-what is stuck to the poly-who?”

“The plastic wrap. He’s talking about the plastic wrap.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize I needed a dictionary to work with you.”

“Did anybody get turkey?”

“I think we all got the same thing this time.”
	
As the young contractors had fun analyzing their meals and critiquing each other’s vocabulary, Shanika wondered if they noticed the platter and cover at her table. Her laptop and brief case might have concealed them just enough. Either way, they didn’t mention it. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice her at all. Surely, they would have seen her name on the itinerary and knew she was somebody they were going to document at this event. But maybe they didn’t know what she looked like. Energy conventions sometimes hired unexpected speakers, and a Silicon Valley computer programmer who moonlighted at human rights organizations wasn’t going to be featured with a picture in the event’s promotional material.
	
And then, as quickly as they entered, all six of them stood up to leave. Shanika felt sad to be alone again. Once the photographers had started teasing one another, she had slipped her shoes off, content to listen and get her mind off of the speech for a while. A recent widow, her kids were of a similar age, but away for school and wildly busy. She hoped they were also making new friends and romping in and out of onlookers’ lives.
	
However, this very moment ended up containing one of the most disturbing and traumatic occurrences in Shanika’s entire life. Just as the photographers reached the door, with styrofoam carcasses left at the table, they formed a queue. Then each one of them, dressed in black and seemingly ready to work the event, looked her in the eyes, said one word apiece, and then literally ran into the hallway as fast as they could.
	
“I”

“Know”

“Who”
	
“You”
	
“Really”
	
“Are”
	
Shanika could feel a physical change in her body. It was a series of chemicals that her mind was releasing in response to their terrifying statement and odd presentation. At the time though, and given the surprise of what had just happened, she thought it might even be the result of someone drugging her. It never occurred to her that this feeling was the result of some disembodied, volitional influence. The behavior by the six young people, on the other hand, gave her every inclination to believe some singular consciousness, outside of any one of them, was involved. Any six people can orchestrate a creepy prank, but this bizarre, coordinated statement hit a little too close to home. If she was right about this, then it’d also be true that this same power was responsible for her physical changes, if only in the chemical responses that her emotions had triggered.
	
She ran to the door and saw the six racing away down the broad service hall. They didn’t appear to her as specters. They actually made a lot of noise in the process, panting and clumsily knocking into carts and walls with their equipment. This was curious, as none of the caterers paid them any mind. Some pushed multi-layered carts that were almost barreled over, yet they never flinched. Some joked and complained about work right as the six ran through their conversations. These loud, solid, conspicuous figures, didn’t seem to appear on the radar of anyone except Shanika. After taking in the curious scene, she channeled some courage to resume her pursuit.
	
However, the cold of the smooth concrete immediately reminded her that her shoes were still back under the table. The hardness of the hallway floor was slippery compared to the matted carpet of the waiting area. She went back, grabbed her shoes, and had completely lost sight of the six. Now working primarily from intuition, she followed the hallway to a loading dock and looked out the back of the building. The area was darker than the rest of the city because the convention center wrapped around two sides of the loading dock, eclipsing the dusk sun. Her future husband Chris would effectively used these types of environment as hiding places from his family whenever he needed to get serious work done. However, Shanika shared with her children the creepy feelings brought on by this type of murky setting.
	
She didn’t see the six photographers. There was a box truck for the caterer and another for the event band. There were about a dozen personal vehicles and, two loading bays over from her, five members of the catering staff on a smoking break. She immediately jumped to the ground level of the parking lot and made her way to the other bay, trying to flag down the smokers. All of them also jumped to the ground and ran to a nearby conversion van. She started to yell questions about the previous odd crew, but then realized that this new group's behavior already provided an answer more terrifying than what she could have expected talking to them. As they reached the vehicle, they crammed inside, each shouting a single word, as if in a perverse incantation.
	
“Your”
	
“Children”
	
“Won’t”
	
“Forgive” 	

“You”
	
Unlike the first message, Shanika didn’t even know what this one meant. So much had happened in her life that wasn’t known to the public. Among other unknown software development, she had single-handedly programmed and released the first Bitcoin software by that point. It had not yet changed the world in the way that it would in the future , but it had certainly stirred some controversy, and was on the radar of some important government organizations. Shanika had actually developed other controversial projects, some of which she never released to the public. This wasn’t because she didn’t think they would be helpful. She had simply never had the time to think through all of the second and third order consequences of much of this untested code. She had years of similar struggle with Bitcoin, but the global financial crisis of 2008 made the decision to release much easier.
	
What had always felt like the most significant secret to Shanika was the time as a teenager that she pushed a bully into busy traffic. By this point, the incident had haunted her for over three decades. She was walking home and came upon the scene of a kid she knew from school holding two younger boys at bay with a knife. They were on a long stretch of sidewalk between a high cement retaining wall and a busy street. Branches and vines drooped from trees above to around shoulder and chest level so that, while hundreds of people were passing by, no one really saw the situation. This same bully, Aaron Pikeman, had robbed her sister under the threat of a similar weapon a few months earlier.  The moment she thought that she understood what was happening, she shoved Pikeman and ran, hoping the boys would too while the bully was getting up. Instead, they whelped loudly at the gruesome scene, and that’s when she turned and realized that he had landed in the street. Pikeman had already been hit at over fifty miles per hour and cars were stopping both before and beyond the body. Young, in shock, and afraid, she ran in shame, climbing a nearby staircase to a tier of city blocks about 30 feet higher, and a good five minute drive away. She never confessed, always waiting for an investigation to lead back to her. She only ever told two people, decades later.
	
However, she currently had a great relationship with all of her children. Had it not been for the fear, curiosity may have ran high. Her brain was still swelling though from all of the potential interpretations of the first message and the creepy special knowledge these people, or this entity possessed. The use of the word “I” instead of “we” was also bizarre. She had gone back and forth between various spiritual and naturalistic explanations for the universe, and the idea of single leaders of “good” and “evil” spirits had always fascinated her. Potentially encountering such a force in a less philosophical and more visceral manner was less fascinating and more terrifying.
	
The van sped off and she ran for the edge of the building to see where it was going. Four new villains stepped out of the shadows in front of her. These ones were all male, they wore designer suits, and were very large. She started to cry and turned to run. The largest of them grabbed her. He clearly had the strength to restrain her gently, but it was harsh and painful. Something more than restraint was expressed in the grip, and what it communicated was unfortunately absorbed both physically and psychologically by Shanika. She bit him as hard as she could and the man didn’t respond at all. Now flailing, she tried to kick out his shins and felt only harder squeezing, at this point worry that he was going to break her arms. Another hand covered her mouth and she received her final message.
	
“Time”
	
“For”
	
“Your”
	
“Speech”

And Then She Disappears - Block 2

And Then She Disappears - Block 1

Thank you for the kind words and giving us the opportunity to write for this territory. I hope to find a new block every week or so and would be grateful for being included in the newsletter.

# And Then She Disappears
## A block by block narrative

https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_a6eca54ef1d0d8d39bec48316ad8e5686eea7e6bfc5eca7a8d4d0a9493dc0463.jpg

### Block 1 - Mugs


Chris had inherited a quirk from his mother. He had, over the years, accumulated enough mugs to fill all the little hooks under the cabinet that hung above the coffee machine. He had, of course, filled the cabinet itself with the normal glassware expected of any small group of people living together. But in addition to this, he had also put excess mugs on the shelves in this cabinet and had even begun stacking them on top of one another.


At the risk of beginning in a state of total chaos, we need to immediately step aside and install some thoughts in the back of your mind. For just a moment, let us put Chris on the back burner and the mugs back on their hooks. This is primarily a document about consciousness. Isn’t any quirky horror story really at it’s root a record of this bizarre phenomenon? Let us clarify.

You’re at the movies and the protagonist awakens in the middle of the night. She peeks out the door and her daughter is standing in the hallway, motionless. Her arms are extended upwards and her head is pointed down. Or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s looking straight-up in the air and her arms are hanging at her side. Maybe she’s just staring ahead blankly. Our point is, the creepy element isn’t her specific posture. It’s not even what might happen next. The horror lies in the possibility that her consciousness has been expelled from her body. Or worse, it’s been replaced by a different consciousness altogether. Potentially most horrific of all, their whole relationship was a ruse and the real personality possessing that body is finally revealing itself. As our protagonist knew her, the daughter never existed at all in the first place.

Here’s another case study. Maybe you’re exchanging emails with a friend. One day you’re speaking with that person face to face and discover they are unaware of the conversation. You may have been interacting with a bot. Its algorithm was simply interacting with the information you fed it. A human impersonator controlling the friend’s address might be scarier. Scarier indeed though would be a disembodied consciousness sending emails to impersonate your friend. This consciousness isn’t a program run by algorithms, but something that has a personality all to itself. Its origins predate the equipment and maybe predate human life as well. The bot or the imposter human’s intentions would be a need for concern. However, the disembodied person or persons would, by their very nature, be concerning, regardless of their intention.

This only concerns Chris inasmuch as why he’s remembered at all. We won’t let you fret any longer that some creepy scenario will befall our current subject. At least we can say that he’ll never know if he’s interacting with a consciousness that isn’t bound to a human body. We’ll even let you know ahead of time that this is not a ghost story. The events that proceed during Chris’s lifetime that might seem that way are all events which he died believing had a human explanation. Nevertheless, Chris’s life and some of his idiosyncrasies certainly persist in a lot of the postmortem related to miracles and horrors that we will need to explore later on.


Chris dug through the cabinet. It’s hard to say whether the sound or the feel of ceramic rubbing on top of itself is more unpleasant. The collecting of the mugs always slightly annoyed Chris’s children, but the daily rituals of finding the right mug actively angered them. Mugs in that house were receptacles for cheap caffeine. The house, cabinets, and mugs were expensive, but the coffee was cheap. This routine was ritualistic for Chris and didn’t have anything to do with a love of coffee. It was a logistical thorn that came with the broader personality of the tech billionaire.

This particular evening, Chris thought he had found the right mug once, poured his Joe, and then decided to keep digging. When the final decision was made, one brand new mug of coffee was poured right into another. He then made the trek through brick hallways and past glass-walled rooms to the end of the house that was opposite the lake. The twilight sky wasn’t actually all that dark on the other side of the house, but the wooded sloping hillside made this shadowy area very unpleasant to the rest of his family by the hours around dusk.

The undesirable environment was precisely why he chose this particular patio from which to work this evening. Neither his children nor their spouses knew about Chris’s true work, and he had kept it that way for over twenty years. They knew about his day gig, but Chris also had an alter-ego that existed exclusively in the digital realm. On the particular evening we have been discussing, he had a long night ahead of him examining headshots. After a quarter-century, Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of bitcoin, had supposedly announced that he was revealing his true identity to the world. Unlike previous fraudsters, this person had already proven that they were legit by removing some of the Bitcoin in one of Satoshi’s long-dormant wallets.

Chris was concerned for many reasons. He was immediately concerned that the use of bitcoin by the so-called “Spanglings” might be compromised. When the World Monetary Unit was first distributed in the late 2020s, many had long been concerned about the rights of fringe political and religious groups. Of course, the concern of using it as a tool for oppression of racial minorities was real, but not discussed as openly. A digital currency controlled by the government can be erased from someone’s account at any time and these were the expected segments of society to go first. However, when English was declared to be the universal language in the autumn of 2029, very few were expecting such an immediate and brutal response to dissenters on the issue. As starvation became weaponized through the World Monetary Unit, certain segments of society started using bitcoin behind closed doors to feed those people whom the United Global Counsel had pushed off grid.

The Spanglings in the western hemisphere had a parallel group in Asia. These were referred to as the “Wimps.” Both terms were slurs devised by state-sponsored media. The United Global Counsel had no love for the Pacific-Indian Federation, but the two world powers both desired a passive, productive population. The Wimps in the east were more willing to cooperate than the Spanglings, but were declared to lack the intelligence required by the Pacific-Indian Federation to make most life decisions. They lived on a fixed income, and excess unspent money was wiped out of their World Coin accounts every week. So World Coin was the currency in the PIF while the World Monetary Unit reigned in the UGC’s domain. Those cast out of the system like the Spanglings and Wimps, or just general rebels and dissenters, had adopted bitcoin again.

The practical use of other alleged decentralized blockchains in the mid 2020s was short lived when much of the developed world violently cracked down on users and many were unmasked as scams. Chris had thrived in this period though and stayed low-profile while accumulating bitcoin. Much larger groups of people started using it after the abuses of the government currencies got into full swing. Chris had always known the need would arise, but he always assumed hyperinflation would be the immediate catalyst in most regions. This is one of the reasons he had continued his double-life, unknown to friends and family alike. The network being compromised at this point would mean mass starvation and disease, not to mention all of the brutal violence that rides on the backs with these evil twins. Fortunately, every attack on the network from its inception only made Bitcoin more resilient. Nevertheless, the reveal of Satoshi meant his character might affect the credibility of the network and the moving of the coins would certainly have a short-term affect on the money’s value.

He had another fear related to the motive behind the reveal. The person moving the coins from the treasured Nakamoto wallet was going to use this fame to some end. At various points in the last decades, Satoshi Nakamoto was arguably the most influential person in the world. Chris knew there must have been a number of other reveals set to follow as well. The potential for harm to both the human race as a whole as well as Chris personally was staggering.

Chris had scrolled through a few dozen head shots. They were all pictures of old employees for a company he led in the first decades of the new millennium. These were the pictures that sat next to biographies on early websites. He was cross-referencing them with a mugshot that he held on the right side of the screen. The mugshot was apparently of the person claiming to be Satoshi. He had provided it anonymously to the world before sharing that the coins were going to move. The person in the mugshot was badly disfigured from a fire that he claimed had been the result of a government raid. Apparently, his house was destroyed in the process and this person lost access to the rest of his resources after a robbery on the street shortly thereafter. When this person’s government was overthrown by the UGC in the consolidation years, his digital identity was deleted do to his association with Spangling hunger relief. Chris thought the disfigured mugshot looked familiar. He may have even known this person well.

His final concern with the big reveal was related to this suspicion. He knew for certain that whoever was moving the bitcoin was definitely not Satoshi. This is because Chris’s dead wife, Shanika Grey, was Satoshi Nakamoto. He had watched her develop the code behind closed doors for years, watched her release it to the world, and watched her die shortly before the rise of the two totalitarian states. Perhaps most curious, he was the only remaining person who had the keys to access the wallet in question. He had tried to forget it over the years. Chris had many other Bitcoin wallets and this particular Nakamoto wallet had become a strong symbol over the years for the strength of the network. He only knew the key because they had spent so much time with it in the earliest years. But, to Chris’s knowledge, no one else but Shanika had ever known that special combination of words.

He picked up his mug. The feel of ceramic brushing concrete was one that fascinated Chris just as much as that of ceramic touching itself. The full mug was cold and it was dumped in the mulch. He went back in to the house to microwave a new one filled from the now-cold coffee machine and wracked his brain for other places to find pictures of old associates.

@ginkgo's bio

I intend to contribute fictional stories to the books and articles territory. I believe bitcoin is a great tool for freedom.