Satoshi No No Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locations, or organizations is entirely coincidental or is meant as commentary or satire.

  Copyright © 2021 by J. J. Quinlan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Canada and the United States.

  Printed book ISBN: 978-1-7776047-1-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-7776047-0-7

  Cover art by Daniela Colleo of StunningBookCovers.com

  For Satoshi Nakamoto.

  Wherever you are,

  whoever you are,

  thanks for the mystery.

  Table of contents

  Cover/title page

  Inside cover

  Copyright and legal

  Dedication

  Table of contents

  Chapter 00: Beg forgiveness, not permission

  Chapter 01: Trust, but verify

  Chapter 02: Wise as serpents, harmless as doves

  Chapter 03: An August bank holiday lark

  Chapter 04: Sufficiently advanced technology

  Chapter 05: A man, a plan

  Chapter 06: Better than fine perfume

  Chapter 07: Fight or flight

  Chapter 08: Redux

  Chapter 09: Davis

  Chapter 0A: Circling the pain

  Chapter 0B: Information wants to be free

  Acknowledgments

  Back cover

  00:

  Beg forgiveness, not permission

  “Do I hear $500? Come on, people!” the auctioneer called out, his headset shiny with sweat.

  Chip’s ears popped as the loudspeakers blasted out the p’s in “people”.

  Old Gerry needs to get a windscreen for his mic , Chip thought.

  Five hundred dollars was more than Chip had hoped to pay. But he was willing to bet that the guy he was bidding against hadn’t noticed that the motherboards in this lot were not SP3 but SP3+ boards, and therefore much more valuable.

  “Here!” Chip cried. He raised his paddle to bid, and nodded as Gerry the auctioneer pointed to him.

  It was near the end of the day, but the crowd at Action Auctions had not yet thinned out. People jostled around the makeshift stage, clutching their paddles and printed programs. Most were waiting for the last lot, a huge collection of solid state drives from a defunct hosting company. Chip smelled greed and body odor. He had no desire to bid against 20 other people; that was a sucker's game. But never mind the main event. This little lot of motherboards could still make him a profit, even if half of them turned out to be defective.

  “Do I hear $600?” Gerry called.

  “Six hundred, yup!” A man in a grey trench coat and brown slacks, Chip’s main competitor on this lot, raised his paddle.

  “Seven hundred dollars?” Gerry called.

  “Here!” Chip raised again. This was almost his limit. Going much higher would be foolish.

  “Eight hundred?” Gerry scanned the crowd. “Eight hundred, do I hear eight? Anybody for eight?”

  Chip’s trench-coated competition seemed to agree that $800 was pushing it.

  “Seven fifty! Do I hear $750?” Gerry stopped and glanced down at his phone on the stool in front of him. “OK, we have an online bid of $750! Do I hear $775?”

  “Seven seventy-five, yup!” Chip raised.

  “OK, we’ve got $775, do I hear eight? Let’s go!” Gerry scanned the crowd. “Eight hundred, do I hear eight? Anybody for eight?”

  After a long pause, trench coat raised. “Eight-hundred, here!”

  “We’ve got eight! Do I hear $850? Let's go, $850, keep it rollin’, let’s hear $850!”

  Chip looked around. No takers. He quietly made his way to the back of the room as Gerry continued his practiced patter. Scanning the crowd, he noticed a guy in a beanie surreptitiously working his phone at waist level. Chip could just make out the blue Action Auctions website logo on the phone’s screen, and the number 850 above a big BID button. The man tapped the button, and a moment later, Gerry called out an online bid of $850.

  Why go to the trouble of hiding an online bid when you could just raise your paddle? Chip wondered. Is the beanie guy just bidding up his own lot?

  It wouldn’t be the first time a seller had tried to drive up his price artificially. Granted, one could argue that if a buyer was enticed to raise his bid in this manner, then the market demand was merely being stretched a little to arrive at a more accurate price. Economic theory notwithstanding, the practice was frowned upon because it wasted everyone’s time: If the seller bid too high and left his buyers behind, the online “bidder” would disappear and the sale would fall through, forcing the auction house to relist the lot. Plus, it just felt sleazy.

  Chip quickly tapped out a text to Gerry:

  Guy wearing beanie is bidding online. Is he seller of this lot?

  He watched as Gerry noticed his phone buzz on the stool in front of him. Gerry stooped down to read the text, squinted at Mr. Beanie for a moment, and then winked at Chip.

  “Holy smokes!” Gerry yelled dramatically. “We’ve got an online bid for $1300!”

  Mr. Beanie looked up, startled. Nobody raised.

  “Winner, winner, $1300. Sold!” Gerry shouted as he slammed his gavel. The pickers carted off the lot and started hauling up the last items.

  Chip sidled up and watched as Mr. Beanie approached the stage, rudely pushing other bidders aside as he rushed to claim his unexpected windfall. Gerry knelt down and put his arm on the man’s shoulder in a fatherly way.

  “Son,” Gerry said to Mr. Beanie, “I’m afraid that $1300 bid fell through. And I think you know why. Now, I’m going to give you one last shot to sell your lot to the bidder in the trench coat over there. You can sell it for $800, full commission. If he doesn’t want it, I’m sure Chip here would be happy to take it for $775.”

  “But your promotion said half commission rate,” Mr. Beanie protested.

  “It’s either that, or I null the lot, charge you warehouse fees of $80 a day times seven days in stock, and suspend your account for bidding fraud.” Gerry countered. “So what’ll it be?”

  Mr. Beanie swore. “Fine. Gimme the papers.”

  Gerry winked at Chip again. Trench coat ended up accepting the lot at $775.

  After Mr. Beanie walked away, Gerry said, “You didn’t have to do that, Chip.”

  “I know,” Chip said. “But it bugs me to see people get away with stuff. You run a clean auction. I’m happy to support it.”

  Chip was disappointed to leave empty handed, but he felt satisfied in his good deed for the day. He caught a ride back home in an Uber. It was late, and he had to work in the morning. He settled into bed, closed his eyes, and dreamed of old hardware and new software.

  Consciousness came reluctantly as Chip sat up. After a few moments, he felt sufficiently booted up to lean over and silence the alarm.

  It was an old AM/FM clock radio from a garage sale 20-some-odd years ago. Chip liked it. If you set it wrong, there was no autocorrect. If you switched the alarm to PM rather than AM, there was no “are you sure?” If you wanted radio, you had to carefully tune the dial until the signal was clear. The machine couldn’t look up a list of stations from the web. No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no personalized calendar or weather forecast. Sure, it was made in China, but it couldn’t spy on you. It couldn’t build a personalized profile to show you more relevant ads each morning. It couldn’t link to your Google account and upload your private information to be wheeled and dealed by some IPO clowns in Silicon Valley.

  Chip was no Luddite, obviously. He had a smartphone and an Instagram account. He was a computer programmer (a “DevOps
engineer,” technically, though he hated that title) at a software company downtown. He worked in a field where his wide IT background and withering common sense made him an asset. He was comfortable with software. But what was that quote about laws and sausages? Chip had seen enough software sausage being made to know that you shouldn’t be quick to eat it — at least not version 1.0. So he kept the old clock radio around.

  Still in bed, Chip checked his phone, skimming dozens of new emails and chats from work to make sure nothing was on fire. He grabbed the day’s outfit and tossed it on the bathroom floor while he showered and shaved. A friend had teased him about his “aggressively basic” wardrobe, and although Chip had tried to randomize the combinations of muted polos and khakis, even throwing in the occasional ironic T-shirt, he took a secret pride in his ignorance of fashion. It seemed a Platonic ideal to look presentable while rejecting aesthetic trends.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, he grabbed a handful of peanuts from the container he kept on his desk. After scarfing those down, Chip grabbed a yogurt cup from his mini-fridge, the biggest kitchen appliance in his bachelor suite. He completed his regular breakfast with a mandarin orange as he sat down for a little web browsing. It was 7:52 AM, giving him about eight minutes of downtime before he had to leave, if he wanted to arrive at work before the 9:00 AM service availability window mandated by his corporate overlords.

  Chip launched Firefox and skimmed the world, local, and tech news from a list of several custom RSS feeds. No Facebook home page for him. No algorithmically curated click-bait. With a quick glance at these prioritized headlines and titles, he felt like he had the world under control.

  He wrapped up at home, locked his apartment door, and went outside. As he walked to the subway and boarded, Chip noticed, as he had countless times recently, how people seemed to go about their business almost as if the pandemic had never happened. Few on the trains made any pretence of physical distancing, and fewer still wore masks. For his part, Chip sported a custom, three-layer synthetic, WHO-approved beauty emblazoned with the art-deco logo of his company, CloudButler. Normally he was a staunch No Logo guy, but he made an exception if a company gave him a useful product in exchange for free advertising.

  He strode onto the IT floor of CloudButler at 8:59 AM and grimaced at the clock over the doorway that read 9:01. It was always a bit fast. They just have to rush us, don’t they? On each occasion that Chip had adjusted the clock to precisely match US Eastern Time, he had found it set forward by two minutes the next day. He suspected Palmer Blaine, his boss and IT department manager, was behind the clock shenanigans.

  Chip had just settled in when Palmer looked up from his desk across the room. If they had had real offices, or even cubicles, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But CloudButler had drunk the open concept Kool-Aid, and thus everyone from lowly drone to C-level executive could, in theory, be approached without a knock on a door. In practice, of course, the higher-ups worked on their mobile devices from myriad remote locations, or from nearby rooms, ostensibly shared spaces but in reality private sanctuaries, not to be disturbed. As he got up and walked over to Chip, Palmer made sure that Chip noticed him glancing at his wristwatch.

  Palmer was a coiled spring of anxiety. He walked up to Chip’s desk a little too briskly for Chip’s liking. What is this, NORAD? Palmer dressed just a bit more formally than the department average. For IT, that wasn’t saying much. But his deliberate rejection of any outward display of casualness irked Chip. He seemed to thrive on stress. After some perfunctory pleasantries, Palmer got to the point.

  “So the ASF funding got approved.”

  “Yeah, I saw the email,” Chip replied. Palmer liked to repeat facts that you already knew if they reminded you of a time-sensitive task. Chip hated the tactic, but over the years, he had come to appreciate its effectiveness.

  “Management is pushing hard to jump into this project ASAP now that we’ve got funding. ‘Move fast and break things!’ ” Palmer leaned in.

  “Sure, we can start gathering some requirements,” Chip demurred.

  “My concern is that the ASF funding is tied to the physical deployment of a prototype,” Palmer explained. “We can’t file our first funding claim until we have a physical deployment.”

  “Well, we haven’t gathered requirements yet. We need at least an outline, a mockup, something. Can’t we file our first claim later?” Chip asked.

  Palmer spoke rapidly, as if that would sneak the words past Chip’s BS detector. “Management wants to maximize the funding. They want us to have a prototype deployed this week so that they can start the first claim by next Monday.”

  “Whoa. This week? All we have is a two-sentence description of the product. We don’t even know if it will work. Heck, the whole thing is based on a drunken tweet from Lars,” Chip complained.

  Lars Samuelson

  @LarsWhole

  CEO of CloudButler

  Joined November 2011

  380 Following 8.5K Followers

  Lars Samuelson @LarsWhole Jun 27

  It’s the year 2022, and streaming video is still downloaded directly from f***ing servers? Why can’t clients that are already watching a stream automatically upload pieces of it to other clients in the stream, BitTorrent style? Free up server bandwidth, increase capacity, let’s Git-R-Done, team!

  Of course, Chip and every other engineer who had read the tweet had serious reservations about the willingness of end users to sacrifice their limited upload bandwidth and join a peer to peer swarm just to reduce the load on servers that were already providing content for free. Never mind the fact that with people joining a stream at different points in time, the buffering and data forwarding algorithms would be a nightmare.

  Palmer seemed to consider the feasibility of the project irrelevant. “Management wants this ASAP. Can you get some new servers from Dell and just script out a simple VM and container system? Post a blank web canvas with the project description and our logo, and just get it deployed. Use the harbor center server farm, it’s the closest. Then we can start filing claims. Once we submit our first funding claim, we can go back to gathering requirements.”

  Chip took a deep breath. He reminded himself that these ridiculous corporate adventures were what paid his salary. If everybody did the logical thing, there would be a lot less IT work to go around.

  “OK. But if these servers are just going to be placeholders for now, do we need brand new Dells? I can get us a way better deal on some used servers off Craigslist.”

  “Stick with Dell,” Palmer said. “Remember the last time we tried used servers?”

  “I do remember, but the problems we had weren’t with the servers themselves. We didn’t test the deployment process properly. If we could just—”

  “Stick with Dell,” Palmer repeated. “Their rep promised us all Starbucks cards if we meet our order target for this quarter.” And with that, he walked away.

  Chip couldn’t hide his disgust. He consoled himself with a few minutes of aimless web browsing. In a rebellious pique, he hit up Craigslist to check for deals on used servers. Nothing stood out. He emailed a guy he’d dealt with over the years to see if he had anything available. He didn’t, but he quickly sent back a link to a posting he had noticed that might interest Chip:

  [$400] Aug 1 2 x SuperMacro 2U Servers - 64GB RAM, Dual Procesor, Quad-core Xenon E5-2643 v3; separate NAS available (Uptown)

  It was miscategorized, full of typos, and lacked photos, which probably explained why it had been up for a while despite being priced, in Chip’s opinion, at least 50% under market value. He emailed the seller and asked if it was still available.

  “The ad says if it’s still up, it’s still available,” came the curt reply.

  Chip arranged to meet the seller on his lunch break. It would have been nice if Palmer had trusted his staff to pop out for brief personal errands. But Chip supposed that if Palmer had trusted his staff, he wouldn’t have kept them in the office in the first place. He wo
uld have just let them continue working from home after the pandemic, as had many other companies.

  So Chip swung by the ATM on his lunch break to get some cash and then grabbed an Uber to the seller uptown. He got out a couple of blocks from the address to scope things out. As he walked, he got the sense of failed gentrification. Not an overtly bad neighborhood; some discarded shopping carts, peeling signs on commercial lofts, trendy low-rise apartments in need of power washing. Just a general sense of futility. Chip smelled a bargain.

  Opening the door right on cue was Henry, a middle-aged Asian with glasses and stubble. He led Chip into a warehouse stocked with heaps of IT detritus. Chip also saw a bunch of rusted industrial equipment. It didn’t seem like anything productive had happened here in a long time. They came to the two servers, not even properly racked, but piled haphazardly in the corner.

  “My business partner got these at a sheriff’s auction,” Henry said. “Foreclosure. Somebody got screwed. Then my partner bailed on our rent and left me with all this crap. Now I’m screwed. Around and around it goes.”