Roseanne's Summer Vacation- Chapter 35
I’m alive and I’ve been chloroformed.
This is what Mr Orville realised before he opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor. Hands tied up at the front and the legs, too. There was no duct tape on the mouth, however. The sunset light beaming through the large windows made him forget for a moment about the troublesome situation he was in. He was supposed to be chilling in a hotel bed right now, prepping the return tickets for tomorrow’s train; instead, he was—
“—On a boat?” the teacher looked around. He elevated himself to a sitting position and leaned against a wall to see better. The area looked like the main bridge of a cargo ship. There was a myriad of colourful buttons spread across at least three dashboards with computers and charts pinned all over. Modern steering wheels were a big giveaway, too.
He then heard footsteps approaching behind the locked door. A man was speaking urgently in Korean, presumably over the phone.
“Yeah, yeah, Kamsahamnida,” the talker said and opened the door.
Mr Orville saw Tae-jun walking in.
The teacher said nothing, and the Korean spy pretended to ignore him. He paced around the bridge, admiring the view of the harbour.
Unfortunately, the windows were too high for Mr Orville to make out where exactly they were situated. The tied hostage tried to stand up by leaning his back against the wall, but the floor was too slippery for his shoes. He struggled a few times until giving in.
Tae-jun didn’t even react. “If I hadn’t met you at that hostel, everything would be fine. Jenjang,” he said with spite out of the blue.
“Huh?” Mr Orville was taken aback. “You mean Yu-Gi-Oh?”
Tae-jun placed the teacher’s phone on the dashboard and immediately smashed it with a fist. He then approached the teacher. “Your student is going to pay for all the damage she did to me.”
“You must be joking.”
It was clear that neither of them wanted to continue this pointless exchange. To demonstrate that Tae-jun meant business, he took out a knife.
“Do you seriously think this will scare me? Go on, stick it in my belly just like in the movies.”
Tae-jun didn’t do that. Instead, he removed a shoe and a sock from Mr Orville’s left foot. Next, he wedged the blade between the skin and the edge of the big toenail. Then he began pulling upwards.
Mr Orville screamed in pain and shock. The sensation was similar to ripping a sticker off a wall, but instead of a wall, there was raw skin. Tae-jun pulled out the entire toenail together with a gummy base at the end of it. Mr Orville looked at the toe, which was burning like hell. Suddenly, blood began pouring out from the exposed edges.
“Teach, you’re no good to me dead, at least not now. If you don’t cooperate, I will remove all of your nails. That’s total nail avulsion—a do-it-yourself edition by yours freaking truly. Believe me, you won’t stand the pain.” Having said this, Tae-jun searched Mr Orville’s jacket and took out the envelope containing the trip money. “Guess, it’s my lucky day.”
Tae-jun exited the bridge, slamming the door behind him. Mr Orville cursed silently. The money was lost, and his toe was throbbing. It took him a while to get a grip and examine the wound. The blood was dripping across the entire foot, but he wasn’t going to die. Still, it really hurt.
Then he heard a ship humming in the distance. It must have been the Stena Line leaving the harbour! This meant he was close to the hotel. But where exactly? The teacher reached for his pocket and took out a handkerchief. He wrapped it around the injured toe as much as he could and put on a sock and a shoe. A quick glance around the bridge made him think.
Although I’m tied, I need to crawl to the main dashboard. Hopefully, I will reach the windows and signal for help before the return of that god-awful maniac.
***
Thally finished her Pepsi when Nika set up the laptop. The girl took out one of the hard drives and connected it to the machine through the cable she had just bought. It took a while, but the computer finally detected the drive. Nika opened Windows Explorer and began examining the files.
“So what is it?” Roseanne asked.
“Calm down. I’m a data hoarder, not a computer wizard,” Nika answered. “There’s a shitload of random stuff on this. For example, there are system files, which do not interest us, application data…”
Nika searched and searched until she reached a user folder. The down arrow kept highlighting individual files until something caught her interest. “Hello there. That’s strange…”
The discovery took her breath away. Nika immediately unplugged the drive and tried another one, and another and another and another. All twelve of them had the same thing placed in the “Documents” location. She has never seen anything like this before.
“Okay, I figured out what it is.” Nika looked at Roseanne. “But I’m not sure you’re going to understand it.”
“Try me,” Roseanne said defiantly. “Spill it out already.”
“Okay. These hard drives have bitcoins on them.”
“Bitcoins? Is that software for downloading movies?”
“No, that’s BitTorrent, it’s an entirely different thing.” Nika didn’t want to infodump Roseanne, so she did her best to concisely explain that Bitcoin is, in fact, a cryptocurrency; a form of digital, decentralised payment devised by an anonymous guy. Its value is determined not by economics but by what people are willing to pay for it.
“So how does one obtain bitcoins? You can’t steal it from a bank if the thing’s digital.”
“You’re right. You obtain bitcoins in the mining process.”
“Mining?” Roseanne raised her eyebrows. “You mean working with a pickaxe in an actual mine?”
“No.” Nika again tried her best to explain. “Think of Bitcoin as a huge, magical book where people record their trades. But before adding anything to it, you must solve a puzzle. These puzzles are created by the book itself, and they’re tough. Many people, called miners, compete to solve them. The first person to crack the puzzle earns two prizes, which are: a new bitcoin and small transaction fees from the trades they recorded. The book automatically adjusts the difficulty of the puzzles so that, on average, one is solved every ten minutes. This keeps everything fair, secure, and running smoothly.”
“Jeez, this stuff is like straight from Harry Potter.” Roseanne tried to wrap her head around the process, but it was difficult for her. Another question popped into her head. “What does a bitcoin look like?”
“Like this,” Nika showed the screen to the girls. It displayed strings of zeros, ones, and a whole lot of different numbers.
“That’s a bitcoin?” Natasha pointed in disbelief. “These are just digits from maths.”
“Cryptocurrency is all about maths. That’s why I never touched it myself. It’s insanely difficult to mine a coin today.”
“So what do you mean? Are these coins stolen? It’s a money heist like from that movie Ocean’s Eleven?” Thally asked, but half of the stuff she heard was too hard to follow.
“You can call it a heist, but it doesn’t involve real money,” Nika said. “All I know is that it was easy to get bitcoins fifteen years ago when the concept was new. These hard drives have 10 bitcoins each stored on them, so in total we are looking at 120 bitcoins, which are worth…” She opened an online calculator. “14,112,998 dollars and 7 cents, or a little over 51 million Po credits.”
Silence consumed the passageway. Natasha felt lightheaded and sat on the floor. Thally hugged Milena together with her Pooh bear. Roseanne stood unfazed by the news.
“Can we sell it?” Thally dared to ask.
“Excuse me?!” Roseanne shouted in outrage. “We have on our hands dirty money for sure. It’s not ours, but we have to use them to save Mr Orville.”
Nika subsequently shook her head, “I don’t know how to do peer-to-peer trading. I only download TV shows and stuff in my free time.”
“Okay, okay.” Thally crossed her arms. “I just asked because I thought Mr Orville would like us to live happily ever after—”
Roseanne now had the full picture. It was clear to her that Tae-jun was basically a smuggling middleman who illegally collected money for his government or some criminal organisation. Why was the money in the form of bitcoins? Why were they stored on old internal hard drives? Roseanne didn’t know, but she suspected it was easier to smuggle and distribute them this way. After all, these were no longer the times when tanned criminals with thick moustaches used to travel the world with banknotes sticking out of suitcases.
A plan began to shyly form in her head. The girl might have the chance to rescue Mr Orville without involving the donutbusting coppers. Maybe it was a shot in the dark, but she had to try.
Roseanne went back to the PC Sick Bay. She had to buy a whole bunch of new stuff to be prepared.
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