Start at the Prologue and First Chapter here

I should have heard from him by now, Crypto thought.

Yes – yes you should have! What if he was caught in Adversego’s office? An agitated voice said.

Crypto hated uncertainty, even when the voices weren’t stoking his insecurities. Leaving nothing to chance was the bulwark he relied on to fend off anxiety. And relying on anyone unavoidably increased risk.

It won’t matter. Crypto replied.  He has no idea who hired him to do the job. Leave me alone! I’m not worried!

Crypto waved his hand, but knew the gesture was mostly futile. How could you lie to a voice in your own head? And yet he believed he could; it was hard to tell, but so it seemed.

Over the years he’d learned how to tune the dosage of his medications to keep the voices from becoming unbearable without suppressing them entirely, at least most of the time. But when he was anxious he became more vulnerable. Sometimes it was difficult to regain control.

Part of him knew it was mad to allow himself to be half-mad. But the other enjoyed dueling with the voices and parrying their thrusts. Often, they were affirming, too, or led him to places he might not have thought to go otherwise. And after all, was it really so different from thinking to himself? Or talking to a physical person? The only difference was the person behind the voice didn’t exist in physical form. So.

In any event, he’ decided to co-exist with the voices long ago, when there was no one else to talk to. He’d allowed no one into his life in America, and his mother was a broken woman who rarely left the small tract house the CIA installed them in. When they’d arrived, neither spoke English; Russian was your second language if you grew up in the GDR. The public school in their Los Angeles neighborhood humiliated him by forcing him into a class with students two years younger than he was to give him time to learn English. The placement bureaucrats of the CIA were thorough and not unsympathetic, but Crypto spurned the English tutor they offered.

Why should he agree to be taught English? There was nothing he wanted to learn from the capitalists who pushed his homeland to the point of collapse. Instead he sat and scowled in the back of the classroom. His smaller, younger classmates were quite content to leave him alone. Notwithstanding the sins of the Stasi, he became more committed than ever to the communist ideology he had grown up with.

Which, for a time, served him well, because eventually it led him to decide his best road to revenge was to learn English and look for an opportunity to become a Russian informant. There was a delicious irony in that realization, and he turned himself to his studies with a vengeance, doing well enough to earn himself a free ride through Stanford, both undergraduate and graduate school.

But partway along the way his world collapsed once again. In college, he enrolled in every cold war history course he could find to better understand what had happened; perhaps the next time communism and capitalism confronted each other there could be a different result. He did not like what he saw. At first, he rejected most of what he read as American propaganda. But over time he realized the accounts of corruption and mismanagement, deceptions and betrayals, were largely true. And not just in the GDR, but throughout Russia and the rest of the Soviet bloc. Yes, there were true believers at all levels. But he concluded that those at the top supported the teachings of Marx and Engels only because they provided an easy way to keep the people in check. Modern Soviet leaders could be brutal, too, and not just Stalin. His successors harshly suppressed the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and the Prague Spring of 1968. And from the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he learned of the Gulag.

Nor were the Soviets unique. The Chinese experience was a debacle. Mao allowed millions of the proletariat to die from starvation early on, and purged millions more during the Cultural Revolution. North Korea’s overpowering government was communist in name alone. The butchery unleashed by Cambodia’s Pol Pot rivaled Hitler’s. And so on. How could so many disasters be explained away? Was communist theory fundamentally flawed in a way that doomed the cause to always be betrayed?

Crypto concluded he’d been an idiot and a fool. It was bad enough to swallow the party line as a child surrounded by puppets. It was ridiculous to indoctrinate himself as a young adult. Clearly, communism held no promise for him or anyone else. Therefore, his determination for revenge made no sense. Revenge against what? And for what? He had no answers to those questions.

That was when the voices began.

He was lucky they were gentle enough at first to alarm but not overwhelm him.  He sought help, and within two months, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was confirmed. After six months of experimentation, the proper mix and dosages of medications were in place. The voices disappeared.

But by then, Crypto had grown used to them. Indeed, he looked forward to their arrival; it was like experimenting with drugs, except that drugs could make them go away. He sometimes had interesting debates, even. At times the experience could be harrowing, before his medications were in place, but at others, he felt exhilarated. For the first time in his life, he could pursue ideas that he would never have dared to share.

When the voices were banished, he felt more alone than ever before. He sank into a depression that immobilized him, and concluded the the medications were at fault. After a month he was desperate and considered easing off on his medication. But that would surely allow the voices to return. Perhaps he could lower his dosage in such that but his depression disappeared and the voices returned only faintly, if at all? No, he decided. Too risky.

Then the depression and his sense of isolation grew worse, leaving him paralyzed and desperate. What did he have to lose? Surely, he could achieve a balance, and a best of both worlds – a stable relationship with the ignorant world around him and a secret world in which to pursue an intellectual path to a better one?

And so, he did.

*  *  *

He was now half way through college, off-balance and adrift. He decided to abandon political science and switch his major to computer science. He had found he had an affinity for technology that made it easy to excel, as well as an intellectual interest in the discipline. Technology was agnostic and empirical. There were no “isms” in information technology, only the unchanging laws of mathematics and physics. There was comfort to be had in that reality, and for the rest of his college career he largely succeeded in leaving his interest in ideologies behind. The voices were not happy, but he was stronger back then, and able to be firmer with them.

Then one day he stumbled on a book about anarchy in a book store. Not anarchy as in chaos, but in the ideological sense, where there seemed to be as many theories as there were theoreticians. But the central idea of a society free of government captivated him. With no leaders, there would be no one to delude and betray the people. He decided the concept provided the only sane reaction to the insanity he’d observed in his own life. Why not give it a try, he asked himself, standing in the book store aisle.

Why not indeed, the voices agreed. He had not heard from them in a while.

He read that book, and then many more. He particularly resonated with an extreme branch of anarchic thought that favored returning to the purity of tribal life. At that level, the will of the people could truly rule, leaving no room for advantage taking and oppression. That sounded good.

Very good!

Of course, anarchy wasn’t something you could talk about with anyone other than the voices in your head; people would think you were crazy, or dangerous, or most likely both. Especially if you revealed your opinion that it might be better to blow up all the governments in the world and allow every individual to make his own way, an idea of which the voices were particularly fond.

The idea appealed to him as well, and he decided he could ease off on his medications to better pursue it with the voices echoing and expanding on his own thoughts. Perhaps the communists had it half right after all, but then lost their way. Maybe small collectives were the answer? Small communities, each the master of its own destiny?

A return to Eden before the fall! the voices agreed.

He followed that train of thought enthusiastically for a while. But then once again he concluded he was a fool. Anarchic theory was a pointless mental exercise. There was no conceivable way to persuade a democratic government to disband, or to wrest control from an authoritarian regime, or even to sell an anarchic utopia to the masses. The voices were not happy, and for a while he banished them by raising the dosage of his medications, leaving him teetering on the balance between raucous objections from the voices and black depression.

And, in truth, he was not completely convinced that a tribal society could not be achieved. The world was becoming more dependent on technology every day. Perhaps someday there might be a way to thrust humanity into such a state of chaos that anarchy would rise from the ashes.

It was an interesting thought. That time was not here yet. But perhaps someday soon.

*  *  *

He set his hopes on the Internet. From the beginning he had been able to find bulletin boards on every topic imaginable. Anyone could find like-minded individuals with odd aliases, like Yoda. Once the Web took hold, his technical horizons and interests widened. In his master’s thesis he proposed a new method of authenticating on-line identity. After he graduated, he continued to be fascinated by the potential for trust to be established through machine, rather than human, means. Happily, he found that developers with his skills were always in high demand and short supply, and he invariably had his pick of opportunities. Not surprisingly, he gravitated to the unconstrained creative havoc of the endless stream of startup companies the venture capitalists were happy to fund.

Over the next ten years, he switched jobs more than a dozen times, working for a company for as long as it held his interest, and then moving on to another that offered more interesting problems to solve. He lived in rented rooms, not caring about money or material goods. Most of his pay piled up in a direct-deposit index fund that was easy to ignore.

One day he received an official looking letter. A huge information technology company had paid an enormous sum to acquire a company he’d worked briefly for years before and barely remembered. Back then, it had only a half-dozen employees, and had given him a very generous sign-up bonus of vested stock. It appeared that he was now a millionaire many times over, and had no need to work ever again. When he deposited the check in his index fund, he realized with a shock that this had already been the case. What to make of that?

He let that question percolate for a few weeks before deciding to quit his job and take some time off to decide what, if anything, he really believed in and what he might want to do. He toyed with the idea of going back to school to study political philosophy. But why bother? He already knew the theory that appealed to him most was anarchy. So be it. But then what? He’d long been a runner, and spent the summer competing in marathons. The long stages gave him plenty of time to think, and he allowed the voices to have a greater role in his internal debates, hoping they might lead him in the direction of some destination that would appeal to him.

What was he to make of his experiences? His life was a tapestry of contradictions: he was a wealthy man who despised capitalism. A former true believer in one of the most controlling regimes on earth who now believed that only anarchy made sense. Even his mind was a battlefield of opposing views. The passage of miles beneath his feet was not matched by any progress in his mind, but the voices led him to a degree of mental exhaustion that matched his physical fatigue.

Partway through this process, his mother abruptly died. The degree of impact it had on him took him by surprise.

He hadn’t spent much time with her in recent years, but she’d always been there. She satisfied what few social needs he had, and she believed in him without reservation. Always had, no matter where his thoughts or deeds had led him. Listened to him patiently, admiringly, even, as he babbled on about whatever he believed at that point in time. Now she was gone.

He had long prided himself on his ability to live in solitude. Now he realized he had deceived himself: his mother was there whenever he needed contact. Now she was gone.

He he was out of work, with nothing to distract him except the voices, who took advantage of his weakness and vulnerability with a vengeance. He sought relief in finalizing his mother’s meager affairs and disposing of her worldly goods. Among them, he found a stack of letters from his father, tied up with ribbon. And he found a diary.

He debated burning them unread. Would it be a violation to read them, or a betrayal to destroy them unread? He decided on the latter.

Reading them plunged him back into the throes of his fall from privilege in 1989 and the emotionally turbulent years that followed. Worse, they provided new and upsetting details. He read that his father had been an ardent Hitler youth. But he also learned for the first time that the cold, indifferent man he remembered had at first been passionately in love with Crypto’s mother. He also learned that one of his grandparents had been Bulgarian, which explained his mother’s dark complexion and hair.

Her diaries grew insecure, and then anguished, as it became obvious to his mother that her husband’s affections had died on the altar of his ambitions. She had lost her figure and her looks early, and it was no advantage for her classically Aryan husband to be seen with her. The Nazis might be gone, but in the hierarchy that replaced them old biases persisted. It struck Crypto like a brick to his head that the same must have been true for him – dark like his mother, and pudgy and unathletic besides.

The revelations were enough to throw him into deep depression. He struggled to adjust his medications, but to no avail. This time, he needed to reduce them drastically to escape the darkness. In order to function going forward, he would need to accept the voices would play a larger role in his life. And to appease them, he realized that he would need to play along with their anarchic dreams.

At first, that seemed like a harmless concession. For several years, he’d participated in an on-line forum populated by anarchists and libertarians. They were obsessed with finding a way to permit the anonymous transfer of money anywhere in the world, thereby destroying the financial infrastructure which they despised. The participants in the forum had many interesting ideas, and indeed seemed to be inching towards that goal. But still, every proposal so far had proven to have fatal flaws.

And then an idea came to Crypto that seemed to solve everything. He called it the blockchain, and decided that it might secretly provide the means to achieve the goal the voices held so dear. But he must be cautious, if that was to be his quest. Before revealing his blockchain vision, he rejoined the group under a different identity. Now, he called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. The name at once amused him and gave away nothing.

He followed his whitepaper with a working example he called bitcoin, and no one in the group was able to find a flaw in his concept. With the possibility of ultimate success, he became cautiously optimistic, and then obsessed with the goal that he now actively shared with the voices. It was two long, hard years before he concluded that the seed he had planted taken root to the point where it could grow on its own. Better to leave it to others now so that he could pursue his own plans unknown and unseen.

As bitcoin grew and flourished, the urging of the voices became incessant, and the medications were no longer as effective. The best he could achieve was to maintain an outward appearance of calm. Internally, though, he was losing control. The price of peace, let alone sleep, was pressing forward with a master plan that the voices laid before him. Eventually, he gave in. The only way to survive was to surrender to the cause the voices demanded.

It became difficult from then on to distinguish between his thoughts and the urgings of the voices. Disregard the undeveloped world, they instructed. Or was that his idea? Or this one? Disregard those nations controlled by dictators. Either way, it made sense: take down the economies of the developed world, and China would certainly collapse. With its vast holdings in US securities now worthless and no market for most of its products, that must inevitably follow. From that point forward, there would be no stopping the collapse of every other economy in the world.

The logic was irrefutable. His scheme would allow him to take down the power brokers of the United States and Russia, the two societies he hated most. It seemed prudent to ease off again on his medication. The prize and the challenge were each enormous, and he was not sure he could go it alone.

*  *  *

Author’s Notes for this Week:

Phew! Long chapter. As I mentioned last week, coming up with a convincing villain is hard work. One whose motivation is convincing rather than cartoonish takes some serious head scratching. Portraying who’s unhinged and convincing is harder yet. You might even say that any author that tries to do so is crazy himself. And you might be right.

Be that as it may, I decided to lay out all of Crypto’s back story sequentially in these two chapters so that you would have it, and also because I’m certain that I’ll be playing around with this until the day I click save on the final draft. Since such a lot of passive back story is a drag on pacing, I’ll want to reduce its length as much as possible, getting rid of everything that isn’t essential and paring the number of words around everything that is. I’ll also chop it up into a number of flashbacks rather than hit the reader over the head with the whole narrative.

While it’s possible I may come up with more or different back story elements between now and that final draft, I expect this is mostly it. Comments on whether it works or doesn’t are welcome.

Last but not least, I trust you all recognized this week’s intro picture.

Next week: We’ll get back to the present.

Continue to Chapter 15