Loss Leader

Casey and Nemo let core principles slide in order to get more—but find themselves poorer for taking shortcuts.

And yet, by divine mercy, this loss starts to unburden them of self-imposed standards too strict.

“You can’t say they don’t have a sense of humor,” Nemo thinks to himself, approaching the Born Bar on the outskirts of Zeitville.

Part of the neon signage for “Born” has blown out, making it look like a massive ad for “Porn” blaring red in the night.

After all, the entire anxiety attack plaguing Nemo for weeks is that Casey has not only betrayed him but herself, through being groomed by OriginalSyn in some kind of casting couch promotional content.

Or, at least that’s what he can gather from the perimeter of data he has access to—from the titillating teaser OriginalSyn sent him, and from their threat that a director’s cut exists.

Leave it to a modern cult to work both sides of the aisle with chains: they’ve got Nemo, their declared enemy, in a bind as much as Casey, their crown content jewel.

And strangely, Nemo envies this ability of theirs to be free of principles through enchaining others—the way they get ahead through a release of conscience.

In fact, though he’s brought back OriginalSyn’s crypto ATM in a bag (per instructions), he’s already scraped as much data from it as he can.

Yes, his idea for TruthToken is robust enough on its own, but he still tells himself that you can never have enough edge. A page from the OriginalSyn playbook, perhaps? A grain of salt in a sugarcube. . .

Victor, the OriginalSyn member who Nemo encountered at the Virgo New Moon, greets him at the bar’s rooftop, as planned.

“Ah, I see you’ve made the right choice. . .the moral choice,” Victor laughs behind his mask with a thick touch of irony.

“How can I be sure that you’ll uphold your end of the deal?” Nemo asks, still clutching to the bag, which bulges under the weight of the black cube crypto ATM.

“Well, we’ve got a live feed of Casey right now,” Victor says, with a quiver of laughter still in his voice. “It’s being streamed from the glasses of one of our brothers, Gainzstrodamus. You can see she’s in good hands.”

He opens up a laptop sitting on the roof ledge, overlooking downtown Zeitville: “Here, have a look for yourself. He’s offering her a contract that requires her permission before we release any recorded content. . .”

Nemo is stoked with jealousy at the idea of Casey spending any more time with OriginalSyn, but he can’t look away: he hands over the bag, and is mesmerized by the images on screen.

The scene presented is the breezy rooftop of an upscale sushi restaurant, presumably somewhere in Cambridge. Everything is from the POV of someone sitting across from Casey—who happens to look great, decked out in one of her formal evening dresses and fine jewelry.

He hears the clinking of chopsticks against plates, muffled background chatter and the voice of Gainzstrodamus .

“So, in translating this fine print into English, this basically states, when you sign, we are legally bound to provide you higher compensation for select content,” the man says.

The contract is slid next to Casey’s plate, which is bejeweled with flawless sashimi. She flips aimlessly through the ream of paper.

“What exactly brings the higher pay?” Casey asks, after a brief pause.

“Anything that involves using OriginalSyn’s branded language,” Gainzstrodamus coyly replies.

Casey thinks back to the original video shoot. She was a bit high on the power given to her in that moment. She recalls reading lines from a script to a camera—phrases like, “Owning a piece of KnowCoin gave me more meaning than getting into Harvard. . .get yours now, and become part of the OriginalSyn family today. Don’t get left behind.”

She cringes now looking back—it goes against everything she believes, even though she despises the backwardness of modern academia, which spurred her to take this modeling gig in the first place.

She’s always been a hard worker, never a fan of shortcuts—and she worked hard to get into school—even though she questions the decision now.

Ambient chatter fills a pregnant pause. “Deal,” she says, making a silent promise to herself that she’ll only grant permissions to requests after giving it a day of consideration.

Nemo feels nauseous and turns away from the screen. Victor is gone.

The transmission on the screen shifts—Nemo looks at it askew, head cocked.

“We interrupt this program to deliver an important message. . .” It’s Victor’s voice.

“Nemo, we’re fair people,” he says, almost choking with laughter on his own words. “We’ve upheld our end of the deal here. It’s not our fault your dear Casey intends to go the distance with us. But you. . .mmm, no you’ve tampered with our intellectual property. And we simply can’t let that slide, can we?”

The screen cuts to a live shot of OriginalSyn’s Twitter account. The latest tweet: “Nemo, founder of TruthToken, is a thief, and we’ve got the proof. Check it out .”

Nemo whips out his phone to defend himself on the app, but one of his notifications shows the current price of TruthToken. . .and it’s tanking hard. Although, strangely, the low price has inspired a brief spike of adopters from those on the fence, it seems.

“People have run with a shred of truth and made a wholesale judgement, a leap of logic,” he groans to himself, scrolling through the reactions denouncing him as a fraud.

“I am not who they claim me to be. . .”

To be continued.