What Gold Dreams Of

You don't understand smart coins. The man renting your backyard room says he does; he offered to pay more than you had asked for if you'd accept his strange currency and incomprehensible app. It has all the signs of a scam, but the power company accepted the coins when you tried them. As long as you're not the ultimate target of the scam you aren't worried.

(That is how scams work. How they trap you. But the extra money is welcomed rather than needed, and seeing light coming from the backyard numbs an ache you ignore with unwavering focus.)

The coins are interesting on their own. Their value changes according to what you want to do with them. There's "an algorithm" there, a vague word used to explain everything and nothing these days. You don't understand this and wonder if the man renting the room really does.

The coins are lighter —there is a number, a conversion rate; you are old enough to remember coins having value: in your mind even intangible coins have weight— when you want to pay for an old physical book. Heavier, more valuable, for a digital one.

It becomes a game, a puzzle. Whenever you pay for something you try to predict how much it'll weigh before using the app. Knowing it's an error but knowing you would be doing it anyway, you give "the algorithm" preferences and goals. People read fury in storms once.

The coins get lighter the further you move from your house and the longer you stay away.

The coins are heavier when you are in your living room and online.

The coins are indifferent about food. They appreciate a good drink.

When you enter a gambling site for the first time in years the coins turn so heavy it feels almost like a transmutation. You tear yourself apart from your computer with some effort and go to the backyard to ask the man about this --maybe there's something wrong with the app, and if it is you wouldn't want to benefit-- but the door is closed and the lights are off. A message in your phone you hadn't read yet tells you he will be away for some unspecified period of time, but he'll keep paying the rent as agreed. A notice of a new payment for the next few months is attached to the message and mirrored on the app, as if meant to be reassuring.

It's not. But what are you going to do?

You continue testing the coins. Tempted by their value, you return to gambling with the easy familiarity of a betrayed lover. It's as thrilling as you remember. You recall well why you played; why you stopped is a hazier memory, somebody else's weakness.

The coins are a game on their own, the subtlest and most rewarding. They like some games more than others, and they change their weight even between consecutive bets at the same game.

It takes you a while to realize they are heaviest when it's a winning bet. By the time you do you haven't left your home in weeks as old familiar habits take their rightful place back from new and false ones.

Your coins multiply as they guide you. They dwindle - they aren't always right. They are right again, and you use your savings to buy more coins to multiply and be guided by.

It works until it stops working.

You get loans from former old friends until you run out of both.

The coins' guidance becomes worse and worse. You realize it's on purpose. It's knowledge that comes when you no longer have the ability to do anything but what you are doing.

The coins take their time with you, but after a short eternity all you have —perhaps all you have in every sense— is one last coin you can't gamble away because it weighs nothing.

You try other sites, making random purchase attempts to see what it wants.

It weighs nothing.

It weighs nothing.

There is a site you don't try.

It weighs nothing.

It weighs nothing.

You understand it's a matter of time. You go to the site you were avoiding and are unsurprised to see the coin has weight.

The precise weight of one specific product. Of course.

You purchase the gun with your last coin.