The lights in the office dimmed. Again. It was the third time in the last ten minutes. This time I found myself sitting in a yellowish glow while the lights flickered and came back to full strength.
I pushed back from the desk and went to investigate. The hall was dark and quiet. We were still a few weeks away from the first wave of colleagues coming back from their remote set-ups. Maybe the IT guys were testing the grid, making sure everything was in working order for the big day.
I went around the corner and heard the low hum of a generator, like the one the neighbor runs after the big storms. There was a bright light coming from Wilson’s office, and lots of talking.
I went to the door and saw Ashley at a folding table with a half-dozen laptops scattered across it. Empty Starbucks cups and energy bars were strewn about. Wilson was behind his desk, pecking away at his keyboard, oblivious to the fact he had a visitor.
Big Mike was over in a corner, ripping open large, thin boxes and sliding the contents out.
“Are those ah, solar panels?” I asked, stepping into the office.
Wilson slapped the keyboard and sprang from his seat. The other two were too engrossed in their tasks to greet me.
“They are,” Wilson said, waving me in. “We need more juice. This whole thing is taking more electricity than we envisioned.”
I nodded, pretending to understand. Ashley pounded her fist on the table. “Come on now. I was so close.”
She looked like she was seventeen hours into an all-nighter before finals.
“I’m making my own digital currency,” Wilson said, excited.
“Your own…currency?” I asked, thinking maybe I had misunderstood.
Before he could answer Ashley yelled.
“Yes,” she screamed, jumping up from the chair and popping a can of something called 72-Hour Energy, cotton candy flavored. “Mined another one. Woohoo, this is exciting. I feel like I’m on the ground floor of a new skyscraper that’s going up.”
Out in the hall there was a crackle, then a sizzle and the lights went off. There was the faint glow of the emergency light over the door to the stairs.
I pointed to the office door, then toward Ashley’s mess of tech.
“The blackout is related to that, yes?” I asked.
Wilson was back behind his desk, his computer and everything else humming along on the generator, which smelled as though it was humming along on gasoline.
“It is energy intensive to mine a cryptocurrency,” he said. “We’re using more energy than most of the Caribbean right now. But that’s why we got the solar panels.”
Mike had the little slat at the bottom of one of the office windows opened. He was holding a solar panel out, extending it over the street eleven floors below.
“I think if I can angle it like this, and then time it just right for when the sun is high in the…”
There was the whooshing sound of a wind gust and the panel flew from his hands.
“Oh, crap,” he said, poking his head out the little slat. “Hey, heads up down there.”
I moved a guest chair in front of Wilson’s desk and sat down. He had a page of cryptocurrencies on one screen and was pointing and poking at the monitor.
“I think we shoot for Dogecoin first,” he said. “Pick that one off and then set our sights on Ethereum, and who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll be up there with Bitcoin. What do you say, team?”
“Team?” I asked.
There was another woohoo from Ashley and something about the mining getting easier.
“But I’m going to need more computers,” she said to me. “Can you go get yours?”
The lights came back on and Wilson looked pleased. “We’ll get all this worked out in no time,” he said. “Would you like to help name my currency. We’ve been struggling with what to call it. And we need something catchy.”
I looked at Wilson, then Ashley, then Mike.
“This is like a real thing?” I asked. “I mean, as real as a non-existent digital currency can be?”
Wilson nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Mike wants to call it MikeyMoney, but I’m not sold on that. Ashley thinks WooCoin would be good. But I think that sounds too much like Wuhan and I don’t want people to be confused.”
“Definitely not,” I said.
“Any thoughts?” he asked.
“Many,” I said.
“I was thinking of WilCoin,” Wilson said, smiling.
I glanced around the room thinking this is what happens at the end of a pandemic. I wondered if maybe the same thing occurred in 1920 when the Spanish Flu eased. A handful of people in a printing plant somewhere started making their own paper currency to pass around. It’d be worth looking into when I got back to my desk and needed something to fuel my web surfing. If Ashley hadn’t taken my computer.
“Hey hey,” Mike yelled from the couch where he had plopped after losing the solar panel. “I think we got our first digital currency buyer.”
There was clapping all around and Wilson said, “Details?”
Mike studied his phone. “Somebody in Ukraine, I think. This is Ukrainian, right?” he asked, holding his phone out for us to look. “That looks like a form of the Cyrillic alphabet to me.”
I had to put Wilson’s digital currency aside so I could process the revelation that Mike was familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet.
“I’ll run it through Google translate to see what they’re asking,” Mike said. A second later he had his answer.
“They want to know if they can have access to our crypto wallets to make the transactions,” Mike said.
“Absolutely,” Wilson said.
Mike kept going. “If we don’t have a wallet set up we can just give them access to our bank account and do the transactions there.”
“I’m liking it,” Wilson said. “We’re moving and shaking now. My digital currency is taking off.”
“You’re…you’re going to give someone your bank information?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Sure, why, not,” Wilson said. “The digital currency community is very open.”
All three of them were giddy with excitement. Maybe delusional with excitement would be more like it.
They buzzed about, each taking care of their business. Mike transacting with his currency trader. Ashley taxing the power grid to make more currency, and Wilson overseeing the entire scheme.
“And what exactly will people be buying or selling with this?” I asked.
“Stuff,” Wilson said.
“Okay,” I said.
“What?” he said. “You look skeptical.”
“I am a bit…a bit…” I started to say before Wilson cut me off.
“That’s it,” he yelled. “Wilbit! We got a name for our new currency.”