GoKawiilOn 2014-04-09, my anonymous feedback form was used to link to a “fanfic” on pastebin.com —a story of Satoshi creating the Genesis Block. (I am not sure if the protagonist is supposed to be me.) I felt it was good enough that it did not deserve to expire, and archive it here with some gentle annotation.
“Daddy!”
He imagined her mouth pressed against the tile floor and winced. The muffled voice had descended from the bathroom on the first floor, the source of the main vent stack, which parted the insulation between the floor joists above and descended into the cement floor below. She knew he could hear him through this rather disagreeable conduit, even over the persistent humming and clicking.
“Lunch is ready!”
The thuds of her bounding footsteps reverberated as they trailed off towards the dining room.
Returning his focus to the workstation in front of him, he distractedly lifted the teacup sitting to the left of the monitor to his lips, and taking a sip, quickly realized how cold it was. Setting it back down on the porcelain coaster with a grimace, he paused, eyeing it, before gently nudging it into alignment with the circular brown stain permanently embedded atop the University of Illinois logo.
The basement was only partially finished: tacky wood paneling lined all four exterior walls, yet there were no partition walls, other than a bump-out near the front of the house that enclosed a small, dismal, emergency-use bathroom. Next to the bathroom stood a dust-covered bar piled high with boxes and cruft, decades removed from any use for its intended purpose. Clearly the work of a former owner, performed piecemeal over months of nights and weekends, with the expected result: a half-finished, shoddy job, and surely a far cry from the original magnanimous vision.
It had been cold down here, too: though the boiler for the radiant heating system stood along the side wall, no radiators had been installed below grade. There was only the click of the boiler’s circuit, the whoosh of the flames, and the screech of the flue closing to keep him company, as the system percolated the heat up through the century-old piping, benefiting only the non-trollish family members upstairs.
But it hadn’t been so much as chilly down here for at least a year and a half—even now, in early January, what with all those little dynamos around. He swiveled in his chair to consider them. They had been good little troopers, overall.
A wide bookshelf, long disgorged of such diverse tomes as The Theory of Money and Credit, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and Critique of Pure Reason, overflowed now with spare power supplies, stacks of tiny silver hard disks, and a spaghetti bowl of yellow and blue Cat-5 patch cables—half of them neatly coiled and tied off, the other half dangling in loose curls halfway to the dusty floor.
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