Sunitha and Matty settled into a rhythm of skiing, then talking on the lift back up the top of blue or red diamond slopes. Matty was graceful on skis, choosing paths through the drifted show different than those she would have chosen had she not been following the older woman's lead. She knew how to steer with her weight, rather than the poles or skis, using the shape of the moguls to make her turns.
They both had nervous energy to work off. There was only about a half hour left before it got too dark, while the views from the lifts would get exponentially better. Sunitha was still almost uncomfortably warm beneath her suit, gloves, boots, and hat. Matty had told her that her family was going to arrive later that night, around when the surf-rock band the Glider Guns were opening for would be on stage.
She'd also told Sunitha about the trip to Blue Lake with Babacar and Marcus, although they had walked ahead, only meeting them on the way back. They'd used separate rented cars to carpool, but had agreed to meet at the lake for lunch, but Matty had taken them down a side-path to look at some recent clear-cuts. She'd been demonstrating a biological survey app that correlated population and air-quality data in real-time, uploading the results into the open-source clouds. They'd run into some environmental activists were staging a small-scale protest, trying to get pictures on their phones where it looked like there were more of them than there actually were.
That had been all of the story Sunitha had gotten from her on the most recent ride back up on the ski lift. Sunitha had fallen over getting off, but it was a controlled fall into light snow, and Matty helped her up without remark.
Now they were on their way back up, admiring the spring sunset, after the jolt of the lift chair touching the back of her knees, always jarring no matter how much she was expecting it.
"Marcus was right," Sunitha said, unzipping the neck of her coat.
"About what?"
"When he was arguing with those trolls in the livestream, when they were calling us ski yuppies, Marcus had said they were thinking of Vail. He told them that Breckenridge had been taken over by snow boarders."
"Oh!" Matty said. "I just got it."
"What?"
"Board rock. The name of the band, or maybe the type of music. I thought people were saying 'bored rock' or that it had something to do with Marcus's table games. But it's rock for snowboarders."
"I need to tell you something. I should have mentioned it before, especially with your family coming. Our friend in Luxembourg, Nico? The Daemon DAO guy? He said that Chase was in danger. I don't know how seriously to take it, but they said people might try to kill him tonight. You said the protesters seemed a little strange, right? Like some of them might have been paid?"
"Oh god," Matty said. "Marcus told them where we were staying."
This time, it was Matty that fell over getting off the lift.
"It might be better if you just got a hotel outside of Denver somewhere."
"What? Why? This was your plan, I thought we had it figured out." She could tell that he was mostly upset, not about the change, but about being the one that would, single-handedly, have to deal with the fall-out of that decision with their children, already, judging by the sounds coming from the back seat, frayed by the version of cabin fever particular to cars, that made her want to pee just thinking about it.
"Things are just getting a little...unstable up here." She tried to convey one thing with her eyes, and another with her tone of voice. Things she didn't want to tell him when the kids could hear. "We ran into some protestors on a hike. They might be planning an action."
She watched him process. If it had to do with her work, he trusted her. "Alright, well, either way we need to get driving again. There might be freezing rain early in the morning. Just call again when you know something for sure." He never talked on the phone while driving, not even with the hands-free devices he'd caved into owning. It made him nervous. He'd had Jenny read the text from his phone, and then pulled over into one of those air-strip like parking lots, somehow orders of magnitude larger than they businesses they supposedly served.
"Okay. Love you." She said it again, loud enough, hopefully, for the kids to hear it over their own intense negotiations over comic books (manga, as they insisted she call it) or Croakymon cards, then looked self-consciously around the little café attached to the restaurant, but with pseudo-patio seating in a secluded green-house enclosure, with quaint garden furniture rusting at different levels.
The only other people nearby were a well-dressed older looking couple, eating scones, the man idly winding the dial on some antique watch, the woman fastidiously adding more butter after each bite. The lights came on, officially signaling the switch to a dinner menu, and probably a staff change. Matty caught the eye of the waitress and smiled, just so she wouldn't worry about her. People sometimes assumed that she'd either fallen asleep with her eyes open or had some kind of cardiac event when she meditated in public.
Matty never actually listened to any of her yoga teacher's advice on meditation, nor had she ever admitted that to them. Unanimously, along with most sources on the internet, the instructions were to try to clear your mind, to not think. Followed by more instructions about how to effectively not think about or dwell on secondary thoughts that would come with the inevitable failure of the original intent, which was to not have any thoughts at all. Matty's secret was that when she was "meditating" she was thinking. Not only that, but thinking methodically and purposefully, observing her own cognition as closely and impassionately as yogis were meant to observe the thought-less blankness of a depersonalized experience (a oneness with the universe).
Other than that one difference, though, she used the same techniques: inventory of her body, focus on the breath, responding to and observing mental outcomes rather than forcing them. She'd spent the last half hour, before Brian had called her back, researching the Daemon Dao. There was a website that she liked, called Dark Spirals, that reviewed DAOs, non-profits, and corporations, and ranked or evaluated them based on the prevalence of manipulative psychological tricks. She'd helped secure some of their funding, and hired security experts to fix the damage after they'd been hacked.
The Daemon DAO was ranked near the bottom of the list, with an impressive number of red flags and vitriol scraped up from forums by key-word bots. Pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, and a generally creepy fascination with occult-oriented MMORPGs from ten years ago. Typical operating methods of confidence games and crypto grift. Promises of transparency, but really just an endless series of increasingly smaller inner circles, hidden channels, newsletters penned in the blood of innocents.
A lot of it, obviously, had been the result of flame wars, in this case between two different factions of the almost-defunct Reincarnate game, both of which had accused the other of rug-pulling and selling out their communities. All of the development repositories had been branched, one side considering themselves the "continuity" faction, and the others the "drift". It had something to do with whether or not the number of NFTs issued were distributed according to historical time or population size. Nico, and Marcus's friend Damien, seemed to have fallen in with the drifters. Continuity, most likely, were the ones hacking Chase's accounts, and now apparently spoofing Sunitha's as well. She'd wanted to avoid all of this kind of crap by not competing. She thought she'd actually be able to relax.
"Matty?"
Sunitha was there, with Chase. "You okay?"
"Yes, just thinking."
"I think, too, sometimes, but I just go ahead and call it meditating."
"Fair enough. Sit down, please. You can grab that chair, Chase, no one's using it."
Chase didn't look drunk, at least. Not yet. "I've been looking into the Daemon DAO. I get the whole shock-value ironic opposite-of-what-you-really-are thing. I was in marketing. But also consider this: when a person or organization tells you something about themselves, even ironically, maybe you should listen. Chase?"
The young man, who had seemed more relaxed around Sunitha than before, now was staring across the frond-shadowed LED middle distance at the older couple. His mouth was open, and something about the ways his brows were furrowing suggested fear.
"I've seen those two before," he said. "On the train."