It felt good to be part of a team. Marcus hadn't had anything resembling a normal job since working at a fish shack in high school, and if he was going to jump back into gainful employment in his 40s, coming in from the cold, this seemed like the least selling-out way to do it. In a way, it was coming full circle. Damien had gotten him into crypto back in college, perhaps as a way to pay Marcus back for getting him laid.
They'd been an unlikely duo, a surfer from Cali and a computer nerd from Ohio, but they'd shared a love of hikes in the mountains. Both loners, they were so far out of each other's social circles that spending time with each other was almost like being alone.
Their bromance had blossomed, for three out of the four years at Colorado University, until they were seniors, where they each had dived too far into their respective interests, snowboarding and programming, for the other to follow.
They kept in touch, though, and Marcus had bought a few thousand dollars worth of Bytecoin, and later bought ten thousand, giving the keys to Damien, to invest however he saw fit. Just like Damien trusted him to find their way back on overnight camping trips, or to not get them killed on the boundary waters, Marcus had trusted his friend to do that "crypto stuff," knowing he would be able to surf the waves of risk and innovation far better than he.
Marcus didn't understand how it worked, but the profit his friend took from the investments, combined with money his parents had given him on graduation, allowed him to do almost nothing for fifteen years other than make snowboarding videos and go through three different marriages, supporting two kids. He'd even lived for a while in the French Alps, following the third wife to the Swiss side, learning a little bit of three different languages.
In 2018 Damien had sent him an email telling him he'd cashed out all of his Bytecoin. He'd lost 40 percent of his remaining investment, but he should consider himself lucky. Marcus trusted him. He'd gotten to know a little bit about the Swiss banking system, and had a nest egg that Damien didn't know about.
A year later, in Yosemite, eating beans that Damien had made (that was the one part of camping Marcus always left to him), his friend had told him that the rest of the money had been invested in Truthereum, and had gone up 200%. Marcus had come back to the States for his mother's funeral, and because Elana was filing for divorce, and custody of their daughter.
Six months ago, on a ski lift, Damien had told him that he'd sold all of Marcus's Truthereum, and invested it in Goalrand, the token of the foundation he was working for. There was a corporation and a foundation, and his job was some kind of a liason between the two. Goalrand was faster, cheaper, and more carbon neutral than Truthereum, and had goal-oriented proof of stake, supposedly superior to the thousands of other cryptographic schemes to solve problems of security and scalability.
Marcus, at that point, had almost none of his own money left, after medical bills, child support, and a tax audit. Damien had told him he could find him a job, despite his only skills being a questionable ability to produce and edit snowboarding videos, and playing heavy metal licks on guitar. They'd offered him work on some tutorial videos on a contract basis, for a trial period.
In what seemed like fate, the Goalrand people were going to be at the Truthereum conference in Denver, where he'd lived, more or less, since his second marriage. Marcus would have a kind of home-court advantage convincing HR to offer him a full-time role. Even better, they were going to a retreat in Brekenridge after the hackathon, to schmooze and unwind.
Marcus's torn groin and the metal rods in his ankle might keep him from doing some the more difficult tricks, but he could still snowboard well enough to impress a bunch of computer nerds.
So here he was, on the top floor of the "temple," which was like a huge library without any books, just rows of tables for laptops and good wi-fi, under half-blinded windows somehow conveying a sense of altitude, the mountains in the distance. He was in an all-hands Boom call, listening to the COO talk about blockers, workflow, and Q1 goals. Marcus was still high from the canna-butter he'd used to cook his eggs, but it was a Sativa strain, so the corporate lingo washing over him didn't make any less sense than it would have sober. Tokenomics, claw-backs, optimistic roll-ups, liquidity on decentralized exchanges. Marcus, having grown up in the punk scene of Orange County, knew a cult of subculture when he saw one, their insular shibboleths and secret handshakes.
Most of the people on the call kept their cameras off, but Markus left his on the whole time, the rafters and heating ducts above him. His new haircut looked good, carefully tousled. Even with his nose that hadn't quite healed right, and the lines starting to show around his eyes, Marcus knew he was nice to look at. He also wanted them to see he was here, in Denver, at the heart of the conference they were talking about, while most of them were in Estonia, or Brazil, or Boston, or wherever.
The meeting was almost over, and they hadn't asked him about how the new video was going. It was basically a promo disguised as a tutorial, for something called Breach, which was one of the smart contract languages they were hoping some of the hackers here would teach themselves in pursuit of the bounties. Marcus had been scouring stock video footage and royalty free music, talking about the script and storyboard with Steve, the lead dev, some yuppie from Dallas. He saw he had an invite into a break-out session with the COO, just as people started dropping off the call.
"He fired me!" Marcus said to Damien over the phone.
"What? Seriously?"
"Yeah, dude, over the Boom call." People in the food truck line were staring at him, so he lowered his voice. "I'm off the team. They're just going to have Steve do it himself. It's going to be him droning on into that crappy webcam."
"Did he say why?"
"No, but I'm pretty sure he didn't like the bounty video." There was a pause.
"Well, it was kind of...unorthodox."
"That video was fire, dude. It would have gone viral if marketing hadn't cut out all the good parts. They just didn't get it. They turned over-the-top self-referential parody into serious cringe. It's like blaming me that a joke fell flat because they took out the punchline. Hold on. I've got to order." Marcus was about to ask for the Pad Thai, then remembered that it usually had fish sauce, and ordered Pad See Ew instead.
The teenager working there told him to scan the QR code on the sign.
"Wait, what?"
"With your Paramask wallet. You should have some food truck tokens from the air drop."
"Okay. Hey Damien, I've got to do something with my phone. I'll call you back."
"I'm pretty busy all day. Meet you at the Tap Room at 8:00?" Marcus hung up, opened the wallet, and tried scanning the barcode, but the transaction failed. "This isn't working," he said.