Ransom by Video
Arthur leaned against the back of his porch chair. One hand was gripped tightly around an IPA from Sierra Nevada, a heritage brew that he paid triple for at the local bodega. The other hand was moving tiles on his tablet, ready to score a triple word bonus in Words with Friends. Below him the ocean churned furiously against the floodgates which kept Monterey Bay from swallowing the entire city.
The bitter hops he sipped felt like an anchor keeping him alive. Despite being eighty-five, he still felt young. He was proud to be a digital native, always jumping into the latest cyber experiences and feeling like he belonged. He had gone through plenty of short-lived trends without losing his growing collection of cryptocurrencies. He kept the private keys locked away inside a hollowed-out GameCube.
Arthur suddenly felt a buzzing inside his head. It felt intense, not an ordinary video call. From the way it felt, it was implicitly an emergency. He nodded his head and connected to the call.
His vision of the ocean faded away as his brain implant synchronized to the call. He could see a dimly lit garage. Little dust motes floated in the air in perfect 16K resolution. In the middle of the garage, he could see Mathy zip-tied to a rusted radiator. His left eye was blackened and swollen shut.
Beside him was a figure holding a railgun against Mathy’s temple dressed in tactical matte-black armor.
“Grandpa Artie,” Mathy called out. He sounded hoarse, and his words slurred together. Arthur immediately empathized with his grandson’s pain.
“Mathy, tell me what’s happening. Blink twice if this is a prank.”
“It’s not a prank, grandpa!” Mathy croaked. His tears streamed down his dirty face. It looked so real. “They said they’re going to... k... ki... They want your Americoin.”
Arthur’s eyes squinted and looked around at the edges of the video frame, looking for some sort of pixel artifacts or a polygon mesh failure. He defensively tried to look for any evidence that this was not really happening, but he couldn’t find anything. He could see Mathy’s adams apple shifting back and forth. He could hear the slight asthmatic wheeze Mathy made with every inhale.
“Prove your real,” he whispered, feeling his body start to shake with emotion. He held back the urge to cry so it wouldn’t blur his vision on the other side. “Remember hiding those sneakers from your mom, in 2024? What colors were the laces?”
The person holding the railgun primed the magnetic core with a loud clack and hiss.
“They were neon pink,” Mathy sobbed and squeezed his eyes shut. “They were Travis Scott fragments with neon pink laces. You told me they were for your retirement. Please, Grandpa.”
Only the two of them would know that. This couldn’t be a scam. His grandson genuinely was in danger.
“Don’t touch him!” Arthur gasped out. “I’ll get your money. I’m sending it right now.”
With a slight tap of the forehead, his bank console appeared. The glowing blue window appeared in his view, covering up his weeping grandson. He set up the transfer.
Authorize Transfer of 500 AC to Anonymous Ledger
He received a warning dialog: “Warning: This Transaction is Irreversible. Are you sure you want to continue?”
“Yes! Make the transfer! Do it now!” Arthur called out.
“I love you, Grandpa Artie,” Mathy whispered.
“Transaction Complete,” the window reported. It closed and at the same time the video call ended.
He returned to the gray fog of the Santa Cruz coastline. He looked down and saw the IPA in his hand. It now felt bitter in his mouth. The silence was deafening. He sat there and thought about the fifty years of labor and savings that he had just handed over in order to save his grandson. Now he waited for Mathy to call back as a confirmation.
And he kept waiting.
A cooling fan began spinning faster than before in a server farm buried beneath the permafrost of Kamchatka, far away anyone who might look for it. The garage suddenly dissolved. The rust of the radiator turned into low-resolution voxels and then vanished together. The tactical armor evaporated. Mathy’s face morphed, turning back into the simpler form of the generic Clean_Male_20s mesh.
Nobody was in that server room, but if they were, they would’ve seen a new entry appear in a log file on a small terminal screen:
Target PENHALIGON, A converted. 500 AC yielded. Grandson Scenario succeeded (3m 31s)
Data used: Deep archive audio logs (2032), Purchase metadata (E-commerce hack 2027)
That log entry was soon pushed off-screen due to another successful scam. Then another. A thousand simulations were running in parallel, each one designed to be perfectly tailored by parsing the forgotten digital debris of the Millennial generation to craft unique and realistic nightmares.
With Arthur’s ransom collected, 0.0001% of that was allocated to pay the electricity bill. Then the next instance in the database started loading.
Target SORENSON, M loading... Lost Dog Scenario rendering...