Dfa global real estate securities fund

Get the collection here: https://www.genkicourses.com/product/robert-kyosaki-ultimate-collection-bundle/ [Get] Robert Kyosaki Ultimate Courses Collection📷 What’s Included in the collection?

• ABCs of Real estate investing
• Cashflow Quadrant
• Choose to be Rich
• ChooseRich
• Conspiracy of the Rich
• Financial Freedom Planner – Your Personal Financial Organizer
• Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting up Your Credit Cards
• High Performance Selling [Robert Kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker,Bob Proctor]
• How to predict the future
• How To Save A Fortune In Taxes [Robert kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker]
• Increase Your Financial IQ
• Michael Maloney – Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver
• Own Your Own Corporation
• Real Estate Advantages
• Rich Dad Poor Dad audio and book
• Rich Dad Poor Dad for Teens_ The Secrets About Money – Robert T. Kiyosaki & Sharon L. Lechter
• Rich Dad Secrets Of Wealth [Robert Kiyosaki, T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Rich Dad’s Advisors – The ABCs of Getting Out of Debt
• Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
• Rich Dad’s guide to Wealth
• Rich Dad’s how to Predict the Future
• Rich Dad’s Success Stories
• Rich Dad’s Who Took My Money
• Rich Dads Advisors The ABCs of Building a Business Team That Wins
• Rich Dads Before You Quit Your Job
• Rich Woman
• Richard Kiyosaki – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Robert Kiyosaki – 6 Steps To Becoming A Successful Real Estate Investor (AUDIO & VIDEO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Before You Quit Your Job
• Robert Kiyosaki – Corporations
• Robert Kiyosaki – Freedom or Security
• Robert Kiyosaki – How to Find Great Investments
• Robert Kiyosaki – New Rules of Money
• Robert Kiyosaki – Real Estate Investor Business Plan
• Robert Kiyosaki – Retire Rich Retire Young (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Real Estate Riches
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Secrets Of Wealth [T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dads Guide To Investing (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Kid Smart Kid
• Robert Kiyosaki – Sales Dogs (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – The 8 Hidden Values of Network Marketing
• Robert Kiyosaki – The Real Book of Real Estate
• Robert Kiyosaki – Who Took My Money
• Robert Kiyosaki Cashflow 101 and 202
• Robert T. Kiyosaki – 8 Lessons in Military Leadership for Entrepreneurs
• Sales Dogs
• The ABC’s Of Building a Business Team That Wins
• The ABC’s Of Property Management
• Why -A- Students Work for -C- Students
• Kiyosaki Live NY City
• Robert Kiyosaki – 60 Minutes To Getting Rich

Could use some support - I thought I would have done so much better on the MBE. I was so close. Can’t imagine jumping back into this.
Essay Scaled Score: 134 MBE Transferred/Scaled Score: 121
Essay Subject Areas Raw Score MPT 8.0 EPR 3.0 Family Law 3.0 Decedents/Estates 2.0 Criminal Law 4.0 Secured Transactions 3.0 Real Property 4.0
MBE INFORMATION Subject Area National Percent Below Contracts 36.8 Constitutional Law 5.7 Criminal Law and Procedure 15.1 Evidence 65.1 Real Property 42.0 Torts 18.6 Civil Procedure 14.1

Epazz Holdings: ZenaDrone, Inc. 1000 AI Predictive Received a Letter of Support from the US Air Force for Drone Cargo Delivery and Intent to Use ZenaDrone 1000 Platform
Epazz, Inc.
Tue, March 28, 2023 at 5:00 AM EDT
CHICAGO, IL, March 28, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire – Epazz Inc. (OTC: EPAZ), a mission-critical provider of drone technology, blockchain mobile apps and cloud-based business software solutions, announced today that ZenaDrone, Inc. received a letter of support from U.S. Air Force to use ZenaDrone 1000 for drone cargo delivery, which includes blood transport. ZenaDrone is invited to work with the U.S. Air Force at an overseas base to test the ZenaDrone 1000 platform under battlefield conditions. ZenaDrone will be assigned a team from the base to conduct the test.
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Over the past couple of months, ZenaDrone 1000 has been presented and showcased in front of the U.S. military. The company has been getting traction from the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army. This test will be the first time ZenaDrone will be actively used in a military environment. Additionally, the test allows ZenaDrone to move to Technology Readiness Level 7 (TRL). “Technology readiness levels (TRLs) are methods for estimating the maturity of technologies during the acquisition phase of a program. TLR’s are measured on a scale of 1 to 9 with 9 being the most mature technology.”
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ZenaDrone is now qualified to submit a Phase II SBIR grant for external funding of this cargo delivery solution. Phase II SBIR grants are generally up to $1.2 million for a two-year period and a nondilutive source of funding. This will be the second direct to Phase II project for ZenaDrone 1000.
​
CEO Shaun Passley, Ph.D., said, “We are excited to see ZenaDrone 1000 the subject of so much attention in multiple military branches. The Air Force clearly sees value in this platform and is pushing the envelope of new testing to find out the extent of its capabilities. We are anxious to receive critical feedback from the Air Force as we transition to mass production operations. We are currently in the process of evaluating a number of suitable sites while balancing the potential commercial uses. We also hope shareholders see how we are trying to move the technology forward through the use of nondilutive funding sources.”
​
About ZenaDrone 1000
​
The ZenaDrone 1000 is a totally autonomous drone, surveillance, inspection and monitoring solution. The drone comprises innovative software technology, along with compact and rugged hardware that was engineered for industrial uses in military, construction, agriculture, surveillance, search and rescue and customizable applications. This multifunctional unmanned aerial vehicle has garnered positive reviews from several industries, especially the military, agriculture, oil and gas, wildfire management and civil engineering industries. It is also equipped with machine learning systems, multispectral sensors and AI technology. ZenaDrone uses the data captured from its cameras to create a 3D interactive environment.
​
In the coming year, the goal of ZenaDrone is the enhancement of its AI capabilities, which include autonomous navigation of unmapped terrains, deep learning algorithms for various actions and dual-use features to accommodate commercial and military drone applications.
​
About ZenaDrone Inc. (https://www.zenadrone.com/)
​
ZenaDrone Inc. is dedicated to improving its intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle technology that incorporates machine learning software and AI. It was created to revolutionize the hemp farming sector and later evolved into an intelligent multifunctional industrial surveillance, inspection and monitoring solution.
​
The ZenaDrone team will use predictive AI analytics or predictive modeling — a type of analysis that employs methods and resources — to create predictive models and forecast future outcomes based on acquired data. Predictive analytics refers to a method rather than a specific technology. Techniques used in predictive analytics include machine learning algorithms, sophisticated mathematics, statistical modeling, descriptive analytics and data mining.
​
About Epazz Inc. (https://www.epazz.com/)
​
Epazz Inc. is a leading cloud-based software company that specializes in providing customized cloud applications to the corporate world, higher education institutions and the public sector. Epazz BoxesOS™ v3.0 is a complete web-based software package for small and midsized businesses, Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies and higher education institutions. BoxesOS™ provides many of the web-based applications organizations would otherwise need to purchase separately. Epazz’s other products include DeskFlex™ (room-scheduling software) and Provitrac™ (an applicant-tracking system). The company is also involved in upgrading the AI technology of ZenaDrone 1000 to increase its global reach across industries.
​
Safe Harbor
​
This Safe Harbor statement is made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
​
Certain statements contained in this press release are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by the use of words such as “may,” “expect,” “intend,” “estimate,” “anticipate,” “believe” or “continue” (or the negatives thereof) or similar terminology. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from future results or those implied by such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results might differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Epazz Inc. assumes no obligation and has no intention of updating those forward-looking statements, and it has no obligation to update or correct information prepared by third parties that is not paid for by Epazz Inc. Investors are encouraged to review Epazz Inc.’s public filings on SEC.gov and otcmarkets.com, including its unaudited and audited financial statements and its over-the-counter market filings, which contain general business information about the company’s operations, results of its operations and risks associated with the company and its operations.
​
Contact
​
Investor Relations
​
[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
​
312-955-8161
​
https://www.epazz.com/

Get the collection here: https://www.genkicourses.com/product/robert-kyosaki-ultimate-collection-bundle/ [Get] Robert Kyosaki Ultimate Courses Collection📷 What’s Included in the collection?

• ABCs of Real estate investing
• Cashflow Quadrant
• Choose to be Rich
• ChooseRich
• Conspiracy of the Rich
• Financial Freedom Planner – Your Personal Financial Organizer
• Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting up Your Credit Cards
• High Performance Selling [Robert Kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker,Bob Proctor]
• How to predict the future
• How To Save A Fortune In Taxes [Robert kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker]
• Increase Your Financial IQ
• Michael Maloney – Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver
• Own Your Own Corporation
• Real Estate Advantages
• Rich Dad Poor Dad audio and book
• Rich Dad Poor Dad for Teens_ The Secrets About Money – Robert T. Kiyosaki & Sharon L. Lechter
• Rich Dad Secrets Of Wealth [Robert Kiyosaki, T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Rich Dad’s Advisors – The ABCs of Getting Out of Debt
• Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
• Rich Dad’s guide to Wealth
• Rich Dad’s how to Predict the Future
• Rich Dad’s Success Stories
• Rich Dad’s Who Took My Money
• Rich Dads Advisors The ABCs of Building a Business Team That Wins
• Rich Dads Before You Quit Your Job
• Rich Woman
• Richard Kiyosaki – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Robert Kiyosaki – 6 Steps To Becoming A Successful Real Estate Investor (AUDIO & VIDEO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Before You Quit Your Job
• Robert Kiyosaki – Corporations
• Robert Kiyosaki – Freedom or Security
• Robert Kiyosaki – How to Find Great Investments
• Robert Kiyosaki – New Rules of Money
• Robert Kiyosaki – Real Estate Investor Business Plan
• Robert Kiyosaki – Retire Rich Retire Young (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Real Estate Riches
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Secrets Of Wealth [T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dads Guide To Investing (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Kid Smart Kid
• Robert Kiyosaki – Sales Dogs (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – The 8 Hidden Values of Network Marketing
• Robert Kiyosaki – The Real Book of Real Estate
• Robert Kiyosaki – Who Took My Money
• Robert Kiyosaki Cashflow 101 and 202
• Robert T. Kiyosaki – 8 Lessons in Military Leadership for Entrepreneurs
• Sales Dogs
• The ABC’s Of Building a Business Team That Wins
• The ABC’s Of Property Management
• Why -A- Students Work for -C- Students
• Kiyosaki Live NY City
• Robert Kiyosaki – 60 Minutes To Getting Rich

Last week, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.25% amid banking turmoil, marking the ninth increase in a year and placing rates between 4.75% and 5%. The Fed aimed to balance fighting inflation while addressing banking sector upheaval, which already had a “tightening” effect on the economy.
The decision was heavily scrutinized by investors and economists for potentially prolonging economic turmoil. Chair Jerome Powell said strong economic data justified the hike, but acknowledged tighter credit conditions could further negatively impact households, businesses and the economy.
Fed officials still anticipate slower growth and higher inflation, with interest rates peaking at 5.1% in 2023 before dropping to 4.3% in 2024. Further, Powell reassured the public of the banking system's resilience, with the Fed ready to deploy all necessary tools to ensure its stability, but critics weren’t convinced.
And so, the most important question remains – will these measures be effective in actually reversing inflation back to the target rate of 2%?
We do have a relatively recent historical example of the Federal Reserve successfully reversing inflation in the 1980s, but it was a bumpy road. The renowned central banker Paul Volcker is widely hailed as one of the “greatest of all time” heads of the Federal Reserve for his role in combating inflation in the early 1980s.
However, one often-overlooked policy mistake made by the Volcker Fed in 1980 resulted in a more protracted period of high inflation and necessitated even tighter monetary policy. This ultimately led to the most severe U.S. recession since World War II up to that point.
By the time Volcker assumed his position as chair of the Fed in July 1979, the central bank's credibility on inflation had been severely undermined by the flawed policies of his predecessors, Arthur Burns and G. William Miller. Inflation had soared to over 12% by October 1979. In a surprise press conference on Oct. 6, 1979, Volcker announced that the Fed would allow the benchmark federal funds rate to "fluctuate over a wider range," resulting in an increase to over 17% by April 1980.
Facing mounting pressure to roll back rate hikes, including protests by farmers and car dealers along with bipartisan political intervention, the Federal Reserve yielded. As unemployment exceeded 7% in May, the Fed chose to substantially lower the federal funds rate, even though inflation had reached a staggering 14.7% in April. This move tarnished Volcker's reputation as a champion against inflation, and throughout the remainder of 1980, inflation persisted at over 12%.
As the recession concluded in July 1980, the Federal Reserve resumed its battle against inflation and began raising the federal funds rate once more. To reassert its credibility, the Fed had to push the rate to a staggering level of nearly 20% by mid-1981. Demonstrating unwavering resolve, Volcker wielded a metaphorical baseball bat to subdue the economy and vanquish inflation. The subsequent recession, commencing in July 1981, was the most severe economic downturn of the century.
Numerous analysts and economists now hold the belief that to effectively curb inflation, the federal funds rate must exceed the rate of inflation for a sustained period. Presently, inflation hovers around 6% (as of February 2023), while the federal funds rate range stands between 4.75% and 5%. Consequently, further interest rate increases are likely on the horizon.
But what happens if the inflation fight is prolonged as it was in 1980? How do we protect ourselves from the value of our assets eroding away?
This particular concern is back on everyone’s mind due to the current instability of the American banking system. The U.S. Treasury Department and the Fed have indicated that they will “back-stop” customer deposits for regional banks where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) fails to do so, which critics say could result in another “money-printing spree” leading to further inflation.
In 2020, when the government initiated money printing in response to COVID-19, Paul Tudor Jones, the American billionaire and hedge fund investor, penned a compelling investor letter, widely regarded as the rational case for hedging one's portfolio against inflation with bitcoin.
He provides a list of inflation hedges “a host of assets that at one time or another have worked well in reflationary periods,” ranging from the most obvious such as gold to more esoteric such as foreign exchange investments like the AUD/JPY (Japanese yen/Australian dollar) foreign exchange trading pair. His full list of nine hedges, some of which you can invest in and some of which are meant to inspire ideas, include:
Gold: a store of value with a 2,500-year history
The yield curve: Historically a great defense against stagflation or a central bank intent on inflating. For our purposes we use long two-year notes and short 30-year bonds
Nasdaq 100: The events of the last decade have shown that quantitative easing can rapidly leak into equity markets, giving stocks a boost
Bitcoin: The most established cryptocurrency
U.S. cyclicals (long)/U.S. defensive (short): A pure goods inflation play historically
AUD/JPY forex pair: Australia is a long commodity exporter while Japan is short commodity importer
TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities): Indexed to consumer price index (CPI) to protect against inflation
GSCI (Goldman Sachs commodity index): A basket of 24 commodities that reflects underlying global economic growth in the U.S.
JPMorgan’s emerging market currency index: Historically when global growth is high and inflationary pressures are building, emerging market currencies have done quite well, likely because they are also suffering from inflation
(The list was lightly edited.)
Tudor Jones then puts these nine candidates through a rigorous analysis using the following four categories:
Purchasing power: How does this asset retain its value over time?
Trustworthiness: How is it perceived through time and universally as a store of value?
Liquidity: How quickly can the asset be monetized into a transactional currency?
Portability: Can you geographically move this asset if you had to for an unforeseen reason?
His analysis leads him to identify bitcoin as the top candidate due to its ability to retain purchasing power (as the best-performing institutional asset of all time, from the perspective of bitcoin’s entire lifecycle), trustworthiness (backed by cryptography), liquidity (tradeable 24/7) and, most importantly, portability (as a peer-to-peer system, no entity can intermediate on-chain transactions).
The run on Silicon Valley Bank underscored the remarkable capabilities of digital finance, with venture capitalists effectively toppling a bank using smartphones and group chats in just a matter of hours. During periods of political turmoil such as wars, pandemics or shifts in government, the importance of digital portability cannot be overstated. After all, it's improbable that anyone would transport gold or paper bonds across borders.

Blockchain and tokenization are revolutionizing the world by providing innovative solutions to issues in many industries such as finances, real estate, etc.
Here is some international blockchain news that you might be excited to know about 👇
1️⃣Goldman Sachs has launched its digital asset tokenization platform, GS DAP, with the issuance of a €100 million digital bond for the European Investment Bank on the private GS blockchain.
2️⃣BX Swiss: Test Trades in Swiss Francs via a Decentralized Public Blockchain. Together with major Swiss banks, the Swiss stock exchange BX Swiss is taking the financial market infrastructure for tokenized securities to the next level.
3️⃣DBS has become the first bank in Asia to complete an intraday repurchase transaction on J.P. Morgan’s intraday repurchase application on Onyx Digital Assets, a blockchain-based network.
4️⃣The DLT Pilot Regime is an innovative piece of European financial services legislation introducing a Europea

We know Avon’s money was slowly starting to dry in S4 as funds to Weebey’s family are cut off (although this could be false & Avon could be financially secure but his sister doesn’t want to help out Weebey’s kin) But what happened to Stringer’s millions? The guy owned a portfolio of stocks, real estate. Where/who did it all go to?

Get the collection here: https://www.genkicourses.com/product/robert-kyosaki-ultimate-collection-bundle/ [Get] Robert Kyosaki Ultimate Courses Collection📷 What’s Included in the collection?

• ABCs of Real estate investing
• Cashflow Quadrant
• Choose to be Rich
• ChooseRich
• Conspiracy of the Rich
• Financial Freedom Planner – Your Personal Financial Organizer
• Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting up Your Credit Cards
• High Performance Selling [Robert Kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker,Bob Proctor]
• How to predict the future
• How To Save A Fortune In Taxes [Robert kiyosaki, Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker]
• Increase Your Financial IQ
• Michael Maloney – Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver
• Own Your Own Corporation
• Real Estate Advantages
• Rich Dad Poor Dad audio and book
• Rich Dad Poor Dad for Teens_ The Secrets About Money – Robert T. Kiyosaki & Sharon L. Lechter
• Rich Dad Secrets Of Wealth [Robert Kiyosaki, T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Rich Dad’s Advisors – The ABCs of Getting Out of Debt
• Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
• Rich Dad’s guide to Wealth
• Rich Dad’s how to Predict the Future
• Rich Dad’s Success Stories
• Rich Dad’s Who Took My Money
• Rich Dads Advisors The ABCs of Building a Business Team That Wins
• Rich Dads Before You Quit Your Job
• Rich Woman
• Richard Kiyosaki – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Robert Kiyosaki – 6 Steps To Becoming A Successful Real Estate Investor (AUDIO & VIDEO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Before You Quit Your Job
• Robert Kiyosaki – Corporations
• Robert Kiyosaki – Freedom or Security
• Robert Kiyosaki – How to Find Great Investments
• Robert Kiyosaki – New Rules of Money
• Robert Kiyosaki – Real Estate Investor Business Plan
• Robert Kiyosaki – Retire Rich Retire Young (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Real Estate Riches
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad’s Secrets Of Wealth [T Harv Eker, Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield]
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dads Guide To Investing (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Kid Smart Kid
• Robert Kiyosaki – Sales Dogs (AUDIO)
• Robert Kiyosaki – The 8 Hidden Values of Network Marketing
• Robert Kiyosaki – The Real Book of Real Estate
• Robert Kiyosaki – Who Took My Money
• Robert Kiyosaki Cashflow 101 and 202
• Robert T. Kiyosaki – 8 Lessons in Military Leadership for Entrepreneurs
• Sales Dogs
• The ABC’s Of Building a Business Team That Wins
• The ABC’s Of Property Management
• Why -A- Students Work for -C- Students
• Kiyosaki Live NY City
• Robert Kiyosaki – 60 Minutes To Getting Rich

My name is Jordan Richter. I’m an investigative journalist for an independent media outlet. Ever since I had to use my wits, an old tape-recorder, and some fake weed I made from my mother’s arugula plant to catch a few bullies in their lies back in middle school, I’ve been obsessed with exposing corruption. I’ve spent years chasing the truth, going undercover, and even doing some modest hacking. Mostly I do political stuff, scandals, coverups, bribery. Every politician has a skeleton in their closet, and if you look hard enough, they usually have a few dozen. It’s not out of the ordinary for people to send me evidence of bad behavior on a potential suspect, like hotel receipts, photos, bank statements, that kind of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I never publish anything I get without verifying it. I always look at every case as hearsay until proven correct. You can really mess up someone’s life with a false accusation, and as someone who’s been through that twice, I don’t want to be that guy. Besides, sometimes the stuff people send is just too vague, not convincing, or obviously faked. But ever once in a while I find something really deep, something my editor would call ‘beyond the pale’.
Something dark.
This is one of those times.
I recently received a recording and transcript of a phone call that the whistleblower, who chose to remain anonymous, secretly recorded and sent to me via email. The first time I listened to it, I was shocked, and had to re-listen several times just to be sure I heard it right. Due to technical difficulties with the recording, I can’t post it here, but I can share the transcript. If what is contained within is even remotely true, then anyone who lives in Barron County Ohio needs to get in contact with either their local travel agent, or perhaps a National Guard unit.
The following is the transcript, exactly how it was sent to me, word for word.
(The recording begins. The sound of a phone ringing can be heard, before a handset is picked up with a soft click, and a man speaks.)
Voice 1: “Sheriff’s office, how may I help you sir or—”
(A second man’s voice can be heard shouting through the phone.)
Voice 2: “Wurnauw! What the hell is going on in your district?”
(A chair creaks, and it sounds as though Voice 1 is clearing his throat.)
Voice 1: “Mr. Karonti, I—”
Voice 2: “Shut your mouth before I shut it for you. Don’t you know not to use my name on the phone, you hopeless lump? I gave you a job to do, one job, and now I’m hearing all kinds of noise about things going wrong down there. You think my group funded your campaign so these kinds of mistakes could happen?”
Voice 1: “Sir, I assure you, my deputies are doing everything we can to—”
Voice 2: “Your deputies? Do you have any idea what I just got done reading? One of your loudmouth deputies has been blabbing online about seeing a Techno in the freaking woods. Thousands of people viewed his post, Wurnauw. If just one of them does any amount of digging, our entire operation could be jeopardized.”
(The sound of a pencil snapping in half can be heard.)
Voice 1: “I . . . I’ll find the responsible man, and deal with him, sir. It won’t happen again.”
Voice 2: “It better not. As for the park, why didn’t you seize control of New Wilderness like I directed? We need that instillation as a base for operations, and those two-bit rangers are still running around firing guns everywhere, stirring up the herds, and causing the anomalies to migrate. I want them gone, Wurnauw. I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of them.”
Voice 1: “Sir, with all due respect, the Night Rangers outnumber us two to one, and they’re the only ones keeping the Technos and Organics at bay. I’ve lost two men already to the Echo-Spiders, and we can barely keep the roads blocked as it is. Civilians are finding their way in, and every one of them that survives has to be silenced or discredited. I need more men.”
Voice 2: “I have a thousand of my best fighters on standby as we speak. But I need live specimens, Wurnauw, the more the merrier, and we can’t get them if those polo-shirt wearing rent-a-cops are killing them all. Ever since that Cromwell girl popped the last Oak Walker, we’ve had nothing but spikes in the electromagnetic satellite readings from your area. Time is of the essence if we want to contain this thing. Arrest the Night Rangers, clear the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve of all personnel, and prepare the site for ELSAR to move in.”
Voice 1: “If I move on the park, the rangers might resist. I know the head of security there, and that old Marine won’t give up without a fight. This could spark a real shooting war right in our backyard, and if the public finds out . . .”
Voice 2: “If the public finds out that there are moon-eyed freaks stumbling around in the woods, they’ll start the shooting war themselves. For God’s sake Sheriff, use your head for something other than a hat rack! You want to flush the rangers out? Drive a herd into them, and let the freaks do their job. Once everyone’s dead, we’ll come in and clean up. No one will ever have to know it was you.”
Voice 1: “Look, this would be a whole lot easier if we had more help. I’m not a miracle worker, and rumors spread every time we take another casualty on the force. It’s a small county, sir, with even smaller towns. All it takes is one person talking, and I can’t contain it. Just give me 50 guys, kitted out and ready to go, and at least then we can man the roadblocks.”
(There is a long pause, and a clock can be heard ticking in the background.)
Voice 2: “Fine, I can send 50, but no more until the LZ is clear. The situation is rapidly deteriorating, and the more men we move, the more attention we’ll attract. If we can’t seal the Breach soon, we could face an ecological disaster that would make Chernobyl look like Christmas in the Bahamas. I don’t need to remind you what we’ll be forced to do if that happens.”
Voice 1: “Clean Sweep.”
Voice 2: “Exactly. I won’t risk creating another Black Crow Island. The press is distracted by the upcoming elections right now, but if we make one slip-up, we’ll have reporters and home-grown watchdogs breathing down our necks all across the country. We cannot afford another Disaster Zone, especially not after what happened in Canada.”
Voice 1: “I understand sir. As soon as the reinforcements arrive, I’ll have New Wilderness captured for you within a week. Three days tops.”
Voice 2: “Time is critical, Wurnauw. Do not disappoint me on this. Get control of your department, shut the Night Rangers down, and keep the anomalies contained until we get there. I’ll work on suppressing any more online activity regarding your area and run some interference in case a few wannabe private-eyes start Googling things they shouldn’t.”
Voice 1: “Yes sir.”
Voice 2: “Oh, and one more thing. The leak in your department, it’s some moron named Hamond. I don’t care how you do it, or where, just make him disappear, now.”
Voice 1: “Hamond, huh? I should have known. Believe me, sir, it’s as good as done.”
(There is a muted click from the other end of the line, and the recording ends.)
Naturally, I dove into the internet and started hunting for information as soon as I read the transcript. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything about a Barron County Ohio in the mainstream press, or on any map anywhere. There is a Barron County in Wisconsin, but nowhere in the foothills of Appalachia, almost as if it’s been selectively deleted from every record available. As for the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve, I did manage to locate its home page just before a strange computer glitch made it unavailable. Just last week, the park announced it wouldn’t be holding a tour season this year, and that all grounds were closed to the public. It also issued a call for more volunteers for its security department, offering a whopping $40 an hour to anyone who stayed longer than a week, along with free room and board. Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to find any contact information, the site crashing in what I suspect was a coordinated DDOS attack from an unknown source.
What really stood out to me about the whole thing was the capitalization in the transcript of the bizarre words used by the two callers. Technos, Organics, and the vague threat known as the Breach. These seem to refer to some kind of animal species, judging by the use of the word ‘herds’ but it was hard to make heads or tails of it. My search in the regular web turned up nothing, until I stumbled across this site, and found four posts; three of them belonging to a girl named Madison Cromwell, and one belonging to a sheriff’s deputy, Sean Hamond.
From what I can gather in reading their accounts, both claim to have seen creatures of gargantuan and supernatural proportions. If there is any truth to them, then it might be reasonable to infer that the creature Miss Cromwell encountered, (called the ‘Oak Walker’ in the transcript by the mysterious Mr. Karonti) was likely an Organic, due to its plant-like characteristics. This creature seemed to be highly intelligent, and even possibly telekinetic, with the ability to create and control smaller human-sized creatures referred to by Cromwell as ‘Puppets.’ It is also important to note that in both Hamond’s account, and in the secret phone call, the creature known as ‘the Big one’ or ‘the Oak Walker’ is described as a type of apex predator, whose downfall contributed largely to the explosion of anomaly activity outside of the regular area. It is entirely possible that Miss Cromwell did in fact succeed in killing the creature, which in turn allowed lesser species to thrive in its absence and spill out into the environment.
In the second account, the strange metallic monstrosity that attacked Officer Hamond seems to fit rather well into the Techno category, given its electronic and mechanical attributes. This very well could be one of the ‘Echo-Spiders’ brought up by Sheriff Wurnauw. While there isn’t much information to go by, it seems that Organics and Technos are merely subcategories of the various paranormal beings that came from the Breach, and these anomalies present a clear and present danger to all human beings around them. A mention of electromagnetic readings powerful enough to be observed by satellites also seems to indicate that there is significant environmental disturbance going on in the area, which may have contributed to the origins of these species, or perhaps is a byproduct of their existence.
This, of course, was troubling to say the least, but I wanted to know more, and for that, I’d have to find the people who had supposedly witnessed these occurrences firsthand. Armed with two complete names, I info-hunted, and found some alarming results.
Madison Cromwell’s family recently moved from Black Oak to an unknown location somewhere deep in the hills of Idaho. For a family of relatively low-income to undertake such an abrupt move, they were either pursuing better income, or desperately fleeing some form of danger. I have no idea if Madison is alive or not. All of her social media accounts have been deleted, and none of her contacts on the various platforms seem to know if she quit, disappeared the last night of her job, or is still lying low somewhere.
In the case of Sean Hamond, it was announced early yesterday morning that a gunfight broke out in the Barron County Sheriff’s Office between members of the department, resulting in three dead, and four injured. Sean Hamond is said to be still at large, charged with the rather serious crime of organizing domestic terrorism, though no more details have been provided on that. One of the casualties was Officer James Walker, the partner Hamond referenced in his account on this site. Walker was shot twelve times in the firefight and taken to the Black Oak Regional Hospital. According to the hospital reports, he died of his wounds on the operating table soon after. For such violence to break out between fellow peace officers, and for such drastic charges to be leveled, there must be serious issues in the Barron County government, which lends more than a little credence to the validity of the whistleblower’s claims.
But it gets worse.
Upon looking into the reference to ‘Black Crow Island’, I could only find a passing mention about an explosion that destroyed an abandoned sanitorium on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Not much was provided in terms of detail, except that two people had been seen fleeing the island on a rowboat but were never apprehended. How this is connected, I do not know, but if it was important enough to mention in the phone call, I can only assume it had ties to the same forces at work in Barron County.
As for the vague ‘ELSAR’ group of which Mr. Karonti appears to be a major player in, I found nothing that matched the description of his lethal capabilities. No large-scale private security companies hail by that name, and while I have no doubt it’s an acronym for something, I don’t know what it could be. Whoever they are, I seriously doubt the fighters of ELSAR are interested in the wellbeing of Barron County, or the employees at the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve.
That leads me to this moment, as I type the finishing touches on my entry. Normally, I would say to refer to my article in our media website for the rest of the story, but my editor was found dead just this morning, with a bullet in his head.
The back of his head.
I have a well-adapted gut feeling when I’ve been asking too many questions, stirred around in too many pots, and I know they’re coming for me. Random cars have been following me to-and-from home, strangers keep watching my apartment building, and I found a tracking device stuck to the trunk of my car today. Maybe this little post will garner enough attention to alert the people of Barron County to their imminent danger. Perhaps the New Wilderness Night Rangers will read this in time and find a way to avoid whatever horrible plans Sheriff Wurnauw and ELSAR have for them. Regardless, my part in this investigation is at an end.
My wife, and two boys are waiting for me, at the pre-determined spot I arranged over the burner phone I bought at a local phone kiosk. I have withdrawn all my money in cash, and have booked flights for three different countries, bus tickets for four different cities, and a rental car with three sets of fake license plates. My social media accounts are all deleted, my entire family has shed their personal phones, and I even dyed my hair. If someone reading this is hunting me, good luck. I’ve dug up people who didn’t want to be found for half my life, and my family is at stake here.
You’ll never catch us.
And if you’re someone who lives in Barron County, or heck, anywhere near Ohio, all I can say is . . . brace for impact.

Interest in tokenized real estate is spreading. All the way to south Texas.
In the latest indicator of the once-niche sector’s spread, startup Homebase has closed out the tokenization of its first single-family rental property, the company told Blockworks exclusively.
The McAllen, TX, single-family home was valued at $235,000. Homebase drummed up $246,800 in about two weeks by tokenizing the residence on Solana (SOL) via a smart contract tied to an NFT created for the purpose: “Homebase 1 [The Cardinal].”
The total amount raised includes $11,800 set aside to “to account for maintenance and other issues,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Homebase, according to Domingo Valadez, the company’s chief executive and one of three co-founders, spent seven months getting just the legal and compliance details of its real estate offering ready for market.
The overall effort took a year and involved the regulatory and fiat side of things: filing the SEC paperwork to market security tokens to both retail and accredited investors.
Of the 38 participating investors, 30 were non-accredited, according to the filing. The minimum investment for the sale reported to the SEC was $500.
Homebase spent some time weighing the benefits and drawbacks of various blockchains to host the NFTs and smart contracts. Homebase eventually settled on Solana. The startup supports USDC to allow users to buy tokenized property slices “in one click,” the statement said.
Homebase considered the Ethereum ecosystem, he said, but was put off in part by concerns over ether (ETH) gas fees that were rising.
Polygon (MATIC) was also in contention, according to Valadez, but blockchain bridges that Homebase would have had to employ resulted in funds disappearing for like “15 minutes,” which would have been “especially scary” for investors new to the sector.
Fractionalizing real estate mints potential Valadez, originally from south Texas himself, spent about five years working for Google before leaving to start up Homebase with two additional co-founders in early 2022.
Living in the pricey Bay Area, Valadez realized something: He “still couldn’t afford anything in the Bay Area after working at Google for five years.”
In spite of working tech hours and earning a tech salary, Valadez said buying a property at the time was out of the question. The US housing market has slowed in recent months, with some analysts eyeing an even more dramatic drop in residential and commercial property prices on the horizon.
A number of tokenized real estate initiatives have started to take shape, including Homebase’s first foray into the competitive market. Those maneuvers come as the Federal Reserve has flashed some indicators that it plans to raise interest rates in a more gradual fashion moving forward.
The Fed’s March rate hike clocked in at a 0.25% increase, which appeared to have been largely already priced in by both traditional and digital assets markets.
But the Bay Area and other municipal US hotspots remain stubbornly out of reach in terms of price for most, according to Valadez.
The median February Bay Area home went for a whopping $1,050,000, according to real estate data provider Norada.

Why we chose to bring real estate on-chain on Solana, a 🧵👇 — Homebase🏠 (@HomebaseDAO) December 29, 2022

Homebase thinks it can provide a viable alternative — even with real estate prices where they are, by tapping Solana and ensuring compliance with related SEC regulations.
The end goal is to create a product that makes money and helps homeowners, as well as investors, in the process, Valadez said.
The mechanics of NFT real estate Homebase essentially captures a spread on the transaction. The startup put in a small amount of its own capital, which Valadez said was designed to ensure an alignment of financial interest.
“Tokenization in real estate is a means of crowdfunding,” he said. “We see the value in a decentralized future. We see some of the issues in the current financial structures…How do we give more power to individuals when they truly have ownership around their assets?”
Here’s how, in Valadez’s estimation:

• The Solana tokenization of the McAllen single-family property went live in early March, generating enough demand that a mix of retail and accredited investors filled the Solana order book at the $1,200 average check size in under two weeks. There was no lien or mortgage on the property, meaning Homebase didn’t have to work around outstanding debt on the transaction. The owner, as a result, held onto 80% of their equity in the property. Homebase took on a 1% interest, and the remaining 19% now belongs to investors in the tokenized offering. Of that approximately 19%, half was raised in fiat and the remainder was processed by USDC. A total of 38 investors participated, and a spokesperson said the “majority were first-time real estate investors and new to Web3.”
• The process resulted in 15 of the 28 backers creating their first Solana wallet, per the company.
• Homebase started the process by agreeing to exclusive terms with the rental property’s owner. The startup then spun up an SPV (special purpose vehicle) to market the tokenized equity sale.

Investors are required to hold on to their NFTs representing their equity interests for at least one year. The process is verified on-chain.
Backers can then freely buy and sell their Solana NFTs on the open market, and underlying smart contracts tie those transactions to their corresponding equity stakes in the home.
Homebase’s “operating agreements say that non-fungible tokens represent ownership of that SPV,” Valadez said, adding that that way “you don’t have to get a lawyer involved.”
“The way we’re marketing this on the demand side is keep all of your assets on-chain and get to invest in rental properties that are truly able to accrue in value,” he said. “On the homeowner’s side, it’s an additional option you have when it comes to liquidity — especially in today’s environment, when interest rates are like 6%…[You now have] an additional potential stake to get equity out.”
Homebase’s second tokenized offering is already in the works.

My name is Jordan Richter. I’m an investigative journalist for an independent media outlet. Ever since I had to use my wits, an old tape-recorder, and some fake weed I made from my mother’s arugula plant to catch a few bullies in their lies back in middle school, I’ve been obsessed with exposing corruption. I’ve spent years chasing the truth, going undercover, and even doing some modest hacking. Mostly I do political stuff, scandals, coverups, bribery. Every politician has a skeleton in their closet, and if you look hard enough, they usually have a few dozen. It’s not out of the ordinary for people to send me evidence of bad behavior on a potential suspect, like hotel receipts, photos, bank statements, that kind of thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I never publish anything I get without verifying it. I always look at every case as hearsay until proven correct. You can really mess up someone’s life with a false accusation, and as someone who’s been through that twice, I don’t want to be that guy. Besides, sometimes the stuff people send is just too vague, not convincing, or obviously faked. But ever once in a while I find something really deep, something my editor would call ‘beyond the pale’.
Something dark.
This is one of those times.
I recently received a recording and transcript of a phone call that the whistleblower, who chose to remain anonymous, secretly recorded and sent to me via email. The first time I listened to it, I was shocked, and had to re-listen several times just to be sure I heard it right. Due to technical difficulties with the recording, I can’t post it here, but I can share the transcript. If what is contained within is even remotely true, then anyone who lives in Barron County Ohio needs to get in contact with either their local travel agent, or perhaps a National Guard unit.
The following is the transcript, exactly how it was sent to me, word for word.
(The recording begins. The sound of a phone ringing can be heard, before a handset is picked up with a soft click, and a man speaks.)
Voice 1: “Sheriff’s office, how may I help you sir or—”
(A second man’s voice can be heard shouting through the phone.)
Voice 2: “Wurnauw! What the hell is going on in your district?”
(A chair creaks, and it sounds as though Voice 1 is clearing his throat.)
Voice 1: “Mr. Karonti, I—”
Voice 2: “Shut your mouth before I shut it for you. Don’t you know not to use my name on the phone, you hopeless lump? I gave you a job to do, one job, and now I’m hearing all kinds of noise about things going wrong down there. You think my group funded your campaign so these kinds of mistakes could happen?”
Voice 1: “Sir, I assure you, my deputies are doing everything we can to—”
Voice 2: “Your deputies? Do you have any idea what I just got done reading? One of your loudmouth deputies has been blabbing online about seeing a Techno in the freaking woods. Thousands of people viewed his post, Wurnauw. If just one of them does any amount of digging, our entire operation could be jeopardized.”
(The sound of a pencil snapping in half can be heard.)
Voice 1: “I . . . I’ll find the responsible man, and deal with him, sir. It won’t happen again.”
Voice 2: “It better not. As for the park, why didn’t you seize control of New Wilderness like I directed? We need that instillation as a base for operations, and those two-bit rangers are still running around firing guns everywhere, stirring up the herds, and causing the anomalies to migrate. I want them gone, Wurnauw. I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of them.”
Voice 1: “Sir, with all due respect, the Night Rangers outnumber us two to one, and they’re the only ones keeping the Technos and Organics at bay. I’ve lost two men already to the Echo-Spiders, and we can barely keep the roads blocked as it is. Civilians are finding their way in, and every one of them that survives has to be silenced or discredited. I need more men.”
Voice 2: “I have a thousand of my best fighters on standby as we speak. But I need live specimens, Wurnauw, the more the merrier, and we can’t get them if those polo-shirt wearing rent-a-cops are killing them all. Ever since that Cromwell girl popped the last Oak Walker, we’ve had nothing but spikes in the electromagnetic satellite readings from your area. Time is of the essence if we want to contain this thing. Arrest the Night Rangers, clear the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve of all personnel, and prepare the site for ELSAR to move in.”
Voice 1: “If I move on the park, the rangers might resist. I know the head of security there, and that old Marine won’t give up without a fight. This could spark a real shooting war right in our backyard, and if the public finds out . . .”
Voice 2: “If the public finds out that there are moon-eyed freaks stumbling around in the woods, they’ll start the shooting war themselves. For God’s sake Sheriff, use your head for something other than a hat rack! You want to flush the rangers out? Drive a herd into them, and let the freaks do their job. Once everyone’s dead, we’ll come in and clean up. No one will ever have to know it was you.”
Voice 1: “Look, this would be a whole lot easier if we had more help. I’m not a miracle worker, and rumors spread every time we take another casualty on the force. It’s a small county, sir, with even smaller towns. All it takes is one person talking, and I can’t contain it. Just give me 50 guys, kitted out and ready to go, and at least then we can man the roadblocks.”
(There is a long pause, and a clock can be heard ticking in the background.)
Voice 2: “Fine, I can send 50, but no more until the LZ is clear. The situation is rapidly deteriorating, and the more men we move, the more attention we’ll attract. If we can’t seal the Breach soon, we could face an ecological disaster that would make Chernobyl look like Christmas in the Bahamas. I don’t need to remind you what we’ll be forced to do if that happens.”
Voice 1: “Clean Sweep.”
Voice 2: “Exactly. I won’t risk creating another Black Crow Island. The press is distracted by the upcoming elections right now, but if we make one slip-up, we’ll have reporters and home-grown watchdogs breathing down our necks all across the country. We cannot afford another Disaster Zone, especially not after what happened in Canada.”
Voice 1: “I understand sir. As soon as the reinforcements arrive, I’ll have New Wilderness captured for you within a week. Three days tops.”
Voice 2: “Time is critical, Wurnauw. Do not disappoint me on this. Get control of your department, shut the Night Rangers down, and keep the anomalies contained until we get there. I’ll work on suppressing any more online activity regarding your area and run some interference in case a few wannabe private-eyes start Googling things they shouldn’t.”
Voice 1: “Yes sir.”
Voice 2: “Oh, and one more thing. The leak in your department, it’s some moron named Hamond. I don’t care how you do it, or where, just make him disappear, now.”
Voice 1: “Hamond, huh? I should have known. Believe me, sir, it’s as good as done.”
(There is a muted click from the other end of the line, and the recording ends.)
Naturally, I dove into the internet and started hunting for information as soon as I read the transcript. Try as I might, I couldn’t find anything about a Barron County Ohio in the mainstream press, or on any map anywhere. There is a Barron County in Wisconsin, but nowhere in the foothills of Appalachia, almost as if it’s been selectively deleted from every record available. As for the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve, I did manage to locate its home page just before a strange computer glitch made it unavailable. Just last week, the park announced it wouldn’t be holding a tour season this year, and that all grounds were closed to the public. It also issued a call for more volunteers for its security department, offering a whopping $40 an hour to anyone who stayed longer than a week, along with free room and board. Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to find any contact information, the site crashing in what I suspect was a coordinated DDOS attack from an unknown source.
What really stood out to me about the whole thing was the capitalization in the transcript of the bizarre words used by the two callers. Technos, Organics, and the vague threat known as the Breach. These seem to refer to some kind of animal species, judging by the use of the word ‘herds’ but it was hard to make heads or tails of it. My search in the regular web turned up nothing, until I stumbled across this site, and found four posts; three of them belonging to a girl named Madison Cromwell, and one belonging to a sheriff’s deputy, Sean Hamond.
From what I can gather in reading their accounts, both claim to have seen creatures of gargantuan and supernatural proportions. If there is any truth to them, then it might be reasonable to infer that the creature Miss Cromwell encountered, (called the ‘Oak Walker’ in the transcript by the mysterious Mr. Karonti) was likely an Organic, due to its plant-like characteristics. This creature seemed to be highly intelligent, and even possibly telekinetic, with the ability to create and control smaller human-sized creatures referred to by Cromwell as ‘Puppets.’ It is also important to note that in both Hamond’s account, and in the secret phone call, the creature known as ‘the Big one’ or ‘the Oak Walker’ is described as a type of apex predator, whose downfall contributed largely to the explosion of anomaly activity outside of the regular area. It is entirely possible that Miss Cromwell did in fact succeed in killing the creature, which in turn allowed lesser species to thrive in its absence and spill out into the environment.
In the second account, the strange metallic monstrosity that attacked Officer Hamond seems to fit rather well into the Techno category, given its electronic and mechanical attributes. This very well could be one of the ‘Echo-Spiders’ brought up by Sheriff Wurnauw. While there isn’t much information to go by, it seems that Organics and Technos are merely subcategories of the various paranormal beings that came from the Breach, and these anomalies present a clear and present danger to all human beings around them. A mention of electromagnetic readings powerful enough to be observed by satellites also seems to indicate that there is significant environmental disturbance going on in the area, which may have contributed to the origins of these species, or perhaps is a byproduct of their existence.
This, of course, was troubling to say the least, but I wanted to know more, and for that, I’d have to find the people who had supposedly witnessed these occurrences firsthand. Armed with two complete names, I info-hunted, and found some alarming results.
Madison Cromwell’s family recently moved from Black Oak to an unknown location somewhere deep in the hills of Idaho. For a family of relatively low-income to undertake such an abrupt move, they were either pursuing better income, or desperately fleeing some form of danger. I have no idea if Madison is alive or not. All of her social media accounts have been deleted, and none of her contacts on the various platforms seem to know if she quit, disappeared the last night of her job, or is still lying low somewhere.
In the case of Sean Hamond, it was announced early yesterday morning that a gunfight broke out in the Barron County Sheriff’s Office between members of the department, resulting in three dead, and four injured. Sean Hamond is said to be still at large, charged with the rather serious crime of organizing domestic terrorism, though no more details have been provided on that. One of the casualties was Officer James Walker, the partner Hamond referenced in his account on this site. Walker was shot twelve times in the firefight and taken to the Black Oak Regional Hospital. According to the hospital reports, he died of his wounds on the operating table soon after. For such violence to break out between fellow peace officers, and for such drastic charges to be leveled, there must be serious issues in the Barron County government, which lends more than a little credence to the validity of the whistleblower’s claims.
But it gets worse.
Upon looking into the reference to ‘Black Crow Island’, I could only find a passing mention about an explosion that destroyed an abandoned sanitorium on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Not much was provided in terms of detail, except that two people had been seen fleeing the island on a rowboat but were never apprehended. How this is connected, I do not know, but if it was important enough to mention in the phone call, I can only assume it had ties to the same forces at work in Barron County.
As for the vague ‘ELSAR’ group of which Mr. Karonti appears to be a major player in, I found nothing that matched the description of his lethal capabilities. No large-scale private security companies hail by that name, and while I have no doubt it’s an acronym for something, I don’t know what it could be. Whoever they are, I seriously doubt the fighters of ELSAR are interested in the wellbeing of Barron County, or the employees at the New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve.
That leads me to this moment, as I type the finishing touches on my entry. Normally, I would say to refer to my article in our media website for the rest of the story, but my editor was found dead just this morning, with a bullet in his head.
The back of his head.
I have a well-adapted gut feeling when I’ve been asking too many questions, stirred around in too many pots, and I know they’re coming for me. Random cars have been following me to-and-from home, strangers keep watching my apartment building, and I found a tracking device stuck to the trunk of my car today. Maybe this little post will garner enough attention to alert the people of Barron County to their imminent danger. Perhaps the New Wilderness Night Rangers will read this in time and find a way to avoid whatever horrible plans Sheriff Wurnauw and ELSAR have for them. Regardless, my part in this investigation is at an end.
My wife, and two boys are waiting for me, at the pre-determined spot I arranged over the burner phone I bought at a local phone kiosk. I have withdrawn all my money in cash, and have booked flights for three different countries, bus tickets for four different cities, and a rental car with three sets of fake license plates. My social media accounts are all deleted, my entire family has shed their personal phones, and I even dyed my hair. If someone reading this is hunting me, good luck. I’ve dug up people who didn’t want to be found for half my life, and my family is at stake here.
You’ll never catch us.
And if you’re someone who lives in Barron County, or heck, anywhere near Ohio, all I can say is . . . brace for impact.

I made some posts here recently about swing trades I was watching and taking. I got some questions from a few members of this reddit asking me about how I select stocks to watch and what I’m looking for in a swing trade. This is what I wrote to one of those members and I was thinking maybe there are some others here who might want to see it.
Here it is:
For finding setups there a good amount to it but I can hit you with some basics.

1. Stay off the idiot subs on Reddit. Especially the short squeeze subs. Reddit can have value, but the problem is sifting through the shit to find the gold. The shortsqueeze type subs, those guys are trying to chase momentum and it almost never works. It’s always a shit stock with shit fundamentals, no good reason to go other than hopium. Develop your own trade style, stick to it, DONT chase momentum!!!!
   
2. Start with the charts. Look at STNE chart for example. Look at the 6 month -1 year, you’ll see it been range bound between 8-12 for a good while. So that’s where I start. I like ranges, I don’t like volatility tho. Volatility will burn you. TSLA has made a lot of money for a lot of people, but it swings and kicks like your drunk girlfriend after you banged her sister. It’s unpredictable and doesn’t really play off levels.
   
3. Find stocks that you personally like to follow. Don’t over commit. Follow 5-10 stocks max!!!! In different sectors. Find a couple in commodities, a couple in oil, a couple in finance, a couple big tech names, maybe a couple that you think are emerging, and stick to those. Don’t be jumping from one chart to another to another. Watch those 10 or so that you’ve selected and learn how they behave. Watch how they react to earnings, news, world events etc. If you only watch tech, or only commodities or only shipping you’ll find that your whole watchlist is red or all green on the same day. But if you watch a variety of sectors you’ll find that when tech is green commodities are down, when commodities up tech is down etc.
   
4. Check your fundamentals. I like to trade stocks with a low P/E, good revenue, decent growth, price to book of 0-3. Price to book is the ratio between stock price and book value (assets minus liabilities). Look into ownership, who owns the stock. Is insider ownership high? Are insiders buying or selling? What institutional investors own it and how much do they own? Can you finding a weighted average of where they bought? A great place to start trying to find stock that you might like is the looking at the Berkshire Hathaway holding list. Example: buffet has been buying OXY for a while now. Bought a pile in the mid-high $60s, just bought more last week weighted average of $59 and change. If you can get some below his price… might be a smoking deal… worth watching for sure.
   
5. Familiarize yourself with P/E in a sector. What is reasonable? Look at semi conductors for example. NVDA has been popping since earnings, p/e is sitting at 147. Look at comparable companies. AMD is at 116. Does that make NVDA reasonable at 147? You could think that, but look at other good companies in the sector….TSM is at 13, Texas Instruments at 16, ON is at 19, MU is at 10, AMAT is at 16, LRCX is at 13. That indicates to me that NVDA and AMD seem over valued. Why? IMO it’s political. So when you investigate a sector, get a feel for what a reasonable P/E should be in that sector. If you find one that seems high or low, investigate why. Get a feel for average price to book as well. Get a feel for growth ratios.
   
6. Watch macro economic events. Right now, American banks are in trouble, war is escalating in Ukraine. Think about how you think that will affect the markets. War escalating…that will benefit defence stocks, could benefit oil too. Swing trading is about watching money move in and out of specific sectors for different reasons. People want security, so right now banks are in trouble….where could that money look to go? Well how about stable companies with good balance sheets that deal in commodities like oil, gold, maybe healthcare? When the US is unstable….maybe time to look at foreign companies. When there’s an overall sense of security, tech, startups, and real estate are good bets. This part has a lot to it, but start paying attention to how money moves.
   
7. I also look at the option chain. If for some reason I want to sell calls against stock I own, I want a decent Weekly chain with good volume. This is so that I can average down a position if I get stuck in it.
   

So in a nutshell, that’s what I do. I’m a combo of value investoswing tradethetaganger. I only want my money in undervalued attractive companies that have high ownership by institutions and insiders, which implies faith in that company. I want to put my money in a stock where I think the stock price has only one way to go.

With 2 YOE at time of applying this fall, which areas of my application should I bolster? Mostly interested in HSW + Columbia. I could wait until 2024 if there is reason to believe my chances will materially improve. I’m a white male who graduated Undergrad in 2021.
Work: By then, two years at a startup backed by top VCs. We’re in an emerging tech area (gaming, metaverse). I was an early employee and saw the company grow 4x over. Reccs likely to be written by 1) my direct manager and 2) our CEO/founder who I’ve worked closely with on numerous projects. My role has been ill-defined from the start, which is partly why I want to leave.
Education: 3.79 GPA at top 10 non-Ivy in Public Policy
GMAT: First practice was 730, targeting 750+.
ECs:

• Write and act in filmed comedy skits for a nonprofit
• Involvement with running a conference at my college in focus area I currently work in
• Politics: I want to work on a campaign and should be staffed on one by the time I apply
• Community involvement: Occasional work for a nonprofit focused on an affinity group
• Real Estate investor: beyond personal investments in short-term rentals I have been interested in opening a fund with a colleague to bring in other people’s money

ECs I would be interested in but haven’t started

• Launching a podcast
• Other political / policy work

Why B School: I want to leave the workforce and launch a real estate fund and eventually enter politics. I strongly believe more government officials should understand business before trying to lead in government. I would not likely tell admissions either of these verbatim. Meanwhile, my grandpa went to HBS so feeling determined to attempt to do the same.
If I do apply this year or next, what areas of my application should I develop the most?
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

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June 23rd, year 024 Angels Descent
It had been a couple of days since the class had been taken into Lust’s estate, and they were starting to go stir-crazy. They had been forbidden from even going out into the garden. Daisy herself seemed likely to carve a groove in the carpet of her room with how much she was pacing back and forth.
Despite the class’ efforts, they could not get Daisy to calm down entirely and just resorted to the easy out of getting blind drunk each evening. Thankfully they had been told by Bak Stah’Ber that the wine cellar of Lust’s estate was extensive enough to furnish the entire capital with a winery of bottles each.
It was over the two days the class had repeatedly petitioned Lust to let them out of the estate. They were nothing but prisoners currently, and seeing their teacher free to come and go had been the straw that finally broke the camel's back. Daisy had stormed through the palace and smashed down Lust’s door.
“Speak of the devil,” Lust seemed unperturbed by the interruption.
“Would you kindly sit down, Miss Haemont,” Lust said, gesturing to the only free seat. Looking to the seat then the one occupied by a man dressed in armour, Daisy reluctantly sat down.
“Septus, this is Daisy Haemont, daughter of Peter and Ludisa.”
“My condolences,” Septus said, lowering his head in her direction. Daisy had to physically fight the bile that was racing up her throat. This man was one of the four names of people suspected behind the attack. He was the last man she wanted condolences from.
“I’m glad you are here. I have some good news; your father seems to have developed a greater vampiric trait.”
“How is this good news?” Daisy grumbled. It wouldn’t matter that her father had become a late bloomer; he was still at death's door.
“Well, it is hyper-accelerated healing. It is a very nifty trait that means…” Lust trailed off, letting her smile finish the sentence.
“My father is going to live?”
“Yes… he has already begun to heal at a rate not seen in generations. However, I will warn you not to raise your hopes up too much. He is still in a tentative spot. I have taken steps to increase security around him; we don’t want a repeat of you know what.”
“Exactly why I am here. Young miss, please talk some sense into this woman… she is refusing my offer of guards in place of her own personal militia,” Septus pleaded.
“You want me to accept your help to protect my barely alive father?”
“Yes!” Daisy glanced at Lust, who rested her chin on the heel of her palm as if she was enjoying a good show. She knew part of the reason they were being kept on the estate was Lust’s concern over Daisy pursuing a vendetta.
“I would prefer to abstain from the decision. I am young and inexperienced and will defer to my elders.”
“Pshh, a load of help you were,” Septus grumbled as he stood up from the chair.
“Lady Lust, I will bring my protest to her most august majesty. Hopefully, she will talk some sense into you.” With a flourish of his cloak, he stormed out through the broken doors.
“Good girl.”
“Hmm?”
“You did well. A big part of politics is dealing with people you would much rather drown in sewage. Now, what do I owe the pleasure of having my doors blown off their hinges?”
“Ah, that… I’m sorry about-” Lust raised a hand to stop her.
“Daisy, I am in charge of internal politics for the Dark Continent. We have a lot of heavy hitters who equate strength with political power. They are the sort to blow doors off the hinges to make a statement. Now please answer my question.”
“I want to be free to leave.”
“Ok”
“It’s just we’ve been locked up for days and have little to do and… sorry, what did you say?”
“I said ok. You are free to go out to town if you like. I don’t have the shadows to spare to keep you safe, though. But you are a bunch of big boys and girls, aren’t you?” Daisy tentatively nodded in response.
“Good here, take this. If you are in real trouble, point this arrow to the sky and pull the cord, then fight till help arrives.”
Lust put a thin metal tube about ten inches long on the table. Along the side was a bright red arrow, and at the end opposite where the arrow was pointing was a cord.
“Now, don’t get any naughty ideas, young lady. This is an emergency flare. It will signal nearby knights to help.”
“And if the knights are the ones attacking me?” Daisy asked rather bluntly. She struggled with the idea that knights would help, especially after learning how broken the guard must be.
“Then hope you can take enough of them with you,” Lust’s equally blunt reply surprised Daisy.
“Now go on and have a fun day on the town. Here have some pocket money,” Lust said, throwing a coin pouch on the desk with a clink.
“I’m not sure what kids are into these days… is it Dancing? Skeletons? Shoes? Tapshoe-wearing skeletons? Regardless have fun.”
Daisy picked up the pouch and walked out of the office in a daze. She had just come face to face with one of her possible targets. Now she was free to do whatever she wanted and even had funding. Returning to the rec room, the class had claimed for their own use; she explained what had happened.
“So we going to go into town then?” Tasha asked to which Daisy nodded.
“I think we need to gather intel on the names. We only have their names and professions. Not much we can do with Gabriella and Noble now.”
“Why don’t we go to the market then? Merchants will know about a few of them, won’t they?” Tasha suggested.
“You just want the candy apples Bak Stah’’Ber told you about.”
“Maxy, it is not just the candy apples!!” Tasha protested.
“She’s not wrong. Merchants live and die by information. Worst case, we just get some sweets,” Bea suggested.
The class all nodded in agreement and packed up some of their equipment. Daisy spent a few minutes trying to wrestle her slime from Sir Sparky, who had grown very attached.
“Come on, Sir Sparky. I know he’s shiny, but I need an emergency weapon,” Sparky though was still reluctant to give up his shiny till Daisy bribed him with a well-polished small bronze coin from the pouch she was given.
Immediately the duck-sized dragon let go of the slime and curled up defensively around the coin letting out a contented puff of flame. The small dragon had been a great comfort over the past few days. He had made a point to comfort Daisy any time her feelings grew too much.
Shaping the metallic slime into a bracelet, Daisy put it on and felt she was now ready to start. Heading out of her room, she found the rest of her classmates ready and waiting for her.
The class didn’t take long to make it to the city’s marketplace. Countless stalls stretched out down every street they could see, with sellers trying to draw in customers. They had almost immediately struck gold by overhearing talk of Lady Gabriella hosting a party for the city’s elite.
Following the conversations and passing mentions, they gathered that the party was going to be a masquerade ball. That only one shop provided the masks and clothes for the partygoers.
“Why don’t we crash the party?” Tasha suggested around a mouthful of caramel-coated apple.
“Tasha, that is-” Daisy cut off Maxwell’s protest.
“A perfect idea!!”
“Daisy?!!! It’s too risky!”
“Maxwell… they hurt my family, killed them… just because you got abandoned by yours, don’t act like you can understand!!!” Maxwell staggered back half a step as the rest of the class recoiled in shock.
“I am going to assume that is your grief talking and leave it at that… Daisy, we can’t guarantee we will be safe.”
“We have gotten incredibly strong already. We are some of the strongest in the school, and worst case; sir will swoop in and rescue us.”
“Still…” Maxwell hesitated to say anymore as Daisy went up to a merchant running a stall to get directions to the tailors handling the clothes for the party.
“Don’t worry, chief… if she goes too crazy, we will pull her back,” Maxwell gave a grateful nod to Gunter and the rest of the class as Daisy returned with the location of their next destination.
Arriving at the tailor shop, just the front of the shop told them this was a very expensive establishment. The clothes on display would be the kind exclusive to nobility due to not only the price but the precious stones sewn into them.
“Nornir Tailors,” Kline read the sign for the shop aloud as he paled.
“It’s just a name Kline… they aren’t the real Nornir,” Daisy said as she bruskly walked into the shop, trailed not far behind by the rest of the class.
As they entered the store, a bell above the door rang, and three figures stepped out from the doorway to the back of the shop. The first was a hunched-over elderly figure with a bald head and a grey beard down to his waist. The second was a man with bright red hair and a well-trimmed beard. Close behind him was the youngest of the trio, who similarly had red hair but was likely closer to the class’ age.
“Welcome to Nornir Tailors. I am Past Tailor, the previous head of the shop,” the elderly man wheezed out.
“I am Present Tailor, the current owner,” the man added.
“And I am Future Tailor; I am currently apprenticed under my father.”
“They have clearly done a lot to get here,” Past said as he looked over a monocle at the class.
“That much is obvious,” Present said as he reached into a pocket and took out a pair of spectacles.
“I will get their purchases bagged right away, father,” Future said as he returned to the backroom.
“You still sure they aren’t the Norns?” Kline asked.
“You do seem to get the red-haired men fond of you,” Bea teased.
“Excuse me, but we haven’t made any purchases,” Maxwell said.
“Not yet, lad, but it is written you would.”
“Written?” Both men burst into a light fit of laughter at this question.
“Yes, it is written,” Past said between chuckles.
“Ok, they might actually be the Norns,” Bea muttered as she stepped forwards.
“Gentlemen, I wonder if one of you happens to be a ‘tailor’?” The quotation marks were loud and clear for all to hear.
“Bea, what are you on about?” Daisy asked, annoyed.
“You know how accountants can also be used to mean assassin?”
“I told you my parents were just clerks!”
“No, I mean tailor can also mean information merchants. I’m asking if they can sell us information.”
“Alas, we are but humble purveyors of clothing. Though our boss is a ‘tailor’ and may be of assistance,” Past explained as Present stepped out from behind the counter and past the class, locking the door behind them and flipping the sign to closed.
“Please follow,” he said with a gesture of his chin towards the backroom.
Reluctantly the class followed each preparing defensive spell. As they made their way through the backroom, they were guided upstairs to a door marked with a sign saying, ‘Knock before entering!!’. Knocking on the door, Present waited till they heard a faint voice reply.
Opening the door, the class walked into a dimly lit room with a large leather chair in the middle. Along the walls were numerous crystalline plates. This surprised them as crystalline plates were expensive and were usually reserved for the highest of nobles. Often used in conference chambers or to remotely view locations.
Looking at some of the screens, they could see they all showed different locations. A few they even recognised, like Port Staine and Academy City. The one that immediately caught Bea’s attention was one where she could see Mimi and Serena training.
Serena and Mimi were facing a phalanx of spearmen. Mimi was dodging and weaving around and over spears being thrust at her. But Serena wasn’t as lucky and was impaled by nearly a dozen spears. Despite knowing this was nothing to Serena, she still couldn’t help but wince. Then the display stuttered, and it returned to the way it had before the exercise had begun.
“Yes, interesting one, isn’t it? It always stutters when that one gets hurt badly,” A casual high pitched voice stated as the chair in the middle of the room spun around.
In the chair was a girl who looked about twelve years old. She had deep bags under her eyes, and her red hair was tied up into a ponytail. She looked very much like someone who had very little sleep.
“Oracle, these are customers,” Present explained as he gestured to the class.
“Oracle?”
“Yes, I am an Oracle. I can see the future, yadda-yadda. I also go by the merchant of wisdom and knowledge.”
“What’s the difference?” Tasha innocently asked.
“If you need to ask that, you are clearly not ready to know.”
“Listen here, kid, I may not be a smarty-pants, but I know when someone is talking down to me!”
“Kid? Little one, I am over four thousand years old. Don’t assume I am a child. Now I will explain the rules. I am a merchant, so everything from now on has a cost. Three costs, to be precise,” she held up three fingers to demonstrate this.
“You can ask any questions you want, and I will quote three prices. One cheap which will provide a vague answer; one average priced, which will provide a reasonable answer and finally, one expensive, which will give you all the details you seek.”
“So we can ask any question?” Tasha asked.
“One small bronze, One small silver or one large gold.”
“But that wasn’t a question!”
“No, it was Tash,” Maxwell replied. “Ok, Daisy, ask your question.”
“Who is responsible for the attack that killed my mother?”
“One small bronze, one small silver, one small gold.”
“Ok, how much do we have?” Bea asked as they all took out their coin pouches.
“One small bronze, One small silver, one large silver.”
“That wasn’t a question aimed at you!”
“Ok, we got enough,” Daisy muttered, seeing a considerable amount of silvers in the pouch Lust had given her.
“Here is the silver for my question,” Daisy said, handing the coin to the Oracle. The Oracle accepted the coin, examined it and put it away.
“The ones responsible for your mother's death were members of the city guard.”
“I already know that!!!! I want to know who hired them?” The Oracle smiled and held up three fingers.
“One large gold, ten platinum, ten mithril.”
“WHY IS IT SO MUCH?!!!”
“One small bronze, one large bronze, one small silver.”
“WHY, YOU LITTLE!” Daisy was promptly restrained by Gunter while Maxwell paid the silver for the expensive answer.
“People can pay me to protect their information, they pay me a set amount, and unless that amount is overcome, then their information is protected. You, however, have requested the details on a large number of potential suspects, and collectively their prices add up to what I quoted.”
“So they are rich?”
“One silver, one gold, one platinum.”
“SHUT UP!!!”
“Daisy! Calm down. Yelling won’t get us anywhere… sorry miss Oracle,” Maxwell said, bowing his head in apology.
“It’s fine; it happens often. People usually catch on soon enough to the way it works. Though why haven’t you?”
“One gold, one platinum, ten mithril,” Bea replied.
“Hah!! I like you… For the laugh you gave me, have a freebie extra… I highly recommend you go to Lady Gabriella's party this evening. I can all but guarantee the one responsible will be present.”
“So Gabriella is responsible?!!” The Oracle just smiled and held up three fingers.
“Never mind,” Bea grumbled, seeing the futility.
With their path now set, the class filed out of the room, leaving the Oracle in the dim light of the crystalline tablets. Daisy was seething at the young appearing girl messing with her, but they now had a solid lead. The one responsible would be at the party.
“Here are your masks and clothes for the party along with invitations, which will be fifty small silvers and eighteen small bronzes,” Future said as he placed size bags on the counter just as they walked past it.
“How much do we have?” Bea asked as they looked at their pooled money. To their shock, their total added up precisely to the cost quoted.
“How did you know how much we have?… and don’t you dare quote three prices,” Daisy asked.
“We received this from the boss this morning,” Future explained, rolling out an order sheet. On it was a request for six costumes and invitations for Gabriella's party. Most concerning was that their measurements were next to each of their names. Even the price they were to charge them. The class collectively shuddered at the sheer display of foresight the Oracle had displayed just with this alone.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Maxwell said as Gunter collected the bags, and they returned to Lust’s estate to prepare for the party that evening.
Watching the class leave, Future walked up to the Oracle's room and knocked. A tired voice said it was ok for him to enter. Entering there in her usual seat was his boss.
“I haven’t had such fun in a long while.”
“I must be difficult, boss.”
“Well, it is. I am one of the best data analysts on the continent. The ‘Researchers’ hire me all the time. But I get my real kicks when I convince people I can actually see the future.”
“Can’t you, boss?”
“Future, you are young, but learn this sooner rather than later. I am just very good at reading data and extrapolating it. Their measurements were guessed thanks to pictures of them. I just make myself seem omniscient.”
“Why, though?”
“Why? Because I can twist information when it isn’t for national security to make a big show for me to enjoy. That reminds me, I need to prepare for that bitch’s party tonight.”
“You’re actually going?”
“Yes, that lot now knows their enemy will be there. I want to be on the front row with popcorn when they inevitably screw up.”
“Will their enemy actually be there, though?”
“Future!” Present snarled, arriving behind his son to slap him on the head.
“The boss never gives false information. She just gives it in a way to let the recipient interpret their own way,” Past explained as he entered.
“This should hopefully be fun,” the Oracle said as she rubbed her hands together and let her chair spin around.
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Start of Alex Series
Start of Teacher Series: Lesson 1
Previous: Meet the Parents: the suspects
Next: Coming Soon
Royal Road
Alex and Freki Artwork // Class Picture
Sub: Random3X (lore and more)

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AN: The Merchant of Wisdom and Knowledge is based on a DMNPC from a DnD game. It let the players ask questions to me and get various answers. The players had fun with it especially when they didn't realise they had asked a question between themselves which was the one I chose to answer. It had the same response as a pun, that I hate you but I loved what you did kind of faces.
Feel free to pinch it for your own games

Dunno if y'all will like this, or if it will even remain up, but a bit of a DISCLAIMER; The first chapter is more akin to a prologue than an actual part of a story, but it is required for the story to make sense, as the story needs a lot of world building and explanation for everything to work out, and unless y'all wanna be confused for the next three chapters, then I suggest you read, unless you aren't interested of course. Oh yeah, it was so long that I needed to post the first chapter in multiple parts, so get comfy, and prepare to read almost forty pages in total.
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Chapter One - Part One
Extremely Lengthy Exposition
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He didn’t know how to describe it.
A sort of lucid state in which he was only partially aware of who and what he was? Maybe. A condition of some sort of brain death, it being a result of gazing upon an entity far too complex for the human mind to ever even dream of conceiving? Perhaps. Or maybe it was a sign. A sign from whatever gods or higher beings that were our forefathers, our creators. The very things that created the universe, and all others as we know it. Perhaps it was a sign from Them, of his ascension, his final evolution into a being so superior, that to others, he could be considered a god himself. Yes, that was right. He could feel it, the power. Not in a way of touching something with a hand, but in a more metaphysical way, one far better than the crude grasping tools that humanity has had to work with for far too long.
It was so close, the innate understanding that was intrinsically tied into the human genome from eons ago, the inheritance he was meant to receive, what he DESERVED to receive, was right there. All he had to do was reach out, and touch it. He did just that, his mental probes extending outwards towards it, to claim what was rightfully his. He closed his fingers around it, and-
“Jacob, wake up. The doctor is trying to say something to you.”
Or it could just all be a construct of his dying brain, one that was futilely trying to sort the things that he was experiencing into something that could be translated and read.
“Jacob?” His mother repeated, with a more stern note entering her voice.
“Oh uh, sorry. What were you trying to say?” Jacob leaned forward, clasping his hands together, placing his elbows on his knees and leaning on his arms.
“I was asking you how you’ve been feeling recently, as it does pertain to the conversation I am having with your parents.” The doctor smiled patiently, expertly hiding most of his probable frustration behind a veneer of placidity.
“Relatively well, though I have been having a good amount of headaches, considerably more than usual.” Jacob responded, plastering a nonchalant expression onto his face.
“And what about that little . . . episode you had a moment ago?” The doctor questioned, leaning forward expectantly.
“Oh yeah, that. I guess I just kinda zoned out there for a second, you know?” Jacob replied casually.
“Zoned out for over half an hour?” The doctor tilted his head.
“Yep.” Jacob wasn’t going to fall for the bait.
“Hmm.” The doctor leaned back. “Well, I'm fairly sure that ‘zoning out’ for over half an hour with absolutely no idea what's going on in the outside world isn’t exactly normal behavior typical for a boy of your age, Jacob. Did you perchance have any sort of feeling that you can’t explain, or something similar to an out of body experience? It could even just be similar to lucid dreaming.” The doctor appears to be very insistent, Jacob, why don’t you take care of him? You could be out of state within a day or tw-
“Well when you put it like that, sure.” Jacob decided that he would indeed play the doctor’s game.
“Hmm. Well Mrs. Pattine, you heard it from him. When we did our testing last week, we noticed extremely irregular brain patterns that would normally indicate extreme stress upon the brain. However, Jacob here seemed perfectly fine, aside from a rather annoying headache.”
“Now, I’m fairly sure that anybody could deduce that that type of behavior from the brain isn’t good at all. In fact, the tumor that we had diagnosed Jacob the same week, being practically the size of a peanut, has now doubled in size. In fact, the growth appears to be scaling upwards in terms of the growth rate. What was doubling in size per week, will quickly grow to quadrupling, and then quintupling. Soon, Jacob will have to undergo intense chemotherapy.”
Jacob’s mother did not seem placated, like what the doctor was trying to do, but in fact appalled.
“Why are you saying all this in front of him!? He’s just a child for damn sake!” Jacob's mother clutched Jacob tighter, much to his both amusement and frustration after she refused to let go.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Pattine, but all parties involved here have to know what’s at stake here, including young Jacob here.” The doctor, to his credit, did seem genuinely remorseful, yet not really backtracking enough to make an effective apology, more like creating a plausible justification for his actions.
Jacob didn’t really care either way. Well, he did care that he was probably going to die and was thankful that the doctor had decided to be blunt, but not caring about his mother’s rather extreme outburst in his supposed defense.
That had been the case as of late, not really caring about his loved ones. Well, he DID care, at least he thought he did, but why did they always have to be just, so, well, like that all the time? Jacob was rather exasperated from the whole ordeal, and plus, the doctor was talking again.
“-however, we have a solution to this problem of Jacob’s.” The doctor reached out to the briefcase on the table to his right, opening it. He then extracted what appeared to be a syringe filled with clear liquid.
“This is a prototype we, us being ANTI, have been working on for a long time. You might have learned what this is from various pop culture and media sources, but if you don’t, I’ll explain what it is now.” Without giving anybody in the room time to protest, he continued on.
“This is a syringe full of nanobots. Yes, honest-to-god, genuine nanobots. We’ve been working on these for a good amount of time, since around 2000, yet no significant headway had been made towards making a nanobot serum cost-effective enough to employ in more, liberal, uses.”
“However, when Russia annexed Crimea back in 2014, Congress decided that a viable threat was rising, and revived the program with a stimulant called cold hard cash. When another budget increase came with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it didn’t exactly hinder us, and a year later, we came up with the first effective prototype of nanotechnological biological cellular regeneration to date. And now, we're gonna give it to Jacob.”
Mrs. Pattine didn’t appear to care about all of the war stuff or fancy political words, only really catching onto the words of, “give it to Jacob” and responded accordingly.
“I don’t believe it. What's the catch?” Mrs. Pattine glared suspiciously at the doctor.
“No catch, just the requirement that we are given full liberty to experiment on the tumor in Jacob’s head, within legal bounds.” The doctor appears to be trying to brush over that fact, but Mrs. Pattine also catches onto the important bits.
“You want to experiment on my son!? That sounds like a pretty big catch to me!” Mrs. Pattine screeches in protest.
“It’ll be within full humane laws, nothing illegal, I promise you. In fact, we’ll give you even more incentive.” The doctor pauses, seemingly for dramatic effect.
“So, out with it!” Mrs. Pattine seems to be quite stressed, and most likely wants nothing more than to just go home already.
“We will give you a sum of thirty million dollars, with no tax put on it.” The doctor says plainly.
Mrs. Pattine doesn’t react for a moment, seemingly processing what she just heard.
“Th-th-thirty million dollars!?” Mrs. Pattine splutters in disbelief. “You can’t be serious!”
The doctor chuckles. “Oh but I am. We’ll place it directly into your bank account, as liquid assets would likely be hard to manage for you. It’ll even be covered by insurance.”
Mrs. Pattine clearly is still suspicious. “This is too good to be true.”
“I can assure you, Mrs. Pattine, it is not.”
She looks unsure as to whether or not to take the deal, and looks at Jacob.
“Go ahead.” Jacob shrugs, hoping to maybe NOT die.
Mrs. Pattine then gets up. “I need to go over this with my family.”
They accepted the deal.
* * *
Three days later, Jacob was inside a chamber packed with men and women in lab coats, all of them seeming to be doing something important. The room was about twenty feet in diameter and in height, circular, with a large ten-foot-high blast door being the only intentional access point that could be used to enter the chamber. A large secure industrial vent was inset into the ceiling, also covered with a steel mesh to prevent something from getting in, or perhaps out. In the center of it all was a large contraption, with many pipes, hoses, and wires protruding from various access ports around the machine. It all seemed a bit too militaristic for a minor cryo experiment, but what did he know?
On the front of the machine in the center of the room was a thick plastic cover that exposed the interior, the interior being a cavity about eight feet tall and two feet wide. It appeared to have been designed to allow a human to rest upright inside the machine, and rest comfortably to boot, utilizing a foam mold to mimic a bed. In fact, the little foam mold appears to be fitted to Jacob’s exact dimensions. Jacob, being the ever-curious fellow, inquired as to what the strange doohickey.
“So uh, what am I looking at here?” Jacob gestured to the machine in the center of the room.
“This is, for all intents and purposes, a cryo pod. It can effectively freeze a human being, preserving them for extended periods of time, without them growing or aging at all.” The doctor, who appeared to be in charge of this whole ordeal, answered him.
“And you’re putting me in there?” Jacob asked.
“Yes. We are hoping to learn more about that little tumor-that-isn’t-a-tumor in your head, as it's something that we haven’t ever seen before. Since the tumor is progressing at an alarmingly fast pace, and since we don’t want you to die, we will be placing you in this for a single year, on the dot. The freeze will stop the progression of the tumor, and the nanobots will keep you in top shape even if something goes wrong with the pod, and they will even combat the tumor, so you aren’t in any danger.” The doctor replied.
“Huh. And you’re gonna find some sort of miracle cure for the tumor while I’m on ice?” Jacob asked, wanting to get all of the essential information.
“Yes.” The doctor didn’t elaborate this time.
“Uh, cool. So we’re starting now? I was wondering why I was in this weird looking wetsuit thingy.” Jacob pulled at his sleeves, the tightness of them a little uncomfortable.
“Yes. Once the specs have been fully calibrated, we can place you in the pod, and you can say goodnight.” The doctor nodded to himself. “Yes, it should only be ten more minutes.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, a bit over schedule, everything was set up. Jacob was standing in front of the cryo pod, talking to one of the doctors.
“So I just step inside, right?” Jacob inquired.
“Correct you are. We’ll strap you up, run diagnostics, and then see you in t- a year.” The lady, Dr. Sophia Vasel by her nametag, appeared to have stopped herself from saying something was either a simple misspoken word, or something she wasn’t supposed to say. It didn’t really matter to Jacob, since you could just kill her, now and be done with it. It would be so easy, to ju-
“Alright, nice.” Jacob stepped up inside, a little stepladder conveniently set into the machine. He turned around and shifted a little, trying to get comfortable. Dr. Vasel and one other doctor began strapping him in, hooking little electrodes and wires up to him to do all sorts of technical mumbo jumbo. After a minute of attaching devices to him and making sure everything was in order, they began to run diagnostics to make sure everything electronic was working. After an agonizingly long ten minutes of affirming and reaffirming, the first doctor that he had met with walked up to the plastic clear door with a microphone in his hand.
“Can you hear me Jacob?” The doctor asked.
“Yeh.” Jacob replied lamely
“Uhm, OK, it seems like everything is alright on our side, so without further ado, I think we’ll be seeing you in a year.” The doctor nodded to his colleagues next to him, and they started to press buttons on the console. A loud alarm started blaring, and a hissing noise spread throughout the pod. Devices began to inject what was probably some sort of powerful anesthetic, considering he began feeling extremely drowsy a moment later.
The last thing he saw before he fell asleep was the plastic cover being coated in frost.
* * *
Three weeks after that, a government official of the program that had taken Jacob Pattine in for treatment and experimentation contacted the Pattine family to offer their condolences, as they had to inform them that due to a malfunction in the systems of the nanobots, Jacob Pattine had unfortunately died in testing, and that they hoped this won’t sour relations between them.
However, it did sour relations between them, as the subsequent lawsuit against them proved all too well. It had even progressed to a Supreme Court case called Pattine v Army Nanotechnological Initiative, which ended up with a seventy-two million dollar payment towards the Pattines, and a ruling that outlawed any and all with the use and/or experimentation on humans with nanotechnology, as it was deemed too dangerous to use on humans. A deep-dive into the records of the ANTI yielded many discoveries, the most notable of them being the many deaths of humans in the testing trials of the nanobots. This also led to the dissolution of the ANTI, and shaped the future of nanotechnology for years to come.
However, using nanobots for the use on humans didn’t stop there. In fact, some would say it thrived, just in a different way than imagined. Like many other creations that were found to be too radical or immoral for the majority of the populace, the CIA was the one to collect the scraps, and make it their own. By using their own funding to revive the unofficially named Nano-Cryo project, they resumed research, employing many of the original members of the infamous project, with the doctor being put back in charge of the currently unnamed project.
That left only Jacob to deal with. Luckily for him, Jacob wasn’t so disposable as some might believe, as certain conditions on his being made his potential quite desirable to some shadowy heads of certain organizations. This led to the CIA creating a cover story about the unfortunate death of the boy, which would allow them to both obtain the asset, and snip off the loose thread that was ANTI, killing two birds with one stone. They continued testing within CIA Black Site-046, which was located within the city known as New Jersey, which would later influence the name of the secretive project.
One more alteration would be made to the test. As Jacob had now been cut off from the outside world and was presumed dead, the CIA had no worry about public retribution, allowing them to extend his period in the cryo pod from one year to ten. At the end of the ten years, Jacob would be woken up from stasis, and testing would be enacted, with various procedures analyzing how his physiology had reacted to the tumor and the extended stay in cryostasis. The nanobots were there to ensure that Jacob didn’t die from the tumor, but also to make sure he didn’t die from the long periods of time spent sleeping. After twenty-four hours had passed, Jacob would be placed back within the cryo pod, and be woken up again when another ten years had passed, with this cycle repeating for the foreseeable future.
In the development of the cryostasis model, one thing had persisted throughout the trials. When the testers had been subjected to extended periods of time within stasis, once unfrozen, the brain would refuse to reactivate. No matter what measures were taken, the brain would simply not resume biological function, and the subject would be effectively dead. The leading theory on this was that the brain had been “dead” for so long, that it simply couldn’t remember that it was alive. This is the same reason why cavemen, even if perfectly preserved in ice, couldn’t be simply revived with a shock paddle or some adrenaline.
So, the nanobots were there to stimulate and keep the brain semi-active during time spent sleeping, keeping the brain alive through the barest of actions, making it more akin to sleep instead of simply dying and then being revived with a perfectly preserved body and brain. However, this led to the tumor being slightly active as well, so it would still progress while within stasis, albeit at an incredibly glacial pace. This would likely cause problems in the future, but a solution is bound to come up at some point.
Right?
* * *
Invariably.
What an interesting word
And a nice one at that. It really just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? A word that most people probably can’t even recall the meaning of, yet is seen so commonly in works that are often above the skill of your average eighth grader. It means for something to happen a lot, or always. For instance, you could say, “Oh, whenever I go to my friend's house, the meals his mother makes are invariably burnt.” or something along those lines.
Jacob couldn’t apply that word to his situation.
That would imply that he had been doing or experiencing something for long enough that he could use that word as a hyperbole. However, he hadn’t. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Imagine blinking your eyes. Now try to recall how long the moment between opening your eyes and the light reaching your eyes was. Now that's a more accurate comparison.
Right when Jacob closed his eyes, he had been hearing a hissing sound, expecting sleep to take him. Then a slight, rather odd blip in his awareness caused him to lose his bearings for a moment, but quickly regained them. The hissing continued, and became rather annoying after a bit, considering the nasty headache he currently had. Did he have that before he entered the pod? He wasn’t sure, but he was having a hard time remembering his last moments before he entered the machine, which was odd, as that was just a moment ago. Oh, now the hissing noise is stopping, so Jacob guessed that the doctors realized there was a problem, and were now spooling down the machine to take him out before something disastrous happened.
The hissing noise stopped, and the sound of pistons groaning filled the small cavity instead, along with a notable difference in the positioning of the cryo pod door, specifically moving upward. Ah, now the door is opening, fantastic. Jacob hoped that he could just get this damn experiment underway, without any more delays.
Goddamn the door is slow. At least he could see somewhat outside, as the door had opened up enough to let him see the feet of two people standing outside his little home. Actually, scratch that, three people standing outside, as the door had opened more up to let him see a third person standing behind the pair that were closest to him. He blinked several times to clear the fog from his eyesight, his eyeballs feeling pretty cold, as if he had spent a little in pure winter weather with his eyes open, letting them freeze a bit. Matter of fact, as feeling returned to his body, he felt cold all over. Not so cold that it was painful, but more of a cool uncomfortableness.
Speaking of feeling returning to his body, he felt a rather unpleasant prickling sensation throughout himself, like his entire body had fallen asleep, or if he had just returned from the cold after a long stay in the frigid winter air. He flexed his fingers, or at least tried to. His fingers were encased in a hard plastic glove, molded to fit his hand. It was the same story with the rest of his body, many straps fastened tight enough to restrict his movement, but not enough to restrict his blood flow. He tried to see more than the feet of the unknown people in front of him, as the door was open about halfway now, but the fog, or maybe steam, wafting up from his pod was masking everything else.
Oh yeah, the hissing was back too.
After another eternity of the door just slowly opening, the long-awaited event finally arrived. The door clanked to a stop, now resting somewhere on top of the cryo pod. The hissing noise also came to a stop, seeming to have been the cause of the fog as well, considering how it began to clear up with the end of the abhorrent hissing sound. The fog cleared up fully, allowing him to see a rather strange sight.
Three people in full hazmat suits were standing in front of him, one of the two in front holding an odd device that looked vaguely like a heart monitor. The one with the heart monitor stepped up to him, uttering a single word.
“Please hold still.”
Jacob naturally held still as the person wrapped a sensor on his wrist, then one on his neck. The man then pressed a few buttons on his little machine, and then watched some sort of readout on the screen that Jacob couldn’t make out from his angle. The man stayed like that for about half a minute before taking off the little sensors from his wrist and neck, and then put the device down on some sort of table that Jacob also couldn’t see due to his angle, before nodding to the man beside him.
The pair moved into action, unstrapping and unclamping him in various areas around his body, unrestricting his movement. Jacob didn’t move yet though, as once the pair were done taking off the various inhibitors, the third man in the back stepped up, as if he wanted to speak. The unnamed man grabbed the bottom of his visor, where a small lip was present. The man then used that lip to pull up the plastic covering his face, or at least the layer that was preventing Jacob from seeing his face. The man pulled it up, revealing the doctor, who’s name he still didn’t know. However, something was off about him, though Jacob couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Long time no see Jacob.” The doctor smiles disarmingly, which makes Jacob beg the question of why he would need to be disarmed.
“What do you mean, ‘Long time’? It hasn’t even been half an hour.” Jacob frowns, tilting his head questioningly, though Jacob is pretty sure he already knows the answer to his own question.
The doctor’s smile wavers, and his eyes turn downcast, avoiding Jacob’s.
“Well, ah, you see Jacob, it HAS been a long time. I imagine you just didn’t notice, due to no little input on our part.”
Suddenly, Jacob realized what was off about the doctor. When he had seen him last, the doctor had a look about him that made him seem like he could be in his early thirties or late twenties, with a little margin for error, of course.
However, The doctor now looked like he had aged around a decade, sporting a few new wrinkles that definitely weren’t there before. Instead of being a man just entering his more mature ages, he looked more like a man entering a higher, more responsible position in your standard American technical corporation. To put it shortly, he looked like he was in his forties.
“So you're saying that it's been a year already, and I was just too out of it to notice?” The doctor winced, and opened up his mouth to speak, but Jacob continued talking.
“However, I have noticed that while you said I was supposed to be in here for a year, the actual reality is different. Unless you somehow had a growth spurt, or decided that looking older was a new fashion trend, it's odd that you seem to have aged a decade in what was supposed to be a year of stasis.” Jacob tilted his head, focusing a stare on the doctor. “Tell me, doctor, how long was I out?”
The pair in front of him, having been listening this whole time, looked back at the doctor expectantly. The doctor shook his head, and attempted a smile, though the result looked more like a pained grimace. The doctor then looked up at Jacob, giving him a strange look.
“Noticed that, did you? Well, I suppose you do deserve an explanation. Let's talk about this in a more, comfortable, area.”
* * *
Jacob fixed the doctor with another bland stare for the fifteenth time in four minutes.
“So you’re telling me, that the damn CIA kidnapped me, your government organization was dissolved, and now I’m officially dead to the outside world? Not to mention I was asleep for not a year, but a decade?” Jacob said all of this with a tone that might have implied disbelief and anger.
“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds, well, exactly like what happened I suppose, but I wouldn’t put it, well, any sort of other way, so yes.” The doctor, contrary to the facade he was still bravely trying to put up, didn’t appear too comfortable with telling Jacob all of this. After all, who would want to tell an innocent, carefree, bright-eyed young boy, that his family thought him dead, and that he was asleep for a decade as well.
Jacob leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and breathed out the air he had been holding in.
“Huh.” Jacob didn’t elaborate.
“I’m sure that this might be very alarming to you, but remember that this wasn’t in our control. I’m very sorry for your loss, but just know that we do have therapists and other people that you can talk to on hand, just let us know.” The doctor didn’t seem very proud of this series of unfortunate events happening to the aforementioned carefree child.
“Well, as long as they aren’t dead yet, I’ll be fine.” Jacob shrugs.
The doctor blinks in surprise.
“I- what? Are you sure? Your mental health is very important, and despite what our higher ups at the CIA might say, you are also important as a person.” The doctor had an increasingly worried expression on his face.
“Nah, I think I’m pretty good for now.” Jacob remained seemingly uncaring for his current status as perceived dead by his family, or for his mental health. “So, what happens to me now? I’m assuming I’m not getting executed for lack of further usefulness, or else you wouldn’t be offering me therapists, and I’m not exactly going back out into society, as that would be a rather awkward situation for the CIA. So, that leaves only one more avenue of action.” Jacob leaned forward. “I’m going back in the machine, aren’t I?”
“. . . yes.” The doctor seemed put off by Jacob’s lengthy statement.
Jacob leaned back and nodded, satisfied by his answer. “I have just one question then.”
The doctor cocked an eyebrow.
“Why am I so important? Plenty of people have brain tumors, and yet you guys aren’t kidnapping those people, right? So, what makes this one special?” Jacob tapped the side of his head.
The doctor cleared his throat, seemingly more comfortable to be conversing over a topic more familiar to him, like neuroscience.
“I can do that. Follow me.”
* * *
The doctor led Jacob to a room with only one other person inside, that person being an assistant. The lights were off, the only source of illumination being a projector shining on a blank whiteboard, the image being an x-ray of what looked like a brain.
“Well, as I’ve said before, that so-called tumor in your head isn’t exactly behaving like a tumor normally would. In the beginning, when it first appeared, it looked like any old brain tumor, forming in your cerebral cortex. It grew a bit abnormally, but nothing too out of the ordinary.” The doctor pointed at a small marble sized mass that was present inside the aforementioned section of the brain on the projection. “However, that's when things took a turn for the stranger.” The doctor motioned for the assistant to switch to the next slide, which he did.
The diagram now showed the same image as before, which Jacob now knew to be his brain, with the sole difference being that the mass had now enlarged, seemingly spreading what looked like feelers or tentacles outwards, the longest one stretching towards a middle section of the brain.
“After this happened, we were notified through plants, and we took over your medical case, observing the growth of your tumor.” The slide switched again, now showing a larger tumor. It had grown even more feelers, now numbering at five, and the longest one was now in the middle of the brain.
“The tumor had spread itself out, and the longest appendage of it had now entered what we call the anterior insular cortex, or, “ The doctor looked at Jacob. “the empathy center.”
Jacob stared back at the doctor, not showing any outward form of reaction. The doctor looked back towards the projection, clearing his throat.
“Ahem, anyway. As you can probably guess, this was highly irregular behavior from what was supposed to be a simple tumor. And what we realized next was even more shocking.” The assistant clicked to the next slide, this one showing . . . nothing.
Actually, it did show something, Jacob just didn’t notice at first. The tumor was now not a simple mass, but instead had somehow become, fainter, he supposed. It didn’t have any clear separation from his brain, instead, only sections could be made out from the former tumor. It seemed like it had merged with his brain, which wasn’t exactly comforting to Jacob.
“The tumor now couldn’t be described as a simple tumor. We had to deduce that it had somehow become part of your brain, as we couldn’t find any clear definition of where the tumor began and where it ended. We could still technically see the tumor, though it was like it had faded its edges in with your brain, merging with it.” The assistant shut off the projector, and turned the lights back on.
The doctor turned back towards Jacob, with what looked to be a sympathetic expression on his face.
“Now I hope you understand why we want to know what the hell this thing is. If this was some sort of parasite, and if it could spread . . “ The doctor let Jacob figure out the rest on his own.
“Huh, yeah. I wouldn’t really want the world to turn into a reenactment of a certain hit TV adaptation of a certain hit zombie game.” Jacob nodded. “So, how are you gonna go about solving, “ Jacob gestured haphazardly to his head. “This?”
“We . . . aren’t sure yet.” The doctor grimaced. “However, it has only been, well, it's been quite awhile, but we learned a lot from the first go around. We are hoping to gain more data from the next decade, with some new technologies to be used.”
Jacob nodded his head, looking around. “So do I just go back in now?”
“No, actually. The planned procedure is to keep you awake for a minimum of twelve hours, with us taking several tests to determine if any changes have been made to your mental or intellectual state. And also, you are going to have to visit some therapists, that's non-optional.” The doctor replied.
Jacob only grunted in response to that last statement.
* * *
Jacob is running on a treadmill, with several devices measuring his various functions.
“Just let us know when you’re getting tired.” The man, Dr. Markus Vasquez by his nametag, repeated for the fifth time.
“And that would be right around now, actually.” Jacob stopped running when Dr. Vasquez pressed the off button.
“Hmm, alright. You’re operating at standard rates for a boy of your age.” Dr. Vasquez writes down notes on his clipboard, probably about him. Or maybe some sort of weird fan fiction about some US president, you never know.
Dr. Vasquez motioned for Jacob to follow him, which Jacob does.
“And that should conclude your physical testing regimen for today.” Dr. Vasquez leads Jacob into a square room about six feet wide, with a couch, a chair, two tables, a bookshelf, and a TV on the wall opposite from the couch.
Then, another doctor walks into the room, holding a clipboard and a sheet of papers. Dr. Vasquez and the new doctor share a few silent words, ones that Jacob can’t make out, before Dr. Vasquez walks out of the room. The new doctor, a Dr. Sophia Vasel by her nametag, sits down on the chair next to the couch.
“Hey again Jacob. I’m here to-” Dr. Vasel begins, but Jacob cuts her off.
“Oh wait, aren’t you one of the people who strapped me in that pod a decade ago?” Jacob tilts his head questioningly.
Dr. Vasel blinks. “Erm, yes. Anyway, I’m just here to give you a couple tests, alright? Just standard procedure.” Dr. Vasel flips through her clipboard. “Here is the first one.”
Jacob started again. “No signing any forms or asking for consent or anything?”
Dr. Vasel hid her apparent frustration admirably. “Uh, no. Our policy doesn’t require us to do that. Anyway, if we could get on with the test?” Dr. Vasel pulled out a pen. “Just some questions for the first one.”
* * *
Jacob was a bit bored.
Actually, that was an understatement. He was VERY bored. There, a much more apt statement.
After a large amount of rigorous testing, physical, mental, biological, the whole shebang, they had basically left him in the small room and told him to entertain himself for the remaining eight hours, twenty-seven minutes, and five seconds. After that, he would be going back into cryosleep. They gave him access to a good amount of literature from his time, as well as giving him a rather generous library of online media, also from his time. However, they had severely underestimated his preferences, as the majority of the online material consisted of children for the age of ten, and all the good books he had already read several times over.
So yes, he was quite bored. So bored, in fact, that even pacing around and thinking couldn’t sate his hunger for entertainment, as the intense migraine he had prevented him from running any sort of complicated scenario that could even mildly entertain him. So, he was forced to turn to his old friend.
History.
A decade ought to have yielded a good amount of entertaining historical fruit, especially when you consider the rather hot pot that was world politics at the time of the beginning of his short nap. So, he had requested a book that recapped everything important that had happened in the last ten years. And how interesting it was.
Standing out the most in terms of the global stage, the American intervention in the Russo-Ukrainian war, pushing the Russians not just out of Ukraine, but also reclaiming Crimea for the Ukrainians as well. This had happened due to Russia repeatedly threatening to use nuclear weapons in the war, and so America finally had to intervene, managing to push them out of Ukraine in just two and a half months. And it seems Russia was bluffing, as no nukes were ever launched.
However, war wasn’t the only highlight of the last decade, as a miniature space race actually occurred not between the East and the West, but SpaceX and NASA were both racing for the clout and money that being the first to have a human land on Mars would be. It ended up with a SpaceX victory, and not a small amount of a budget increase.
Nanotechnology had also progressed, yet not as much as other avenues, as it's mostly been used for small-scale construction supposedly. Congress was being quite strict on the Supreme Court’s ruling. However, some small advancements had been made in the effectiveness and build of a standard nanobot, making them considerably cheaper and easier to make. However, the availability of nanobots was mostly limited to either private firms or large corporations willing to invest in the product.
As entertaining as history was, it wasn’t enough to sustain him for more than an hour, so he resigned himself to sitting, standing, pacing, and occasionally watching kids cartoons for the rest of his time. He wasn’t going to ask for his benefactors to obtain some new content for him to watch, not because they couldn’t, no, they likely could do anything, but because his pride would be too injured if he did. Yes, a truly brilliant mind we have here.
* * *
“This feels familiar.” Jacob mused, his words certainly pertaining to the scenario that he was currently in.
Dr. Vasel and another doctor were strapping him in, securing his hands and feet in molded plastic to restrict movement, and straps to secure his arms and legs. This time, a little hat with a dozen blinking electrodes was added to his menagerie of devices. They had also given him a fresh edition of nanobots, these ones supposedly more efficient by two percent. Yes, such a great increase. However, they also fed off the energy his own body produced, so that theoretically gave them an infinite life, as long as he was alive.
The doctors finished up strapping him into the machine, giving him a final once over to make sure nothing bad happens again. They stepped back, and began to run diagnostics on their computers to make sure everything electronic was in order as well.
Jacob sighed. He had a feeling that this set of actions would become an agonizingly long procedure.
After a very long fifteen minutes, the unnamed doctor, who had come down during the diagnostics, nodded to an assistant, and he began pressing buttons. The machine clicked and hissed, and the door came down, blissfully quicker this time. After just thirty seconds, the door sealed shut, and Jacob saw the doctor through the plastic. The doctor walked out of sight, as the foggy plastic couldn’t see that far, though the doctor clearly went somewhere where he could talk to Jacob, as he heard the doctor’s voice over what sounded like an intercom inside the pod.
“You can hear me, right Jacob?” The doctor asked.
“Uh, yep.” Jacob replied.
“Very good. As there isn’t anything else we have to do on our end, we’ll be sending you off right about now. Any questions before you’re frozen?” The doctor inquired.
“None that I can recall.” Jacob said.
“Then we’ll see you again in ten years.” The doctor said.
The intercom shut off with a crackle, and the hissing noise came back, probably meaning he was gonna fall asleep any time now. He wondered what the world would look like in another decade, bu-
Oh wait, he did have a question. What WAS the doctor’s nam-
-------------------------------
​
Part Two is gonna come, maybe in a day. I've already finished it, but the first part will serve to as a way to observe this communities reactions to this little thing, and see if I should post another. I expect about ten to twenty chapters, with hopefully not all of them being as long as this one, so yeah, hope y'all like this.

Binance, the largest global crypto exchange by trading volume, and Chief Executive Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, were reportedly taken off guard by the U.S. Commodities and Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) decision to file a civil lawsuit against the company on Monday. The firm, which has for years avoided establishing a permanent headquarters, had been in dialogue with U.S. and other regulators about operating compliantly in the hundred-plus jurisdictions it services.
Just last month, Binance Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillman told the Wall Street Journal that the exchange had closed “gaps” that formed in its compliance strategy as a result of the exchange’s rapid expansion. At the time, Hillman more or less suggested Binance was prepared to eat flour for its previous crimes, committed unwillingly, but was also having substantive conversations with regulators that would allow it to continue existing.
The CFTC’s filing was a surprise, to an extent. There have been rumors the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and even the Internal Revenue Service were preparing lawsuits for a range of corporate failings. When U.S. officials sanctioned Russian crypto exchange Bitzlato, they noted Binance was a large counterparty for darknet marketplaces. That the CFTC dropped the first shoe is surprising – if only because it fuels confusion over whether ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies are commodities or securities.
In its 74-page complaint, the CFTC, accused Binance of not only servicing U.S. customers without filing for the appropriate licenses but actively helping customers skirt know-your-customer and other compliance rules. Binance’s executives were allegedly aware its geofencing tools were inadequate, and even had a semi-formalized (though confidential) procedure for getting “whales” around it and shielding their U.S. IP addresses.
The case is obviously bad for Binance, and comes during an uncertain time for crypto. Experts say this could be a fatal blow to the exchange (worst case), or disrupt a significant part of its revenues (Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, for instance, essentially said the case is not centered on consumer safety, but designed to prevent Binance from profiting from U.S. hedge funds). CEO Zhao could be barred from running the firm he founded in 2017, and from trading crypto period.
If Zhao, who is thought to be one of the wealthiest people in the world, starts selling off assets, that could have a negative impact on crypto prices. And cutting Binance out of derivatives markets could have deleterious effects on bitcoin’s liquidity and price. If the BitMEX case filed by the CFTC in 2018 provides any insight into how things will play out, the toppling of the largest derivatives exchange may be worse than it sounds.
Instead, this is likely just another significant blow to crypto’s reputation. Evidence suggests there is at least one informant at Binance, who passed private communications and self-destructing Signal messages to the commodities watchdog. Those messages paint a portrait of Binance – with Zhao at the helm – as a business that would sacrifice rules for the sake of growth. Large traders were privileged with faster settlement connections and lower fees – putting them above retail investors. And, if the CFTC is to be believed, Binance traded against its customers, which seems to be a trend at crypto exchanges.
However, it’s important to note the claims made are just allegations. Too often (in and out of crypto) are the police taken at their word. U.S. regulators are likely not filing a lawsuit based on false evidence, but it is information with a slant. In the Bitzlato suit, U.S. regulators assumed without evidence the exchange’s lifetime transaction volumes were all from illicit sources. In the BitMEX suit, regulators suggested but did not prove the exchange facilitated transfers for terrorists.
Binance, as Hillman said, has made serious mistakes and has operated under a suspicious corporate and regulatory veil. But the worst accusations have not yet been proven, and may have explanations. The U.S. government has taken a hard line against crypto – seemingly coordinating efforts to cut crypto off from the wider economy through banking restrictions and punitive lawsuits – and so it should not be a surprise they would target an exchange that has seemed to weather and grow during the bear market.
Make no mistake, Binance’s apparent conflicts of interests and willingness to flaunt regulations is abhorrent. Zhao and other Binance executives’ internal communications regarding fraud and illicit activity on the exchange, disclosed in the court documents, are laughably inept. But the lawsuit, as bad as it is for Binance, won’t kill Blockchain.