Harold sipped his coffee. The early morning sun, mixed with birdsong, drifted lazily in through the open french window. He sighed and yawned. The little dog in his lap stretched, yawning as well, then hopped down and padded over to the automatic feeder, and whined.
"I know Pascal, it's not your usual, but it's the apocalypse, buddy, what do you want me to say? You're lucky I found you, you could still be out there on the street, or lunch from some mastiff," Harold said.
From outside, a blast rocked the house, a plume of fire and smoke went up in the distance, and dishes clattered in the kitchen cabinets. Howard moved to the window, closing it, just as dust and small pebbles rattled against the glass. He sighed again. Not from contentment this time, but from knowing he'd need to power wash the siding again. A grim reminder, that this wasn't "the good old days".
Harold looked out the window and grimaced, a sort of half smile that said,"You've done all right for yourself my friend," while still leaving some doubt as to the necessity of being alone here.
Through the haze of dust, the window looked out over a city block's worth of patch work garden, vegetable plots, a small tilapia pond, rabbit hutches and here and there a free range hen roaming the green grass. A hundred yards away, a jagged wall rose, twenty feet, obscuring his little paradise from the outside.
Another explosion rocked the house, this time closer. The glass panes vibrated in their wooden frame. It was from the fighting outside. It had been going on for weeks. A group calling themselves "Tea Party Three" was trying to hold the state capitol building, where they claimed to have formed a new representative government, but The Consensus, the blockchain authority with a stranglehold on North America, wasn't in a hurry to crush them, too many eyes watching.
So,every other day or so, they'd pummel the surrounding area with drone bombs, just to remind the "rebels" what would happen if they ventured further out. Here, three miles away, Harold would sigh and clean up the mess, as dust and debris filtered in, and things toppled. As he watched, the concrete bird bath on the edge of the fish pond tilted and fell, a casualty of the chaos.
But this, Harold knew, this violent upheaval was not the apocalypse. The apocalypse had gone all but unnoticed, this was the recovery phase and it was going to get messier before it got better. He closed the curtains, just as another cloud of dust peppered the glass with fine bits of sand. He'd have to skim the fish pond for debris and the hens wouldn't lay tonight, too nervous, but it was all going to be worth it.
The hum of central electric power woke Harold. That was how he always knew he was back in the "real world", no grid in the apocalypse. But, there were no daily explosions here, it was a trade off. He'd had another of those weird dreams, living in a "castle" compiled of a block's worth of old houses in the city's art district, surrounded by a wall of rubble two stories tall. He smiled and almost called Pascal, before he remembered, the dog, like so many things, wasn't part of his present existence.
He heard the coffee pot chime, his first cup of the day was ready. He made his way down the hall of his luxury town house, perched four stories above the bustling restaurant and business district, known as Bricktown, that had once been nothing but abandoned warehouses.
His open living area looked out to the East, eight lanes of seventy mile-per-hour traffic cruised by unheeded, just forty feet on the other side of a wall of soundproof glass. The sun was just coming up. Smelled like a good day to make money.
"Alexa, show me markets," he said.
A large portion of the central glass panel became opaque and a flat screen display came to life. He followed a half dozen crypto exchanges, and he was good at getting them to talk to him. He could make those candlesticks dance, when he wanted.
Right now, he had the bulk of his liquid holdings in a relatively new coin, Steem. It hadn't done much lately. Harold froze. That couldn't be right.
"Alexa, refresh," he said.
The screen cycled, but there it was. A giant green candle, where he'd expected to see more of the same. He scrambled for his desk, sloshing coffee down his arm. He winced, but ignored it. There wasn't time.
He'd bought into this coin on a rumor, something big was about to happen, something called Smart Media Tokens that would change the way the world saw ICOs. Harold had been in the crypto market, since he'd made nearly two million dollars from a small investment in Bitcoin, purchased from a friend in college, looking for beer money.
"Look man, it's ten thousand shares," the friend had said.
"But, it's worthless," Harold had told him.
"Right, but all I need is a ten for a case of Keystone," the guy had said.
Harold had laughed and turned over the crisp Hamilton. He looked at his phone, as the Bitcoin wallet he'd just downloaded, filled with over 10,000 invisible tokens that would change his life in a few years.
Back in the present, waiting as his computer came to life, he felt the same nervous rush he'd felt the day BTC peaked at $20k per share just a year before. Sell. There'd be time to think about it later. He was looking at the screen in disbelief, one green candle stood alone, too tall to even show the last position. Steem had gained $982 per share in one hour and someone was buying them like it was the end of the world.
Harold clicked a few keys and the process was started. He had nearly 1,000,000 shares. He was about to be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Good thing he'd raised his account levels, but it was still going to take days to move it all.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" Harold hit sell on the final account and jumped out of the chair, pumping his fist. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne he'd been saving, popped the cork and grabbed two glasses, then he realized.
There was no one to toast to his success. He stood in the kitchen of his three million dollar downtown apartment, the apartment he'd outbid three NBA players to own, alone. He sat the glass back on the counter, and sat down at the computer, numbly watching the numbers add up.
He wondered if this is how the prospectors had felt, in California, during the gold rush? Elated, but alone. It seemed the focus and dedication it took to get to this point had isolated him. Well, that and life.
His parents were both gone, he had no brothers or sisters. He'd never known any of his grandparents, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins. But, the rest he had done himself. He went back to the kitchen and picked up the bottle, then went to stand at the window, surveying the scurrying commuters, like a king.
"Alexa, screen off," he said.
The monitor disappeared, leaving him nothing but a breathtaking view of the sunrise. He took a long pull from the bottle, coughing as the bubbles burned his throat.
He hadn't done it to be mean, cutting himself off. But, he knew what he needed to do and friends weren't a part of the equation. The shit was about to hit the fan, he just had a feeling, and getting ready for it was going to take everything he had. He could see it so clearly.
From the time Harold was a kid, he'd known things. He'd once predicted a neighbor kid's untimely death to his mother, three hours before the boy fell from his tree house and snapped his neck. He'd also stood up to his fourth grade teacher, with the certain knowledge, that Mr. Lance Jackson, had bullied his last kid. And sure enough, the cops took him away just an hour later in front of the whole cafeteria as he was doing lunch duty.
After he'd ended up spending two years in a mental institution, being poked and prodded, and asked every day to produce a prediction, he'd stopped telling people about it. Plus, knowing what was going to happen to people made it hard to have friendships. He'd fallen in love once,it had latest nine minutes.
In a pub, downtown Oklahoma City, Midtown, to be exact, McNellie's, he could still see her face, Rachel. It had been a set up by one of his work friends, and they'd hit it off immediately.Then Harold had gone to the bathroom, had a vision of her with his best friend, and walked out of the bar without ever talking to either of them again. A year later, he got an invite to their wedding.
The thing was, Harold didn't really believe in psychics, or mediums, or prophets. You couldn't prove it, and he'd even been wrong once. Well, maybe. He'd seen an accident and warned a friend, who avoided the skate park that day and now lived in Arizona, never having a broken bone in his body.
Harold thought the worst part was the inconvenience. It wasn't like he could pick or choose what he saw. Sometimes he'd go years without seeing anything,then, he'd suddenly see all the mundane things to happen in a single day. Like it was on a two minute delay.
Alcohol helped. When he was drunk, he could ignore it. But he wasn't a good drunk. It wasn't that he hadn't tried. A lot of people talk about happy drunks, or angry drunks,but Harold was a sleepy drunk. Two or three drinks and Harold could sleep for a week straight.
He set the bottle down and confronted a feeling he hadn't been able to shake for some time now. All of this was happening for a reason. Things in the world were about to change. Maybe he was supposed to do something about it, but what?
He looked out at the interstate, all those people, running to work, just so they could run home, trying to beat the clock, earn just enough to keep the tank above E, maybe someday get a little ahead. But, what would they do if all of this suddenly ground to a halt? Maybe he could help.
Or maybe his mother had been right.
"You're a monster, Harold."
It was the last thing he'd heard her say, before she left him at the Daybreak Residential Treatment facility, for a forty-eight hour assessment that turned into two years.
He'd watched her death. Not in person, but he hadn't been surprised when the doctors told him about it. In a car crash. He'd tried to get them to warn her. He'd loved her.
"We can't help you by giving into your delusions, Harold," Doctor Wannamaker, head of interactive therapies at the hospital had said. Then he'd locked Harold in a sensory deprivation tank for two solid days.
That was probably the worst thing you could do to someone with precognitive abilities, leave them alone with their thoughts, all kinds of things played out in his mind, all of them came true.
For a while, Harold wondered if he was causing these things to happen. But how could he? He'd see people he didn't even know sometimes, then hear their stories on the news in the dayroom. He'd come to accept that he was just some kind of antenna for glimpses of the future.
His sociologist father had gotten a job studying indigenous cultures in the Amazon basin, abandoning Harold, to escape the pain of his wife's death. Harold had blamed him for a long time. He didn't now. Harold was seventeen when he went in to treatment. It had taken him 20 months to stop telling the doctors about his visions, which he had almost daily while he was "inside".
By the time he got out, at nineteen, his father declared Harold was no longer his problem. He'd died of Malaria complications the next year, leaving Harold in his current situation, completely alone in the world.
But, the day after he walked out of the hospital, with $200 in cash and a bus ticket back to his home town, where he knew all of three people, none of whom would talk to him, he'd made the discovery.
While he couldn't control the visions, there was one thing Harold could control, one tiny window into the future he could open at will. He was sitting in a McDonald's looking for a job in the newspaper, when he'd flipped to a page he'd never paid any attention to before, the stock market.
Suddenly, the page rearranged itself, and there lay his salvation! It took him six hours of standing outside the Prudential building in downtown Oklahoma City to get a broker to help him invest the $188.90 he had left on one stock, a tiny tech company that was about to be bought in a takeover that would send their stock through the roof.
Within a week, he'd made over $10,000.00. Finally, he'd found a way to use his gift, and now, eleven years later, overlooking the interstate, in his penthouse apartment,it had led to a deal he hadn't even seen coming. Harold was rich beyond his wildest imagination. Only one problem. It wasn't going to last.
What happens next, could be up to you! That's right! I'm looking for co-authors!
While I could sit down and write this thing myself, I've already done that and I'm looking for a new challenge, so, instead, I'm looking for some partners to write every other chapter of this saga. Interested?
Go here and read the rules first. Then, go here, and get the complete details on Harold's world and things you need to know. Follow the guidelines to create the next chapter, picking up where this one leaves off
ONCE YOU'VE READ THE DIRECTIONS AND CREATED YOUR CHAPTER, COME BACK HERE AND...
- Post your chapter to your blog, including a link to this post
- Come here and leave a link back to your chapter submission on your blog
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- Help promote the contest, read and comment on other chapters (encouraging comments, only, please)