Super Rich: Starting the game by going back ten years to buy Bitcoin

The wind in Nevada whips sand into people's faces.

A military helicopter painted gray flew low over the wasteland, its rotors kicking up pebbles that slammed into the barbed wire fences on either side of the runway with a crackling sound.

The reliable guy sat by the porthole and didn't say a word the whole way.

The approval rating report in his hand was crumpled. The numbers were stark—a drop of nineteen points in just one day. Voters didn't care about any "unexplained celestial events"; they only saw an ally's island vanish in forty seconds, and then their most powerful carrier strike group turn east and sail faster than merchant ships.

"Sir, we've landed."

The head of the accompanying intelligence agency opened the cabin door. A wave of heat rushed in, mixed with the smell of aviation kerosene.

He carefully stuffed the briefing into his inner pocket, bent down, and got off the plane. Four agents immediately formed a diamond shape and led him into a metal hangar.

Two long-retired transport planes were parked in the hangar, their wings covered in dust. The agent led him around the landing gear of the second plane and stopped in front of a weathered concrete wall.

There was a fire hydrant box on the wall. The agent lifted the lid; inside, there were no water pipes, only a palm print recognition panel.

A green light swept across.

The entire wall slid open to the side and back, revealing an elevator. The interior walls of the car were bare steel plates, with rivets protruding, making it look even older than the two wrecked airplanes outside.

The door closed, and the numbers started jumping.

-50. -120. -270.

Te Kao Pu stared at the screen, his eyelid twitching slightly. He had been in office for four years and had only been here twice, and each time he felt the elevator was too slow—so slow that he wanted to have it replaced.

Negative four hundred and sixty. Negative five hundred.

Stopped.

The moment the door opened, a rush of cold air rushed out.

Before me lay an underground space large enough to fit two aircraft carriers. Thousands of cold fluorescent tubes hung from the dome, illuminating every inch of the ground without casting shadows. To the left was a three-story experimental platform, with glass-enclosed cubicles one after another; to the right were stacks of liquid nitrogen tanks, shielding chambers, and several accelerators whose names I did not know.

People in white coats jogged down the central aisle, and when they saw the secret agents in black suits, they all stepped aside.

Te Kao Pu strode forward, his leather shoes slamming against the epoxy flooring with a series of loud thuds.

He stopped when he reached the deepest part.

A 40-centimeter-thick piece of bulletproof glass stood there like a wall. Behind the glass, on a bracket, lay that object.

It's a dark gold color, non-reflective, with a surface covered in countless hexagonal holes, each containing fine, hair-like tubes. When light shines on it, the tubes shimmer with an iridescent, oily sheen that slowly shifts as a person moves.

It is over forty meters long and over twenty meters wide.

"Mr. President."

A man in his fifties ran out of the side door, his white lab coat buttoned up one button off, and his name tag read "Dr. Smith, Principal Researcher." He was also clutching half a pencil in his hand.

He was so reliable that he didn't even have to extend his hand.

He grabbed the person by the collar and pulled them close.

"Dr. Smith," his voice echoed in the empty basement, "how much money do I allocate to you from the defense budget each year?"

"Three, three hundred and seventy billion... sir..."

"Three hundred and seventy billion," the reliable man repeated, enunciating each word clearly. "Over thirty years, trillions of dollars have been poured into this piece of scrap metal beneath your feet. Now I ask you one question—have you cracked the core technology?"

Smith's glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose. He tried to raise his hand to push them up, but his arm was held down by Truly, and he couldn't move.

"We have achieved some initial results—"

"I don't want phases." The reliable guy pulled his collar up another half inch. "Two days ago, six beams of light crashed down from a height of 360 kilometers. How long did our early warning system give us? Zero. Could THAAD stop it? No. Could Standard Missile 3 reach it? No."

He let go, took a half step back, and shook his hand.

"The Great Xia Kingdom is now hanging its weapons over our heads, ready to smash us at any moment. And I, a president on the other side of the Pacific, can only order my most expensive aircraft carrier to turn around and head east."

"Do you know what I heard in Congress yesterday?" Trump pointed to the wreckage in the glass. "Someone suggested we give this to them in exchange for a non-aggression pact."

Smith's face turned pale: "That's absolutely unacceptable—"

"Yes, absolutely not." The reliable guy nodded. "That's why I'm here today. What I want is very simple: the technology to shoot those pieces of junk from the sky. Right now, immediately, pry them out of this thing."

Smith finally pushed his glasses back in. He took two steps back, pressing his back against the glass.

"Sir, I must explain—" He swallowed hard. "For the past thirty years, our reverse engineering has been entirely on the periphery. Materials science: we replicated thirty-seven percent of the lattice arrangement of that honeycomb structure and used it on the radar-absorbing coating of the B-21."

Dynamics: We derived a set of magnetic confinement equations from fluid circulation; the current electromagnetic catapult is a simplified version of those equations.

Get to the point.

"The key point is the core." Smith tapped his finger twice on the glass behind him. "There's a set of encapsulated modules over there, which we call the 'master node.' For thirty years, through four generations, not a single team has dared to connect the wires inside."

"Why wouldn't you dare?"

"Because it didn't die."

The reliable guy frowned.

"Nineteen years ago, Group Two used an oscilloscope to build a passive probe, which was only for listening and did not send any signals." Smith spoke faster and faster. "Fourteen seconds after the probe was connected, the node woke up on its own. It read the sampling frequency of the probe, deduced what kind of equipment we were using, and then wrote a series of data back to the probe."

"What data?"

"Something in coordinate format, and a set of self-test instructions." Smith swallowed hard. "It took us six years to figure out the structure of that thing. There were two modules inside, one for self-destruction, and the other... broadcast."

The basement was quiet, with only the distant sound of a compressor.

"What's on the broadcast?"

"Location," Smith said. "It will send out its celestial coordinates, as well as the basic biosphere parameters of that celestial body. We don't understand how it sends them out, but the speed may reach the speed of light."

The reliable guy stared at him for three seconds, then suddenly laughed.

"So this is what you're afraid of?"

"Sir, this isn't fear." Smith took a step forward, surprisingly raising his voice. "This thing is debris from a spacecraft over two hundred meters high. The people who built it had space travel technology thirty years ago. And now you want me to plug a data cable into its central processing unit—"

Yes, that's exactly what I meant.

"That's like us standing in front of a dark forest, shouting through a megaphone, 'We're here! We have water, we have oxygen, we have six billion people!'" Smith's voice trembled. "We're inviting trouble! The whole planet will go down with us!"

He was very reliable and didn't yell back.

He slowly walked to the glass and raised his hand to touch it. Beneath his palm, the iridescent honeycomb structure flowed through him.

"Doctor, how old are you?"

"...Fifty-three."

"I'm seventy-eight." The reliable guy turned around. "Let's do some math. Even if those guys you're talking about really received the signal, how long would it take to fly over from their location? What did your internal reports say?"

Smith gritted his teeth and remained silent.

"I'll speak for you," the reliable person said, holding up two fingers. "The most optimistic estimate is two to six hundred years. Right?"

"Sir, that's only based on our known physical framework—"

"Two hundred years," the reliable guy interrupted him. "Two hundred years from now, the grass on my grave will be three meters tall. I won't even know the last name of your son's son's son. And you're telling me about things two hundred years from now?"

He walked back and stood in front of Smith.

"But I'll tell you what 'now' means."

"Now, my approval rating has dropped by nineteen points. Now, no one in the East China Sea dares to take a single step forward. Now, our allies are holding a small meeting to discuss whether they should find another backer."

The reliable guy poked Smith in the chest with one finger. "The election is in eighteen months. If I still don't have anything that can counter Great Xia by then, I'll have to get out of that white building—and the person who takes over will make the same decision as me, just two years later."

"So," he withdrew his hand and straightened his cuffs, "is the aliens two hundred years from now my problem? No. The ballots eighteen months from now are."

Smith's lips moved a few times.

"You're betting on the entire species."

"Politics is all about betting," Trump said. "And let me tell you a secret—no one ever bets on people two hundred years from now at the gambling table."

Smith wanted to say something more.

The reliable guy raised his hand and waved it behind him.

The intelligence chief stepped forward, drew his sidearm from under his arm with the swiftness of a drill demonstration. The muzzle was pressed against Smith's forehead.

The metal was cold. Smith froze, the pencil slipping from his hand and rolling into a crack in the floor.

Several researchers around gasped in suppressed anger; no one dared to move.

"Doctor," the reliable man said in a very gentle voice, even with a hint of a smile, "I'll give you two options."

"First, you could die at the hands of aliens who fly in two hundred years from now. No, you wouldn't live that long anyway. Second, you could die at the hands of my agent—he's thirty-six years old this year, and his shooting test scores are very consistent, so it won't be too painful for you."

He paused.

"Choose one."

The compressor in the basement was humming.

Smith's forehead began to sweat, and beads of sweat slid down the muzzle of the gun.

A dozen seconds later, he closed his eyes.

"...Retrieve the Level 3 key from the main control panel." His voice was dry, like sandpaper. "Notify Group Seven to retrieve the archived permissions from thirty years ago."

The agent put the gun away.

One by one, the doctors in white coats turned and walked towards the circular control panel. No one spoke, only the sound of keyboards clicking. Screens lit up one by one, and a 32-digit permission code, handwritten thirty years ago, was entered segment by segment by the three doctors. When the last digit was entered, the red light on top of the control panel lit up.

[Highest level access has been unblocked]

The sound of hydraulic pressure came from the dome.

A massive robotic arm descended from the overhead rails, with six thick black data cables dangling from their ends. The bulletproof glass split in the middle, and the robotic arms reached inside, slowly, inch by inch, aligning the cables with the encapsulation module at the broken edge of the wreckage.

When the first cable was inserted, the speed at which the iridescent color flowed on the dark gold surface changed.

From slow to fast.

"Interface coupling successful," a researcher announced, his voice trembling. "Initiating forced read."

A red progress bar pops up in the center of the main screen.

0.1%.

0.3%.

The reliable man walked up to the observation platform in front of the control panel and placed his hands on the railing. The lights shone from below, illuminating his face in a half-light, half-shadow.

He raised his hand, straightened the tie that had been crooked all day, and pushed the bow tie up a little.

"The Great Xia Kingdom." He smiled at the object being pried open, his voice soft, only audible to the two people beside him, "Your good days are over."

The United States remains the dominant power on this planet.