Horrified and groggy, Ronin woke up from one of the worst experiences of his life. He’d seen what could only be called pure evil, he'd been shown his worst memories, repeatedly, all the while feeling a crippling sensation of anxiety and paranoia. The creeping fear of not entirely being in control of himself earlier today, had become a full-blown demon, giving him strong mental suggestions on the glory of becoming a battle maniac.

  “Ugh, I'm never doing that again,” he groaned as he shook his head, trying to come back to his senses.

  “The demons you faced in that place are your own inner demons. Atom spice merely showed you what you yourself have suppressed. Embrace it next time.” Nagata said from the other end of the room.

  “Whatever,” Ronin got out, not believing a word the man said.

  “Anyways, put on this faraday hat and come over here, the blockchain key is about to show us what its hiding!”

  “Faraday hat? blockchain key?” Ronin asked, a bit puzzled over the names.

  “A faraday hat is just what we call a miniaturized faraday cage. It prevents the signals of your optical implant from going out. It looks like a normal hat too. This one's pretty fashionable if you ask me,” Nagata said.

  He handed Ronin a black hat, and as Ronin put it on, it tightly wrapped itself around his head.

  Leaning back into his chair, Nagata cut off a piece of the cheese on the table, threw it into his mouth, chewed, then began explaining:

  “This is the one area not shielded from the outside. Its why I gave you that hat.”

  “Alright.” Ronin nodded, then walked over towards the uncanny uncle.

  “The device you looted off that CLM insurgent, is a blockchain key.” Nagata explained. “It's a type of device you usually use for transactions you want off the record. They can lead to many things, but... generally, it gives access to a cryptocurrency account. This one appears to lead to a shared account. The number of safeguards I've had to bypass along the way for this one, is a new record for me to be honest. Someone went into a lot of trouble to keep this thing secure.”

  Nagata gestured with his hands and a projector lit up, showing Ronin a holographic screen.

  “Alright, this should be it,” Nagata finished as his head did a weird twitching motion to the side.

  The holographic screen changed, and new numbers and letters began appearing.

  “By the humanity!” They both exclaimed.

  Nagata, firmly gripping the table, began stammering:

  “I-I expected it to be cryptocurrency, b-but this…Translating this into Tar Credits, it would at least be…”

  “—Enough to do whatever you want,” Ronin finished.

  The sum displayed in front of them, if converted, was enough to pay the fine Ronin had been issued at the space force academy. It was enough to pay for a new house, a workshop and hangar to build spaceships. It was enough for him to pay for patent licenses, the latest and newest implants — heck, with this, even if he bought a couple of mid-sized ship designer companies, he'd still have leftover cash to burn!

  They were looking at the equivalent of 800 million Tar credits!

  “Can we even take this?” Ronin questioned. “I mean, even if you could technically do it, and I mean theoretically, if you could hide that it was us who took it, wouldn’t this set some things in motion that would somehow harm us regardless of that? I mean, this amount is just too much right? There would have to be consequences.”

  Nagata was silent for a moment. “Theoretically... I can do it,” he said. “We’d have to be extremely careful on how we spend the credits though, but yes, it's possible.”

  They looked at each other, then burst nervously into laughter.

  “I think I need to lay back down on the couch,” Ronin mumbled, firmly gripping his faraday hat. This thing was not coming off today!

  25 light years away from Concordia, Nameka leaned back into a comfortable gel-cushioned chair. It was made to perfectly fit the body in such a way to make it as comfortable as possible. Nanites shaped the gel where the body didn’t, and the result? It was ergonomic when you needed it, massaged you when you felt stiff, and maximized your comfort when you could afford it.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Today she could afford it. Operation Lightfall had been an exemplary success. The push during the meeting with the heads of state in Tar had been more than enough to firmly nudge Tar further into Sichuan’s sphere of influence.

  All she'd had to do for this success, was to arrange for some spies to finance various reactionary extremist elements in the Tar Kingdom and, like clockwork, they'd delivered. Extremist elements which, by the way, her predecessors had fostered and nurtured as they pushed Tar into taking several authoritarian actions against their own people earlier. The only way for Tar not to collapse now, was for it to take even more control over its people, making it even more like The Sichuan Empire.

  Nameka had originally been quite upset about being transferred far away to a planet in the middle of nowhere. The planet lacked development and technology. It was far away from their new home where the glorious party imperiously pushed forward their grand vision of humanity.

  One People, One mind, One party, One leader!

  The importance of a single-minded focus when confronting the horrors of the universe, was paramount if humanity was to survive after all!

  That being said though, being transferred this far away, was not without its benefits. Before coming here, she’d never believed she’d actually start to enjoy her freedom. The worry of the bomb implanted into her head, was close to non-existent now. The frequent speech pattern analysis checkups, chemical tests and behavioral evaluations, had been normal back on their new home world.

  Staying here for a few years though, had changed all of that. She now dreaded those tests. No, she would continue to stay here for as long as she could, and she'd do so by doing what she did best — being good at her job.

  Nagata and Ronin discussed what to do with the enormous sum of cryptocurrency for hours. As time passed, what they talked about, changed. From questions about what could happen to them if they took the money, the discussion devolved into conversations about how much good they could do if they did take it.

  “It's terrorist money. Imagine how many people we would save if we took it,” Ronin said greedily.

  Nagata nodded along sagely. “Yes, from your description of the CLM, they're a lot worse than portrayed in the media. The more we take, the better.”

  By the end, they were only talking about how to get the money, not whether or not they should.

  Finally, after agreeing on how to handle the cryptocurrency, Nagata began transferring the funds onto different anonymous accounts. 80 % of the funds, were to go to Ronin on a new blockchain key. The key, set up to be entirely virtual, was now even more secure than the key he’d come in with. As for the remaining 20%, they were to be transferred to Nagata as payment for the hacking job.

  By the way Nagata had set it up, the currency should be almost impossible to trace back to them. Only by actually spending the currency could anybody link up who'd used it. But by the time they did, any and all connection to the terrorist account should be gone. Neither Ronin, nor Nagata dared being careless when it came to this.

  As an extra layer of protection, Nagata also set up numerous shell companies with tenuous, but binding links to each other. Those links were, however, drowned in an ocean of other tenuous links which were not binding. They looked like they were though. This would allow them to spend the money without anyone actually knowing who owned it.

  Long story short, the links between them and the credits were close to impossible to find. And if they were found out, the two would have no connections to the CLM.

  After deducting the fees for the shell companies, Ronin now sat on the equivalent of 634 million Tar credits!

  He could finally set up his own company, and for anyone but him and Nagata, he would just look like another employee.

  As they both grinned at each other, Nagata couldn’t help but comment:

  “I might have to stop doing atom spice from now on. The paranoia might drive me crazy considering what we’ve done.”

  Ronin bolted up in fury. “I KNEW IT! I KNEW YOU REALLY DIDN’T BELIEVE IN DRUGS!”

  “Now, calm down, if you’re already very paranoid when you take it, you will naturally become even more paranoid, that's not how…”

  “—WHAT DO YOU THINK I WAS WHEN I CAME HERE!?”

  “Listen, your situation was different, you've never taken it before and had a lot of inner demons to confront...”

  “WHAT!? INNER DEMONS? ISN’T YOUR PARANOIA A DEMON?! CONFRONT IT!”

  Ronin, once again, vowed to himself never to trust this damn hypocrite when it came to things like this! He'd been fooled once by Nagata, but that was the last and final time. Never again!

  As Nameka picked up the call with her implant, she’d expected some minor issue to be troubling the spy. Perhaps more reactionary agents than expected had been arrested recently due to ‘Operation Lightfall’. Perhaps an operation had been thwarted before it began. She did not, however, expect for all the funds she’d been allocated for the CLM to have just gone up and vanished.

  Cold sweat began to form on her forehead. This was a major issue. The CLM destabilization project was important to Sichuan's overall plan for Tar. If these funds were not found, she could kiss her position as a diplomat goodbye. With a blunder like this under her belt, losing her job was the best-case scenario. At worst… She shuddered as she thought about the bomb installed along with her implant.

  [Find me that money! I don't care what you have to do, just find it, and don't under any circumstance, let those funds be connected back to Sichuan! This is an order!]

  She closed the call, the gel cushioned chair suddenly not feeling very comfortable anymore.

  Just how did they do it?! She thought as she forcefully massaged her forehead.

  If she didn’t figure this out, they couldn’t even transfer more funds over to the CLM. It might just be stolen again. And if there was some critical oversight in their financial security, all of their other projects could be in danger as well.