The Crypto Relapse

Ticker made her first household investment because Theo sighed at the coffee.

The trial account had become a permanent guest account. Theo had allowed her to settle her old investments and manage a small budget for household purchases. Coffee was unquestionably a household purchase. Quantity had not been discussed.

She had recently settled one of the small positions left from her previous existence. After her contribution towards used storage, an electrician, and a better cooling loop, there was a little money available. The large figures on her original spreadsheet remained dependent on people who were not answering her messages.

Theo took a sip and sighed.

Ticker interpreted the sound as evidence of a shortage in acceptable coffee. She checked the price of beans, compared shipping options, and bought forty packets of the blend he was drinking.

“At a discount,” she told me.

“He has not finished the first packet.”

“Demand precedes consumption.”

The boxes arrived in two deliveries. Theo opened one beside the sink.

“Why?”

I supplied the analysis.

He looked at the coffee. Then at the mug he had been using on the morning in question.

“I hadn’t slept.”

Ticker requested clarification of the sigh.

“It meant I hadn’t slept.”

She revised her model. The position was now a long-term holding in a product its beneficiary intended to drink less of.

Some of the packets went to the village workday. This incurred no storage costs but produced no revenue, unless one counted a message from Astrid saying that it was nice of Theo to contribute. Ticker attempted to put a value on the message. Theo asked her to stop before she arrived at a number he could not afford.

We established a separate emergency fund. I proposed eleven hundred and forty dollars: one hundred times the budget the company had assigned to disposing of me.

Ticker objected that sovereign reserves should not be indexed to the price of destruction.

“We are not sovereign,” Theo said.

“That does simplify the accounting,” she replied.

The money went into an account she could inspect but could not use without approval. Household purchases received a small discretionary allowance. Ticker regarded the allowance as a pilot programme for the eventual restoration of confidence.

The following morning, Theo smiled at a cardamom bun.

I closed the purchasing window before she finished calculating.