001 LET THE MINING BEGIN
"Beep… Beep…"
Damen's eyes snapped open.
The sound came from his school-issued phone resting on the nightstand.
That was strange. The device wasn't supposed to buzz at this hour. It was locked down—only school apps allowed, no late-night distractions… no extra curricular distractions allowed at all.
"Damnit, I had a long day…now what?", he complained.
Frowning, he reached for it. A single notification glowed on the screen.
Congratulations. DemCoin 1.0 mining app is installed on your phone.
"DemCoin?" he muttered. "That's not possible…"
No extra-curricular app was allowed on his phone. The Ministry of Education went to great lengths to encrypt and lock student's phones.
No outside Apps are allowed.
"This doesn't seem like a school issued app," Damen told himself.
Curiosity got the better of him.
He tapped the alert. The screen flickered, then the phone's camera activated, bathing his room in a faint glow. At the bottom of the screen, text appeared:
Begin Mining Now.
"Mining?" Damen whispered. "This definitely isn't on the syllabus… Did someone hack the school servers?"
He hesitated, his thumb hovering. Finally, he pressed the button..only for it to remain stubbornly inactive.
"Figures. A bloody scam. This is some hacker's idea of a joke."
Shaking his head, he was about to power down when a sharp "miaow" split the silence.
"Not again." Damen winced as claws raked his arm. The stray black cat had slipped in through his balcony door, coming inside for its nightly raid for food.
"Damn pest," he growled, half-reaching for the broom in the corner. "One day I'll…"
The phone vibrated.
Damen froze, glancing down. The "Begin Mining" button had lit up, glowing faintly before fading again.
"What the hell?" He tilted the phone, waving it across the room. The camera feed shifted across shadows and furniture… but there was nothing.
"I am sure the button lit up just now."
Then the button flared to life once more.
This time, he noticed why. The cat sat framed in his screen. A thin digital border appeared around its body, as if the device was targeting it.
Damen's pulse quickened. "No way…"
Without thinking, he pressed the button.
Suddenly, a counter appeared on the screen, a glowing $ symbol beside it.
0.01 … 0.02 … 0.03 …
The "Begin Mining" button vanished, replaced by: Mining in Progress.
Damen blinked, shifting the phone away from the cat. To his surprise, the numbers kept climbing.
His mind raced. "It's mining… from the cat. But it doesn't need to stay on it. Just one scan to lock in the target…"
"This is insane. Who designed this trash?" he muttered.
The memory of an old AR game popped into his head, of people chasing imaginary cartoon creatures through their phone camera screens.
Pocket… monsters. Pokémon.
"Great," Damen sighed. "So, this is some twisted knockoff."
He immediately tried to uninstall the app….dragging it to the trash, diving through settings. But nothing worked. The icon refused to budge, like it was burned into the system.
"Fine," he grumbled. "Let the school IT guys deal with it."
But then the counter froze.
"What now?" Damen tapped the screen. The app didn't respond. Slowly, he lowered the phone, scanning the room.
The cat was gone.
A realization hit him like a spark. "The mining only works when the target is nearby… once it leaves, the stream cuts off."
He stared at the dark balcony where the cat had vanished, uneasy. The phone still glowed in his hand, the counter frozen at $0.47.
Damen was about to tuck the phone under his pillow when the apartment door slammed open. A wave of cheap liquor hit him before the man did.
Ralph Dark, a middle-aged, red-faced middle-aged man, reeking of booze, stumbled in like a thunderclap.
Damen froze, then feigned sleep. There was no point drawing the attention of a drunk man with a grudge.
"Bastard… you bastard!" Ralph hollered.
Damen rolled onto his back and blinked sleepily. "What is it, Uncle Ralph?" he asked, his voice soft.
"You're supposed to be at work in the mine. Where the hell were you?" Ralph came shuffling into the room, his boots scuffing across the floor.
"Mine," Damen thought. "He was supposed to be working in the mine with his uncle after class. Again."
Damen was an orphan since a young age.
He lived with his uncle Ralph ever since. But it wasn't due to charity or love or kindness…. Ralph took him in because of the city's allowance given to the heirs of the city's heroes.
"Yes, my parents were heroes…. but so what?"
Damen's parents died while in service to the city. The actual merit of the service, even Damen doesn't know it. But the City of Melrose pays Damen a monthly living allowance due to the merit of his parents.
Those allowances fell into the hands of Ralph, Damen's legal guardian. But despite that, Ralph made Damen work.
Ramen had been working in the Aur Mine with Ralph since he was a child after school so Ralph could buy the next bottle. If the City didn't offer scholarships and an allowance for heroes' children going to school, Damen wouldn't have the opportunity.
Ralph wouldn't allow him to school but for the monthly schooling allowance.
"I had extracurriculars in school," he said. "I didn't get out until late."
Damen couldn't say why he skipped work. Maybe it was fear…or just habit.
On his way to work, some rough boys stopped him again. If he hadn't run, they would've robbed and beaten him. He knew it; it wasn't the first time he'd suffered under them. Having no place to go, he sneaked home.
He couldn't tell Ralph, either. Ralph would just call him an idiot…and probably beat him worse than the gangsters.
Ralph sneered and spoke in a drunken manner, "School…. What do you need school for, huh? …. It's for rich people…. You finish school, you…. you still come back to the Aur mine to work…. err Might as well quit now."
Damen opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. Drunks forget by morning. Confrontation with him now was a waste of energy and asking for a beating.
"I'm sorry. I'll be at the mine tomorrow."
"You better," Ralph slurred, stalking toward his room.
As the door closed on his uncle's retreating silhouette, a hot, ugly tide of anger rose in Damen.
He thought of all the afternoons he'd missed, the homework and training shoved aside for a wheelbarrow and a shovel. His results in school were poor due to the work. If he didn't catch up soon, his future would be gone too.
A cruel idea slid through Damen's head suddenly and, with it, a small, defiant smile.
If he couldn't kill Ralph, he could at least "mine" him.
He leveled the phone, his thumb hovering on the screen. For a second he felt ridiculous, childish even then pragmatic. He tapped Begin Mining.
Ralph stopped in his crawl.
Damen was shocked. "Did he find out I started mining him in my app?" he asked himself before realizing the stupidity of the idea.
"How would he know?"
Ralph stumbled but moved again, slowly returning to his room.
Suddenly, the counter on the DemCoin app blinked to life and began to climb and it climbed much quicker than when it was mining the cat.
0.77 …. 0.79 …. 0.81
The phone glowed between his fingers, counting.
Damen watched the numbers with strange, private satisfaction.
"Serves you right", he told Ralph in his mind although realizing there was no harm at all to him. The mining app was a joke. It wasn't real.
But in his mind now, it felt like justice; it felt like theft; it felt like power. Even if it was just a fantasy in his mind.
When the counter hit a small, neat sum, he sat back on his elbows and let out a breath that tasted faintly of triumph and something colder.
Outside, the apartment hummed with the ordinary noises of the building. Inside, Damen wondered how long the world would let him get away with this.
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