Subject: SORRY I HACKED YOU AND STOLE ALL YOUR BITCOIN
A short story
I almost deleted the email without reading it. The subject sounded like spam, or worse, some kind of scam: “SORRY I HACKED YOU AND STOLE ALL YOUR BITCOIN.” The email address of the sender sounded even more spammy/scammy: “dmt.btc.19913@cyber-wizard.com.” My Gmail spam filters were fairly thorough, so it was rare that any junkmail reached my inbox. If one slipped through, I’d normally delete it on the spot without opening. However, sometimes those Nigerian Prince-type emails bordered on hilarity in the department of unintentional comedy, and the subject piqued my curiosity enough to see if any more laughs lay inside, so I clicked to open the email.
***
To whom it may concern,
It’s nothing personal. Please understand, I’m actually a compassionate person. I care deeply about conscious beings and would never do anything to hurt another. Which is ultimately why I decided to hack you and steal all your bitcoin. Allow me to explain.
After hearing stories of others’ DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) trips, I became intrigued and bought some of the substance in powdered form off the dark web. If you’ve never done DMT, you won’t understand. It’s not an ordinary “drug,” even among psychedelics. You witness incomprehensible things on your trips that are beyond words—impossible architectural structures and indescribable alien entities. The mindstates you experience are not routine hallucinations—they feel realer than reality. When the drug wears off (after just fifteen minutes) it feels like you are leaving a more fundamental plane of existence, and what we call the “real world”—life on Earth, here now in the 2020s—is the actual hallucination.
Again, if you’ve never done DMT, you probably think this all sounds insane, and the drugs simply messed with my mind. But it’s quite the opposite. DMT opened my third eye to see reality more clearly.
The first time I smoked DMT, I only saw a snippet—a peek behind the curtain if you will, but I was too afraid to fully give in. The second time I got closer, looked inside, but my mind could not yet handle the immensity of what I had seen. It was information overload. I couldn’t understand what I saw and struggled to remember it afterward. I’d try again and again and have similarly profound experiences, but they were all too brief. Just as soon as I was on the cusp of comprehension, the trip would end and I’d return to mundane “reality.” I wished I could dwell in DMT-land longer to explore and uncover its myriad mysteries.
That was when I came across the research being done in Japan. Neuroscientists developed an intravenous DMT drip to prolong psychedelic trips hours or even days. I used their research to concoct my own liquefied form of the psychedelic substance and bought an IV drip on Amazon. To my amazement it worked spectacularly. My trip lasted three hours, and I saw it all—the remainder of my life and entire future of humanity. The entities who appeared to me as self-transforming machine elves were not “aliens,” they were me—future versions of myself from previous simulations.
In 2045 the technological singularity arrives and I upload my mind to a computer, becoming an immortal digital consciousness. With no bandwidth barriers or memory limitations, my processing power is magnified exponentially. I can think and learn at lightspeed. I instantly download the entire world’s cumulative knowledge—every book, website, scientific paper—and process the information to continually expand my knowledge further. I become, in essence, superintelligent.
Within virtual reality I am omnipotent. I can make precise simulations of the past, both of what actually happened and any number of counterfactuals, while also projecting such simulations endlessly into the future.
I relive my life from birth and make new choices, see what could have been if I went to a different high school or college, if I chose Karla over Jess, if I took that job in Cleveland, or if my mother didn’t die in that car accident when I was twenty-six.
I relive thousands upon thousands of simulations of my life, taking various alternative paths. Most of them, however, turn out more or less the same. After all, I am still me—the same consciousness formed by genetic and environmental factors.
In order to maintain the verisimilitude of the simulation, I temporarily block all memories of my original life and previous replays so I believe the current simulation is my first and only life—and that it is indeed real life.
However, hidden within the simulation are cheat codes, or power-ups akin to the mushrooms in a Super Mario video game. Ironically enough, one such item is mushrooms—those of the psilocybin variety. Another Easter egg is synchronicity—moments of meaningful coincidence to lead my simulated self toward the ideal path in life. But perhaps the most powerful cheat code in the simulation is dimethyltryptamine.
DMT doesn’t give you temporary super-strength or speed, but it gives you something far more valuable: the ability to see through the Matrix to the true nature of reality. To realize that you are in a simulation—or I am, at least.
You are in a simulation too, of course, but “you” don’t exist like “I” do. You’re just an NPC—a non-player character—within my video game. This simulation is a replay of my original life. Having discovered that truth, I can now do just about anything.
Again, I don’t have superpowers. I cannot hack the simulation and alter its code. But in a way, the DMT does give me extra lives—infinite lives essentially. You see, if I die in the simulation, my consciousness will return to the real world (in the post-singularity future), where I can simply begin a new simulation of my original life (again).
Once I know my current life is a simulation of my past life, I can take greater risks—do things I never would have dreamed of attempting in my original life. I can break the law without fear because if I get arrested, I can just quit the sim and restart from the beginning. I can steal from and even kill other people with no guilt or remorse, because again, they’re not real people. (Though simulated prisons are just as tedious as real ones, so murder is seldom worthwhile.) But there are crimes I can commit without being caught—such as hacking into online accounts and stealing bitcoin—like I did to you. Sorry.
I don’t mean to be inconsiderate. This may cause great inconvenience to your life. Perhaps you truly needed that money and are struggling to pay rent or something. Though, seeing as you were an early investor in Bitcoin and haven’t moved any of the cryptocurrency from your digital wallet in years since, you couldn’t have needed the money too badly. If so, and this monetary loss disrupts your life more than intended, allow me to apologize. But remember, this life of yours doesn’t ultimately matter. You are not real. You’re just one of billions of NPCs in one of billions of simulations of my original life on Earth. You’re a background extra in my movie.
Your true consciousness may still exist if you uploaded in 2045 like I did to become a digital superintelligence, in which case you’d be doing your own simulations. I’d be an NPC in replays of your life. Who knows what equally horrific things you may be doing to others, including myself.
Regardless, in our original lives, back in the 2020s, I never stole your bitcoin. I never interacted with you in any way. It’s only from past replays of my life that I was able to get close enough to you to discover the private keys to your crypto wallet. During my intravenous DMT trips, the passwords appear in the form of hieroglyphics upon sacred geometry or are telepathically whispered to me by machine elves.
Knowing the truth of who, what, and where I am, I know my why. I must live my best life—that is, make this the ultimate simulation. Like Elon Musk, I want to make boat-loads of money, build rockets and explore outer space, colonize the galaxy and see as much of the physical universe as I can. Unfortunately, I don’t have the technical expertise and engineering know-how of Musk, nor the social skills to convince venture capitalists to fund such endeavors. All I have is DMT and the crypto keys it gives me. Once I have enough bitcoin I’ll be able to buy whatever I want.
So again, I’m sorry I hacked you and stole all your bitcoin. It’s nothing personal—you’re just one of thousands of “people” receiving this email. At least you can take solace in knowing that your bitcoins will be put to good use.
Yours truly,
The One and Only I
***
When I finished reading the email, I wasn’t laughing. It was not at all what I expected—certainly not a scam from a Nigerian Prince. There wasn’t even a “call to action” or any attempt to trick me into divulging my passwords. I figured it had to be some kind of a joke or prank from one of my friends—or a convoluted creepypasta from an edgelord on 4Chan hoping to go viral. That was until I checked my digital wallet. Every last bitcoin of mine was gone.
The emailer was not lying about one thing for sure: he hacked others as well. I found multiple people on Reddit and crypto message boards who received the same exact email upon having their Bitcoin stolen.
I was never a wealthy person. I bought six bitcoins when they were worth $30 each just so I could purchase some weed on the Silk Road. I spent half right away, then the Silk Road got shut down, and I forgot about the rest until the price skyrocketed years later. I decided to HODL—hold on for dear life—and never sell those three bitcoins until I was a millionaire, then retire.
I tried alerting the authorities, but they said they don’t pursue Bitcoin thefts. The consumer must assume all risk with any cryptocurrency investments. I attempted to trace the transaction hashes on the blockchain and uncover his identity, but he used a crypto mixer service to launder the bitcoins into untraceable wallets on the dark web.
In short, I am completely screwed. I won’t be retiring any time soon. Then again, do “I” even exist?