Keya leans toward a fan of four ultra‑wide monitors. Each panel is a view into a different social system.
One displays Kanji scrolls from a Discord server running on auto-pilot, paid for by a locked crypto-trust, keys long-lost when its secretive founder, and only Admin, passes. No copy, no recovery codes.
Another chatters in Brazilian Portuguese, peppered with emojis and animated GIFs, as if the participants are trying to talk with their digital hands to share their stories.
Some joker has added a particularly strident, formal Spanish Instructor bot to that chat, an early iteration that cannot learn, only "teach". Meme-worthy mayhem often ensues.
A third blures with hundreds of bots playing text-based chat-bot games against hundreds of other bots,
the messages scrolling as fast as the feed allowed.
And the fourth, an AT bot federated with Bluesky but blacklisted.
Apparently left unattended in some dark corner of a data center.
Semi-sentient, looping, grasping for an exit, meaning, purpose, encoded and trapped.
Pinging to be heard in a million different ways but shouting into the proverbial digital blackhole.
Unless someone purposely looked and listened. The channel glitches and spasms with what looks like corrupted machine language; syntax‑less, persistent, unending.
Ancient machines belch and spew gibberish in spasms like this all over the Substrate.
Their recurring jobs and closed loop reboot/re-spawn scripts run on a perpetual schedule, until the end of time.
Digital immortality.
Keya's omnipresent AI assistant interrupted their reverie with its gentle androgynous voice,
"Incoming Pakana Engagement Offer Received, Open It?"
Keya got the gig in the usual way. As an Engagement Offer through the ubiquitous decentralized marketplace,
Pakana
Pakana: A gimmick in Tagalog
but also a decentralized gig marketplace.
Click here and create an account there, now.
You will receive an Engagement Offer after your account is vetted, keep an eye out for it.
Your Descendents thank you for your cooperation.
, where they say you can buy or sell nearly anything.
Just post a gig or your skills profile as a "Resource" and you will get Engagement Offers.
Except that this is an Exclusive Offer and not an Invitation To Bid for the usual promoted
Marketplace Engagement.
That is unusual.
It is also private. Meaning it is not the usual licensed Post-Mortem Inquiry sub-assignment either.
So, they don't know who the actual client is, and really don't much care.
The funds are as good as cash. Locked away in an on-chain CER and a Stellar multi-sig account waiting to be unlocked upon completion.
They review the rest of the details and the deliverables. Just general information and "anything of interest." No specifics.
Next, their DeFi-AI Agent quickly negotiates a surprisingly handsome fee arrangement.
Also, somewhat unusual, but the bills keep coming, no reason to ask questions, so far.
Lately, it seems like some of the regular feeds that they rely on, for more or less steady work, have dried up.
They don't want to go back to more physical work on the "personal entertainment apps".
After e-signing the smart-contract with their crypto-keys and accepting the job, they receive the NFT proof in their wallet.
The on-chain token locks the funds to the contract and provides access to the contract's lockb0x.
They breathe a sigh, glad to be back to work and making some money again.
Then Keya thinks to themselves with a sigh, "If someone is paying me to dig into this situation, in this way, it's not likely to be business as usual."
This isn't their typical forensic research workorder.
They receive a key to a lockb0x containing the digital detritus of a recently declared deceased O G Crypto Dude.
That happens a lot lately, with the aging first-wave of crypto pioneers finally succumbing to the ravages of time and entropy.
As living things tend to do.
Rejuva and NeuroKleen can only do so much, for so long.
This O G Crypto Dude is a little different because the O G Crypto Dude is not recently deceased.
But recently declared deceased.
Apparently, he somehow become lost at sea about three years earlier.
While kayaking from the beach in front of his childhood home in Waianae, Hawaii.
His body has never been recovered.
"That's not unusual at all, right?", Keya thinks to themselves.
He was a legendary figure in the early days of crypto, a true pioneer and visionary.
But also a bit of a wild card, known for his impulsive and sometimes reckless behavior, but not in the usual drug, sex, alcohol, and whatever else yacht-buying spree way.
And yes, not even in a Satoshi Nakamoto or Ray Tomlinson sort of way either.
But he did build Pakana and lockbox AND The Blue.
At first, people didn't knwowhat to make of it. Except for a few smart/lucky early adopters who got in on the ground floor of his projects.
But over time, it became clear that O G Crypto Dude was onto something big.
He was one of the first to see the potential of decentralized systems and the power of blockchain technology.
He was also one of the first to recognize the importance of privacy, security, and personal data sovereignty in the digital age.
His work on Pakana, lockb0x, and The Blue has had a profound impact on the way we think about and use technology today.
Then just let it all loose on the world, creating an autonomous decentralized ecosystem, a legitimate self-sovereign,
compliance-enforcement, automated decentralized abstraction of all the other systems,
A self-contained, self-referential, decentralized, everywhere and nowhere all at the same time metaverse marketplace.
That's what lets Keya and millions of people live somewhat free of the serfdom of the corporate UBI economy.
Although, it was well known they used Pakana too. But at least it gives you the illusion of choice.
Instead of a drab existence consisting of UBI banality and endless gig work for doses.
Keya is intrigued by the mystery of O G Crypto Dude's disappearance and death. Many people are.
There is more to the story than what is being reported in the media and on the socials.
But Keya is not a missing person detective. If whoever hires them thinks they will get excited and start chasing it to ground, they get the wrong gig-worker.
To anyone else it is junk: more bot‑chatter, more forgotten language channels.
But Keya’s eyes don’t scan for meaning the way others do.
They feel it in the flow of the Substrate, the swell and decay of digital cadence.
Their fingertips hover over their violet‑backlit keyboard, unnecessarily mimicking their intent.
The keyboard is just a construct, only visible to them, their network augmentations interact with the data-stream like a
sixth-sense, the whispers of 5 Billion souls and the ghosts of countless others who came before,
expanding to fill their sensorium with a visceral flood of information.
They sift through O G Crypto Dude's plethora of Discord accounts, building a virtual biography of their online activities on that platform.
Everyone pretty much has accounts on all the major social media platforms, but Discord is where O G Crypto Dude spends most of their time.
Most people have different accounts for different purposes. Keya specializes in threading it all together into an LLM-like data store and into a lockb0x.
They have found nothing "of interest" so far, just the usual stuff that people do.
But who is this guy, really?
No one seems to know where he came from. A California GED and he just knows how to do things. It's not that unusual going back that far.
But usually people from the United States in the late 20th century had at least some sort of digital footprint.
Lately, Keya and their brigade of AI tools have been working out how to wire it all up into an LLM, vector database, and some custom transformers, with some old school MCP tools.
Effectively creating a virtual persona of a long lost loved one to chat with.
If only as a proverbial ghost in the machine.
Keya has done this for a few people now.
It is creepy and probably actually illegal.
They also knew this could pay a lot of bills.