keyword "soil" title "jack and the beancoin" in misc. flash fiction

Jack’s mother was a widow trying to hold onto her old family dairy farm and, while it still made enough money to keep Jack and his mother in food and clothes, the county executive was trying to claim it on Eminent Domain rights to build a Wal-Mart or an Amazon Shipping Hub or some other monstrosity. Hiring a lawyer takes money, of course, hiring enough lawyers to take on the lawyers for billion-dollar wage-slavers takes a whole lot of money. More than some widow with a modest farm could generate for long. Ruin would soon be on them all, barring a miracle.

Jack’s mother, being a worker of the soil by tradition by education and by trade, left keeping up with new technologies to Jack. Paperless billing, e-trade, cyber networking, these things she did not understand, the entire information super-highway, she left those parts of their business up to her one and only son. The difficulty was that while Jack was well-educated, and Jack was clever, while Jack was nimble, and Jack was quick, Jack was not necessarily always wise. Intellect isn’t always a conjoined twin to wisdom, knowledge does not always come with foresight or sense.

Jack’s mother did not know that while paying most of the bills on time, Jack had been conned by internet shysters into investing larger and larger chunks of the farm’s liquid assets into the shiny new cryptocurrency Beancoin, send their money off into the cloud for Beancoin, so convinced he was by techno-libertarian flimflam-men in empty suits. Giants of industry who built their billions off confidence schemes like these, the same kind of men making the county sue away the family farm, they built the high-ivory towers in which they resided on the backs of scams like Beancoin.

Jack’s mother was technologically illiterate, yes, but she was far from stupid and there finally came a day when she was balancing the books with pen and pocket calculator and discovered what Jack had done. When she looked into the whole affair, she wanted to be mad at her son for following these wealth-liars to the point where it had exacerbated their spiral, but she couldn’t be too mad. Her son was only trying to help, and his knowledge of machines led him to believe the giants of the computing industry only meant him well.

Jack’s mother turned around and sold off all his imaginary money for a pittance, to pay off that month’s bills and then… a funny thing happened. Her sale spiked a rush of a million people all realizing Beancoin was worthless, a run of sell-offs that destroyed the entire Beancoin market and it bankrupted the giants who were coming for their farm. They could no longer pay off the county-men and the eminent domain suit halted.

Jack’s mother was later heard to say that there are almost no happy endings to stories on the internet but thank God there are still happy endings in the good-old paper books.