Power

The lecture hall’s air hangs thick with whiteboard ink and general disinterest. Twenty minutes into Professor Vance’s droning dissection of post-war Keynesian economics and your brain’s already switched to autopilot. The textbook in front of you lies untouched and unopened. Instead, your phone screen glows under the scarred lecture desk, illuminating the sleek interface of the PayPal app.

You’re not checking for a measly Venmo reimbursement from Dave for last night’s shitty pizza. No. You’re watching a digital miracle unfold.

Numbers. Big numbers. Incomprehensible numbers. They cascade into your balance like a slot machine hitting the cosmic jackpot. $10,000. $25,000. $100,000. The increments blur. Your thumb hovers, frozen like a stone, as another $500,000 materializes. Then a cool million. Then two.

There’s no stopping the money train anytime soon.

A detached part of your mind registers the sheer velocity. This isn’t a trickle; it’s a flash flood drowning your account in liquid green. $15 million. $30 million. The digits climb with uncanny indifference to reality. You feel nothing but a cold, humming buzz behind your eyes. $47 million. $49 million. $50,000,000.00.

The number sits there. Stark. Impossibly large. A digital monument to audacity. A grin, sharp and utterly wicked, threatens to crack your face.

A bit of that shrewd arrogance tears through a solitary comment.

“Holy fucking shit.”

“Not paying attention again, are we? Also, language, young man.”

His voice slices through the humid whir of the lecture hall like shaved ice: cold, precise, utterly devoid of warmth. Professor Vance has stopped mid-sentence, his laser-pointer beam freezing on a graph depicting something terminally boring. Every head in the tiered rows swivels towards you. Air crackles with sudden, uncomfortable attention.

You don’t flinch. Slowly tilting your head up, you meet Vance’s stare across the sea of curious and mildly judgmental faces. His eyes are flinty behind rimless glasses, his thin lips pressed into a bloodless line. He radiates academic disdain, the kind perfected over decades of dealing with entitled, brash undergrads.

“Yes, Professor?” Your voice is smooth. Almost annoyed, even. You don’t bother hiding the phone; it’s already darkening in your lax hand under the desk.

“Perhaps,” Vance enunciates each word with glacial precision, “the intricacies of aggregate demand stabilization hold less fascination for you than whatever digital diversion currently consumes your attention. Would you care to enlighten the class? Or perhaps simply enlighten yourself on the material currently being discussed?”

A few stifled snickers ripple through the room. Dave, sitting two rows up, shoots you a look that’s half sympathy, half ‘ you dumbass.’

Leaning back slightly in the uncomfortable plastic chair, projecting an aura of effortless nonchalance, “Apologies, Professor. Just confirming a critical— bursar notification.” The lie slides out, polished and utterly insincere. You inject just the right note of distracted concern. “Tuition deadlines, you know how it is. Won’t happen again."

You flash a quick, meaningless smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.

Vance holds your gaze for a beat longer, his expression unchanging. Behind the facade, a mask of polished disappointment. He doesn’t believe a word. He doesn’t need to; his point is made.

With a microscopic sigh that’s more a tightening of his jaw, he turns back to the projection screen, the laser pointer flickering back to life. "As I was saying, the multiplier effect under conditions of excess capacity—”

The hall’s collective attention drifts away, a low murmur resuming the dull lecture. With that inconvenience sorted out— kind of —you look back down. The phone screen, reactivated with a tap, still screams its impossible truth: $50,003,421.87.

The ‘bursar notification.’ Right.

A vibration buzzes against your thigh. A text notification overlays the obscene balance:

> Dude. Seriously? Vance looked ready to spit nails. U ok? Rent $$ still coming Fri, yeah?

You stare at the message. Dave. Good old Dave. Reliable. Boring. Still sweating his part-time job at the campus bookstore to cover a shoebox apartment he shares with three other guys. Still waiting on the $400 you ‘borrowed’ three weeks ago for a speaker system you definitely didn’t need. The text feels alien. Trivial. Irritatingly small.

Your thumbs move with detached efficiency.

> Vance needs a hobby. Chill. Yeah Fri. Maybe. Busy.

You hit send without a second thought. Busy, all right. Busy watching fifty million dollars solidify in an account linked to a fake name, a PO Box, and layers of digital obfuscation you criminally underpaid a sketchy guy in Estonia to set up. Dave’s rent money? A rounding error. A speck of dust on the gleaming monolith of your sudden, dirty wealth.

Here’s the scheme: Veridian Quantum Holdings. Sounded legit. Impenetrable. Cutting-edge.

You’d spun a web of pure, glittering bullshit. Whitepapers dense with pseudo-scientific jargon about “quantum-encrypted algorithmic arbitrage” and “high-frequency liquidity harvesting across decentralized dark pools.” Meaningless phrases and humongous word salads cobbled together from tech blogs and sci-fi novels, designed to sound complex enough to intimidate, promising enough to deceive even the relatively wise. You targeted the desperate and the greedy—aging dentists with midlife crises and crypto bros drowning in FOMO. Promised them 15% monthly returns, compounded. Guaranteed.

“Proprietary AI-driven market penetration,” you’d written, your own bullshit artistry surprising even you during those late-night coding-and-Adderall-fueled sessions building the sophisticated, utterly fraudulent investor portal.

The key was the cascade. Early ‘investors’ —mostly you funneling stolen seed money from maxed-out credit cards—got paid. Lavishly. Their testimonials (“Veridian Quantum changed my life! Retiring early!”) plastered the fake site. For them, the returns were real. Paid for by the desperate flood of money pouring in from the next wave of suckers, lured by the blinding appeal of impossible, effortless wealth. A classic pyramid. A house of cards built on human greed and gullibility. You knew it couldn’t last. You’d planned to pull the plug, vanish with maybe a couple of million when the heat got too close, disappear to some non-extradition beach.

But this—this was different. This wasn’t a couple of million. This was fifty. The final, massive tranche must have hit: some pension fund manager chasing yield, some oligarch’s bored nephew playing with daddy’s money. Perhaps a combination of both. They’d bought the fantasy wholesale, dumping unimaginable sums into your digital black hole. The absolute scale of it, the breathtaking stupidity of people with real money—it was almost poetic.

A cold laugh bubbles in your chest, ruthlessly suppressed. You stare at the number on the screen. $50,003,421.87. It’s not just about money. It’s power. Unchained, absolute freedom.

Vance’s rumbling voice fades completely, replaced by a roaring silence filled with possibilities. Private jets materialize in your mind’s eye. Islands. Cars that cost more than this entire lecture hall. The ability to walk out right now and never look back at this soul-crushing charade of education, these uncaring people, this entire suffocating life.

Your thumb hovers over the PayPal app. One transfer. To an offshore account you set up months ago, waiting like a coiled serpent. A few precise taps. The digital equivalent of stuffing a duffel bag. Months of calculated risk, sociopathic charm, and complete, unadulterated fraud culminating in a heist that feels like a masterclass in embezzlement, a new name etched in history’s dastardly acts, to be studied by future scholars and true crime YouTubers.

You execute the transfer. The confirmation screen flashes. A single, breathless thought explodes in the vacuum where your conscience used to be, drowning out Vance, Dave, the fluorescent lights, the dust, the entire pathetic world outside the glow of your phone:

“I can’t believe that fucking worked.”

The weight of fifty million dollars settles onto your shoulders. Not as burdens, but wings. Ready to break you free from this prison.

You slip the phone back into your pocket. The lecture hall feels smaller, cheaper. Professor Vance is just an aging man droning into a lifeless, uncaring void. Here today, gone tomorrow. Then you lean back into your seat. A genuine, predatory smile finally touches your lips. The cartoonishly evil chuckle comes naturally. Your first stop after class? The Lamborghini dealership. And maybe hit up a Bugatti showroom right after.

Fuck Dave’s rent. Fuck macroeconomics. Fuck everything. The game is over. You won. Now comes the spending.

—————

Bolting out of the lecture hall after the initial bell, the fluorescent hallway lights buzz like trapped wasps as you stride toward the exit. The phantom weight of fifty million dollars a tangible pressure between your shoulder blades. Freedom tastes metallic, electric.

“Hey! Hold up!” Dave materializes from a knot of students, his brow furrowed, backpack dangling precariously from one shoulder. He falls into step, a persistent shadow. “Seriously, man. What the hell was that back there? Vance looked ready to spontaneously combust. And you just— grinned?”

You don’t slow down. The polished linoleum reflects the harsh light from above. “Vance needs a hobby besides torturing undergrads with aggregate demand curves. Consider it performance art.”

Dave grabs your elbow, pulling you to a stop near the fire exit doors. His grip is tight, insistent. “Performance art? Dude, you’ve been weird for weeks. Jumpy. Barely answering texts. Skipping the usual hangs. And now this? Grinning like a maniac in Macro? What’s going on?"

His eyes search yours, genuine concern etched into his features. Concern that feels alien, irritating.

You shake his hand off. "Busy. Got things going on. Not everything revolves around pizza nights and Econ 101, Dave.” The dismissal is cool, smooth. Fifty million dollars makes impatience a luxury you can’t afford.

Dave blocks your path to the heavy push-bar door. “Busy doing what? We’ve got Stats in twenty minutes. Where the hell are you bolting off to like the building’s on fire?” He gestures vaguely back towards the lecture halls, the prison of schedules and syllabi.

A slow, deliberate smile spreads across your face. You meet his confused stare head-on. The answer is simple, absolute, a guillotine blade dropping. “Freedom, Dave."

Shoving the bar, the door groans open onto the ordinary campus quad, the grey sky, the world waiting to be bought. "I’m going to freedom."

You step through without looking back, leaving him framed in the doorway, mouth slightly open, the echo of your words hanging in the stale institutional air. His confusion is a speck of dust on the gleaming monolith of your escape.