3:32 AM, Wednesday.

Vinny MacBell was a very rich man.

His holdings in computer software design companies, drone delivered food services, and glass manufacturing organizations had served him well.

His accumulated riches brought him high-tech household amenities, a private, lakeside summer house, over a thousand acres of loaned out farmland, and enough money to casually buy smaller businesses.

When he was a small boy, his father had taught him a number of lessons about wealth. They weren't all effective, but one had really stuck with him.

"Son," his father had said, dressed in his white, sleeveless shirt, drinking beer on the couch. "Jus' rembember this, alrigh'? Jus' remember this..." His father straightened out from his slouch on the couch, and brought forth an expression of seriousness only a drunk can manage without seeming severe. "Time... is money."

That lesson had served him well over the years, allowing him to rise from near-poverty to judicious wealth.

He'd always preferred the nicer things in life. When he had been an infant, he had always preferred their single silver spoon. The taste of silver over stainless steel was one he'd never forget, as it was a reminder of how far he had come.

Vinny shook his head, clearing the cobwebs from his thoughts and the reminiscence from his mind. Today was important. Today was the day he'd become rich enough to buy a mansion, and to maintain 24 hour servants.

Vinny maneuvered his holdings through an intricate web of shares, placeholder charities, backdoor donations, and beer commercials. It was a very sensitive task, but nothing Vinny wasn't comfortable doing. He'd made most of his first million doing something very similar, only with less money to start with.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Time is money," he murmured under his breath, his eyes locked to the monitor as he skillfully made money.

"It is ironic," he thinks to himself. His father hadn't ever made use of his own advice, and had never turned out to be much more than a belligerent drunk. His mother had divorced him when Vinny had been 17. Despite all his father's shortcomings, his advice had always been good. The only advice that hadn't been good was the nuggets of wisdom about how Vinny should have spent more time socializing. Vinny had discarded them with little thought, shrinking from the idea in disdain like the nuggets were from a different sort of mining, as his father was unfortunately prone to doing.

In the case of what he was doing, the adage he'd learned from his father was the truth. The money he made this way only existed because of proper timing. It also only existed because he had enough time to research and then utilise his knowledge from that research. Yes, in this instance, time was money.

Vinny caught a glimpse of something in the online markets. Something was stirring. His keen senses of the web told him some vast sum of online currency was being hefted, ready to be spent. Real-time chat rooms spoke differently, people started moving their shares from long-term to short-term in preparation for a massive sellout or buy-out. Vinny's eyes did the eye version of salivating at the very thought of this vast amount of cash being his.

This gave him pause. Vinny reached up, and felt at the trickle of liquid from his eye. He wasn't sad, so why was he crying? He leaned back from the desk into his chair, rubbing at his eyes to clear the liquid away. He then heard a massive crash.

A rush of small metal pieces smashed into him, carrying him away in a massive stream of glinting metal.

Vinny opened his mouth to yell, or scream(he wasn't picky about this), but only small, flat, rounded metal pieces filled his mouth.

A bell tolled, and his smartwatch chimed. Through the sound of untold thousands of sliding pieces of metal, he just managed to hear it speak.

"It is now 12 o'clock in the morning, East Standard Time, Thursday."

This was the last thing Vinny heard as his massive fortune in small denominations crushed him to death in his home's office. The last sensation he felt was the taste of silver.