I took a hyper lift up to the 16th floor. After a sudden jolt, the doors slid back and revealed more of the same: an empty corridor with no one in sight. With the recent data muggings, the city's inhabitants have gone into a pseudo-self-imposed quarantine. If anyone needed to leave, they would first glance over at the security feeds that are accessible to all residents, making sure that no one roamed the halls, they would make their way out. Mako and I are the few odd exceptions. If anything people probably figured us data muggers, but we weren't.

We were just too burnt out to care any longer.

Stepping on the conveyor floors, I allowed it to take me all the way to my door. Before, when I first got this place, I hated the movable floors. It reminded me of everything that was going wrong with the times.

People were getting so damn lazy that they didn't even want to lift their feet. As an act of rebellion, I would hit the emergency brake, forcing me and whoever trailed after to walk.

That lasted only a few months; then the draining happened. It's as if one day I woke up and realized that the whole world was a file that had been corrupted, and left to continue progressing into this warped and distorted surrealist version of reality. And here I was, someone that was meant for the reality in which the human soul and aspirations are still something worth a damn.

But I knew it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment triggering, it was a series of events that spanned a year that lead to this snapping.

I, like every other resident of this building, being trapped in our current crypto-economy. Think of the rat race run by a pyramid scheme in which everyone is obligated to join.

Crypto took over the economy one morning and the government, which had at that point, been taken over by the Rand Corporation, allowed it to run completely unchecked. The Rand Corp was a subgroup of Ayn Rand followers whose sole purpose was to obtain power in order to create an economy without the obstruction of the government.

Essentially; they won in order to unleash their corporations. Monopolies took over, then Meg-monopolies took over them, followed by Eternal Enterprises, and the list went on and on, takeover after takeover, companies swallowings others before they even had a chance to move into the building. Until finally, we were left with three organizations that run the world: Apple, Amazon, and Ayn Corps, the three and only A's.

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With crypto unregulated, it meant that rug pulls, hostile takeovers, runaway CEOs, everything that can go wrong did; and there was nothing we could do.

That's not completely right.

The people played a role in their own downfall. The thing is, we love the system.

We now live in a world where anyone can and has become ridiculously wealthy overnight.

There was no longer a stable form of income. When paid everyone had the option to get paid in whatever form of crypto combinations of their choosing. From here apartment complexes will deduct their rent before you even receive your check, this reduced homeless drastically, and it was also necessary with the volatile nature of crypto. One week you could get paid, only to go to sleep, and wake up to a crash on all of your coins, or worse, a complete wipe.

And, if you weren't properly diversified, you were virtually financially pillaged frequently, having to resort to online peddling to make a few virtual credits, which could be exchanged for crypto at a heinous markup, just in order to survive for the week. Everyone played the game and the insane thing was that it sort of worked.

Back in the day, in the early 2000s, everyone dreamed of wealth, but few people actually had the chance to land themselves in that position. Now, with this current system in place, everyone became a Psuedo-investor, but more of a gambler that was forced to play his hand every moment of every day.

Some coworkers of his had struck it big, and went on to live that lavish life that one does when they're wealthy, only to return right back to the same dead-end job in a month's time.

It was always the same story: they became wealth managers; as in their new job had become making sure their newfound wealth didn't disappear. For the mass majority of people; it always did. There is a select minuscule selection that managed to ride the capricious sea that was the crypto-ran market and live that dream life that the rest of the population worked for.

Oddly, no one was ever defeated by the sudden bankruptcy; if anything, some were liberated by it. Having to base your whole waking life on managing wealth that you know will one day blink out of existence is all-consuming. Once it's over, you're given the journey again. You wake up and go to work with the thought of when you'll strike rich again, and how you'll handle it differently; how next time will be for good.

And so, the trap is set and there is no escaping it.

I scanned my wrist reader on the lock of my apartment.

With a click, a red light turned green, and a hiss of pressurized air ushered me into my home.

I was home and I could see her staring out the virtual window, thinking and waiting