Chapter 5
Fifty lives
Fifty people depending on him, a business that collapsed, and an unlikely choice: build a currency, a bank and a network without knowing how.
With the capital from the events business, Bairo joined a company as an investing partner.
The business was not what it seemed. It didn't hold.
He went broke again.
The weight
This time the fall was not his alone. There were fifty people who depended on him. Fifty human lives, in a business he had trusted.
There is a natural reaction to a moment like that, and everyone knows it. To complain. About the partner, the system, the country, bad luck.
Bairo didn't complain.
Years later, he would give an artificial intelligence a name that means to claim, the other side of the same word. That day was still far off.
Doing what he didn't know how to do
At that moment, he made the most unlikely decision a broke man can make. Instead of looking for familiar ground, he headed for the unknown. He decided to do something he did not know how to do.
Build a currency. Build a bank. Build a navigation network.
To someone who had never done any of it, the list sounds like madness. To Bairo, it was the same logic as always: if no one is doing it, it's because someone has to.
Left hanging
It went wrong.
And it didn't go wrong for lack of ideas. It went wrong because of people. The very ones he had helped left him hanging.
It is the shortest sentence in this story, and the hardest to write. Being abandoned by strangers teaches caution. Being abandoned by the people you helped teaches something else: that your decision cannot depend on anyone's gratitude.
Keep going
It did not make him give up.
He kept going. And, this time, it worked.