Sidestepping the Porygon, which wandered the room in a daze, directionless, I grabbed the two hard drives from the table. Doubling back around the orange C-shaped couch. As I moved, one of the others led the confused Porygon to the side.

  Arriving at the ptops in the corner of the room, I began connecting the drives and starting up the sorting program. With the sorting program running, I checked for updates and reread emails. From the replies, only four out of twenty were willing to go ahead and pay for info, “At least these four are willing to use crypto in the exchange.” They were probably used to keeping things discrete with their sources, or from experience with whistleblowers. There was also the possibility that they just wanted to be the first to break the story, even if the evidence was obtained through unscrupulous methods. The other eight wanted more info and some form of reliability in the information that I was selling before moving forward. As for the rest, I had yet to receive a reply, my message likely having gone into their spam folder, ignored, or otherwise deleted because it looked suspicious.

  Since these four were offering, and I needed money, it wasn't a bad idea. After all, it’s not like I can make a company selling magic items without it leading to problems… (I’ll shelve that idea for some time in the future).

  Bitcoin was a decent source of money right now, with each worth over 20K a piece. The only real issue is turning it back into liquid without raising suspicions. The blockchain is incredibly monitored for something designed to be so unrestricted and the end result might be the end of the crypto market… Maybe I can just reinvest once everything is over? I guess that adds investigating Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and Blockchain to the list. From what I remember, there's already dozens of videos of people throwing out USBs with hundreds of coins on them from years ago. Many of whom lived to regret their decisions. Taking those out with my ability wouldn't be an issue but, “Haa~”, I couldn't help but sigh, restoring the Stock market is just one huge pain. I kinda feel like just hacking the systems but that will just lead to more problems.

  Not wanting to dwell on it any further, I started writing my replies to these 4. When the tempte for all subsequent messages was completed, I only needed to attach about half of the promised documents before sending them out. Going about each one was easy as I had marked them all in a special folder that was transferred to the server that I set up yesterday. Before I sent them out, however, I got curious and started checking the progress on the test sorted files.

  Their task was to scalp data from defunct banks and old servers in hopes of finding anything that would be useful. While I did also add a few functioning banks to the list of locations, most of the files on here were old enough to have come from decades ago being converted to digital sometime in the nineties. Some of them were so bad I had to start defragmenting to get them to load up. Otherwise, there were some old bank statements, which were functionally useless, the routing numbers contained within these documents however were a different story. That is if they were still functional and didn't have a living owner.

  As I continued to look through documents one of the Porygon had started hovering near my head. Kuramon had also grown curious hopping his way from the couch onto the desk and watching me scroll through files.

  Continuing to browse through various files I could what looked like the building blocks of an entire banking system stored away in here. “I wonder if I can get you guys to just copy the banking system and recreate it…” It was an errant thought, an idea I had vocalized passively while scrolling. But the Porygon were more than capable of making it a reality.

  “BWEEOO!” The Porygon over my shoulder called out before its body began to shudder as various colored shapes appeared on its crystal surface. Its body converted to 1's and 0's entering the left central ptop, quickly taking over with a new pink and blue pop-up. Said popup also looked different than before. Previously, these popups looked like they belonged in the early 2000s along with Windows 95, now, it looked slightly more modern with rounded edges. “Huh?” It was slowly changing taking on a more current appearance, one more fitting for modern systems while still staying true to the Porygon color scheme. As I sat and watched the changes the other two had brought the dazed Porygon over. Their bodies began to shudder and flicker with shapes before converting to data, dragging the st one in with them.

  The screen flickered with various popups, one for each Porygon, before additional websites started to open. The command console even popped up a few times, all within five minutes before the system shut down. Only to be repced with a Porygon-themed loading screen.

  Pory OS V1.0An entirely new operating system along with their pink and blue color scheme was deployed on the ptop. "They just wrote an entire operating system..." All within several minutes, my jaw went sck, as that didn't seem to be the end. The version value started a slow climb. Starting from 1.0, the .1 version came three minutes ter, accompanied with a circling set of squares each having an opposite color of Pink and Blue. And it seems they weren’t done, a .2 and .3 appeared shortly after. “How far were they going to take it?” I wondered seeing them reach .5 in a little under ten minutes. It appears they were able to learn, rapidly at that, as they were upgrading the system.

  Leaving them to their work, I continued browsing the files on the remaining computers when I stumbled upon an unsorted file “What’s this?” It was a strange file taking up exactly 5 bits. Forcing it open, a little 8-bit jellyfish appeared on the screen, shifting left to right. “Did you leave a clone…” (That can’t be good…)

  “AwA!” Kuramon cried before passing through the screen, adding a second 8-bit jellyfish to the dispy. One of the jellyfish began to move around the screen, from what looked like the other's will. “So, you can control them?” Coming out of the screen Kuramon gave a happy nod, “AwA!”

  I let out a deep sigh. “It’s not an end-of-the-world situation.” I was relieved, I felt the knot in my stomach start to recede. “But you’re going to show me where you left them, ok?”

  “AwA!” Kuramon gave another happy nod before entering the ptop once again, this time writing another app. When he finished it was an icon with Kuramons face, (tentacles included) beled: “MEs!” before coming back out of the screen with another "AwA!"

  Opening the app, I was greeted with a strange world map. From what I could infer, it was data servers with about two dozen dots in various pces. “Are these… You’ve made two dozen clones?!”

  “awa…” Kuramon shuddered as I yelled.

  Taking a deep breath, “You can control them, right?”

  “A-AWA!” Kuramon gave his assurance.

  After discovering that the Porygons could harvest data from anywhere in the world using the Internet, I would call myself a fool if I didn’t use it. While I don’t know their current limits, they should have just been improved over what they were capable of before, plus or minus their learning capability for added complexity. This, however, might lead to an end-of-the-Internet scenario; I can just barely remember the movie where a Kuramon slowly eats the entire Internet.

  “Please don’t duplicate anymore and minimize the numbers. I don’t know how many you can control, but I don’t think you can tell either.” Even with control over the duplicates, there is no guarantee any of them won’t go rogue. Or just start eating data.

  “AwA?” Kuramon gave a confused look. Even he didn't know whether he could control all the copies.

  “Your clones might eat through the internet if you’re not careful.”

  “aWa!” Kuramon gave an indignant response.

  “Can you guarantee they won’t?”

  “awa~” Kuramon seemed to ment, admitting defeat.

  “How’s this, how about you only make one for each continent?” I suggested.

  With everything I set up, this system should be secure and separated. But I’m only human. I’m bound to make mistakes, a setting I forgot to change hidden somewhere. Then there’s the fact that I’m still connecting to the rest of the internet to achieve any of this and no matter how much I prepare, there’s bound to be someone somewhere who can find me.

  To that end, “I have a job for you.” I said to my sad little Jellyfish. “How about you and your clones create a little gift for the people that can track us down? You can make it do whatever you want. Maybe set some false positives here and there to trick them?”

  “AwA!” Kuramon gave a cute reply as he cheered up. He seemed to understand my intentions as his red eye gleamed with instinctual mischief passing through the computer screen. I watched as he started making something new, then stopped, deleted it, and repeated it a few times.

  During his little stint away, he seemed to have learned how to browse the Internet. Using Google, he started skipping through various programming sites and hacking forms… “And now he’s on the deep web…They grow up so fast.”

  Kuramon bounced around different sites, testing hundreds of viruses. If he liked one, he would bring it back and test it. If it suited his taste, he would tear it apart and create his own version. If he didn’t like the execution, he simply ate it, destroying the data.

  After watching for several minutes, I felt something hard nudge my shoulder. Turning around, there was a blue leg staring at me with its red mechanical eye. Beldum seemed to have become lonely seeing as all the others had abandoned it going about their tasks. "How about we py a game of chess before I set you up for stocks again?” It gave a nod.

  END

  Spoilerkidmonkey94

  So, after doing some research on Bitcoin pricing, 1 coin was roughly around 20K between February- March of 2023.

  [colpse]