"Do you exschpect me to talk?"
"No, Mr. Bont, I expect you to watch this PowerPoint presentation detailing my elaborate scheme to hold the world to ransom." Eugene Stelios Boccali directed his laser pointer towards the large screen hanging from the wall and clicked a button to bring up the presentation.
"Thatsh a relief," said George Bont, international super-spy. "I wash worried that the laysher might have been for something elshe."
"My plan is simple," explained Boccali, indicating the first of many slides. It read "Extorting the International Community for Fun and Profit," which was written in curving blue WordArt with a yellow border and flanked by two hastily pasted-in screenshots depicting the guy from Despicable Me who was himself illustrating an evil scheme with the assistance of a much less high-tech flip chart.
"I appreshiate the effort you've put into thish," said Mr. Bont.
"Thank you!" said Boccali. "Unless you were saying that ironically, in which case the illustrations in the PowerPoint are also ironic."
He flipped to the next slide. It featured two images: one, a photograph of a sizeable nuclear device; the other, Clip Art of a mushroom cloud. A slightly tinny explosion sound emanated from the laptop hooked up to the projector.
"As you can see, my contacts in PHANTOM have furnished me with a fifty megaton thermonuclear bomb, with which they expect me to destabilise the San Andreas fault, sinking much of the existing coastline and instantly converting our black market investors' luxury housing into extremely valuable beachfront property."
"You're a monshter!"
"Now now, Mr. Bont." Boccali smiled. "Surely you don't think I'd be so crude as to actually follow their feeble plan?"
He clicked the remote a few more times, revealing photographic evidence of an industrious mining and smelting operation, as well as a handful of choice cartoons featuring a pickaxe with a little face.
"Using my own untraceable offshore assets I have gained a controlling stake in the five largest cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By salting the bomb with a mere few hundred tons of common cobalt, I can ensure that this weapon—capable in itself of levelling just one city—will distribute enough Cobalt-60 fallout to end all life on Earth."
"That'sh even worshe!"
"Do you really think so little of me?" asked Boccali, the laser pointer dangling casually from his fingertips. "Yes, I could scrounge some ransom money out of the United Nations. I could wait out the radiation in some undersea city or moon base and repopulate the Earth with a race of Nazi supermen, but those are amateur ambitions. And I am a consummate professional."
"Sho what'sh your game, Boccali?" asked Mr. Bont. "How do you shtand to profit from all thish?"
Boccali moved onto the next slide with some satisfaction. Unlike the others, this one was sparse, bare. It featured only a minimalist black-and-white logo of a skull. And also that face-with-tears-of-joy emoji repeated several times.
"Not only have I succeeded in double-crossing PHANTOM, I have also secured the alliegance of rival criminal enterprise WRAITH. Now, WRAITH believe that I am supplying them with the cobalt bomb in order to extort a five trillion dollar ransom from the wealthiest governments of the world."
"But I asshume it'sh not quite sho shimple," offered Mr. Bont.
"Oh, but it is!" cried Boccali, moving on to yet another slide. "That very simplicity is the beauty of it! Because while WRAITH think they'll be getting the lion's share of the ransom, the truth is there won't be a ransom at all!"
He circled the little red dot of the laser pointer around the image on screen. It was the letter B but with two vertical lines drawn through it.
"Is that...Bitcoin?"
"Bitcoin!" confirmed Boccali, emphatically. "You see, my negotiations with WRAITH were simply a ruse to prompt the notorious Dr. Fandango to defect from PHANTOM. When WRAITH inevitably selects him to oversee the management of the bomb in his facility deep underground, we will stage a hoax nuclear accident that has us both presumed dead and the bunker presumed so radioactive that nobody would ever dare open it."
"But how does..." George Bont wasn't even sure how to phrase the question. "How does that do any Bitcoin?"
"Unbeknownst to either PHANTOM or WRAITH, Dr. Fandango has developed a powerful temporal displacement field—capable of sending an inorganic device ten years into the past—which will allow us to mine bitcoin in 2010, not only at a time when the comparatively low difficulty of the task made small-scale operations considerably more feasible, but with the benefit of technology that, in accordance with Moore's law, achieves both power and efficiency unparallelled in—"
There was an exceptionally loud bang. The room shook vigorously.
"Jeshush Chrisht!" yelped George Bont. "What the hell wash that?"
"Oh, that?" said Eugene Stelios Boccali, putting down his laser pointer. "That was just the entire west coast of the Contiguous United States nipping off to join Hawaii."
"But...but you shaid..."
"Yes." Boccali furrowed his brow in a mock frown. "I thought about doing the whole convoluted plan with the double-double-cross and the doomsday device and the time machine, and then I realised that was stupid and time travel doesn't exist. All in all, it seemed as though a much better plan would be to accept a share of the black market property money in exchange for keeping you out of the way listening to nonsense while we set off the bomb."
"Oh my." Mr. Bont put his head in his hands. "Mishush Cashcoin won't be happy about thish."
"If it's any consolation," said Boccali, "I can do you a great deal on a beachfront condo if you like. I've got this whole other presentation all lined up..."
YOU ARE READING
Blunderball
HumorYour mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read these 31 very short stories written for Flash Fiction Month 2018. Some follow the adventures of spies and secret agents, more of them don't, and most are very, very silly. This book will not s...
