Growing up, I was obsessed with Pokémon.
Not the battles.Not the gym badges.Just the idea.
That you could walk through life with a creature who believed in you.That someone had your back.That the world was big and dangerous—but you'd never face it alone.
For a boy who grew up alone in a cold apartment with a radio older than his memories...that idea was everything.
So yeah. I wanted a Pikachu.Not to shock people, not to win.Just to have a friend I didn't have to explain myself to.
Maybe that's why I ended up doing what I did.
When I was twenty-four, I completed my double major.Economics and Biomedical Engineering.Brains and blood. Logic and life.
I was the kid who could run regression models on emotional suppression, then build a biometric scanner to measure it.
While others were still applying for internships, I was writing my thesis:"The Price of Pain: Modeling Emotional Regret as Quantifiable Currency."
Most of my professors called it dangerous.One called it delusional.One offered me a job.
I declined all three.
I didn't want tenure.I didn't want to play nice with corporate ethics boards.I wanted to leave a mark.
So I started a project.A wild, insane, ambitious project that would change the world.
I wasn't alone.
He was there.
Gonzalo.
He had the kind of mind that made mine look slow.
Where I saw data, he saw systems.Where I saw equations, he saw people trapped inside them.He once said, "If Freud was a hammer and Jung was a map, then we'll be the compass."
And I believed him.
We spent two years building it.Mapping how the brain stored pain.How memory calcified when emotion hit a certain intensity.How guilt left bio-electric fingerprints.
We found the threshold.We built the Specter Coil.
And with it, we extracted the first shadow.
It was a memory.A scream, wrapped in heat and loss and silence.
We had turned regret into data.Pain into something… useful.
We called it Shadow Economics.
For a while, we were celebrated.
The system helped trauma patients reprocess memories.Helped negotiators learn empathy.Helped soldiers offload what they couldn't carry anymore.
For a while… it worked.
Until it didn't.
I won't tell you what happened yet.
Just that Gonzalo crossed a line first.And I—
I crossed it better.
Now I sit here. Broker. Cleaner.
Half-forgotten man with a ledger full of other people's sins.
And somewhere out there,someone is selling pieces of my own shadow.
The fragments I never authorized.The ones even I don't remember anymore.
Before I was a broker,I was a believer.
Before there was currency,there was trust.
And I gave mine to him.