Letter from Wall Street
(Ethan's wedding invitation is sandwiched between anonymous death threats)
In the dryer tumble of the laundry room, Amber is decoding blockchain with Victoria's Secret bra steel rings. It's the seventh time she's failed to break out of prison, and her ankle monitor has been converted into Tiffany blue Gucci Ace sneakers - embedded with an Autopilot chip stolen from the warden's Tesla.
"Your delivery." The one-eyed female warden flings in a package wrapped in a Hermes silk scarf that smells more like blood than Scarlett's abortion party.Amber slashes the fire-painted seal with a sharpened nail clipper, and the Cartier cheetah brooch tumbles to the floor-exactly like the one that disappeared from her mother's funeral. The cover of the invitation bears a wedding photo of Ethan and Scarlett kissing on the gangway of a private jet, with an exploding cryptocurrency mine in the background.
"You are invited to witness the initial public offering of love." Below the stamped lettering, the FedEx tracking code has been replaced with a Dark Web auction number.Amber wears the prison's homemade YSL matte lip glaze (made from cockroach shells with red paint from the punishment room), illuminated under an ultraviolet light to reveal the hidden message: for every breath you take, a dirty bomb advances ten centimeters through the Manhattan sewers.
The power suddenly goes out in the laundry room, and the dryer display pops up with a Bitcoin ticker.Amber quickly plugs her brooch into a USB port, and a home surveillance video from twenty years ago begins to play-it shows Ethan in a ski mask, tampering with the parameters of a morphine pump in her mother's hospital room. In the background, Scarlett's laughter is harsher than the sound of the heart monitor stopping.
"Sweetheart, it's time to pay the debt." Svetlana's mink coat sweeps through the dryer, and her fingertip ice pick manicure taps Morse code on the control panel, which Amber knows means "miner overheating," after she intentionally cost the Russian gang 200 bitcoins last week when she used the prison grid to launch a DDoS attack on Ethan's pharmaceutical company.
During release time, Amber carves the Fibonacci sequence into the basketball court floor, and Queen Latifah's dirty braid sweeps across the back of her neck: "Little princess of Wall Street, your heart is beating faster than the Fed's rate hike." Black gangs are forging Bitcoin cold wallets on gym machines, weightlifting barbell pieces engraved with Swiss bank account passwords.
Late at night, blood-colored champagne drips from the ventilation ducts of the confinement cell.Amber catches the liquid with the handle of her mascara brush and tastes the 1996 vintage of Dom Perignon-the same bottle that disappeared from the liquor cabinet the night her father crashed. Three long taps come from the pipes and Maria's dirty braid hangs down, "Your little boyfriend is active on the dark web."
The tablet lights up and Lucas's AI company is auctioning off "emotion algorithms". Amber zooms in on the algorithm model and realizes that the core code was adapted from a courtship letter she left on her computer at Wharton.
"Time for a wedding gift." Amber removes the GPS module from her ankle monitor and dips it into the prison's homemade Chanel No. 5 perfume. The liquid, mixed with the scent of cyanide, seeped into the circuit board, and she hummed the wedding march as she tucked the modified homicidal device back into the delivery box. The warden's mistress is coming to visit tomorrow, a viper who loves to steal the perfume of female inmates.
The next day in the visiting room, Scarlett's studded Valentino heels crushed the sunlight. The black diamond wedding ring on her ring finger sparkled dimly, and Amber knew it was actually a miniature EMP weapon - last week's paralysis of the New York Stock Exchange had begun with a similar fluctuation.
"Like my invitation design?" Scarlett's fingernails raked through the bulletproof glass, leaving bloodied NASDAQ codes in their wake, "Ethan said to place your urn in the hotel suite where we spent our first night." She convulses suddenly as the scopolamine in the prison special coffee kicks in, and Amber takes the opportunity to write a string of IBAN account numbers on the glass with her lipstick - the offshore account Scarlett opened for the gigolo.
Amber was watching Scarlett being lifted into the ambulance when the alarm went off.Queen Latifah whispered in her ear, "The coordinates you gave us were right, that Porsche did have a tracker for the feds in it." The two look to the sky, where a swarm of drones is forming a wedding anniversary blessing when one of them suddenly crashes into the prison power grid - with Amber's mother's relic brooch strapped to its wing.
During a library firefighting drill, Amber pries open the cover of the 1934 edition of Security Analysis. Tucked inside the yellowed pages is a cryptic letter from Lucas, written in blockchain ink, "The AI calculates that you have a 78.9% success rate in escaping from prison, but the risk of falling in love with you is 247%." The attached USB necklace stores a neural algorithm exploit from Ethan's company, the chip styled as a Cartier screw.
Before lights out, Amber finds the wedding menu in her Bible. The French lobster bake is labeled "Amber Sauce" and the first line of the wine list reads "Dom Perignon 1996 - for guests with blood type AB-." She rips up the menu and swallows it as stomach acid breaks down the hidden protein code: Tomorrow night, 8:00 p.m., Warehouse 23, Chelsea Piers, ransom for your father's autopsy report.
On a stormy night, Amber maps the Manhattan sewers with her menstrual blood on her cell wall.Svetlana's ice-pick manicure bursts against her throat, "Sweetheart, it's time to take a cut of your revenge fund." There's an explosion from a dryer, and the prison Bitcoin mining pool instantly vaporizes $20 million.Amber laughs and points to surveillance footage-Ethan's pharmaceutical company shares are melting down, and Scarlett's ambulance has just plowed through an FBI roadblock.