This was greeted with a proud smile from Ross.
At exactly 4:20 p.m. on Thursday, January 27, Ross had gone to a Web site called the Shroomery, which was an online haven for all things related to magic mushrooms, and registered an account under the name Altoid. He then posted a comment on the site’s forum under the Altoid pseudonym, writing that he had just happened to “come across this website called Silk Road,” as if he had been out for a stroll on the Dark Web and accidentally stumbled upon it. He then urged people to check it out. This, he hoped, was how people would find his new creation.
He was unsure if the anonymous posting would work, so soon afterward Ross registered the same nickname on another Web site focused on Bitcoin, under a thread discussing whether it was possible to build a “heroin store” online, and he urged people to visit the Silk Road. “What an awesome thread!” he wrote. “You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?” Again, Ross did this incognito so it could never be traced back to him.
All he had to do now was wait. But not for long.
“It’s crazy,” Ross told Julia. “People have already started to come to the site from those forum posts.”
“Has anyone bought anything yet?” she asked him as she clicked around on her laptop, exploring the Silk Road.
“Not yet,” he said.
But he knew that they would. How could they not?
Chapter 10
WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN
Dusk settled over Austin, and the Good Wagon Books warehouse was eerily quiet save for the sound of Ross, who stood at his desk, typing ferociously on his keyboard as he tried to finish up some coding on the Silk Road Web site so he could leave for the day.
He had never been so busy in his entire life.
Putting aside Julia (and the attention she required), he was working on his book business, managing his part-time employees, and running his drug Web site simultaneously.
He wanted so badly to give up the Good Wagon Books part of the equation, but he didn’t want to upset his friend who had given him the business, and, more important, Ross didn’t want to be seen by those around him as abandoning yet another unsuccessful project.
Thankfully, the daily tasks were complementary.
Each morning when Ross arrived at the Good Wagon Books storage facility, he would fire up his laptop in his tiny office, which sat off to the side of the warehouse. He checked the book orders, followed by the drug orders, before shipping both off to customers around the country.
For the books he would wander the aisles of the stacks he had built by hand over several months; dozens of rows of nine-foot-tall wooden shelves filled with old novels and nonfiction tomes that were all painstakingly organized and alphabetized. Ross stuffed titles that had sold online into puffy manila envelopes before printing the recipient’s name and address on a label maker.
He would break to eat his lunch—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on mulchlike hippie bread—before the real fun began.
It was time to package the drugs.
With a vacuum sealer normally used to keep food fresh, he encased the magic mushrooms he had grown in plastic wrap. He then dropped them into one of the same padded envelopes he used for paperbacks and hardcovers. Finally he used that same Good Wagon Books label maker to print the recipient’s name and address. He took immense pride in the process.
In the weeks after the Silk Road opened for business, Ross had been shipping his shrooms off to buyers only once or twice a week. Now, a couple of months after he officially launched the site, orders were starting to come in daily. There had also been another new development on the site. An unbelievably exciting one! Ross was no longer the only person selling drugs on the Silk Road. A couple of other dealers had surfaced, hawking weed, cocaine, and small quantities of ecstasy.
When he told Julia about this development, she showed signs of worry. It was one thing to sell a few joints and little baggies of magic mushrooms on the Internet, she warned, but harder drugs could come with larger consequences. Ross argued that the system he had built was completely anonymous and safe and could never be tied back to him.
Assuring Julia that everyone was safe wasn’t his only challenge; he had to convince new buyers too. To help entice potential customers to feel comfortable acquiring drugs from these mysterious new dealers on the Internet, Ross built a ratings system on the Silk Road where sellers were given “karma” points, which acted like positive or negative reviews, just as on eBay or Amazon.
While he was exhausted by all this work, he was also elated that people were finally using something he had built. And by March 2011 he had already made a few thousand dollars in revenue.
Now his biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to manage his time between his drug Web site, his book business, and Julia.
As luck would have it, one of those three things was about to vanish into a plume of dust. As he worked away on his laptop amid the empty silence of his office, he was momentarily interrupted by a ferocious BOOM! that erupted from inside the warehouse. It was so loud and terrifying that he stopped breathing for a moment as more bangs detonated inside the space.
His mind spun in a nanosecond with all the possibilities of what was happening. Maybe it was a raid by the police, a battering ram slamming through the door to stop the creator of the tiny Silk Road. Maybe it was a gas line explosion. Ross stood there panicked for a moment, fearing that all those hours of coding and mushroom farming had been in vain and that he was destined to be the underachieving failure that he dreaded.
Then, as soon as the thunderous claps arrived, they were gone. And in their place there was nothing but stark silence.
Ross’s heartbeat started to slow slightly as he built up the courage to carefully walk around the corner into the warehouse to see what the noise had been.
There he saw that, one by one, like giant dominoes, the bookshelves of Good Wagon Books, which weighed thousands of pounds, had toppled. What he had heard was the sound of snapping wood and a mountain of books piling atop one another. It looked like a giant hand had reached in from the roof and swirled the room around.