Ransoming the Crypto: Reading from #JFTRE19

In this section the con from Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine gets cannibalistic. Our antihero Jonnie is sweating bullets in the lobby of a Mexican casino, cornered by creditors, stalked by feds, and hanging everything on a Hail Mary: regaining access to a Bitcoin stash he bought for peanuts back in 2011… and promptly locked himself out of.

Enter Sato, a pint-sized Japanese hacker with drag flair, linguistic mischief, and a gift for manipulating reality—and people. But when Sato is (allegedly) abducted by Somali pirates mid-job, Jonnie finds himself in a hall-of-mirrors dilemma: Is Sato really kidnapped, or is this just the latest in a long, surreal scam? And if so, who’s scamming whom?

Through Fazoolie's spiraling monologue and mounting paranoia, we tour the grotesque graveyard of crypto fraud: fake ICOs, Ponzi tokens, vanished founders, and mutilated bodies in the wake of pump-and-dumps gone nuclear. It’s a reminder that crypto didn’t just mint millionaires—it left a trail of dead dreamers, defrauded rubes, and real blood in the reddened sand.

And yet Jonnie, ever the believer in his own genius, still thinks he can spin this. Still thinks he’s got a shot. Even as the walls close in and his delusions become a metaphor for everything he’s lost—his confidence, his contacts, his last thread of dignity—he doubles down. That’s what hustlers do, especially when they’ve been hustled themselves.

Behold the perfect setup for a man broken enough to say yes to the biggest, dumbest, most metaphysically insane scam of all: the Transfinite Reality Engine.

The Novel

Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

First Reading

Alice Unchained

Next Reading

Every Color You Lick