Coins Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
No
one really knew how many coins there were, but they were the most sought after coins in history. No one
really knew where the coins had come from or who had crafted them, but people
didn’t ask too many questions about coins that had the power to generate new
wealth from seemingly nowhere. But the seemingly magical fortune came with a
peculiar caveat – the coins could make a person rich, but only as long as they
didn’t spend any of their new found wealth. As soon as the coin owner started
spending any of the wealth that the coins created, the charm was broken and coins
would stop working. Fortunes would dry up. Savings were lost. Stocks would
plummet. Banks would be robbed. Any number of calamitous events would occur to
make sure that any and all coin generated wealth was lost and gone down to the
final penny. And if someone actually used the original coins themselves, not
only would the gains disappear, but the fate and fortunes of the offender would
forevermore be changed and ruined and said offender would be doomed to a life
of poverty and strife.
Of course the coins didn’t come with instructions,
but when a puzzle presents itself, especially a money making puzzle, someone
somewhere will always figure it out.
The philosophic question that had to be answered and asked was how
much is enough? Everyone dreams, but do they have the patience to wait for what
it is they say they want. Set the genie aside, ignore the magic lamp, and wait.
Compounding interest has a bit of amazing magic to it, but most don’t have the
time, energy or ability to just watch it grow. Most of the owners had good
intentions. Most. Not always. But greed usually won out against good
intentions, and conventional wisdom will tell you that good intentions aren’t
all they’re cracked up to be. Most of the owners reasoned they had enough and
there was no reason to save forever and not spend any of it. Most of these
owners soon discovered that what seems like enough never is, and any amount is
fairly easy to spend once you put your mind to it. And once it is gone, it’s
gone. The coins didn’t care. They weren’t attached to their owners or concerned
with their owner’s well-being or futures.
No one really knew how many coins were out there. The people that
had such knowledge of these things knew there were a large but limited number
and that they were very very old. There was a record of a dozen or so at Alexandria
which helped fund an empire. Caesar and the various Caesar descendants had
their own.
No one was really sure how the whole thing worked. If you had a
coin, it made money. Money didn’t just appear, but money always found its way
to the coin owner. New opportunities arose, investments soared, and luck always
seemed to work out. The longer the owner held onto the coin, the greater and
faster fortunes were increased. Just how much money could they produce? Hitler
was rumored to have one, and that was enough to fund an entire national economy.
Myron was sixty-three years old. He had thirty-two coins,
twenty-seven of which he had inherited from his father. He had spent years and
a small fortune to find five more. Six of the coins had been in his family for
over seven hundred years. One of those six had been with the family on three
different continents and had been making money when Rome was the center of the
universe.
Myron’s brother Merle had possession of the oldest family coin,
but he had only inherited nineteen coins from their father. Neither Merle nor
Myron knew how their father had decided who got what or why, but when the two
compared their fortunes years earlier, they had the exact same amount of money.
But Merle had two heirs himself while Myron had a baker’s dozen with a half
dozen different women, so in a way Merle’s lineage would win out in the long
run. That is if Myron tried to divide his own assets evenly or if he was
content only to possess that which his father had given him. Myron had already
found five new coins and was willing to cash in one or two more of his own if
it meant he could set his heirs up for generations to come.
Finding the coins was an arduous task. Myron had read about a stack
of nine that were melted down for the gold when they were discovered in a
robbery and the thieves had no idea what they had stumbled upon. “Fools!” thought Myron. He had records of
over one hundred that were stolen from Europe at the end of World War Two. None
of those had reappeared but Myron suspected they were either in the former
Soviet Union or somewhere in Nazi hiding places in South America. He had
detectives researching these theories, but so far he had had no luck. Sixteen
were accounted for and held by families in the Franco-Prussian regions. They
were rich and powerful families already and Myron didn’t want to spend the
necessary money to wage war against them.
Myron wanted an easier way out so he set his sights on his
brother. Myron hated that he had to resort to this, but he reasoned that his
offspring were more important than his brother’s. So Myron hired a thief, a man
with a reputation of never failing. Myron didn’t want his brother dead, all he
was after was additional coins, but if it came to that, he gave his consent.
Myron’s thief was successful. Unfortunately so was Merle’s
assassin.
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