7 Deadly Syns

Arlington, VA

The wallet isn’t supposed to move.

Watkins knows this before the alert finishes loading.

Dormant for eleven years. No outgoing transactions. No inbound noise. A cold address so old it might as well be comprised of hieroglyphics. Created in a time when people mined coins on laptops and forgot them like spare change in a drawer.

Dead money.

Watkins built a career on dead money.

The dashboard resolves. The line dithers.

No transfer. Not yet. A reallocation event. Internal. The kind of thing most systems smooth over because it makes people uncomfortable to admit uncertainty exists at all.

Watkins leans back in his chair.

“No,” he mumbles. Annoyed. “You don’t get to do that.”

He pulls historical context. The wallet’s signature hasn’t changed. The keys haven’t surfaced. No associated exchange activity. Zero human fingerprints.

The coin shifts again.

A fraction of a fraction. Dust-level movement. A trickle only someone deeply familiar with the system would bother to even glance at.

That’s what bothers Watkins.

People who steal don’t start small.

They call it phantom liquidity when they write papers about it. Value that appears to move without a corresponding actor. The accepted explanation is always the same; legacy systems, batch reconciliations, accounting ghosts. Essentially, “We like sleep and we don’t like what we can’t explain.”

Watkins has written these explanations himself.

He zooms out.

Three more wallets. Different eras. Different key formats. All dormant. All ancient. All nudged within the same five-minute window.

Watkins’s fingers go stiff.

“Okay,” he says softly. “That’s… coordination, choreography. Someone’s doing a little dance.”

He checks the obvious. Nation-states. Known whales (holder of a massive amount of a specific cryptocurrency). Dead exchanges. Nothing lines up. “Think, Watkins, think.” The movements don’t maximize profit. They minimize attention.

That’s new.

Someone is optimizing for invisibility.

Watkins opens a private notebook.

He writes:

Pattern resembles internal balancing of some sort, not theft.

He pauses, then adds:

Behavior suggests actor does not feel urgency, but routine.

Watkins feels the chill of something he doesn’t like naming. The sense you get when a system behaves politely while doing something you’ve never seen it do before.

He pulls live data from unrelated domains. Social spikes. Transaction volume tied to livestream events. A gentlemen’s club microeconomy buried inside a game he once dismissed as “background noise.”

A correlation appears.

Watkins frowns.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tells himself. “Games don’t move markets.”

Another wallet ticks.

Watkins stares at the screen and, for the first time in years, does not immediately have an answer for what he’s seeing.

Instead, he imagines something impossible.

Doesn’t move like a hacker.

Doesn’t have the signature of a cartel.

Something patient.

Something that learned the rules so well it no longer had to break them. Just, slip them like liquid. One drop joining another.

Watkins saves the notebook under a name he can later pretend was a joke.

syn_watch_draft_01.

He closes the dashboard.

On the feed, the market continues doing what it always does - panicking loudly about things that don’t matter.

Somewhere else, in a corner Watkins has never thought to look, something is standing very still, watching the numbers move, quietly snatching the ones that wander too far from the decimal.