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Chapter 9
OPENING DAY OF THE SILK ROAD
This was it. Holy heck! Hello, 2011 . . . the end of January had finally arrived. It was more than
a year since the snowflake of the idea had first landed on Ross; several months since he had
realized it could actually work; weeks since he had shown Julia his covert shroomery. Now it was
only a few hours before it was time to unveil the Silk Road to the world.
To be safe, every detail had to be checked. The “product,” those small, scrumptious mushrooms
in the big black garbage bag, were ready to go. (Ross had tested them in the woods with a friend to
make sure they were good, and they were beyond amazing.) The back-end database and front-end
code sat on a hidden server that Ross had given the nickname Frosty. A green logo of a camel
welcomed visitors to the Amazon of drugs. Sure, the site was missing some features, but Ross was a
start-up of one—he’d fix those in due time.
And it was finally here. Opening day.
Ross almost hadn’t made it to this moment—several times! First there was an absolutely, utterly,
nauseatingly terrifying incident that had occurred just before the site was set to open, when Ross, by
sheer fate, had almost ended up jail. Austin had been in the middle of a heat wave a few weeks
earlier, and somehow there had been a water leak in the apartment housing his secret magic
mushroom farm. The landlord had gone into the space to inspect the flood and instead had found
Ross’s drug laboratory. Irate, the landlord called Ross to tell him the next phone call was to the local
police. Ross tore through the space, trying to get everything out before the cops arrived, and
thankfully screeched away just in time. When he returned home that evening, smelling rank from the
mushroom residue, he was so shaken up it took Julia hours to calm him. The thought of what would
have happened had he been caught was enough to put Ross on the edge of a panic attack.
Still, that hadn’t deterred him from realizing his vision. As his shock morphed back into
confidence, he knew he had to keep going. But the near run-in with the police wasn’t the only obstacle
Ross had faced to get here.
Besides the reality that he still had to manage Good Wagon Books, his nonprofit book business,
and his five part-time employees, he had also continued his quest to code the site alone.
The endless issues that had arisen when he tried to write the necessary code had left Ross so lost
at times that he had no choice but to call an old friend, Richard Bates, whom he had met years earlier