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transaction. This would require rewriting programming language he clearly didn’t know how to write
in the first place.
For the next few days Ross barely slept, and ate even less. Julia tried to keep him afloat with his
favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but after delivering one to his side, she would come back
hours later to see the sandwich sitting untouched next to his laptop.
Through it all, anxiety pecked away at his insides.
After almost a week of these major issues, after the site had gone down and the senators had
declared war on the Silk Road and its founder, the reality of what he was doing, and what the
consequences were, started to settle in.
“They’re looking for me,” Ross said to Julia in an almost catatonic and exhausted state one
evening.
“No shit they are looking for you!” she responded.
She had seen Ross like this before, when he had been caught growing mushrooms months earlier.
A strange look of excitement and fear had shown in his face back then too. Almost as if there were
two different people inhabiting Ross’s body. One was a timid and sweet boy who truly wanted to help
people and make the world a safer place; the other, a recalcitrant rebel who was ready to take on and
fight the entire U.S. government. Sweet Ross and Rebel Ross.
“Ross, maybe it’s time to stop doing this,” Julia said to him after she, too, had realized the
potential consequences. “Maybe this is growing too big and too quickly.”
But Sweet Ross didn’t respond. Instead, Rebel Ross was toiling away trying to figure out the
problems with the code that were making his profits on the Silk Road evaporate. Not only was he not
going to take Julia’s advice to stop working on the site, he was instead going to batten down the
hatches so those U.S. senators would never be able to find him.