In Portland, openings for full-time personal assistants were rare. Then his mom got lucky. Her agency got a new client, an author who was finding it increasingly taxing to venture out in public. It would be easy work—simple cooking, cleaning, and errand running. The author never entertained and liked to make his own travel arrangements. His mom was warned that he did have lots of overzealous fans, but she was used to them from previous jobs.

But when she learned it was R. M. Haldon, his mom almost turned it down. She blamed two men for her divorce. One was Derrick’s dad, Curtis. The other was Haldon. Over two decades ago, Curtis had been one of the first fans of King of Swords, a new fantasy by an unknown local author. He became so obsessed he started a LARP inspired by it.

In Joanne’s view, both Curtis and Bob were pathetic. Grown men who cared about unicorns and magic, when the real world had neither.

After his mom finally told Derrick the name of her new employer, she refused to introduce him, no matter how much he begged. To appease him, she eventually gave him one of Bob’s many fantasy con T-shirts.

Derrick delighted in owning something that had belonged to his idol. And then econ class gave him an idea. Why not take advantage of his mom’s access to Bob, or more precisely, Bob’s stuff? From class, he knew that demand was either elastic—increasing if something was cheap, and decreasing if it was expensive—or inelastic, meaning price had little effect on demand.

And the demand for memorabilia was very much inelastic. Fans would pay a lot for something a star had touched. Enterprising folks had sold Justin Timberlake’s unfinished French toast, Scarlett Johannson’s used tissue, William Shatner’s kidney stone, Britney Spears’s chewed gum. One quick thinker who happened upon Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had even sold a jar he’d opened and closed in their vicinity. The eBay listing claimed it probably contained a molecule of air that had made direct contact with at least one of them. It sold for more than $525.

R. M. Haldon memorabilia was a popular search term on Google, but all Derrick could find were various types of paper Bob had signed: books, scripts, the odd poster. A signed first edition was easily worth a thousand.

If only there was something more for fans to buy.

So Derrick decided to give it to them. But not on eBay, where questions might be raised. Instead, he turned to the dark web, the internet’s evil twin, a place he’d already done some exploring. With enough Bitcoin, you could buy anything there. Netflix accounts. Uranium. Credit card numbers. Grenade launchers. Fake passports. Usernames and passwords. Even a hit man.