The Plot Calls #25 : "The Portfolio"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Wallace Keene didn’t crave wealth for wealth’s sake. He craved the feeling of having more—a superiority measured in numbers and charts. More stocks. More land. More leverage. More insulation from risk. More evidence that he was untouchable. His financial portfolio wasn’t a safety net—it was an altar. A sacred shrine of tabs, graphs, and projections. Every spreadsheet update, every green uptick, every successful arbitrage triggered a chemical thrill in his bloodstream—a quiet, clinical high that came not from luxury, but from knowing others had less.

But markets fluctuate. Algorithms wobble. Risk never sleeps. And fear—quiet but constant—gnawed at him from the corner of his mind. It dressed in business casual. It spoke in Fed language. It whispered when he paused to breathe. He wore fear like cologne: undetectable to others, but ever-present, soaked into his skin.

The whisper came during a red market day—the kind that leaves traders sleepless, CEOs swearing, and keyboards shattered in quiet penthouses. Wallace didn’t hear a voice. He felt it—an ache that uncoiled from beneath the floorboards of his private office like something feral curling under the bones of the world. A hunger that mirrored his own. Quiet. Efficient. Relentless.

That night, as city lights flickered through the storm-tinted glass of his high-rise, Wallace found it. He pried up the wooden floor beneath his standing desk, beside a mini bar filled with vintage scotch he hadn’t touched in years. There, nestled in a shallow cavity of impossible space, pulsed a patch of black-violet soil. Iridescent. Breathing. In its center, a porcelain hand rose from the dirt. Delicate. Timeless. Open. Expectant.

He didn’t hesitate.

Wallace reached for a small, velvet box buried deep in his safe. Inside—his father’s gold cufflinks. The only thing he ever inherited. The only time his father called him “son” without disappointment in his eyes. They were weighty, dignified. Real. They made Wallace feel legitimate—like the man he pretended to be.

He placed them in the porcelain hand.

The hand closed. The soil shimmered. The hunger sighed.

The next day, markets rebounded. A violent surge. Unexpected. A tweet triggered a panic-buy. One of Wallace’s riskiest holdings tripled overnight. A competitor’s scandal broke just as his firm filed the patent. Press releases turned into headlines. Fortune smiled wide.

And Wallace grinned wider.

The cycle began.

Every dip in confidence. Every threat to his empire. Every shadow on a candlestick chart. The soil called. Quietly. Faithfully. Like a margin call from the void.

He answered with offerings—slowly at first. Trinkets. Watches. Gifts from long-lost friends. Then faster. Family heirlooms. Birthday cards. Childhood photos. A letter his mother once wrote in pencil—its edges worn soft from re-reading.

All of it sank into the soil. All of it fed the pact.

The market kept giving. But Wallace began to blur. He didn’t feel the wins anymore. The dopamine that once crashed through his nervous system now dripped like a leaky faucet. Empty. Meaningless.

No fear. No joy. No appetite.

Just the pull of more.

His penthouse grew colder. His suits looser. His eyes hollowed behind designer glasses. He stopped sleeping. Stopped speaking to his assistant. The walls of his empire grew higher, and yet Wallace felt exposed.

Then, one night, he stared too long at his own reflection.

It didn’t blink.

Pale. Glassy. Paper-thin.

His face was still familiar. But his presence—that internal self—was gone. Somewhere between assets and liabilities, Wallace had offloaded his soul.

And standing behind him, in the edge of the mirror, stood a figure.

Still. Pale. Cloaked in black.

Not waiting. Not expecting.

Idle.

The Idle Man said nothing. He didn’t need to.

Wallace turned toward the floor, where the soil pulsed faintly in the corner of the office—its shimmer dulled, but persistent.

The hunger beneath it was patient.

A rhythm.

A hum.

A truth.

Together, Wallace and the Idle Man gazed into the soil. Neither man. Nor beast. Nor number. Just the residue of more.

Together, in unison, they whispered:

“The Plot Thickens.”

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